Anyone got a runcible spoon?

As anyone with an allotment or fruit trees in the U.K. will know, this has been a Mast Year for trees producing nuts and fruit - meaning an absolute glut of produce. The weather conditions conspired to make everything go into overdrive and as a result boughs are bent under the weight of apples, plums, pears, everything. I had to take off half the unripe plums to stop the victoria plum's branches snapping under their weight. People literally cannot give away their apples for free because everyone has far more than they can use.

There is one exception in our garden - my beautiful little quince tree in a pot. We had a wind storm just after the blossom opened and they blew off without a chance to be pollinated, so it's another year without fruit for me. But not, it seems, for others.

Somewhat overripe but scented quinces

I was lucky enough to get a bag of quince from a guy with heavily cropping tree in our old neighbourhood. They are like large yellow pears with an amazing smell and a dense texture. I kept sticking my head in the bag to sniff them because it was just so delightful. It's a hard scent to describe, but it's fruity and perfumed at the same time, and nothing else is quite like it.

 I had made quince jam before but I wasn't happy with the slightly gritty texture. You know that underripe pear sensation, where it's a bit granular? It's like that writ large. I had clearly not done something right, but all the blogs and articles I read about quince said either that you needed to push it through a mouli, that it just was slightly grainy, or that if it's grainy you're doing it wrong but without any further information of how to do it right. So I decided to make quince jelly instead - like the membrillo you can buy in Spain to have with manchego and other hard cheeses, but not quite as tart. Let's be honest, any excuse to eat cheese is a win.

 I roughly chopped the fruit - which took some doing, those things are rock hard! Between the pesto making and the quince my arms are going to be bulging with muscles at this rate. (One can dream). I put it in a large pan with some water and simmered it until mushy - it took about 2 hours. One of the nice things about making a jelly rather than a jam is you don't have to peel and core anything, just whack it into chunks and let it cook down slowly, so it's a nice easy way to make a preserve.

Rather enthusiastically bubbling quince

Once it had cooled, I set up my straining bag and its holder. Or rather, I didn't. I couldn't find the damned straining bag anywhere. I looked in all the sensible places and several not so sensible places, to no avail. Mark suggested the mighty Cliff's Hardware, which is a tiny shop that sells everything you can possibly think of. Although they assured me they usually had jelly bags they were out of stock at the minute.

As an aside, I hope everyone has a Cliff's in their life.  The sort of place where you can hold up the broken bit of dishwasher or esoteric connecting pipe and they'll reach behind their counter and say "like one of these?" and you will be able to fix whatever it is, even if you do have to go back twice more for further advice. It's a bit like a halfway house between Mr Hooper's store and Luis's fix it shop on Sesame Street - they don't do the repair but they sell you the stuff so you can, and explain what you need to do if you're unsure. The staff are unbelievably patient, friendly and knowledgeable. Timber, plumbing, tea cosies, bird seed, bedding plants, hay for your guinea pigs - Cliff's Hardware has you covered.

With this rare lapse by Cliff's, I still had not straining bag. Mark offered a trip to Harrogate to buy one from Lakeland, which would have included a bonus trip to Betty's for a fondant fancy (my personal favourite) but as he was in the midst of painting the kitchen I declined. Better to get that done than my domestic experimenting. I had found a metre of muslin in my search, though, so I ran up a spectacularly bad but still functional drawstring bag on the sewing machine. I really should remember the bit about measuring twice before I cut once. Oops.

We're in the middle of decorating,
 of course it's a mess

With the mush of 2kgs of quince shoved into the bag suspended above a large bowl, I left it to drip through the fabric overnight. It didn't do much, so I wrapped a couple of tins of tomatoes in clingfilm and used them as weights to get more liquid through.

The result as a scant pint of juice, give or take. I added 400g of sugar to the liquid and simmered it to reduce until it reached 104.5 degrees Celsius. That left me with a single jam jar of crystal clear pink jelly - not much to show for 2 kg, 2 hours cooking, 18 hours draining and then half an hour simmering with sugar, is it?

