Sweetcorn

My favourite thing about this time of year in terms of food from
the garden:  picking corn on the cob for tea.

This year I have grown a different variety from previous years, normally I grow 'supersweet' but I couldn't find the seeds anywhere this spring), and while the taste is good, most of the plants only have one cob and are pretty small, so I'll go back to supersweet next year.

And this is the very best bit - removing the husk,dropping them in to boiling water for a couple of minutes and eating slathered with butter!

Summer meal from the garden

Having wandered down to the veg patch to do some much needed weeding and watering, I actually ended up picking things for my tea - I couldn't resist the rumbling tummy any further. (I did a little bit of half-hearted weeding, the rest will have to wait until tomorrow now)

There were a range of things ready for the picking - purple podded peas, french beans ( cosse violeto, north eastern and norwegian dry varieties), tomatoes (small cherry varieties inc sungold), baby courgettes ( yellow zucchini and patty pan) various leaves (wild carrot, lambs lettuce, purple and green orache, baby chard, mixed lettuce, nasturtium leaves, comfrey), a small whole garlic bulb and a lemon balm plant - pulled up by accident with poor weeding technique.

From left to right: fresh garlic, nasturtium flower, cherry tomatoes, purple podded peas, baby courgettes, wild carrot leaf,  cosse violetto beans, lambs lettuce,  nasturtium leaves, norwegian dry beans, mixed lettuce, purple and green orache, northeastern beans, lemon balm

As the hens have been laying well recently, and one of my favourite ways to use our eggs is home-made pasta, I decided to make some goats cheese tortellini and have them with the veg.

From LHS: tomatoes, baby courgettes and peas, mixed salad, goat cheese and lemon balm tortellini and frazzled garlicky beans

Goats cheese and lemon balm tortellini
This was just a standard pasta mix which I stuffed with a mix of goats cheese and chopped comfrey - but I laid a lemon balm leaf onto each piece of pasta before I put the cheese stuffing in. The lemon balm was stronger in flavour than I expected, but to get a really strong lemony -goat cheese filling  I'd put an extra leaf in each tortellini. I tossed the coooked tortellini in butter, pepper and some torn tarragon leaves before serving.

Frazzled garlicky beans
Having sliced the beans diagonally into bite-sized pieces, I quickly boiled them then tossed them into melted butter with some of the fresh garlic and freshly ground black pepper and 'frazzled' them a bit.

Baby courgettes, tomatoes and peas
The courgettes and tomatoes were sliced in half and lightly cooked in olive oil for a few minutes. Towards the end of the cooking time as the tomatoes were softening slightly, I threw in the peas that had been boiled for about a minute, and some of the chopped fresh garlic.

Salad
I used the various salad leaves (not the comfrey which was used in the goat cheese and lemon balm tortellini) and added some olive oil and balsamic vinegar and mixed together to make a vinaigrette

Enjoy!

2013 Garden produce

Produce from the first year in the Broadway garden

Artichokes (Jerusalem) - Novembers

Aubergines - August

Beans (Cobra variety?) - October

Beetroots (Yellow and Chioggia) - September

Carrots (Purple dragon) - August

Chilli peppers - September

Courgettes (De Nice, Lebanese, Black Beauty) - Augusr

Courgettes - late September

Leeks (Bleu de solaise and Jeune Pitou)

Leeks - May (2014)

Potatoes (pink fir apple) - November

Potatoes (Vivaldi) - August

Squash (Acorn?) -  September

Squash (unsure of variety) - September

Squash (no idea of variety, has been referred to as the 'willy squash' in our family for obvious reasons - delicious flavour!) - September

Sweetcorn (Supersweet) - October

Sweetcorn (Supersweet) - October

Tomatoes (Mixed varieties) - August

Wild plums - August

Courgettes, Beans, Tomatoes -  August

Purple orache, Sunderland Kale, Purple-podded peas, Courgettes - June

Mixed courgettes and Chillis - October

Tomatoes (mixed varieties) - November

Mixed courgettes, Beans - September

Coping with the marrow glut

We've got marrows coming out of our ears! Despite the lousy weather this summer (and the overproduction of slugs in both garden and allotment) we have a glut of lovely golden yellow marrows. So it's time to experiment...

Marrow Chutney
I actually started out following a random Marrow Chutney recipe but it looked uninteresting and rather bland as it was cooking;  there was other garden produce sitting around waiting to be used so I just started chucking it in. The final recipe is something like the following:
Start with a large marrow and peel, de-seed and cube it, I left it overnight with salt scattered over it to remove water. After a good rinse it went into a jam-making pan (which I am fairly sure has a proper name that currently escapes me) and I started cooking it with white wine vinegar and sugar. In went some chopped fresh ginger, chopped apples, shallots and onions and a handful of dried mixed fruit. At this stage it looked very unchutney-like and pale so I halved some red and green cherry tomatoes and some physalis from the greenhouse and added them for the colour (and flavour??).
Once it had simmered for a while and was starting to look gloopy, I added some pickling spices in muslin to add to the flavour and simmered a while longer before bottling. Chutney tends to need a few months for the flavours to develop and intensify so this will be one for Christmas - and no doubt a useful Christmas present for people too!

