ANNABEL LANGBEIN + WINE MATCHES

When the going gets tough

It’s the everyday glitches that can really get to you. The dishwasher finally slumps into a death roll, full of dirty dishes, you singe your favourite shirt with the iron, the bill from the garage has an extra zero on the end of it and the car still won’t start in the morning.

When you hit overload, the first thing to go out the door is usually eating properly. Just thinking about dinner feels like one step too hard — let alone cooking it. It becomes all-too-easy to resort to opening packets and pouches to reheat and “assemble” or hitting the redial button for your favourite takeaway. You know things are really grim when you can’t actually get into the cupboard for the overflow of takeout containers.

At this time of year, when there is so much great produce to choose from and the weather is still hot and summery, my go-to strategy for getting a yummy meal on the table in a flash is to make a salad, bake or grill some chicken or fish or fry or barbecue some halloumi or steak and toss it all together with a tasty dressing. Just by changing the salad ingredients and the flavour profiles of the dressing you can create so many variations.

What I really like about this kind of cooking is that it’s less about following an actual recipe and more about using whatever combination of ingredients you have to hand to make a tasty meal.

I often make a marinade that doubles as a dressing, as it’s an easy way to create a rounded, balanced flavour profile in the salad. A quick caution: – be sure to separate out some of the marinade at the start, to use for your dressing later.