When Shakespeare coined the phrase “salad days”, he was referring to a state of youthful inexperience. But at 41, and midway through the hottest summer on record, I can safely say my own salad days – these weeks of endless salad-eating – are the result of experience. As my organs segue into their fifth decade, I need more than rosé and a bag of Tyrrells for dinner.
Fridge-raid dinners and no-cook salads
I’m not only eating salad, of course, but assemblies of raw ingredients are an obvious choice if you’re looking for lo-fi meals that involve more interaction with the fridge than the oven. I like Tom Hunt’s rubric for a fridge-raid dinner salad, which – rather than sending you out for ingredients and sweat patches – uses whatever you have on hand. And Meera Sodha’s no-cook salad of tomatoes, chickpeas and rose harissa delivers fibre and flavour without so much as a struck match.
Then there is Feast’s archive of recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi, which boasts doozies such as his tomatoes with mango-miso dressing and this courgette and cantaloupe salad. Ottolenghi’s lime and poppyseed slaw with curry leaf oil, meanwhile, has accompanied almost every barbecue or “family-style” spread – the citrus juice softens and “cooks” shredded cabbage, carrot and onions into submission, and don’t even get me started on its maple-turmeric cashews. The whole lot cries out for a beer – preferably Table Beer by the Bermondsey brewery the Kernel, a pale ale that is big on hops and low on booze (variable, but about 3%).
Minimal cooking, maximum flavour
When it comes to minimal cooking, we’re spoiled for choice. Margot Henderson – a master of picnics – gives florets of cauliflower a quick roast, and leek discs a fleeting blanch, to make a very resilient salad with chickpeas, herbs and yoghurt dressing. My love for her husband Fergus’s anchovy and roast tomato salad is shared by Rachel Roddy, who wrote about it with the recipe here; salty, sweet, herby, crunchy and with lots of dijon to boot – bliss. Anna Jones’s summer taco salad also puts roast tomatoes to work alongside a tin of black beans, smoked tofu, feta, romaine and loads of tortilla chips, which soften slightly under a lime-chilli dressing.
I’m also a big Joe Woodhouse fan, and find myself reaching for his books for easy veggie dinners, whatever the season; his Moroccan carrot salad is everything I want, alongside grilled halloumi and some roast peppers – and lasts well into the following day. Lastly, I like Georgina Hayden’s hot-weather remix of a Greek summer classic, broad beans in tomato sauce (pictured top), involving minimal hob-time; instead of braising the two key ingredients together, she crowns grated tomatoes with the beans and lots of feta.
What to drink with summer salads
What am I drinking with all of this? If you read my column on crémant, you’ll know I’m partial to a glass of fizz any day of the week. But temperatures of higher than 30C call for lower ABVs. With that in mind, I have been discovering “second drinks” made by extracting one more use from fruit that has already been pressed. Little Pomona, in Herefordshire, makes a range of ciderkins made with already-pressed apple skins, including one with quince (3.8%) and I recommend anything made by the Beaujolais winemaker Domaine des Grottes, whose Piket-Nat uses upcycled, pressed gamay to make fizzy grape juice with a 5% kick.
And, look, I’m not down on a crisp meal. This summer’s most absurd, but thoroughly enjoyable, dinner was the food writer Ella Risbridger’s crisp, feta and dill arrangement, where the three ingredients are simply tossed on a plate and served. Crisp days are a thing, too.
What I ate this week
Cottage industries | I am thrilled by the revival of cottage cheese, which featured abundantly in my vegetarian childhood in the 1990s. Thanks to the current obsession with protein, it’s everywhere again – witness Meera Sodha’s latest Feast recipe for rollercoaster muffins. I’m particularly keen on the very creamy one from All Things, which I’ll pile on to a piece of cold toast with cherry tomatoes and some chilli sauce, and crank up Magic FM for a stellar laptop lunch.
Dreams of shiso | Every fortnight, I drive to a residential cul-de-sac 15 minutes from my home to pick up a carrier bag of vegetables grown near Lewes. Not just any veg, but veg grown by Namayasai, a biodynamic farm run by husband-and-wife duo Robin Williams and Ikuko Suzuki that specialises in Japanese produce such as (this past week) komatsuna (mustard spinach), shiso leaves and kabu (turnip) pickled in sweet vinegar. The contents of the bag are a bimonthly kitchen joy around which I plan several dinners – these always include rice bowls crowned in stir-fried greens, tofu with kujo-negi (green onion), pickles, a jammy egg and plenty of furikake seasoning.
A vintage read | I’ve been rereading Kermit Lynch’s classic book from 1988, Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France. Lynch, an importer who opened a shop in Berkeley, California, in 1972, is at pains to remind us that wine is more about people and places, contexts and cultures, than prices or vintages. He always offers a lyrical turn of phrase: with a boiled artichoke, for example, a Bandol rosé “dances like Baryshnikov”. At the close of his introduction he writes: “Wine is, above all, pleasure. Those who would make it ponderous make it dull.” Amen to that.