But throughout that time the house smelled amazing. And to be honest I wasn't making quince jelly because we needed a decent supply of it, I was doing it because it seemed like fun. 

I should have stopped a little before 104.5 as the quince jelly is very firm. Then again, the Owl and the Pussycat dined on slices of quince, so it's probably meant to be like that. At least, that's what I'm now claiming.

So there we have it - one glowing jar of scented beauty, to be put aside until the Christmas cheeseboard brings cheeses worth such an effort.

The owl and the pussycat went to sea 
In a beautiful pea-geen boat...
...They dined on mince, and slices of quince, 
Which they ate with a runcible spoon 

 

 

 

Bringing The Holiday Home With Me

 

 Obviously one of the many reasons to holiday in Italy is the food. What's not to love? Seafood, pasta, pizza, risotto... the whole country is awash in marvellous things to eat. It would be daft not to make the most of it.

Inspired by my very excellent mate Kirsty's habit of going to a cooking lesson when she's on holiday, I booked Mark and I a morning of making the traditional Ligurian pesto and focaccia in a restaurant in the stunning town of Sestri Levante, a short ride on the local train from our hotel in Rapallo. 

Lovely restaurant in Sestri Levante

Yes, I've made pesto before, but it was just more fun doing it with the local ingredients - a scant tablespoon of pine nuts, mounds of fresh basil from Pra', Ligurian olive oil from cold pressed Taggiasca olives, and their preferred a mix of parmesan and Sardinian pecorino. Of all the things we ate in Italy, the warm focaccia lavishly coated in freshly made pesto was pretty much the best thing, and believe me there was some fierce competition! 

All the essential supplies

The charming  Davide insisted that a glass of wine was a very necessary part of making pesto. I remember my Dad saying something similar in Canada in the 1970s - if he didn't have a cold beer in one hand, the barbeque just wasn't going to cook properly. I wasn't entirely convinced that was true for pesto being made at 10:30 in the morning, to be honest. Breakfast Wine is not something I want. However, Davide said wine was what powered the pestle and mortar - without a sip of wine to keep you going as you pound away, you won't have the oomph to make a smooth and delicious pesto.

Like I say, he was a very charming fella. 

See? Charming!

 I was very surprised how little salt and pine nuts went into the recipe. It was maybe half a teaspoon of coarse salt with half a plump garlic clove and the pine nuts that we pounded into a cream to start with. Then it was picking the leaves off mounds and mounds of basil, thumping the bejeesus out of it in a big heavy mortar with a marble pestle, and then thumping some more. The grated cheese was added a tablespoon a time with yet more pummelling in between. If I did this often I'd have muscles Rosie the Riveter would be proud of. Three or four tablespoons of cheese later and we were finished.

Davide said the oil must never be added to the mortar because the marble (or stone) is porous and will absorb it. We scooped all the paste onto our pestles like a glowing green basil gelato cone and put it in jars to be topped by olive oil. Apparently, the pesto is mixed with the appropriate amount of oil when it's going to be served. Otherwise, as long as it was covered with a layer of oil to prevent oxygenation, it was fine as a fairly stiff paste.

Having a brilliant time 

 
When we got home I was keen to try out making pesto - nearly as keen as Zach was to eat it! I have a very small Mason and Cash pestle and mortar I use for crushing spices,so I had a go with that.

Nightmare.

The bowl was far too small and the pestle far too light to crush the leaves thoroughly. It took muscle power to break it down, and muscles aren't what I'm known for. I'm more of a limp noodle than a powerhouse and it was absolutely exhausting.  I am never doing that again.

Luckily there was a very big stone pestle and mortar in the sale due to one of Amazon's spurious reasons for an event (I can't even remember what that one was called, but it wasn't Black Friday) so I bought myself that enormous thing* and had another go.

