Hello lovely subscribers and visitors to my Substack! Lately, I’ve been thinking about accessories. For reasons only the Instagram algorithm can explain, my timeline is peppered with fashionable ladies peering into the camera lens, raising a brutally groomed eyebrow, and telling me I’m getting dressed all wrong. Apparently, I must half-tuck in my tops, apply belts, necklaces, earrings, bags, jackets, scarves and hair clips to “pull together my look”.
This is an approach to dressing I mostly can’t be arsed with, but it *is* a strategy I embrace when pulling together a meal. Take a plain white T-shirt and jeans kind of a dinner - a simple plate of roast vegetables, say, or a piece of fish. You can sexy these basic dishes up with ‘accessories’, by which I mean crunchy toppings, sauces, flavoured butters, yoghurts, spices mixes and other trimmings. These are little extras that go a big way towards making an unremarkable meal much more interesting, delicious and appealing. (And those who eat your food will think you’re a culinary clever clogs when you’ve not really gone to much trouble at all.)