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.

June's Three Letter Acronyms: HRT and RHS

 

What a lazy thing I've been for 6 months! Not a word written, and my principle activity has been binge-reading for days on end. No wonder I'm fatter and more unfit than ever. The inactivity and inertia of 16 months of isolation has led to me being heavier than ever and I'm a bit ashamed to let people see me. I was feeling pretty low about it. With that and my stomach hernia tearing ever wider, I feel something of a lopsided freak. 

In addition, my moods have been getting worse and worse. I've alway been on the ranting feisty side. However, over the last five years I've been FURIOUS. Not a bit irritable, not grumpy, actually incandescent with rage most of the time and struggling to suppress it. My poor family are very hard done by. It can't be helping my blood pressure

Added to that has been increased joint pain, erratic sleeping, hot flushes, and for the first time in my life, poor memory.  I always had an excellent memory. Now I feel disorganised and stupid; I can't remember names and frequently drop a word from my brain for a while. I was worried this is how dementia starts, to be honest.

However, Davina McColl's excellent programme about menopause gave me the prod I needed. I emailed my GP (phone calls and appointments are near impossible) and aftert a telephone consult 4 weeks later, find myself the owner of the coolest stickers known to women - the HRT patch stuck to my butt cheek.

I'm only at the start of my HRT experience, but so far it's bloody fantastic. Reduced flushes, but still there sometimes, slightly reduced joint pain but mostly NO RAGE.*  It's brilliant! I feel optimistic. I can have fun. I can have sex, too, which perimenopausal me was struggling with somewhat. It's a clear broad square of cellotape that is making my life so very much better.  I give thanks to the Goddess of HRT, whoever she is, and encourage all my perimenopausal-suffering sisters to request it. 

Side effects so far are a tendency to get even pinker in the sunshine, a burst of swearing when I realise I've forgotten to swap patches and having to use baby oil for the first time in decades. (It cleans the sticky residue off your skin). It should even regulate my periods; a blessing when my cycle ranges from 16 days to 147 days!

In celebration of this new optimistic me, Mark and I went to a visit at the new RHS Bridgewater garden in Salford. We'd seen the first of four episodes of the BBC documentary of its contruction and thought it looked great. The main attraction for us was  - inevitably -  the chance to see such a massive kitchen garden. I may be a grempty spoaces adual convert to growing flowers but my true love is growing food.

It's important to remember that Bridgewater's a very new garden opening in a difficult time. There are some areas not established enough to look impressive - particularly the Chinese Riverside Garden - and some empty spaces only gradually being planted out. However, you such a young garden it is fantastic!  The repeated swathes of salvia and geums, the beautiful structures for climbing plants echoing the Bothey's chimney, the pleached tree courtyards and stunning use of water in both the kitchen garden and paradise garden were delightful. 

We weren't the only fans. As well as the human admirers, the gardens were filled wiht bees of all types, butterflies, dragonflies, damsel flies and birds. We were particularly delighted to see a swallow nest full of chicks, and watch the adults swoop in every two minutes with beaks crammed with insects. Give me a puffer jacket and call me Michaela Strachan!

I was very impressed how natural the new lake looked already, with at least 3 species of dragonfly in residence. Their waterlilies were in bloom weeks before ours, so I was definitely rather envious. Unfitness and knee pain meant we didn't explore the furthest areas of woodland, but this is very much as garden in progress so coming again won't be a hardship.

One thing I've found at every RHS venue or event I've been to is how absolutely lovely the staff are. Those at Bridgewater are clearly as proud as punch of the new garden, and were happy to chat with the many visitors on all sorts of topics. They really are a credit to the RHS, and I hope the organisation knows it.

The main prompt for writing a quick post today was my mother in law Marion, who was hoping I'd posted some phtots of Bridgewater for her to admire. In that spirit, here are lots of photos of pretty or inventive things that appealed to me:

*Ok, a bit of rage, but that's because of Johnson and Cummiongs and Hancock and all those weaselly mendacious incompetents, so is to be expected

To garden is to be an optimist

It's that rare thing - a properly snowy day in England.  They are exciting days to be relished, as years can go by without them. The wildlife is making the most of it as well - two healthy young foxes were. doing what can only be described as frolicking in the next garden, and it was all very Christmas card-like. Leaping, pouncing, rolling in the snow, looking absolutely gorgeous. The birds are less keen. The hens are quail are hunkered down under shelter. 23 starlings mobbed the bird feeders, so I suspect I'll need to venture out and top that up shortly.

