The sun floods the kitchen tonight while I'm making supper,
roasting sweet peppers and aubergines from the farmers' market,
red onions and courgettes from my sister's garden.
As I've run out of basil I make the Salsa Verde with a bunch of flat leaf parsley, and a few pungent Vietnamese basil leaves which taste like chilli. I add roasted cumin and walnuts at the end along with the mustard, garlic, capers and lemon zest.
The failure of the olive harvest all over the world this year is very worrying. I don't think I could live without olive oil.....
or lemons....
or garlic....
or parsley.
The runner beans - another gift - are so sweet and fresh they are perfect on their own with a little olive oil and a scrunch of salt, but tonight I decide they need spicing up. So diverging from my Italian theme I fry spring onions, fresh lemongrass, turmeric, ginger, chilli and garlic and stir in a chunk of creamed coconut block let down with hot vegetable bouillon to make a thick coating sauce for them.
I also roast fat slices of bright orange Hokkido squash which turn out to be dry and chewy so abandon them - will turn them into soup... put potato wedges in the oven instead.
I serve my mixed cuisine supper with chopped ruby chard, Romanesco cauliflower florets and fillets of salmon.
Robin increasingly says he doesn't want a big plateful so I always make his much smaller than mine....but he still leaves some. I think he can't be hungry but then he makes a cup of tea and piles up a plate with shortbread biscuits, fig rolls, sugar coated nuts, dried banana chips and dates and takes it upstairs.
I don't know why this annoys me so much but it does.
But then why would I expect him to get the same pleasure out of vegetables that I do - out of what I call 'proper food' - however delicious I make it, when the only sweet thing in his life, the only thing he can control now is sugar....
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