Creamy burrata with basil, grilled tahini chicken, plus a pistachio ricotta cake – summer dishes perfect to eat in the garden
As we slip from seemingly endless spring into summer, lunch and dinner outdoors has become an almost daily event. I’m happy with this and the change of step in the kitchen that accompanies it. Working at this new slower pace this week, I spooned a basil-leaf and green-pea dressing over a tender egg of burrata, and stirred coriander leaves into a crushed melon and raw tomato soup. The soup was taken outside and eaten in the shade. We poured a ribbon of olive oil into its chilled orange and scarlet depths. The little cooking I did was brief: asparagus cut into short lengths and fried with spring onions to make spidery, tangled fritters, and grilled chicken with a quickly made tahini dressing.
What links everything I have put on the table in the last few weeks is that it feels more at home outdoors than in. Even the cake I made felt like one for the garden. Its crumb freckled green with pistachios, the filling a barely set ricotta and orange cream. It was my favourite apricot sponge recipe, the fruit swapped for nuts, and we ate it as intended, before the filling had frozen, and then kept the rest in the freezer to scoff with our fingers like ice-cream wafers.
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