I'm warm and snug inside with a stack of seed and plant catalogues and a wish list. It's time to plan this year's vegetable garden. 

We've had a lot of reference books over the years but the one I most turn to is the River Cottage Handbook: Veg Patch by Mark Diacono. It's full of practical advice, suggestions about various varieties, soil conditions, sowing and planting charts and all the usual stuff you'd expect. However, what stands it apart is the section on What To Plant.

Diacono suggests first making a list of all the veg you like. Don't worry about whether it will grow or not at this stage, you can whittle the list down later.  If a vegetable doesn't appear on your list, don't grow it.  Sounds obvious but believe me, it isn't. I grew perpetual spinach for several years before accepting that yes, true spinach bolts and runs to seed but who cares? It's far, far nicer to eat than a chard pretending to be spinach. See also beetroot (for my Mum) and radish (for my Dad).

He also suggests you look at several different reasons to plant something. Is it far better when freshly picked? Asparagus, peas, sweetcorn and sprouts picked minutes ago are all a world away from the supermarket equivalent because the sugars degrade to starch by the hour. Freshly picked tomatoes smell absolutely wonderful. The best strawberries you'll ever taste are picked straight from the plant, still warm from the sun.

Is it expensive to buy but easy to grow? Again, asparagus is the clear example; once the bed is well established it effortlessly produces stalks for years. Herbs grow very well from seed in generous armfuls. The more unusual varieties like Pink Fir Apple spuds are pricey in the shops and a doddle to grow in a sack on the patio.  

The reverse is also important from my point of view - is it cheap to buy and either complicated to grow or needs too much space? Don't bother. (Celery, I'm looking at you.) Greedy things, squashes - the plants grow quickly and well but they take many months and a huge patch of the raised bed to produce something I can pick up for a quid at the supermarket with no loss of flavour. Onions are insanely cheap, whereas shallots are far more expensive to buy and grow beautifully in our climate so I choose them instead.

NB - this space issue is for those of us with limited raised bed space or a small veg patch. You allotmenteers can fill your boots, you lucky devils.

How about thinking about food miles - there are loads of commonly imported vegetables that grow perfectly happily in our gardens. Any we grow ourselves is a step to reducing our carbon footprint. With successional planting in troughs I can keep us in mixed salad leaves from late May to September at the very least. 

Is it attractive? Runner beans were initially grown for their flowers, not the pods, and come in many shades from  white or yellow through orange to the most vivid red. Globe artichokes are stunning plants with huge silver leaves and giant purple thistle flowers (if you leave some buds to develop.) They are always covered in bees and hoverflies. Jerusalem artichokes are really a strain of sunflowers that grow 3m stalks with bright yellow flowers. Borage is not only great for bees and for producing cucumber flavoured flowers for your Pimms, those flowers are prolific and the most heavenly blue. So if you want to enjoy the look of your veg patch as well as its produce, that's worth thinking of.

Diacono also strongly recommends growing something you've never tried before. That's brought me a lot of fun over the years from cute but silly cucamelons, tomatillos for Mexican food, my first taste of quince this year and the ridiculous looking kohlrabi, which makes great coleslaw.  He also suggests something you think you dislike.  I know that sounds contradictory to Grow What You Enjoy, but it's choosing something deliberately to see if your prejudice holds. That's how I learnt that I love sprouts (see Better When Fresh above).

I would add another consideration - Don't Grow What Is Doomed To Fail. Why do it to yourself?  Optimist that I am, I have attempted to grow aubergines on at least 12 occasions. I'm here to tell you that if you live in Yorkshire without a heated greenhouse, my lovely, you are NOT likely to be successful. With red and green peppers you'll get some, with chilli peppers (in a poly tunnel or cold frame) you'll have masses; aubergines? not so much. Ditto rosemary in heavy clay soil, or blueberries planted in lime-rich soil. I also tried chilli peppers from seed unsuccessfully for years until I got a heated propagator. I make that mistake a lot, and it's expensive. Enthusiasm over practicality. I'd save yourself the bother; just look at me as someone who makes mistakes so you don't have to.