Seriously enormous, weighs a ton

 

However, all that weight means the heavy pestle does a superb job of bashing the poor basil into submission.  It took less than a third of the time of the small one and was a great deal more fun. It was also rather intimidatingly loud, for which I probably owe my neighbours apologies. And poor Luke who was nearby and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Having tried pesto with the traditionally shaped Trofie pasta (very narrow twists) and with breadsticks and focaccia, I fancied a go at trying to replicate a delicious lunch I'd had in Santa Marguerita. It was big billowing sheets of fresh pasta with loads of pesto on top. It looked messy and awful, but it was so light and delicious. 

Least appetising, most delicious

 

I've not made pasta with 00 flour before, but as I was trying to do it all with the proper Italian ingredients I bought flour to have a go. Bloody hell, that stuff is so much harder to work with than plain flour! It was so very stiff I wondered if I'd got the proportions wrong. I was using Angela Hartnet's 400g to 4 large eggs and a tablespoon of olive oil. I rolled half of it out to thing, long lasagne sheets ribbons and cooked them for around 3 minutes.

I'd been a bit overly free passing homemade pesto around my friends and neighbours to have the quantity  the restaurant served on the pasta, but it was still absolutely delicious. The pasta was light and silky, the pesto was strongly herby with just a gentle kick of garlic and it all felt like a bowl of happiness. Z and I agreed we'd definitely have it again, although with regular flour next time unless I take up an interest in weight lifting in the meantime.

There was the other half batch of pasta dough left over, so a couple of days later Zach and I had homemade tagliatelle with a puttanesca sauce, one of our favourites.  It normally takes less time to make the sauce than the pasta takes to cook, but that isn't true when cooking fresh pasta -  fresh pasta is done in two to three minutes. It's still a ridiculously quick sauce and punches far above its weight in the effort vs flavour ratio. We enjoyed it very much. (Mark, the Philistine, chose fried chicken tenders and chips instead. There's no accounting for taste)

I love puttanesca

*If I am ever found dead in my kitchen, there's a fair chance it will be because I dropped this damned thing on myself when trying to put it away. It weighs a ton and could probably fell an elephant. 

Flying The Flag On Holiday

Mark and I have just returned from a wonderful week in Rapallo, a coastal town not far from Genoa in Liguria. It's a lovely old town full of beautifully painted buildings in the tromp d'oeil style so typical of that area. It's also Not The Pretty One, supposedly. At least, not in comparison to its neighbours Santa Marguerita Ligure and Portofino - which as Mark pointed out, tells you how thoroughly spoilt the Italians are for beauty, if they can regard a gem like Rapalla as the "meh" town of the region.

Rapallo in the early evening

 
 I have lots to say about the food and the beauty and the food and the people and also in particular, the food, but it's something else that I want to write about today. 

As anyone living in the UK will know from the news, there are the flags of St George popping up all over the place in England. Not just flags attached to lampposts but naff spray-painted red crosses onto mini roundabouts in the road, and any other available white surface. It's either declaration of pride and love of England or a dog whistle to show non-white or non-English people that they aren't welcome, depending on your news source.

So I was surprised to see the flag of St George flying absolutely all over the place in the Genoese region. And it's for an absolutely brilliant reason - It's not our flag anyway.

We have to go back to the middle ages. There's England, trading in the Mediterranean far from home. We had no reputation to speak of. No one was intimidated by us; our traders, merchants, pilgrims and vessels are all easy targets for any pirates, bandits or opportunists who see easy pickings. England was getting her butt kicked in the Mediterranean arena, and it was expensive. What she needed was an ally - help from someone too fearsome to be messed with who'd offer England protection.

This is where Genoa, The Republic Of The Magnificents, came in. Genoa was extremely powerful, wealthy and well-armed. It had colonies across the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. The city was a major power from 1099 through to the 1700s, first through might and then through banking. It was Venice's main rival as a trading power and had a formidable reputation.

For a 'substantial' annual fee, Genoa allowed England to fly the Genoese flag of St George, knowing that anyone seeing that flag will not want to incur the wrath of the republic known as La Dominante and La Superba. (Italian republics really went in for nicknames. Just look at The Eternal City and La Serenissima)

For literally hundreds of years England paid Genoa for the right to fly their flag. Hundreds of years .From Richard the Lionheart to the mid 18th century. We only stopped paying when Austria invaded Genoa. The mayor of Genoa in 2018 jokingly requested 247 years of back rent for the flag the English now think of as theirs.

