Horticultural

A beet-er aftertaste

Tonight I roasted* the first harvest of my Yellow Intermediate Mangel beetroot (we'll call it YIM for short) - an heirloom variety sourced from the Heritage Seed Library. The first five seconds of flavour were lovely - sweet and earthy, just how a beet should be. But then this bitter aftertaste kicked in and my tastebuds rebelled.

I am not sure if that's just the way YIM tastes or if it's something to do with the growing conditions? Too much or too little water?

Also - am I right in thinking that YIM isn't actually a beetroot** at all - a member of the beet family, yes, but odn't mangel (aka mangelwurzel) usually better known as livestock feed? Unfortunately my regular beets failed to germinate so now I am left with these turkeys. If only the pigs were still being housed next door and they'd have a rare heritage treat on their trotters.

*If you haven't tried it before, do roast some beetroot, homegrown or otherwise. It's dead easy - just top and tail lightly, scrub the skin but don't remove it, and wrap in some tinfoil with olive oil and pepper. They take about half an hour in the oven and you know when they're ready because the skin will skip off easily.

**Yes, the title of this post is a terrible, terrible pun, but I couldn't resist it ...

Pumpkins in the microwave: a salutary lesson

Now, I have to admit to occasionally having a lax grasp of the laws of physics, the incident I am about to relate to you being one of those occasions.

I have a few pumpkins still left from last year. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the only ones not in an advanced state of decomposition by this point have incredibly thick skins. But never one to let some pumpkin flesh go to waste, I decided to tackle one of the smaller squash. A few vain attempts at attacking it with knives of varying sizes resulted in little more than a couple of dings on the surface.

I'd read somewhere that you could microwave smaller pumpkins whole, to I put it on a plate and popped it in for a couple of minutes. I was pottering around the kitchen and forgot about it for a while, and by the time I remembered the microwave had stopped, so I turned it on again for another couple of minutes.

BOOM!

Yes, that will be the pumpkin exploding in the microwave, oh-so-perspicacious reader. The picture above sets the scene of devastation rather well, I think. Anyway turns out that, like eggs, you need to make some kind of hole in pumpkins when you cook them in this way. Who knew? Ok, anyone with half a brain ...

Anyway it was interesting to note that this was a spaghetti-type squash, the result of some cross breeding experiment of an earlier year. I managed to salvage most of the flesh, but I won't be doing it again in a hurry. The inside of the microwave was an awful mess.

Topping off the jam

I've never been into the while "WI look" for my preserves but I broke with usual practice for this batch of blackcurrant jam because I had some fabric left over from my quilt making activities (more of which in another post) and I'd bought a jam pot lid set in an impulsive cookery equipment shop purchase a while back.

I have to admit they do look rather jolly and not too twee. I particularly like the blue fabric featuring chickens on the right-hand side.

The fact is, though, I still have a good five to ten pounds of blackcurrants in a freezer that seriously needs defrosting, and a lot of jam to eat in the next few months. I think next up is going to be some blackcurrant ice cream, a la Delia Smith. This stuff is divine. Only trouble is, once you nkow how good it is, the temptation is to make it far more regularly than is good for one's arteries ...

Potatoes boulangere with a twist

Tonight's goal was to use up the Jerusalem artichokes that had been sitting in a plastic bag in the fridge for, oh, longer than they should have done, let's leave it at that. Provided you put them inside an airtight cover, they keep quite well: leave them loose in the fridge and they'll be soft in a couple of days.

There really is no point in picking all your jersualem artichokes at once, though, as they survive very well in the ground throughout the winter, suffering a lot less damage than potatoes will given the same conditions. Just remember to leave a bit of the stem sticking out so you can locate them. If you fancy trying something simple to use up a big haul of jerusalems, what about the simple deep-fried artichoke chips as seen on Carol Klein's great new BBC TV show Grow Your Own Veg?

But back to my  food. I riffed on Delia's classic Potatoes boulangere with rosemary recipe, subtsituting about a third of the spuds for the artichokes. The potatoes and red onions weren't my own, but the rosemary was. It's a crime against all that is good in the world to buy rosemary in a little plastic packet: it's such a ubiquitous and easy to grow plant.

The artichokes lent a smoky taste to the finished product which, I like to think, has a certain rustic quality to it. The dish it is served in, for any readers who share my china obsession, is Denby - a small round overnproof lidded number that I picked up from a jumble sale or charity shop at some point in my hoarding life. It's brilliant for stews for one, soup, and just about anything that needs to segue seamlessly from fridge to oven.

What's left in your fruit and veg store?

My work colleague Neil Perry described the experience of tasting my blackcurrant jam as being "like an angel crapping on your tongue".

Thanks Neil! I guess that's a thumbs up ...

It reminded me of another of those many posts that falls into the "things I've been meaning to write for weeks" category: what's left in your produce store?

