A summer lunch for my husband's aunty - to make up for the awful meal we took her out for in Lyme Regis last time - minuscule scallops......a creme brûlée sent back.....
I roasted fillets of hake with an emerald green salsa verde using handfuls of giant basil leaves which my husband grows at the allotment, which are thriving in this heat. And a tiny-chopped tomato/peppers/ avocado salad.... and thick rounds of soft, blackened-at-the-edges sweet potatoes.
The Grilled Courgettes were a last minute addition - a well loved Nigel Slater recipe which I've lost now but know by heart...
Grate the zest of a lemon and squeeze the juice into a shallow bowl. Add several glugs of olive oil, sea salt scrunches and black pepper and a handful of chopped herbs - oregano, rosemary, mint.
Slice yellow and green courgettes lengthways. Grill them in several batches in a ridge pan with no oil and when black striped and soft lay them gently in the lemony oil and herbs and let them marinate and soak up the juices.
This time I added roasted ground up cumin seeds to give an extra dimension to the dressing.
The dessert was raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and meringues ( a new extra-burnt-sugar, chewy-in-the-middle variety - created when I forgot to take them out of the oven last night) with Blackcurrant Ripple Parfait - another well loved recipe by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall which is perfect as it is and works every time without any of my own alterations/additions....
You can find his recipe
I've been in a kind of heat daze today.....the house oven hot....bare feet .....doors, windows wide open not a whisper of a breeze....sweat collecting in creases just sitting still....drifting into memories all the time of other places......holidays....other climates....other countries.....when I was another person happy in my own skin..... in the dimension of hot hot hot....
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