I love this. When Tommy 'Not a racist, honest, guvnor' Robinson had his march in London the other week and there were countless images of people wearing the St George's cross flag as a cape, I like knowing that it's the flag of somewhere else. That we had to pay protection money to use the flag because our own name didn't count for much. When they talk about pride in their country while flying a cross of St George, I don't think 'borrowed muscle' is the pride they mean. 

That brought me to another public item on display - signs. I like signs in new places. I did see something else displayed in Liguria that delighted me - a handwritten sign, emphatically underlined and over punctuated, outside a street-side pizzeria in the tourist town of Santa Marguerita.

It was everything in one pithy sentence - the cultural difference between the Brits and the Italians, how common it was that this misunderstanding occurred, and just how frustrated both British tourists and Italian waiting staff found the behaviour of the other side. 

Line Has No Value

Line Has No Value is almost a declaration of war to a country with a penchant for queueing. There is nothing a Brit won't turn into a queue given the opportunity. When a bunch of people are waiting for something, we don't just rush in like some pack of savages, we form an orderly queue and shoot daggers from our eye while harumphing should someone attempt to push in. (This doesn't apply when getting on the Tube in London for some reason.)
 

The number of patiently queuing potential diners getting huffy that they aren't being seated, and the sheer impossibility of actually speaking to someone to request un tavolo when you could indicate your wish without having to exchange a word...  You know it has to be substantial if a sign written in Sharpie with two underlining and four exclamation points needs cellotaping over your cafe name.

I bloody love the Italians. And not just for their food. But mostly.

 

When In Rome

When I was a teenager I believed I'd been born in the wrong place.

I believed in souls and bodies in the Cartesian dualism mode back then; that souls were slotted into bodies as if they were assigned dorm rooms. What can I say? I was a teenager in the 80s; I believed a lot of stupid stuff. Particularly things could be used in a romantic narrative of soul mates, miracles and true love. If a story was beautiful enough surely it must be true. 

I was born in Chester to a family living in North Wales and I grew up living in a small town in Southern Ontario. This was clearly an error on the part of the universe. I didn't like small towns. I was supposed to be going to theatres and ballets and live in a major city because everything good about the world could be found in a city. I was supposed to be French, ideally. I was meant to be eating amazing food and within reach of great art and inspiring architecture. 

When I moved to the U.K. in my late teens I made getting to Paris my main focus, and I went as often as I could: 7 times in 6 years.  Finally, I was visiting a place that spoke to my soul. I loved Paris, but I wasn't sure it loved me. I was too noisy and uncool.

And then, 9 years from arriving in the U.K, I had a long weekend in Florence. Oh. My. God.

My soul wasn't French, it was Italian. Loud, messy, demonstrative, passionate, food-obessessed - not to mention holding a full motorbike licence for my Vespa. Obviously I was Italian! 

I don't believe in souls and duality anymore. I'm resigned to being a Canadian/Yorkshire woman in her mid 50s. I've been through enough with this body to know it is me and I am it, we aren't separate. But I still think Italy is pretty much the most wonderful place I can think of, other than my own garden. Florence, Rome, Venice, I adore them all.

There was marvellous story on the BBC News website this week that reminded me why I love Italy so damned much and why it's such a good fit for me. It gets worked up over the sort of tiny details that I also get aerated about.

There was a recipe on the BBC Good Food website for Cacio e Pepe, that most Roman of pasta dishes. This recipe caused a Roman restaurant committee to write a letter of protest to the British ambassador. The recipe described Cacio e Pepe as "a speedy lunch", which was felt to diminish this deceptively simple classic, but most egregious of all it included butter and parmesan.

