This moreish, flapjack-style oaty bake, flavoured with maple syrup and dotted with sour cherries, works as well for dessert as it does for breakfast

I’ve been making versions of these baked oats ever since discovering Heidi Swanson’s recipe in Super Natural Every Day. This is my favourite store-cupboard version, for when stone fruit and berries have slipped out of season. Morello cherries are a dark, tart variety of sour cherry, with an intensity of flavour and bright acidity that stand up particularly well to baking. I love them here paired with almonds and coconut drinking milk (the light kind sold in cartons, not the rich tinned variety). The cherries I use are whole fruit in syrup, which I drain and dot over the oats – they remain distinct while becoming deliciously jammy as they bake. Almost any fruit compote or jam will work here, though, so choose your favourite.

A thrifty and delicious crumble-like autumnal treat, a bit like a cobbler … or a buckle … or a grunt …

We have a family tradition of making our daughter a fruit pie of some sort for her first day of school each September. Last year, it was a simple apple pie, but we intend to make our way through the myriad heritage desserts, from crumbles and crisps to cobblers, buckles, pandowdys, grunts, slumps and sonkers. This year, we made a brown betty, a wonderful, crumble-like dessert made with stale bread. We kept things seasonal with apples and blackberries from the garden, but any combination of fruit works really. I sweetened this one with maple syrup, but use your sweetener of choice: each adds its own unique flavour.

Celebrate seasonal British-grown produce with four easy dishes guided by a natural ingredient in its prime

Early autumn is one of the most generous and comforting times of year to cook with British produce: sweetcorn is at its peak, squash begins to sweeten as the weather cools and bitter leaves such as radicchio provide balance to the season’s abundance. Today’s recipes are simple celebrations of British ingredients, using just a handful of carefully chosen components to let each vegetable shine. Whether it’s a buttery cheese tart for sharing; a fresh, herby corn salad; sweet roast squash with warm, spicy ’nduja; or bitter leaves lifted with a floral dressing, they all rely on cooking with ingredients at their seasonal peak and allowing nature to guide the menu.

A pleasingly proper curry-filled pie with a zingy chutney to go with it

This is one of my all-time favourite pies, pie born out of the Midlands. While studying at University College Birmingham, the now head of department at the college of food there, Lewis Walker, and I were in digs together and regularly ended up in very late-night balti houses after big nights out. These pies remind me of that really special time. It wasn’t much before my university days when balti cooking emerged in 1970s Birmingham, apparently created as a way to appease the British palate of the time. Its roots are in Pakistani-Kashmiri cooking and the base of the curry always has to contain tomatoes, onions, peppers and chillies, although variations can be built on those foundations. They’re a wonderful celebration of multicultural Britain.

This fantastic tart is a minor miracle invented by a legendary chef, yet it has very few ingredients and an intriguing technique for baking it

Often, the greatest dishes are made from very few ingredients and with pretty standard techniques, and this tart is one of them. It’s based on an old Frédy Girardet recipe that, despite his reputation as one of the all-time greats, calls only for a simple application of process to deliver a knockout result (which is one reason I put it in my latest book). A pastry case is spread with sugar and cream, then dotted with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon. The pastry is not blind baked, but filled and baked in a very hot oven. That sounds wrong, but it is not: a fierce heat is needed to bake the pastry under its filling and to meld the cream, sugar and butter. A pinch of flour is mixed with the sugar and, as it all boils up, that smidgen of flour holds everything together as it bubbles and reduces until it takes on the appearance of condensed milk while the pastry cooks and toasts at the edges. I still use Girardet’s quantities because, unsurprisingly, they work perfectly. Merci, chef.

Henry Harris is chef/co-owner of Bouchon Racine, London EC1. His book, The Racine Effect, is published by Quadrille at £40. To order a copy for £36, go to guardianbookshop.com

A crisp surface and creamy core are the traits of this cheesecake with no base, here topped with spiced and sliced apples and a sticky, caramel sauce

My go-to cheesecake these days is a burnt Basque. It’s so good it doesn’t even need a biscuit base, which might be the very reason some people aren’t fans. But Basque cheesecakes are rarely too sweet, because the burnt top provides just enough bitterness to balance things out and the insides stay ridiculously creamy. If I can give you one tip, though, it’s to make sure you take it out of the oven while it’s still really wobbly, to get the best set. An overbaked Basque is no fun at all.

Nutty in flavour and creamy in texture, autumn’s bounty of squash and pumpkin has many uses, both sweet and savoury

The shops are heaving with pumpkins and squash, and though there are so many different varieties to choose from, most of them are interchangeable. My favourites are kabocha, crown prince and delicata, for their deeply nutty flavour and creamy texture, plus they hold their shape well when roasted or braised. And if you’re carving a pumpkin for Halloween over the coming weeks, don’t waste the flesh: chop it up and throw into a risotto. It’s hard to imagine that such deliciousness could come from such a ghoulish grimace.