“It is like being hurled while still asleep into the midst of a Beethoven symphony, with the brasses at their most ear-splitting, the basses rumbling, and the flutes sighing away; each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole…. it is such a bewildering chaos of colours that your poor imagination is dazzled as though by continuous fireworks….”

Gustave Flaubert, writing about Egypt and quoted in Alain de Botton’s The New Art Of Travel

Normally this salad doesn’t include any meat, but because I thought pastrami was made from camel meat (I now know it doesn’t) I thought it would be appropriate to include it and I was using the salad as lunch meal in itnself…in any case it is excellent with it so it stays!

• ½ small white cabbage, finely shredded
• 1 bunch spring onions, finely chopped – include about an inch (2 cms) of the green
• 8 tbsp walnut oil
• 1 tbsp lemon juice (juice of half a lemon – if you use a fresh lemon use the zest as well)
• 3 fat cloves of garlic
• 1 tsp smoked salt
• Cooking salt
• Some grinds of white pepper
• 80g/3 oz pastrami, chopped into strips – if you serve it with Mahmudiyye (chicken with dried fruits leave the pastrami out)
• 25g/1 oz/a handful parsley

1. Rub some cooking salt through the cabbage and rinse well
2. Add the spring onion and the pastrami
3. Mix all the other ingredients together, except a little parsley which you’ll use as a garnish
4. Pour over the cabbage mixture
5. Garnish

Like me, keen on camels? Treat yourself to this gorgeous tapestry cushion made by the prisoners supplying the Cell Works range.