Cacio e Pepe is spaghetti, pepper and pecorino cheese. Here's what the Italians said:  

• "We are always told we are not as good as the BBC*... and then they go and do this. Such a grave mistake." 
• "What Good Food published with butter and parmesan is called Pasta Alfredo. It's another kind of pasta." 
• "You have to yield to Caesar that which is Caesar's." 
• "Our tradition is based on food. So if you touch the only thing that we have..."

A letter to the British Ambassador. I am not kidding. God, I bloody love the Italians.

In remembrance of trips to Rome over the years and to correct our country's offence against Roman culinary history, last night I made Zach and I Cacio e Pepe the Roman way. That is to say, correctly. (Or at least I sincerely hope so)

Cacio e Pepe for 2

Put a kettle on to boil water for the pasta and then add it to a pan with a hefty dash of salt. Only fill the pan about halfway. The trick is to not use too much liquid as you want to water to get a good amount of starch in it. 

Add spaghetti or linguine or similar to the pan, stir to prevent it sticking and cook it for 3 minutes less than the instructions on the packet. It will finish cooking as the sauce builds.

Finely grate about half a wedge of pecorino romano, so probably 60g to 80g for two people.  It does need to be finely grated; regular grating is prone to get clumpy when we hit the emulsifying part. Put it in a bowl with plenty of room for stirring.

Grind a lot of black pepper - about 1.5 - 2 teaspoons full. Toasted that in a dry frying pan over a low heat until it releases its fragrance but take care not to burn it.

While the pasta cooks, add several tablespoons of the pasta water into the pepper and swirl it around a bit, then another few tablespoons. Once the pasta hits that 3 Minutes To Go point, do not drain it. Use tongs to lift the al dente pasta into the frying pan and toss it about in the pan, coating it with the pepper and starchy water, which will emulsify into a creamy start of a sauce. 

You need to guess a little about the amount of water, but go for less rather than more. It's easy to add a couple of tablespoons to a thick sauce before serving but not to thicken a thin one.

Add several tablespoons of the remaining pasta water to the mound of finely grated pecorino and stir it until it makes a thick smooth paste. Take the pasta frying pan off the heat and let it rest a moment to lose a little heat. If you add the pecorino paste while at simmering temperature the sauce more likely to split or get claggy, so do take that half a minute or so.

Using the tongs to toss the pasta and pecorino paste together in the pan until glossy and coated in the silky sauce. Serve with a little extra ground black pepper on top.

It really is a very easy and straightforward pasta dish, but tastes so much more than the sum of its parts. And of course anything that makes me think of Rome is a good thing. 

Ciao, amici miei!

* although the BBC got the blame because of the domain name BBCGoodFood, it actually sold off the Good Food site a couple of years back so it's not actually the Beeb's fault.

Celebrating Mum's birthday in Rome in 2008

Beets me

 One of my favourite experiments in the veg patch is growing something we think we don't like. 

My reasoning goes that if you can taste something picked at its best, prepared freshly and still dislike it, you've given that food every chance and you never have to try that thing again... but you might be surprised.

I used to think I didn't much like sprouts until I grew them and harvested them myself. Peas got a lot more interesting to small children who could eat them fresh out of the pod. Somehow red currants off the bush are vastly nicer than those in a supermarket. In fairness kohlrabi remained boring and salsify just wouldn't grow so there's not always a success, but it's a game worth playing. 

In my opinion, the worst family of vegetables is that loathesome Clean Dirt masquerading as food, beets and chard. There's no faster way to destroy a salad than to add some baby chard leaves, or that duplicitous, misnomered leaf Perpetual Spinach. Aside - It's not spinach, it's a chard. The name is to make it sound good when it's actually dreadful. Just accept that spinach bolts and sow it successionally.

Worst of all is the Root Vegetable of Doom, beetroot. 

I've had it grated raw in salads, pickled, roasted with other veg, added to hummus, as a so called crisp, ruining added to a smoothie  and god knows what they do to the weird vacuum sealed stuff in the supermarket, but I've had that too. All tasting like a mouthful of earth. At least the pickled one was dirt with added vinegar. 

