You shouldn’t play with your food!!

Looking for recipes online, as I often do, I’m amazed (and grateful) at the variety that’s available for every single thing you could possibly want to cook. Usually – a lifetime’s habit – I opt for the easy recipes. I’ve found that the complicated versions of many a standard recipe, where the results were meant to be special, were often not! Sometimes recipes are over complicated, and cooks/chefs seem to be in a kind of competition to be the most innovative and, though I don’t doubt that this produces some delicious results, it has the effect of taking us away from the simple, but still so good, dishes. This can make you feel that the simple is simply not good enough and that you have to change and add.

Some food is so special and delicious in its natural state that it’s ‘gilding the lily’ to add too much to it. I’m reminded of France: a friend made a dish of oysters grilled with a cheese and cream sauce. It looked spectacular but the French guests were bemused (and some were devastated). How could anyone play around with this wonderful shellfish? It was already a miracle of nature, with its rough, grey outer shell contrasting with the gleaming, smooth interior; it needed no other form to present it. The mouthful that tasted of the depths of the sea - salty, clean, refreshing - needed only the addition of a squeeze of lemon to enhance the flavour: anything more was too much.

Today, I bought far too much fruit from the stall outside my apartment. I was only going to buy bananas but as I arrived so did an ancient car laden with fruit and vegetables. Two farmers unloaded boxes, bags and crates of beautiful, fresh produce so I couldn’t resist! Of course, afterwards I wondered how I could possibly eat it all while it was still fresh. Well, I couldn’t, so decided to share it – this would be my contribution to a brunch I’d been invited to. In my kitchen trying to decide what to make, I regarded the fruit. It really didn’t need anything added: it was perfect as it was. All I needed to do was put it together in a fruit salad – so simple, yet so delicious.

I don’t think I need to tell anyone the recipe for this one (any fresh fruit will do!) except to say that the fruit is in freshly squeezed lemon and satsuma juice.