Simple Salad

Back when I had a TV I remember a show where a chef would pounce on someone in the supermarket then follow them home and cook a meal with only the ingredients he found in their shopping basket, fridge and pantry. Even if you ignore the stalking connotations it wasn't a particularly good show, worse when a friend told me the chef visited her work and allegedly sent the crew shopping to stock the fridge before recording the shot of him arriving to 'discover' the ingredients he was going to cook with. Wuss.

Discovery cooking pretty much sums up my entire culinary philosophy. Planning meals, writing a shopping list, checking a cook book in advance; these are all extremely foreign concepts. Which is why this salad I picked up from Summer in Toronto is such a winner with my fridge, especially at its most bare.

All you need to do is wash, dry and shred some iceberg lettuce then toss it with chopped dill, lemon juice, olive oil, cracked black pepper and sea salt. That's it. Iceberg always tastes better shredded and this dressing makes the little green strings sing. Combined with baked stilton mushrooms, this is a stupidly simple and tasty din dins.