Simply Seasonal

In the civilised world, and Preston almost qualifies, nobody is truly self-sufficient but we can all be a bit more self-reliant. To that end we recently had solar panels fitted, something that will reduce our carbon footprint a bit more, though I am pretty sure that growing lots of our own food has a bigger impact on that front - but only if we actually eat the stuff.

The trouble is that certain foodstuffs tend to come in gluts. We have half a dozen apple trees of different types, the idea being to spread the season, but it's still pretty much compressed into a tall bell curve with September and October acocunting for 90 per cent of our crop. Cobnuts are worse, you have to harvest them before the squirrels (utter bastards with fluffy tails) nick the lot, so the yield from our two trees is now picked and drying in the conservatory. This year beetroot can be added to that list, as we got relatively few earlier on, but all the remaining ones have started to balloon in the last couple of weeks, and need using up before the frosts get them and/or they go woody.

For a cook situations like that are fun. I veer between thrifty and profligate, and both stances can be accommodated simultaneously in this period. An idea borrowed from HF-W - for a salad of boiled beetroot in apple sauce - led to a gratin of boiled beetroot and two sorts of apple, a cooker reduced to sauce (with a spoon of honey) and an eater chopped small and fried in butter before the lot was mixed together and baked with a cheese topping. It could have been a waste of good produce, but was very enjoyable, sweet and savoury in one blast.

It's good when the gluts can be combined like that. Another recent example was lettuces (oakleaf and cos) cut before the frosts start, made into a big salad with more boiled beetroot, boiled eggs (our chickens working overtime currently), and toasted cobnuts. I could have added chopped parsley and some chicory leaves, but wanted to keep it simple. It was doubly satisfying in both the filling-up sense and in being seasonal, and triply because beyond the dressing the Sainsbury family benefitted by not one penny from it.