With all that in mind, I'ver gone through and created the list for Veg Patch 2021. I hope by placing my orders on the early side I won't get blindsided like last year when a third of the things I wanted were out of stock as new lockdown gardeners emptied the shelves. 

This year's wish list include some things I fancy a go at, some things I know we love, some stalwarts we can't do without. I haven’t included shallots, coriander and salad because those are my essentials I won’t forget.

Equally important is my No list. That starts with those I often out of habit but don't justify the space: broccoli and cauliflowers, squashes, more than 2 courgette plants.  The other group includes those that are great  in theory but fail in practice: last year no one harvested the runner beans or peas beyond a handful picked in passing and eaten raw. Not this year, I'll wait until we actually miss them before adding them back in the rotation. (Side eye to Mark, who asked me to plant the runner beans when I don't like them!)

I also know from experience that some plants are more economical for me to buy as seedlings rather than growning from seed myself. I'm an erratic gardener really, and tend to stop paying attention between the exciting bit (Oooh! a seedling!) and the fun bits (big enough to plant out, then later harvesting). Therefore I tend to have more luck with a sturdy couple of cucumber plants than a packet of 10 seeds. It's not all my fault, the slugs are also a major factor, but it's pretty frustrating so now I acknowledge that and work around it. 

By the way, my all time best Buy It, Don't Sow It is sweetpea seedlings from Sarah Raven. They are EXPENSIVE, there's no way around. However, they are extremely study and prolific plants. I get 2-3 bouquets of sweetpeas for at least 12 weeks straight - more if I were a less erratic waterer. It's an annual gift I give myself and it is stupendous value compared to any cut flowers I might buy. The whole house is filled with the scent, it's divine. My friends and neighbours benefit too. She has many gorgeous collections but my favourite are the very simple ones with few flowerheads that produce the most wonderful scent. 

My final decision on the wish list is to not buy what I will inevitably get given. Last year I was offered courgette and tomato seedlings from 9 different people. Both those good natured plants propagate like billy-o, bless their lovely selves. Any gardener who grows them inevitably ends up with a glut of seedlings and not enough space. I'm going to bank on being offered some*, and will have some less common seedlings to offer in return.

Next jobs - planning what will go where, which involves looking at last year's planting diagram to make sure I'm rotating my crops and remembering companion planting. Then placing the orders. I love this - all the potential, and dreams of warm summer days in my garden, piucking veg for dinner. 

*If this all backfires, don't worry about us going without. I reorganised the freezer and food cupboards this week. Turn out I have 31 tins of tomatoes in there!

And treat those two imposters just the same

This is a story of hubris, preserves and living in a sitcom.

The first thing I did after breakfast on Saturday was to water the poly tunnel and harvest some of the produce. The first batch of tomatillos were ripe, there were 17 jalapeños ready, some dwarf cucumbers and courgettes ranging from acceptable to giant marrows.

After chucking the marrows to the hens (chickens love them) I laid my haul on the garden table. I called  to Mark, "behold, I have a crop of finest Green!" in a daft pompous tone. The photo went to friends and family, Facebook and Twitter; I was extremely satisfied with the fruits of my labours. Downright smug even - look at the Earth Mother growing her veg and making preserves and pickles! How very Good Life. 

I wasn't far off the mark, but not in the way I thought.

The next thing I did was tackle the overgrown raised bed to remove some of the giant courgette leaves, the borage that had collapsed in the high winds and was drooping across the path and remove the bits that were rotting or dying back.  It's a job I'd been putting off because they are extremely prickly plants. Despite long sleeves and gloves, I had the raised bumps and  rashes I always get from the many bristles poking into me. My forearms were covered in them. I hate that job.

Mark and the kids were doing errands in Zach's car (Mum's aged Polo) so I messaged him to ask he buy a big bottle of white vinegar so I could do the pickling in the afternoon. We usually buy the glass bottles with a screw top. This time he bought plastic bottles with the small hole in the stopper (like you use for putting vinegar on your chips) because he thought I might need lots and it was cheaper. This will matter later.

I was looking forward to making the salsa verde with the tomatillos. You can't buy them easily in the UK and they are delicious. We love  Mexican/Central American food in general, really - hence the jalapenos! 