As this only used one marrow and five more were waiting to be used in the kitchen I decided to try making Marrow Jam. The lack of wild plums this year because of the rubbishy weather means we need something for the toast - I wasn't convinced about this - marrow jam - really??! But its worth trying at least once.

Marrow Jam
This is one recipe I have followed properly - thanks Hugh for a nice River Cottage recipe.  I used ground ginger rather than fresh and added enough so that there was a distinctly gingery smell. I admit this is mainly because the thought of marrow jam is pretty unappealing - it sounds tasteless so the ginger was to address this.  I did try some when bottling it, and there is no taste of marrow in the final jam. I'm not sure what it tastes of but I really like it. The real test will be if the kids ask for it on their toast instead of crabapple...

Tapas-style tea

Chilli spiced potatoes

Scrub the skins of some baby new potatoes and cut into pieces a bit bigger than an inch. Heat some olive oil, chilli oil and paprika in a frying pan then toss the potatoes in and coat the potatoes thoroughly. Turn the heat down low and cook for 15 - 20 minutes until golden browned and softened.

Artichoke and asparagus salad

Snap and discard the woody ends from some asparagus spears. Boil the asparagus spears in salted water for about 3 minutes, drain and set aside. Quarter some globe artichoke hearts and mix with the asparagus spears,  Add some lemon zest, lemon juice and sesame oil into the artichoke and asparagus and season with pepper.

Comfrey, hop, courgette and chipotle tortilla

Slice up some baby courgettes and gently fry in a frying pan with olive oil and some chopped spring onions.  Chop up a chipotle chilli (a smoked halapeno chilli pepper) and add to the courgettes and spring onions. Add some chopped comprey leaves to salted boiling water and simmer for 2 minutes, throw in some hope shoots, simmer for a further 30 seconds then drain and add to the courgette mix.  Mix about 4 eggs with some cottage cheese and pour over the vegetable mix in the frying pan. If you like it, chop up some goats cheese and sprinkle that over the top with some mozzarella. Continue to warm over a low heat until most of the egg mixture has set, then put under a hot grill to finish off the top and brown the cheese.

Plate the asparagus and artichoke hearts onto a bed of mixed leaves and nasturtium flowers.  Make a mint and cucumber raita to take off the heat from the chilli potatoes, and serve with big wedges of tortilla and salad.

Pea, hop shoot and goat cheese mezzaluna

I love the golden hops round the greenhouse - but they are misbehaving, sending suckers inside and then revelling in the heat and abundant water and crowding out my tomatoes - so it was time for another chop this evening.  I cut down a large handful of hop shoots (the top six inches of each shoot) and then realised that I didn't want omelette or fritatta which is how I normally eat them - instead I was rather keen to have some pasta.

So, I made pasta  using Doves Farm pasta flour mixed with egg yolks, and a tiny bit of water to bind, then rolled it into strips and cut out circles to make mezzaluna (half-moon).

The stuffing was made from an approximately equal mix of peas, hop shoots, goat cheese and mozzarella - slightly pureed down and then put into the pasta circles which were folded over and sealed. I boiled them for about 3 minutes then tossed them in melted butter with lemon zest, basil leaves and freshly ground black pepper.

I'm not sure that I could taste the hop shoots in there at all - maybe they don't add to the flavour - or just have a very delicate contribution to make? I think I'll try hop fritters next, or maybe one of my favourites: battered halloumi (a la Terre a Terre) on a bed of buttered hops - whatever, the hops are already planning their next greenhouse takeover so it won't be long.

Comfrey and Fat Hen Pie

The smell of comfrey tea, a fantastic homemade fertiliser of plants, stewing in the water butt has always put me off eating comfrey myself. Until now.

The comfrey in the garden has grown ridiculously fast, and with the high winds this week, much has blown over forcing me to cut the first lot to make comfrey tea. So I took the opportunity to pick some of the best leaves for myself - with trepidation.

I started by blind baking a pie case that would end up a bit crunchy on the outside (I preferred it to a a very short pastry crust). The comfrey and fat hen were boiled for about 3 minutes - and actually smelled fantastic which I was not expecting! I then chopped them up and added them to a bechamel sauce to which I had added two egg yolks and some cottage cheese. This was all mixed up and put into the pastry crust, topped with some panko breadcrumbs and baked for 20-30 minutes.

I did not expect this to taste as good as it did, but I'm delighted to have found another leaf in the garden that can be used in place of spinach. Comfrey puts down incredibly long roots and is able to bring a lot of nutrients back to the surface - why its used to make liquid fertiliser for plants.  Fat Hen was traditionally used in cooking until mass-produced spinach replaced it. Hens also love it hence the name (and its effect on them apparently).

Recipe inspired by Rosamund Richardson's recipes for Fat Hen and Comfrey.