Here's a summary of my remaining allotment harvest.

My potatoes, pumpkins and onions are finished, but the shallots and squash are still going strong. In the freezer, the last batch of gooseberries became a crumble, the last shavings of horseradish was whipped up into some horseradish cream with a roast beef dinner, and I am still valiantly working my way through my personal frozen  blackcurrant mountain, ie churning out jam. The only other freezer occupant is a bag of courgettes that I don't really know what I am going to do with - tip into a vegetable stew, probably.

I am also hoarding the last two specimens from the haul of delicious Bramley apples we bartered for a squash earlier in the year. They're sitting on a table in the garage next to the squash, robed in newspaper.

Then of course there's the fresh stuff: when I get around to updating it, my "now harvesting" list includes florence fennel, chard, cavolo nero, brussels sprouts, Romanesco cauliflower, and some very persistent chicory. That's despite the fact that my plot is looking rather down in the dumps at the moment: waterlogged, weedy and sad. I am hoping the weather will cheer up soon - I need one of those crisp winter days to get some serious tidying up done.

Why does soup taste better in a mug?

A serious question, this.

I frequently bring some soup to work for my lunch: today it's pumpkin, coconut and chilli made from the last of my pumpkins by my better half. Sometimes it's red lentil (the recipe for which is in my new book, plug, plug ...), or French onion.

Recently I've found the delights of this homemade fare had dimmed - not so much a case of familiarity breeding contempt, as a feeling of dejection at the sight of the slightly beaten-up plastic box I carry and serve it in.

So a couple of days ago I started pouring my soup into a china mug instead. And guess what? It tasted better than when slurped from a plastic spoon dipped into a plastic box. I am sure a scientist has delved into quite why this is the case, but I'm wondering what else it applies to. Would my egg sandwich taste better served on porcelain than eaten from a (frequently washed and reused) plastic bag? And why does certain food taste better when eaten outside?

A triumph for the River Cottage chestnut and chocolate truffle cake

If you happened to see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on The F-Word Christmas special show on TV last night you'll know that he wiped the smug grin off Gordon Ramsay's face by winning a bake-off with his delicious chestnut and chocolate truffle cake, as judged by the unlikely figure of Sharon Osbourne.

If you'd like to try Hugh's recipe for yourself - and I highly recommend that you do as it's absolutely yum - you can find it on the River Cottage site - here.

Something else to do with all those pumpkins

Scroll down this page about half way and you'll find your way to a recipe for Nigel Slater's perfect pumpkin and green olive bread.

I'm afraid to admit - gulp - that I don't think I've ever made bread ... or if I have the memory was so traumatic I've blocked it out. But I am really tempted to break my duck with this one, particularly as it involves breaking into my large pumpkin stash.

Fennel and kale: first harvest

I relished my first fennel harvest at the weekend, and tried to recreate a fennel and orange salad I'd had in Umbria, Italy. The main key is fresh ingredients rather than any particular culinary magic, and the fennel was straight out of the ground, so it tasted delicious.

You can either squeeze a little of the orange juice over the salad to act as a dressing, or add a little extra virgin olive oil and white wine vinegar to taste. An alternative suggested by veggie chef extraordinaire Rose Elliot is to use pink grapefruit instead of orange.

I also sampled my first servings of Kale Nero di Toscana from the Real Seed Catalogue alongside a duck breast with blackcurrant sauce on Sunday night, and was delighted to read today that sales of kale are up on the grounds that it's a superfood. It was also surprisingly tasty steamed, and not as "earthy" as I'd feared. As Ben and Kate of Real Seeds say:

Normally you use the mature leaves as a cooked vegetable, but this has such   a nice flavour (different from normal kale!) that we have been eating the thinnings   and baby leaves raw in salad. Not quite as hardy as the other kales, but will   stand well into winter, and often right through into spring in milder years.

Fenel, flowers and more at the allotment

I finally got some quality time at the allotment over the weekend, and boy did I enjoy it. The recent rains meant there was some serious weed growth, but everything was so lush I didn't particularly care. I was most pleased with the late-sown sunflowers, which are in full bloom at the moment, the fennel, grown for the first time this year, which is going a treat, and the rather lovely oak leaf lettuce, which has been turned into a couple of gorgeous gren salads. And there was lots, lots more to harvest, as you can see from the trug pic below.

I am now on the lookout for good fennel recipes, although the first thing I'll try is a simple orange and fennel salad in a vain attempt to emulate something we ate in Umbria last year.

There were also several beetroot and the last of the tomatoes, which have now been transformed into a fab beetroot and feta soup (as classic Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe as magicked up by Rick), a few lovely little egg-shaped white aubergines, and a half dozen Sweet Hungarian Wax peppers. The only thing I am sick of the sight of is marrows: I have chutneyed them 'til I am blue in the face and have resorted to giving them away to colleagues. There's only so much marrow a girl can eat ...