The counter was *covered* in stuff because I am a slob who lives with slobs. I couldn't be bothered clearing it all properly. I knew I could clean down a working area and ignore the rest - to Mark's horror I can do this perfectly happily. For reference, here's how it looked last week when I was making a curry:

Yes, I am ashamed. Mark can't work in this chaos because he's normal but as long as I can clear and clean a small space I'm good to go. 

First, I peeled the papery cases from the tomatillos, washed their soapy residue off, halved them and roasted them skin up in a very hot oven for 10 minutes.  I'd then pop them in the blender with half a chopped onion, a big fistful of coriander, a garlic clove, 3 chillies and the juice of a lime. Whizz it up, salt to taste, and there you've got a fantastic salsa that lasts about a week in the fridge or several months in the freezer.

Spot the food blogging in the anecdote; I'm content-rich, me.

While the tomatillos were cooling, I started on the pickling liquor for the jalapeños.

My preferred recipe is 250ml water, 250ml vinegar, a teaspoon or sugar, a tablespoon of salt and a few garlic cloves simmered to boiling, to which I  add the sliced chilli peppers off the heat and leave them to infuse/gently cook for 10 minutes before putting in a jar. It's very good, I heartily recomment it.

(See - content! Two recipes already)

I tried to prise the stopper off the vinegar bottle with the edge of a spoon so I could pour out 250ml, but it wouldn't be shifted. Damn it.  I squeezed the plastic bottle into the measuring cup.

I squeezed a bit hard.

The stopper came off with a POP and vinegar poured out at force, covering everything.

Everything.

Veg, cooking equipment, papers, a book, bowls, fruit, phone, floor, me.

I found every single scratch I got pruning back all the prickly stuff this morning. Ow.

It took me 40 minutes to clear up: wash everything down, mop the floor, rinse the fruit and veg and leave them out to dry, bin the butter in the butter dish, wash the pasta jar, lay out the papers and novel to dry, change clothes, wash up the crockery I doused.

 I was knackered and sweating. 

My (freshly washed) hair and face got covered to. I sweated VINEGAR into my EYES.

I smelled like a chip shop.

I want to be an Earth Mother type, whereas I am in fact in a slapstick sitcom or a Carry On film.

It was the hubris particularly.  “Look at my amazing monochrome veg harvest. Isn’t it gorgeous! Aren’t I such a great example,  growing and preserving things?” to a Joni Mitchell Ladies Of The Canyon soundtrack. Me in my maxi dress and wellies, tending my crops and preserving my veg.

Fast forward to vinegar drenched train wreck.

I did get a happy ending - see the jars below. 

This morning I resolved to have a less farcical experience. I went down the garden to sit in my new swing/hammock chair and read a novel. Swaying gently in the sunshine enjoying a favourite book I was feeling at one with the world.

Until the hook holding the chair gave way.

Cue title sequence.

P.S. No, I'm not kidding, yes, it hurt and I'm on painkillers and yes, it did look ridiculous and yes, I was flat on my back like an upturned tortoise.

Summery food for sunny days

A burst of sunshine in between the rainy days had me in the mood for food that tasted of summer. I started browsing the Guardian and BBC food sections for something new to make that is suitable for celebrating warm and gentle days. I found it on a round up of Nigel Slater recipes. 

I've cut and pasted this recipe directly from the Guardian article so I won't lose it. When read it I suddenly remembered an amazing tiny taster of gazpacho we were given before our meal in Cancalle 8 years ago, looking over the oyster beds in the sunshine.  It was one of the most delicious things I'd ever tasted. 

This wasn't quite the same but was still utterly gorgeous. Today I'm making it for the second time but I'm going to leave out the crab. Maybe try tuna or prawns? It won't have the same contrast of heat and sweetness but at £5 for a small pot of white crab meat I can't afford to use that ingredient often.

Actually, I'd have this gazpacho without any seafood at all and still love it, I think. It is dead easy and so delicious.

