Why do we make food so complicated? A plate of good ingredients still counts as dinner.

I've had an epiphany: we really don't need to put as much effort and faff into every single meal we cook for ourselves. I know, it's a bit rich coming from someone who writes recipes and makes a living from books about how NOT to just put bits of food on a plate. But I've had a revelation: meals don't always have to be an effort.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m pretty much flying solo in the house this summer and working very hard indeed to meet a book deadline, so cooking for myself is the lowest of low priorities. Basically, my will to cook has withered away with the sweet peas (it makes me very sad, as I live for the arrival of these blooms each year, but I think it’s simply been too hot.)

One night, I could barely be bothered to make a cup of tea for dinner, but aware that nothing runs on an empty tank, I forced myself to make some food. I chopped up some lettuce, cucumber and tomato (channelling my grandparents version of a salad), threw in some seeds and walnuts for health and made some brioche toast left over from recent recipe testing. And then I dropped in some GORGEOUS blue-veined nuggets of Stilton that the good folk at Colston Bassett had sent me, with a splodge of cherry jam for cheese (a bit like quince paste but made with cherries).

It was desultory and slapdash and yet I couldn’t have wished for a more satisfying and delicious meal, just so bloody tasty and refreshing, in a way I didn’t expect a cheese salad to be. I put a picture of it on Instagram, saying that generally nobody really ever raves about ‘cheese salad’ including me (the very idea brings flashbacks of soggy cheese salad sandwiches). But other people popped up to say: me too! So many of us during this hot weather are apparently living on an assemblage of stuff they’ve found in the fridge, and realising it makes a perfectly fabulous meal. Of course it does! A simple salad can be genuinely complete, without entering roast-vegetable, hard-to-find-grain, grilled-salmon-salad territory.

I ate my cheese salad outside under a violet sky, the air was a perfect temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, and there was silence except for a cackling magpie. It was lovely. And while I ate (trying not to stare at the dead sweet peas) I thought about the other things I’ve eaten recently that were just assembled and not ‘dinnerish’ but lovely in a surprising way.