I'm not alone in this. When my Dad did a bit of vegetable growing in a corner of their herbaceous garden, he was delighted by the success of his beetroot crop. My Mum actually had nightmares about him force-feeding it to her. 

A few years ago I blew a moderate fortune on booking 6 months ahead to take Mark to Tommy Banks's restaurant The Black Swan at Oldstead*. Don't get me wrong, it was money well spent, it was the meal of a lifetime! What I didn't realise was that one of the signature dishes is a slab of crapaudine beetroot cooked for 5 hours in beef fat or olive oil. Yikes!

It was absolutely delicious.

With that in mind, this year I decided to give beets a chance**.

If Tommy Banks goes to the hassle of growing 14th century French heritage beets, and I really want to give beetroot the best go at being acceptable, I thought I should probably do the same. Crapaudine means toad, a reference to the rough skin on these unusual beets. Only specialist and heritage growers sell the seeds, but there are lots of chef-type recipes specifying them in recipes so I figured they must be worth the hassle.

Looking a bit moth eaten by October

Germination went quite well. I sowed the seeds direct in May, with a second, less successful sowing in late June. The leaves looked like pretty much standard beets but the root itself is more like a fat parsnip shape than a globe. I wasn't expecting that. Unfortunately, the same problem as I've had with both carrots and parsnips happened with the beets - they hit an obstacle in the soil and split. I had a nice thick cylinder for the top few inches of root, them they split into useless leggy strands.

Slightly deformed beetroot

Still, I had some healthy looking plants, so was free to experiment.

First I tried the baby leaves, which I'd been told were good in salads. Nope, they taste exactly like chard and are horrible. The hens were extremely grateful to my picky tastebuds as they got loads of nice leafy treats. Personally, I'd rather go hungry.

Next, I tried one of the tiny beetroots raw after I'd thinned the row a bit. Dad said they are particularly nice when young. Nope, still like willingly eating dirt. 

When it came to cooking them, I decided on a split approach. I would drizzle some in oil and salt and roast in a tinfoil parcel, and the other I would try approximate the Tommy Banks approach by cooking it on a very low heat in olive oil on the hob for a few hours.

The latter didn't work at all. Even on the lowest setting on the smallest gas ring, the oil cooked too vigorously. I ended up with a weird halfway house of boiling olive oil then turning the heat off, back and forth for about 2 hours before I abandoned it. I think I should have removed the beetroot from the oil at that point but I let it cool down first.

The second worked really well! I couldn't justify having the oven on for a couple of hours for just beetroot, so I also baked a gluten free lime yogurt cake for my Very Excellent Mate SJ, then one of my favourite easy meals, confit tandoori chickpeas from Ottolenghi. 

To serve it, I meant to have nice seeded flatbreads with Abergavenny goats cheese and walnuts. As it turned out, the shop didn't have any flatbreads and the walnuts in the cupboard were stale, so we went with just the beetroot and cheese.

The attempted confit beetroot was a bit oily, but other than that they all tasted pretty much the same. Remarkable sweet, a smooth texture and yes, a little bit like Clean Dirt but only a tiny bit, and it complemented the cheese. I think the walnuts - or a bitter leaf like radicchio - might have improved it by cutting through the sweetness but it was still more of a success than I'd anticipated. 

Mark's verdict was Absolutely Delicious. Mine was Not Bad, Actually.

I don't think I'll be rushing to buy great bunches of the stuff, but as an occasional thing, slow roased beetroot is a nice surprise. 5 months from garden to plate, but I don't garden hoping for fast food.

A small plate for such a long project

As I have been putting away gardening things for the winter, I see I still have half a packet of crapaudine seeds. I might even plant them next year. 

Maybe.

* It was later voted best restaurant in the world, and I believe it. If you should ever stumble across a giant wad of money, I heartily reccomend spending it there, or Roots in York by the same team.

** Apologies to John and Yoko

Beanz Meanz Happiness

One of my very favourite moments in the veg patch is when the borlotti beans are ready to be picked. For weeks I've watched the pods grow and swell, become mottled then a deep satisfying scarlet. They are lovely ornaments dangling down, gently swaying in a breeze. They draw the eye, only to taunt me with Not Yet.