Nigel Slater's Cold Crab Soup:

See that tiny green chilli?
That was TOO MUCH

Serves 4

garlic 1 small clove
cherry tomatoes 300g
cucumber 1
romano peppers 2
bird’s-eye chilli 1
sherry vinegar 2 tbsp
white crab meat 300g
mustard and cress or watercress to finish

Peel the garlic and place in the jug of an electric blender or food processor. Tip in the cherry tomatoes. Peel the cucumber, then halve and cut one half into two or three pieces and add to the tomatoes and garlic. Finely dice the second half of the cucumber and set aside.

Roughly chop the romano peppers and add to the vegetables in the blender. Process the vegetables until you have a brilliant red puree, then season with the sherry vinegar and a little salt and black pepper.

Chuck it all in the blender

Fold the reserved diced cucumber into the white crab meat, taking care not to crush the flakes of crab.

Pour the soup into four bowls. Spoon the crab on top of the soup, add a pinch of mustard and cress and serve

Ready for the fridge, chilled for later

Note from me - White wine vinegar was fine instead of sherry vinegar. I think I could use a normal red pepper too, but I did buy the long romano peppers this time. I charred the skin off before using them as I find pepper skin a little tough when not cooked.
I would also go very cautiously with the bird's eye chilli - they pack one hell of a punch and could easily overwhelm the other flavours. We love chillies and it had us gasping.
If you put the soup in the fridge before serving, it really thickens up.
If you skip the crab, I suggest a little spring onion in the diced cucumber. Up the salt slightly and maybe a dash of Worcestershire sauce in the soup itself.

Spice of life

I'm a lucky woman.  I live in a city I love and I know truly wonderful people. They are interesting and fun, they have a mass of knowledge I lack and - HURRAY - they are generous with it all.  Most importantly they respond positively to the question "Can you show me how?"

My lovely friend Sabrina (mother of Miss B's also very lovely friend A) seemingly thinks nothing of knocking up meals for 18 people arriving in 3 separate sittings as her extended family call in over the weekends. She told me she and her sister-in-law used to churn out 80 chapatis twice a day when she lived in her in-laws' house. I was agog.

I've never really got to grips with Indian food. If we eat it, it comes from a jar, an insta-dinner or a takeaway. I'm more Italianate than sub-continental.  Sabrina generously agreed to teach me one afternoon.

I'll say now - she spoilt me rotten.  I'd had an accident with the bread knife the week before and had only just removed my bandage. Sabrina was concerned it might be uncomfortable for me so she'd acted as commis chef and done all the preparation.  Everything was sliced, peeled, chopped or otherwise ready to go.  It was brilliant.

Here's what I learnt:

It all starts with garlic and ginger. A full bulb of garlic, peeled, and a lump of fresh ginger half the size of my palm blitzed together into a lumpy paste -

 

This lives in a sealed jar in the fridge to be used as needed.

To get the curry underway, we fry chopped onions in vegetable oil.  Where I'd have gone slow and used olive oil for most meals I eat, Sabrina had the temperature much higher and cooked them until they were starting to caramelise.  

Once the onions have a fair bit of colour, a heaped tablespoon/serving spoon of the garlic and ginger paste goes in.  Cook that for a good 2 or 3 minutes.  Then the pretty bit -

Doesn't that look gorgeous?

So, a good teaspoon of turmeric (the central one) and 1 to 4 teaspoons of the chilli powder (at 12 o'clock) depending on taste. We love a bit of heat, so went for 3 teaspoons. A generous teaspoon of Basaar mix (at 3 o'clock) and a spoon or two of the seed mix, panch puran (at about half five)


Basaar spice mix is a Kashmiri spice blend.  Panch puran is an Indian - or Bengali - 5 seed mix.  There are mustard, fennel, onion (or possibly nigella?), cumin and we *think* fenugreek. Sabrina regards it as essential.  She also says she gives the kids the little black seeds - the ones we couldn't decide on as nigella or onion seeds - on a cold day to warm them from inside.

As soon as they hit the pan they the smell was AMAZING.

Sabrina says it is very important to cook the spices before adding the tomatoes. We stirred things around for a minute or two, then in went masses of chopped fresh tomatoes.

 The mix cooked at a high temperature for a good long while with the lid off, to get rid of excess water.

Isn't that starting to look good?  For the vegetable curry, that's all the cooking the sauce needs. If we were adding meat we'd have cooked it still further. For fish, we'd have cooked it down to a much thicker sauce and pureed it smooth before coating the fish in it and cooking slowly with yogurt.

