New year, new salad. A real personal win of a salad, this one; delicious AND attractive on the plate, surprising and decadent and spiritually soothing, the kind I tell people about unbidden. Hello, yes, I have a new salad for you, would you like to learn more? Would you like to know more about this salad? And of course you would, because you too have just survived Christmas. Impossible to open up January, impossible to hit Epiphany, without a powerful longing for greens. Please, Lord, remove this cheese from me: I am lactose intolerant with the will-power of a grape. Remove this cheese from me. Remove this cheese from my fridge.
The Lord did not intervene, so I put all the cheese in the freezer and went down to the Lewisham World Food Centre, where I bought cucumbers and limes and tahini and a huge bunch of extremely fragrant, frondy, kitchen-scenting dill. This in itself, quite normal, except that this time last year I simply could not stand dill, and this time several years ago I could not stand tahini either. And this is what we like to call “personal growth”.
Every year I try to like something new.
I mean this quite literally, and mostly, it has to be said, in a culinary sense: every year I try to like something I didn’t like the year before. I am morally opposed to picky eaters, which makes it difficult when I myself am privately pretty picky. Textures, mainly, I hate; but also a wide and irritating variety of flavours I simply have ever quite got on board with. A fun confession from your favourite* food writer! Elevenish years ago I moved to London with a limited palate. I had spent a year in Paris consuming chiefly Nutella and Nesquik. I believed the height of sophistication to be my new ability to put red wine in a bolognese. Call me Nigella. Also, don’t put any chilli in the sauce, or in fact, in anything; and also if there is a visible piece of red onion I will pick it out, thanks so much.
I didn’t like having this as part of my personality, so I started with black pepper. This should tell you what we were working with. Black pepper, and then the next year, chilli. I read somewhere that a baby needs to try a food at least ten times before you can think of it as something they actively dislike: this was encouraging to me. It is my annual challenge: what do I think I hate that I might like? I think it is good for me as a cook and as a person: I was wrong about this before, I have changed, I can change and keep changing. Time and effort can improve your experiences of life!
I learned cardamom one year. Fennel. Pineapple. Peanut butter! Anchovies! Tahini, as discussed. Another year, a really successful one, I learned kale. I had a real setback with radicchio because I had given a whole year over to “bitter leaves”, and Covid took me right back to square one: they taste like poison again to me now. Still, we move. There will be another year for radicchio. I don’t plan it; there isn’t a master list of things I dislike. Sometime in January it always occurs to me that I hate a particular thing- oh, no thanks, I don’t like whatever- and then it dawns on me that it is my cross to bear for the year.
This year is going to be spinach: a real trial. It tastes like blood! It infuses everything around it with the taste of blood! On New Year’s Day Kate asked if I wanted spinach in my dumpling soup and I opened my mouth to say absolutely not, it tastes like blood. Then I saw that it was going to be a year of spinach, and said yes please. It was not as bad as I was expecting: I will give it that.
Anyway, last year was dill.
What can I say? It was simply extraordinarily successful. I love dill now. I love dill so much. I am a dill head, a real pickle for dill. And I really hated it before. It was a great challenge for me, and I feel, modestly, that I rose to it. There were several things that helped: my friend Lettie made a pasta salad with broad beans and dill, Kate wrote a book in which she put dill with a variety of fun dips to eat with crisps. Ultimately I just kept trying it, and also saying to myself: “That flavour you hate? I think maybe you like it loads.” And now I do. A triumph of mind over matter, but also perhaps dill was so good and I was simply stupid before.
So the salad. The salad. The first time I made this I just simply stirred together chopped cucumbers, chopped dill, salt, lime juice, and tahini, and it was incredibly fast and very easy. I really recommend it, but also then I made it in another way to feel a bit fancy. While generally the food thing is my only actual New Year’s Resolution, I am also trying to get into a good routine of waking up on time, doing some exercise, eating three meals a day etc– and so having a fancy lunch was one of those things that made trying to actually hit this new routine feel easier.
What you do is: dice two or three very little cucumbers into small chunks, and set them to one side in a bowl. Squeeze over lemon or lime, generously, add a little salt. Shred a big handful of dill, add to the cucumbers and stir.
In another bowl, stir together two big spoons of smoooooooth tahini, two teaspoons of Dijon mustard, a teaspoon of white miso, two tablespoons of hot water. Writing this now I feel like you could crush a garlic clove in here and it would add something. I will try it later. It goes sort of clumpy but if you keep stirring patiently then very very smooth. Maybe you add a little extra hot water, maybe not. Ideally you would like a pourable consistency, like a good custard.
I also soft boiled myself an egg here, for protein and satisfaction, which I did using the method in Miracles: one minute of fast boiling, six minutes of lid-on off-heat sitting, into cold water and peel.
Pour the warmish dressing onto a little plate per person, don’t ask me how many this serves, it serves me maybe one and a half times, I trust you to know how many cucumbers and spoons of tahini you want to eat. Spoon cucumbers onto the centre of the dressing. Add egg to one side, if using. Scatter with sesame seeds, drizzle over a bit of sesame oil, for flair. I sprinkled over some sea salt because I love salt. Toast and a Little Gem lettuce on the side for dipping and scooping.
It was so delicious! So delicious I immediately decided that I needed to talk about it. I told my sisters and Kate and now I’m telling you. This was supposed to be a very short newsletter just to tell you, because I didn’t have a take-home message for you when I started writing it and I still don’t really. Three options?
Dill is nice.
I like this salad and maybe you will too.
Or, perhaps:
Change is possible, sometimes, and provided the change you’re after is very small and completely within your power.
Does that do anything for you? The salad will, anyway; and perhaps the moral is that not everything has to have a moral. The kitchen smells like aniseed and gardens: what else is there?