In lieu of a “real” post (haha), please enjoy a few photos of the food at a picnic I attended this past weekend. We were instructed to choose and make one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes, and we (mostly) followed instructions, choosing his burnt eggplant dip from Jerusalem, the chard and saffron omelettes from Plenty, and the cauliflower cake from Plenty More. K brought bread: a beautiful selection of slices from several different country loaves (the sesame seeded one was indisputably the best), handmade in what she calls her “nano-breadery” out of her own kitchen.

Unable to resist going off-recipe a bit, S. made us a drink, too: a fizzy mocktail featuring rhubarb simple syrup and a fresh mint sprig. I did dessert, not Ottolenghi but pulling toward some of his flavors: a massive rectangular pavlova drizzled with raspberry coulis and dotted with fresh raspberries, candied-and-aleppo-pepper-spiced pistachios, and dolloped with fresh whipped cream. As you can see from the final photo, we all but decimated it…