However, with vegetables a bit of texture from the tomatoes is fine.

We tipped in a mass of fresh chopped carrots, courgettes, cauliflower and some frozen peas.  We could have gone for just cauli and potato to make aloo gobi, but we had for a broad mix.   We stirred thoroughly and covered the pan while the veg cooked through.

To serve, we made chapatis.  Sabrina kept an almost straight face as she watched me attempt to make these quick flatbreads.  First, she suggested I roll each lump of dough into a ball inside the flour drum, to keep from getting too sticky.  Then roll it out thin or slap it from hand to hand until it is a very thin round (ish) shape.  Slap it on a VERY hot dry pan, flip it over to cook the other side, and put on one side while you do the next one.  She can do two at once.  I could barely manage one at a time, but I had a great laugh trying.

 Not exactly a great looking chapati, is it!

I made 6 in all. I was very proud.

We topped the curry with chopped fresh mint and coriander. It was a delicious lunch - veg curry, chapatis and fresh thick yogurt to subdue the heat. I've never cooked a curry half as good.

I did take a picture of Sabrina while she was cooking, but her scarf had slipped back so that would be impolite.  If you picture a pair of women standing at the hob, one rather quiet, gorgeous and wearing a beautiful headscarf and dress and yet not splashing any food on them,  the other one much more expansive and wearing an apron with damp handprints and plenty of spice stains on, and both are talking and laughing, you've pretty much got us.  

It was a fantastic afternoon.  I'm so looking forward to making more of Sabrina's curries for the family. Saturday night 'round at mine, everyone?

Mellow Fruitfulness

Ah, Keats.   Of all the poems I learnt at school, Ode to Autumn is the only one strangers quote t me. There is something about going for a walk and coming across someone picking elderberries or sloes in the hedgerows that seems to compel ramblers of a certain age to say "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." Every time. Seriously, it happens every single time.

It's a corker of a line, of course. In fact, I like the whole first stanza -

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,	5
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;	10
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.

The apple and pear trees have been wonderful this autumn. I've had crisp, sweet Discovery apples from the cheap little tree from Costco we planted 18 months ago.  There were two freakishly large Red Delicious apples, each as big as a baby's head, from a cordon tree SJ gave us. I can't bring myself to eat them, they're just too ridiculous. Miss B's apple tree has had a less successful year but after last year's bumper crop probably needed the break.

For the first time our little pear tree has been properly productive. Up until this year it's lost most of its fruit before they'd ripened. I've been plucking ripe pears from the branches for a nearly a month - I must have had at least 15, which is good going for such a small tree. They are so much nicer than any pears I've had before, but I suspect that's sentimentalism on my part.

This week my lovely pal Suzanne took me to visit our friends Jo, Ang and Lucy for a visit of walking, sloe picking and a big shared lunch. Lucy is a keen walker and cyclist. When she said there were blackthorn bushes 'near' her house, I hadn't realised she meant a 4.5 mile round trip rather than a gentle stroll along the lane. However, it was a beautiful sunny day, the company was good and the sloes plentiful. It was a lovely day, the kind I will look back on to keep me going during the dark winter days.

People say things like "wait until the after the first frost" to pick sloes, but that's rubbish. Most years, by the time we have a frost the sloes have been eaten by the birds, picked by foragers quicker off the mark, or have wizened on the bush. The frost breaks down the cell structure, which is helpful for making sloe gin. I guess that was pretty useful in times past.

However, we don't live in the 18th century.  We have freezers.  Bobbing your freshly picked sloes in the freezer for a couple of days does a fine job of rupturing the cell structures, with the added bonus of killing off any unwanted passengers.

After picking over the frozen sloes for stalks, leaves or deceased insects,  I poured 1kg of them into a 2 litre Kilner jar. In went just over a litre of gin and 200g of sugar.  Traditional recipes call for a lot more sugar, but I don't like it too syrupy, and I'd rather add more sugar later than end up with something tooth-dissolving.

I've left the jar on the counter this week so I remember to shake it every day. in about a fortnight I'll banish it to the cupboard under the stairs until near Christmas.  Then I'll test the sweetness, adjust as needed, and leave a while longer.

