Hot Summer Cooking

And the watermelon salad I’m living for

It’s hot hot hot in Venice right now, the kind of hot where you break a sweat just from sitting still, the kind of hot where all you want to do is do nothing at all. It’s so hot, in fact, that I’ve basically given up cooking: I’m subsisting on fresh fruit, bags of salad, ice cream (lots of ice cream) and peanut butter and banana sandwiches, a throwback from my childhood that I’ve happily rediscovered. Nothing innovative about it, but my goodness: white bread with creamy peanut butter and sweet banana is an excellent combination, isn’t it?!

The only kind of cooking that I’ve actually been brave enough to attempt is to toss together this watermelon salad. And that’s primarily because as lazy as I feel, my greed for hot pink, sweet melon dressed with Tabasco and snow-white feta cheese is ultimately greater than my languor: I’m living for it, the taste of summer holidays and everything you crave on a fiery summer’s day - refreshing, salty, juicy, but also somehow crisp. The hot summer salad.