Flavours of the season

Is there a chef's competition we haven't heard about yet, or is it just the desire to express as many seasonal flavours at once on a plate that is at the core of some interesting dishes popping up with an extraordinary number of components?

Chef Nic Poelaert's meli melo (first at Embrasse, now at Brooks), has up to 80 ingredients at any one time. ''The meli changes every day from lunch to dinner; I just employed someone to prep the meli full time,'' Poelaert says. A small example of what might be found on a meli melo includes french radish, savoy cabbage, white beans, calendula, pense, red elk and wild sheep sorrel.

Dan Hunter, head chef of Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld, has a dish called Garden Salad that has anywhere from 45 to 65 ingredients. Hunter says the dish is ''conceptually, lifting up the kitchen garden and putting it on a plate''.

The number of ingredients is determined by what looks good on the day, he says. Asked if this gave new meaning to the expression ''there's too much going on on the plate'', Hunter says ''there are certain flavours that would be aggressive separately but work well together''. He likes to serve a nettle butter with the Garden Salad to ''add a fat element''.

-Hilary McNevin