The other autumnal thing I did this weekend was roasting 2 large butternut squashes for soup. I just hack them into big slices or wedges, skin on, and rub a little olive oil across them. Then I bang them in the oven for about an hour.

I pull them out when they are all soft and look like this -

Cooled, rinds removed and whizzed up with stock and pepper, they become pretty much my favourite fall lunch.  That's why I make such a lot at once - I will eat it for days given a chance!

Turning Japanese

I'm still in the lucky position of having great piles of veg ready for eating. The summer sprouting broccoli is up, green and yellow courgettes are everywhere, the red onions and the carrots are all reaching decent sizes

A few of the courgettes had graduated to significantly less appealing marrows. It seems size isn't everything. However, the hens regard marrows as a high treat, so they made short work of the whoppers. The smaller and more tender fruits are much more my thing.

Mark and I had totally failed to do the supermarket shopping this week. We've been popping to the smaller shop at the end of the road for milk and bread and I've been using up the contents of the cupboard and freezer to cobble together meals. The garden has been a great help with this. However, I was getting a bit bored and wanted something new to eat.

I'd read about making vegetable tempura a lot but I've never tried it.  For a start I know nothing about Japanese food aside from having noodles at Wagamama. And for another thing, it looks a bit scary. It's the deep frying. I don't deep fry anything. At all. I like fish and chips from the chippy but that's the full extent of my deep fried dabbling. Partly, all that oil seems pretty wasteful, partly I'm scared it will spatter terribly and burn me, and partly the episode in the first series of Spooks that Mark told me about - I hadn't even watched it - horrified me and I think of it every time I hear the sizzle of fat.

However, that is wussy and daft. It's not wasteful if the veg going in it is free, as long as I am careful and also don't get water near the oil there's no reason it would spit and burn me, and ... well, I couldn't think of anything to banish the Spooks thing but I pushed on regardless.

I picked carrots, broccoli, courgettes and grabbed an onion that had been drying. I washed them all thoroughly to get rid of any insects; I know eating bugs is bandied about in the Guardian as a good form of protein in an overpopulated world but I'm not going for it just now, ta.
I sliced the small courgettes and carrot into narrow lengths, the larger courgette and the onion into disks and left the broccoli florets as they were.

Excuse the rubbish photography - frying dinner and taking quick photos with my phone at the same time mean one or the other will be badly executed. I chose good frying and poor pics as the wise balance.

Anyway, I read a number of tempura recipes that are scattered across my cook books. They all called for sparkling water or, in one case, beer. I don't know about you, my lovely webby mates, but if I am cobbling together a dinner because i haven't done the shopping, sparkling water is not something I will have to hand.  In fact, other than when making a drink with my elderflower cordial that calls for some soda water, my 'water' options are only ever of the tap or tonic varieties, and the latter is only since I discovered how nice a gin and tonic is.

So clearly sparkling water was out of the question.  Then again, tempura is a traditional Japanese dish and I doubt they had sparkling water back in the 1500s. The thing seems to be to keep the batter as light as possible, and both fizzy water and cold water are supposed to help this. But other things help a batter remain light, and they didn't involve a trip to the shops. I went for a 50/50 split of corn flour (cornstarch) and plain flour to achieve that. (I am the sort of person who has corn flour in her cupboards) I added an egg yolk, which 3 of my 4 recipes advised, and ice cold water.  In retrospect popping a couple of ice cubes in the batter would have helped keep it cold for longer as I fried the veg in shifts.  Oh, and I seasoned the batter with salt.
I mixed enough to get it to come together and added enough cold water that the batter would coat my finger when I dipped it in, but only thinly. I dipped and fried the veg a few at a time, for about a minute.
 When I lifted the cooked vegetables out of the cooking oil I placed them on a tray lined with paper towels to absorb any excess oil.  I actually popped the first few in a lined bowl but that made them go a bit soggy as the heat from each piece sort of steamed the batter of its neighbours. 

I had intended to make a dipping sauce based on soy sauce. Unfortunately, as I rooted about for the sauce I noticed its expiry date was 3 years ago. In the end I just sprinkled a little salt over the top and we tucked straight in. They were just LOVELY. My 11yo, who is usually game for anything, looked at them in disgust. But once he tried a piece it was hard to stop him from scoffing the lot. 

