My Favourite Way To Grill Vegetables

A little postcard from Palm Springs.

The cooking I most enjoy is not recipe driven, it’s free and spontaneous and is at its best, using up what’s leftover in the kitchen. Scrappy sauces from pantry ingredients, the art of injecting life into sorry looking limp vegetables and generally making something from almost nothing tends to bring me the most joy.

We’ve been in Palm Springs in the desert about a two hour drive outside Los Angeles for the last couple of days and have spent our time cooking, eating and lounging by the pool- the perfect little Easter break escape.

One of my favourite ways to cook vegetables, as a side dish, for al fresco eating, is to grill them. I had bought a glut of asparagus, spring onions and kale, which spent the week looking at me from the fridge and needed using up. For this method you could also use cauliflower, broccolini or radish. Toss in oil of your choice, season generously and grill until tender and charred. The secret however is not just in grilling the veggies over flame, which gives them a sweet smokiness. It is in fact in the sharp acidic and herb heavy après dressing/marinade which they sit in before serving.