If you don’t want to sweat your summer starter – well apart from some leeks that is – then look no further than this easy-peasy chilled soup. It involves no more than around 15 minutes cooking time, can be made well ahead, is deliciously refreshing and looks beautiful thanks to its vibrant green colour. Of all the recipes in my novel Love Apples, this has probably garnered the most rave reviews, sometimes outdoing a main dish that I’ve laboured over…..
A recipe for a fresh, fragrant Middle-Eastern-flavoured dish that’s perfect for summer, plus a bit of background on how food got mixed up in my fiction. Some of my strongest memories from novels are those involving food, perhaps because it engages the senses so fully. I can still almost taste the toffee shocks in Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree, which swelled as you chewed until you couldn’t speak, and finally exploded in your mouth. Later, while studying French at university, I…..
I had no intention of writing a novel when I signed up for a creative writing course in London but the seed was sown when I wrote a short story inspired by a travel assignment in Mauritius for Marie Claire magazine. Still, the idea of cultivating a full-blown 300-page piece of fiction seemed a daunting prospect – Jack’s beanstalk compared to the shrub-like 1,500-word magazine features I’d written to date – and the story was shelved for a while. But…..