Charred lemon dressing

Expanding my salad dressing repertoire by one

We had parked up in Sóller in lieu of not finding a space up in the hills (a moot point as we discovered when we actually arrived at the restaurant). I was grateful for the walk, eager to escape the car and pace up the winding mountain roads lined with orange and lemon groves. We were on our way to a restaurant recommended to us by our friend Harriet, who also had asked us to deliver a set of uniforms for the bar from her brand Marazul. Before ascending to the top, we commented on the lush and verdant land, the sparsely-laid out houses that could host us in our dreams and the smell of citrus. I asked Amelia if she thought she could reach a lemon and we comically held her legs as she leant over the wall and picked one off the tree. We placed it in the bottom of the pram and forgot about it until we returned home hours later, placing it in the fruit bowl.

The next day I was prepping a big Sunday brunch and had only half the ingredients I needed for my lime miso vinaigrette. I remembered a video I’d seen about charring lemons and cut up the one Amelia had foraged for us. It was the best use for a lemon not quite ripe enough to squeeze, and it gave off this heavenly scent, like summer on heat. I poured it over a salad of frisée, fennel and orange and we ate everything outside by the pool, new and older babies cooing, old friends and new lovers laughing, and everything was as it should be.

You’ll need…