Stuffed deep fried patty pans in batter

I love to pick baby patty pans with the flowers still attached - these are then stuffed with a herby mozzarella mix, dipped into batter and deep fried.

Here they have been served with fresh sweetcorn from the garden (Supersweet is my favourite variety for our climate and can't be beaten in terms of sweetness) and chopped beans.

All this is cooked and eaten within 15 minutes of harvesting it from the garden - you can hear it growing still its that fresh!

Goats cheese ravioli

This is probably my favourite ravioli recipe - a good goat cheese ravioli cannot be beaten!

I mix lots of different cheeses - but always a good goat cheeses (and usually with a nice cheddar, some mozzarella and veggie parmesan) and use this to make ravioli.

Here I have served the ravioli with a creamy cherry tomato sauce with slivers of baby leeks and wilted mixed leaves from the garden.

Harvests from the garden

Bean harvest

Patty pans, potatoes, cherry tomatoes, purple podded peas, garlic,
mixed leaves (clockwise from top right)

Onion harvest

Squashes, beans, sweetcorn and asparagus peas

Hop Frittata

The golden hop growing up the side of the greenhouse (LHS of picture)

April and March see the re-introduction of hops into our diet as the hop inside and outside the greenhouse gets going again.  I leave all the tendrils growing on the outside of the greenhouse as they provide some temperature control over the summer to the tomato plants inside, but woe betide any tendrils that come up inside the greenhouse. They are far too aggressive and invasive and as they send runners up to ten feet in all directions, have to be kept under control.
Eating them is by far the best way. They have to be cooked as they tend to have lots of silica spikes along the stems (that help them climb and cover) but these can be incredibly sharps - plunging into boiling water deals with this problem.

Probably our favourite way to eat them is in a Frittata. I chuck fresh garlic, hop shoots, cubes of re-cooked potato (or some raw grated pink fir apple potato into a frying pan with some olive oil and cook for a few minutes. In the meantime I mix eggs with a dollop of natural yogurt (Yeo Valley is the best), and some chunks of goats cheese and then pour this all over the potato, garlic and hop mix. This is then cooked until all the egg has set, and often finished for a minute under the grill to brown the top a little.

I vary this recipe throughout the year - its a great way to use up our permanent glut of eggs and the occasional glut of courgettes, patty pans and cherry tomatoes.

The spikey cardoon

Cardoons harvested from the garden

Cardoon heart

Cardoons in flower

Dedicated to my cardoon plants.
The cardoon plant - the wild uncultivated predecessor of the globe artichoke plays a strong role in my cooking due to being so prolific each year in my garden.
I cut a third of the heads for me - to eat and to study the perfect geometrical patterns of the choke.
The rest are left to go to flower for the bees - and also for me. For the bees who appear to be blind drunk and unable to fly away from them they are so satiated. And for me because the smell when you walk past them on a summer evening is so strong it feels like breathing in pure honey.

Edible wedding bouquets

Getting married between Christmas and the New Year raises many problems in terms of sourcing things that are short-lived or out of season.   When I was told that I would have to pay over £80 for a small bouquet of red roses that would be long past their best, and £4 for each buttonhole, I decided to think about it later. Then promptly forgot  until three days before the wedding - Christmas Day when everything was shut.

I was fortunate to be saved by an artichoke plant in my garden that had been confused by the unseasonably mild Autumn and was busy producing heads.  Inspired by the tradition in parts of Italy of having chillis in a bridal bouquet (with interesting meanings I'm sure) I decided to use some of the chillis I had grown earlier in the year to surround the artichoke head. A quick whizz around the garden on the morning of the wedding to pick Bay, Rosemary and Fennel (magical in its ethereal featheriness) meant I had all I needed to create my bouquet.  I just added a few red roses bought from the local Co-op on Boxing day to ensure the bouquet matched the buttonholes I made for  the male guests - and that was it, a bouquet and ten buttonholes for about a tenner!

On returning from a two-day honeymoon, I used the bay leaves and Rosemary to make stock for an artichoke heart, borlotti bean and chestnut stew served with spiced polenta fingers - and a deep feeling of gratitude to a seasonally challenged artichoke plant.

Last of last year's beans from the garden

I've just used the last of last years beans from the garden.  The beans were ridiculously prolific last year and I had to freeze huge quantities so I didn't bean-off the entire family by making them eat them daily from mid July to the end of November.

They froze really well and we ate the last ones nearly ten months after they were first picked.

The best varieties for freezing from last years garden were the dwarf Yin Yang (grown for many years now from beans originally acquired from my Mum), the Norweigan Dry variety, but best of all the french purple climbing beans - now grown from home saved seed over so many generations I no longer know what they are officially known as - but always referred to as 'prolific purple climbing french bean'

Here they are served up last summer with Nasturtiums from the garden, grilled halloumi cheese and a pile of potato gnocchi served with artichoke hearts (sadly these particular ones were canned) and my favourite cherry tomato variety - Sungold.