Not quite ready

It's when those pods are drying and dull that the fun starts.

I love the feeling of splitting a leathery pod down its central seam to reveal the cream and purple jewels inside. It's incredibly satisfying. Each bean is a beauty - even the occasional pale green under-ripe ones are pretty. Before long the mound of pods is replaced by a bowl full of plump borlotti beans ready to become that most wonderful of soups - or is that stews? -  pasta e fagioli.

Pasta e fagioli just means pasta and beans. If you're Dean Martin and come from Naples stock*, it's pronounced Pasta Fazool, which conveniently rhymes with "when the stars make you drool," which is why I sing That's Amore every time I make it.

There are probably as many different Correct Recipes as their are Italian families, but this is how I make mine, showing off the borlottis at their finest.

Pasta e fagioli

• Large bowl of fresh borlotti beans
• 3 medium onions
• 2 large carrots
• 1 small head of celery
• bay leaves
• stalk of rosemary
• sprig of thyme
• stalks of parsley tied together
• 2tbs olive oil
• 2 tins of tomatoes
• salt
• pepper
• lemon juice

then, later, 

• macaroni
• water

First, cook the borlotti beans until tender:

In  a good sized pot, tip in the beans and cover with plenty of water. Cut in half one each of the onions and carrots and add them and 4 stalks of celery (including leaves if present) to the pot along with the bay leaves, rosemary and thyme. To make life easier for yourself later, tie the parsley stalks together so you can fish them out easily at the end.

Bring to the boil and skim off any froth, then simmer until the beans are completely tender. This is generally about an hour - do keep checking the beans aren't boiling dry as the liquid will make our soup stock.

Leave to cool, then remove and discard the vegetables and herbs. They have both infused our beans and flavoured the stock, and have little goodness remaining.

Chop up the remaining onions, carrots and celery and fry gently in the olive oil until tender. Add the tinned tomatoes and cook until they've broken down a little.

Depending on which pot is the biggest, either add the beans to the vegetables or the vegetables to the beans and stock. Bring to a boil and season generously with salt and pepper, plus a healthy slosh of lemon juice to brighten the flavours.

At this point, I usually let it all cool and portion it into tupperware or ziplock bags, labelled E Fagioli because they haven't got the pasta in yet. The pasta tends to keep absorbing water and becomes unpleasantly over-floppy if it's kept for several days, in my experience, so is best added when you're going to eat it. I pop the various containers of soup in the fridge and freezer - they defrost just fine, and we have a very quick dinner whenever we need it.

The Pasta bit:

Put as much of the soup in a saucepan as you need for the number of people you are serving. I find a big heaped ladle per person is about right, maybe one and an half if you're greedy me. Add a small handful of dried macaroni per person and some cold water - probably 125ml per portion. Bring the soup to the boil and simmer for around 8 minutes. Top with some grated parmesan or pecorino if you like.

The borlotti beans really are next level delicious. They elevate this from a basic vegetable soup to something rich and nourishing and ridiculously moreish. I highly recomend growing them, they are an absolute doddle.

Buon appetito!

  

*yes, a terrible soup pun. I'm not proud.

Water works

 I love to grow veg in the poly tunnel and I love my garden but one part I really don't like is watering things. I forget, or my knees hurt, or I get distracted. I am terrible at remembering to do it consistently and unfortunately consistency is the key to successful veg growing.

Watching a section on Gardener's World about an allotment for a guy who is frequently away for periods during the growing season, I was interested in his 'self-watering' planters, or Wicking Pots. This is a system involving a reservoir of water, a wick to draw the water up, and the pot itself. There are absolutely heaps of items you can buy from the basic to the very high tech, but the principle is largely the same.

Our garden tends to the 'allotment chic' aesthetic rather than gadgetry. It felt much more fun to work out how to make them myself than to buy a system so I headed to Google to look at ways of making some wicking pots myself.

