If you live in a hot, tropical climate, you are rarely short of ingredients. Audacious, bright, ridiculously named fruit and vegetables, dock-slapping fresh fish and sweet, fragrant herbs waft, swing and swim past you every day.

Yet while staying in a ‘nice’ hotel in St Lucia, every night my partner and I would be forced to play: guess when the cauliflower will inexplicably arrive. A game I haven’t taken seriously since I was five years old — an age when to eat cauliflower meant certain death (as with mushrooms, or anything not from the crisp family).

For four long nights, whether we were having seafood paella, red snapper or just steak and chips, there it was, waiting for us, bland, unseasoned and lurking in our order’s midst. Continue reading »