JUICY ENOUGH TO DRINK
Until you are under the cosh of the fiery heat of Summer, its quite hard to take your tummy brain to a place where you can totally understand the necessity of a salad so sweet and juicy you could almost drink it.
As always, nature gives us exactly what we most desire, precisely when we do! The peaches growing on Jaime’s land are a deep shade of fuchsia, hanging so heavy on the tree that the fruit sits supported by the soil, the branch only serving as an aboulic life line, offering no facilitation of a dance in the breeze on a vaguely vertical branch.
The tiered land is swathed in citrus trees interspersed with peaches and highways of grape vines running like arteries across the slip of sun-drenched land that he tends. Arriving at his Olivar is to stumble across a paradise of peace and rural husbandry. Each orange tree is invisibly tended to perfection, the wisdoms of past generations played out across every branch. Between the trees sporadic pockets of vegetable plantlets live out their life, planted in loving harmony with the rhythm of the sun moon and stars.
After no more than 2 minutes of arriving I was dripping in the syrupy pink juices of the finest peach I’ve had the pleasure of tasting. The fruit so ripe you have to grapple with the flesh as it falls off the pip and down your hand, head ducking down to catch the juice, a tactic played out many a time to catch the molten waterfall of ice cream running down the outside of its cone.
We meandered amongst vast carpets of wild carrot flowers, admiring every inch of growth and planning for the fruits of later in the season. Tomato and pepper plants shrouded in a thin film of sulphur powder grew bulbous and bursting beneath the vines, melons took shape underneath their adventurous sprawl of leaves and little aubergine plantlets giving growth everything they’ve got before the fruit grows heavy against its frame.
All the while, my peach pip growing sticky in my hand, thoughts travelling down the familiar road towards lunch and how to justify eating 50 more peaches before it was time to go to sleep.
The conclusion was a lightening fast assembly of icy cold shards of watermelon, over ripe peach and the mixed aromatics of purple and green basil, dill, mint and parsley - all heavily dressed and tumbled together in salt, olive oil and red wine vinegar – left to sit together for a minute or two, their juices melting into the oil, flavours mingling and sliding into one another, before layering with wafer thin slices of feta, fresh pickled onions and compulsory extra extra extra olive oil – eaten whilst dribbling, dripping and dunking fistfulls of charred sourdough.