THE TRIAL

On the advice of some very helpful YouTube channels, we bought generic builders buckets from Wickes for a quid a go. These would be our resevoirs.

Reusing large plastic pots from shrubs we'd bought in the past would be fine for my cucumber and tomato plants. To hold up the pots I put upturned ice cream tubs in the buckets. This holds the pot proud of the bucket, creating more space for the reservoir.  I cut openings in the sides to let the water in, and in the top to allow air to escape as I pour water in.

As for wicks,  I took the worst of our old tea towels and a sweatshirt B has outgrown. I cut them into strips and pushed the ends through the holes in the base of each pot, long enough to dangle over the ice cream tub to the bottom of the bucket. 

There are loads of different ways to lay out the wicking systems. I made three different ones so I can monitor the results and see which (if any!) is effective.

1) Four thick twisted sections of sweatshirt fabric running all the way up the sides of the pot and held in place by clothes pegs, with a piece of fabric across the bottom of the pot to stop any soil falling into the reservoir. 

2) Several short wicks leading to a thick layer of fabric in the base of the pot to water it from below only.

3) Loads of short croquet-hoop style wicks made from tea towels, both ends trailing to the resevoir and fiilling every one of the holes in the pot - a little but everywhere approach

You can see approaches 1 and 3 - I forgot to photograph the base layer type.

Next job was to fill the pots with peat free compost and plant the tomato and cucumber seedlings. I put in a cane to tie them to as they grew. The pot then went into the bucket - making sure the fabric wicks were hanging down to touch the bottom of the bucket - to sit securely on top of the ice cream tubs. Mark carried them into the poly tunnel for me and I filled the resevoirs from the water butt.

I found the top of the soil felt slightly damp for about 4 days - 5 if it was cooler out. This was great for my erratic watering; even more so later in the summer, when I once again tore the meniscus in my right knee and mobility became a bigger issue for me.  It was also great because our 8 days in Portugal meant my Very Excellent Mate Penny only had to pop over twice to water them.

The gorgeousness of Portugal

Truly fantastic holiday- and yes, you can read in a pool

RESULTS

Good things - 

• stayed moist
• needed little attention
• plants survived heat waves and absences

Bad things - 

• the insects! something clearly lay its eggs in the stagnant water at the bottom of the resevoirs
• the smell when watering - disturbing the stagnant bit not only led to a swarm of flies but also a horrible stink
• instability - the pots listed somewhat over the course of the summer so the plants grew at some inconvenient angles. I could pop a bit of stone or brick to wedge them upright in future

Learning points - 

• FEED THE PLANTS.  I always used growbags with added fertiliser incorporated so it didn't occur to me I needed to regularly feed the plants. What can I say, I'm a twit.
• put less water in the resevoir each time unless I was going away. By leaving so much standing water in the reservoir (because I thought the plants would be more thirsty than they were at the start) I ended up with the bugs/pong situation
• wedge them in place so they don't tip to the side

I will definitely do it again. There was no observable difference in the growth of the plants or the effectiveness of the wicking systems whether tea towel, sweatshirt, long wicks, short wicks and croquet hoops, so that makes things easy. The wicks aren't reusable as the cotton is pretty disgusting after one season, but we always have some old rags, t-shirts or cloths around.

For a number of reasons we didn't have a successful tomato crop - the scary 40 degree temperatures stressed everything, the plants fruited late and didn't have time to ripen, and yes, for those on the back, I totally failed to regularly feed the poor things.

On the positive side, lots of green tomatoes means lots of green tomato chutney.

Green Tomato Chutney

• 500g unripe tomatoes
• 500g onions
• 250g sultanas (or 125g plus 125g diced Bramley
• 200g brown sugar
• 1.5tsp salt
• 1tsp cayenne pepper
• 1tsp crushed cardamom seeds
• 1tsp mustard seeds
• 500ml vinegar - whatever type you have

Chop the tomatoes and onions, chuck everything into a pot and simmer uncovered for 45-75 minutes, depending how finely you diced things. When it's nice and reduced, put the hot churney into sterilised jars.

Ta-Da!