Next time I will make a sauce first - something with a vinegar and chilli kick, I think.  I'd keep the batter cold by either adding ice cubes or having it in my metal mixing bowl sitting inside a bigger bowl lined with ice. I would make the batter slightly thicker, but only slightly. I sloshed a tad more water in than I meant to when I was thinning it down the first time. And I would definitely try it with some prawns or strips of fish as well as the lovely veg if I had any in the kitchen.

Here's my current version of a tempura recipe:

125g corn flour

125g plain flour

pinch of salt

1 large egg yolk 

Very cold water (sparkling if you are feeling all fancy)

Sift the corn flour and plain flour together. add the salt and egg yolk. Stir in just enough water to make a thin batter - I found somewhere around the 1/2 cup/ 125ml level was pretty close. It doesn't matter if the batter is a little lumpy. It makes nice crispy bits on the food that way.

Dip small pieces of vegetables in the batter. Deep fry in hot vegetable oil for a minute or so. Eat while they are still hot.

Do you know what? Even the Spooks thing won't stop me from making this again
J xx

Dealing with August's overabundance

At the start of April my garden looked like this -

This is not normal for Yorkshire. Not normal AT ALL. There had been a brief warm spell in March that got my hopes up but then cold, wet, horrid weather stopped anything growing for months. By the end of April I'd done all the prep work for my vegetable garden but nothing had started growing. My seeds remained resolutely unsprouty. It started to look like it was going to be another duff year for growing food.

I should have had more faith.  Once the ground warmed up everything took off like a rocket. This is what my garden looks like today:

That is different washing on the line, by the way. In case you were thinking I left stuff out for 4 months at a time. I may be slack, but I'm not quite that slack. 

The veg have all gone a little mental. I have so many green beans eating them was starting to feel like homework. The Italian kale has more leaves than we - and the caterpillars - can possible eat. The lettuce are becoming small shrubs, the nasturtiums are threatening to cover the lawn and the courgette and squash plants have colonised two paths and are making a bid for the strawberry patch. It's ace but it's also a bit too much.

I am a big fan of seasonality up to the point that the glut of produce is making me feel guilty. I don't want to waste any of the lovely fresh veg but I also don't want to force feed the family on greens to the point of a revolt.  So I thought about preparing and freezing some of the harvest.

I started with French beans. To keep them in the best possible condition for future use I needed to freeze them. However, the enzymes in veg that cause rot and decay remain active when frozen unless they've been killed off by blanching the vegetables, so you can't just wash them and bung them in freezer bags. Blanching means briefly boiling them then plunging then into ice cold water to stop the residual heat from cooking the veg further. It's as easy as that.

I had no ice as I'd used it all making iced coffee last week, so I stuck a huge bowl of water in my chest freezer while I went to pick the beans.

Then I took a colander out with me and picked as many as I could fit in it. I threw the manky and dried-out -looking beans to the chickens to fight over and kept all the nice ones. I washed them thoroughly in a sink of salty water to remove any small beasties as well as traces of dirt and leaves.

We like our beans pretty long, so after I'd trimmed the ends I just cut the most oversized ones in half and left the rest. If you prefer your beans cut into short pieces, now's the time.

I brought a massive stock pot of water to the boil, tipped the beans in and put the lid on. They were there for 3 minutes. A side benefit of blanching is that it makes the colours all lovely and intense. That's why the beans in photos below have a much deeper green than the ones above.

Then I drained them and plopped them in that big bowl of water I'd had sitting in the freezer. The rule of thumb is to leave them in the cold water for as long as you've had them in the hot.

I dried them on a clean tea towel and spread them on a tray to freeze. 

After an hour, I tipped the partly frozen beans into a ziplock bag. I couldn't resist weighing my beans - look, nearly a kilo! 

To prevent freezer burn it's best to get as much air out as you can, so I sealed the bag up except for enough space for a straw, and I sucked out all the air I could. Then I sealed that last corner quickly and popped the bag back in the freezer. 

 Ta da! Lots of lovely green beans ready for us whenever we fancy. The time between picking them and freezing them was about 20 minutes, so they keep all the lovely fresh vitamins and sweetness. And no kids throwing strops about having French beans for the third night in a row. Well, not until next week, when the next lot of beans are ready for picking.