Summer wrote a letter today.
It arrived in the form of watermelon — cold from the fridge, sweet and impossibly refreshing. The kind of fruit that drips down your chin and makes you laugh. I could have eaten it plain, standing at the counter, but today felt like a day for something more.
So I made the salad that tastes like the best kind of contradiction: sweet meeting salty, cool meeting bright, simple meeting sophisticated. Watermelon cubed into fat, juicy pieces. Feta crumbled over the top — not the plastic-wrapped stuff, but proper Greek feta, creamy and tangy and just salty enough to make the watermelon's sweetness sing even louder.
Then the supporting cast: paper-thin slices of red onion for a gentle bite. Fresh mint leaves, torn with my hands, releasing their cool, herbaceous perfume. A drizzle of olive oil. A squeeze of lime for brightness. And the secret weapon — Aleppo pepper, with its fruity heat and gorgeous rusty-red colour, scattered over everything like confetti.
Ten minutes from fridge to table. No cooking required. Just assembly, really. But the result is something that makes people go quiet for a moment when they taste it, trying to figure out why something so simple can taste so complete.
This is summer on a plate. This is what happens when you let good ingredients speak for themselves.
