Time rich…

I spent all of yesterday afternoon melting some onions and tomatoes for a tortilla. It takes time for onions to melt into an incomparable sweet savoury fondant and more time for tomatoes to transform into  a sticky palate stinging jam. Luckily I can afford it. Saving has never been in my remit but somehow I have amassed an enormous reserve of time. I have certainly wasted enough of it but but it seems to have been replaced by my high interest rate.

Melting onions can be very well behaved which good behaviour they displayed yesterday. Owing to these paragons I was able to avail myself of another slice of time savings to recreate a summer salad that had impressed me when I first saw it on a wonderful blog – http://mapleandmiso.com/2014/06/24/courgette-with-tahini-yoghurt/ – that I urge you to visit. Although the dish in Maple and Miso’s blog travels under the name of  Courgette with Tahini Yoghurt, it’s the fresh peas and broad beans that initially caught my fancy, along with the outrageously silky combination of greek yoghurt, tahini, sumac and olive oil. Over the passing years I had lost faith in fresh peas which, on each occasion that I had eaten them, never seemed to have retained the sweet pea taste of my childhood memories. However, I relented and bought a handful of fresh peas and the same of broad beans together with the first pomegranate that I have bought since God was a boy. A pomegranate in the hand is worth sending all your clothes to the dry cleaners in the vain hope of removing the stains. However, in the back of my mind rang clear the words of none other than Andy Harris, that doyen of pomegranate seed removal. “Cut the bugger in half and whack it on the back with a wooden spoon”. Unbelievably it worked like magic. The perfect little jewels shot out of their shell and landed harmlessly in the bowl beneath. I could have been dressed in a white Dior sheath dress and no one would have been any the wiser about my close encounter with the stain of pomegranate juice although pomegranates would not be the first concern if such an encounter were to occur.

This salad was so much more than I had expected. I strongly recommend that you go to the blog of Maple and Miso for the recipe….and for all their other delicious recipes.