Wood - and More - from the Trees

Last week I read what was an eminently sensible suggestion from a green lobby group, namely that in Britain we should produce less meat and use the land freed from sheep and cattle to grow more trees.


The idea was rooted (hmm) in thinking on greenhouse gases, animal farts being a significant contributor of unwelcome emissions, as it were. Trees take in carbon dioxide, and produce oxygen, so it's win-win. And win again, if the trees planted on the land in question were to be food producing species.


I'm not suggesting a vegetarian future, indeed for culinary, nutritional and other reasons I want to see us continue to farm land that's most suited to meat to produce - meat. There are plenty of upland areas in the UK where trees struggle, but make great grazing for sheep. But we've moved on, or should have, from every meal being a big lump of meat and two veg. Growing very productive trees like chestnuts - good protein and carbs - apples and pears, all suited to our climate, makes sense - I don't have the figures to hand, but I've read several times that in broad terms such husbandry produces a multiple of what meat farming can.


Walking the Dear Leader's domain* recently I counted up what we, in a very small way, had done along those lines. We have 18 trees in the ground that provide us with nuts and fruit, and a further 10 smaller ones in pots likewise giving us some return now, with the promise of more to come. There's (continued) austerity sense in investing in these plants, though we are now reaching peak tree at Pilkington Palace. About 15 years ago we spent maybe £15 then on what was a small quince tree, and after a decade of generally small harvests it is these days well established, and 2018 has seen it yield a perfumed glut. The walnut tree planted soon after our arrival here has similarly started to produce greater numbers of nuts, more to the benefit of the squirrels than us, but we have some jet black nocino maturing that we'd not have enjoyed without our own crop of green nuts. We have more cooking apples than we and several friends can cope with. We've enjoyed lemons and apricots, pears and plums, our bay tree is a cook's joy, and we hope one day soon to see cherries, mulberries, figs - even olives, who knows? There's a cobnut offshoot taken from the soon-to-be-quit allotment already doing well at the bottom of the garden.


This is the sort of action that many of us can take independently in our gardens. There are community orchards springing up in more enlightened towns and villages. But it's also the sort of thing the government should be getting behind. The cynic in me says that the meat processors and feed makers have more financial clout than the plant nurseries, well able to top up political coffers mightily meatily, and to wine and dine ministers and officials royally, so such thinking won't get much further in that direction than having a parliamentary committee established to study the broad range of possibilities - with deputations sent on fact-finding missions to... I don't know, Portugal, California, Australia, and anywhere else nice and warm.


Meantime we continue to lurch towards ever more calamitous results of climate change - the extreme events now coming thick and fast, though across the pond the Donald is keeping his piggy eyes shut to them - and a time when it won't be only distant foreign lands but our own struggling to feed itself. Planting productive trees, and beyond that permaculture, at least where it works best, is a proven solution.


*and mine

The Ham Diet

The Dear Leader and I have just returned from Bologna, where we spent a long weekend being a bit cultural and very greedy. Given that ham, mortadella and salami nearly always featured at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and watching the Bolognese themselves consume vast platters of ham in the restaurants we used, I am struggling to understand how so few people we saw were fat.


It may be that such meat feasts are for dining outside the home, while vegetable-rich meals are enjoyed in the home. There were more grocers than butchers to be seen as regards shops, and the former had fantastic variety on display, not least the radicchio that seems to have gone out of favour with our  supermarkets (so we are growing plenty to make up for it).


Another theory is that they walk so damn much, as we did, though we had the excuse of being visitors intent on seeing the sights (again in some cases, given we made a similar trip last November). All Saturday and Sunday the streets in the centre were thronged with families and groups of friends just strolling about, working up an appetite (or indeed an appetito).


The culinary highlight of the weekend, for me at least, was tripe in the Parma style, which was tripe stewed with tomato and a rich stock. I am a massive fan of tripe, both for its flavour and its texture. Interestingly (well, for me) that tripe dish was, in comparison to my own standby of tripe and onions, on the underdone side; just so the various pastas we had over the four days of dining, all of them done very much al dente. I will learn from that and not always think 'I'll just give it another minute.'


I've made a resolution to make use of my pasta machine again, the particular aim being to make some ravioli (tortelli etc look far too complex for my folding skills to manage). What I have in mind are some very large ravioli, stuffed with things like ricotta and parmesan, but also I am keen to try pumpkin - though not flavoured with crushed amaretti biscuits. I had that combination in one restaurant, and it was intriguing - a traditional dish of the Veneto apparently - but however interesting and (to me) new, a little went a long way.

Healthy Fast Food?

We rarely eat fast food in this house. Put that down to meanness, not liking the smell of the places that serve it, and preferring healthier options. That's not to say that I despise the foods that fall under the fast food umbrella (a brolly made of burgers then?). 

When the Dear Leader was in the Great Wen recently I took the opportunity of making myself some relatively healthy hot dogs with all the fixin's, as we say in deepest Fulwood. Of late I've been baking a lot of bread, so in that day's run I included two torpedo rolls that were still warm from the oven when the meal hit the table. They were adorned by a pile of fried red onions, made with a minimum of oil; a massive bowl of fresh-made coleslaw; and some very spicy chili beans. All told at least four of my 387 a day. Even the hot dogs were relatively healthy, some proper German frankfurters with 70% pork, bought from Waitrose (I am a great label reader - the best ones I could find in Sainsbury's last time there were less than half that meat content). 

It should have been a nicer meal than it was. That sort of food - for filling up and pigging out - needs to be eaten with friends or family, partly to slow down the gorging process with conversation. Cooking for yourself can be pleasure, but not that sort of cooking, if that makes sense. It ended up feeling rather sad, and I ended up feeling very bloated. Contrast that to a meal served up some time back (that I may have mentioned previously), made for the Dear Leader (may her foes writhe in torment) and Sternest Critic. 

The focal point of that meal was chicken not a million miles away from the KFC style, though mine was baked or roasted, depending on how you look at it. The breadcrumb coating mimicked the Colonel's formula (you can't go far wrong with lots of ground fennel seed, clearly the dominant flavour in the big-o-bucket). If memory serves it was also accompanied by lots of coleslaw, not one of those micro-containers you get with KFC. I will recall that meal with great pleasure; maybe it is the approval thing; maybe just sociability. The hot dogs, however accomplished in their way, were missing the ingredient of company; perhaps I felt guilty getting outside such a hefty feast. The next time the DL is absent I'll keep it a bit more sophisticated.

Mrs Lenin and I

My brain tends to retain the oddest facts. In the late 1830s I studied Russian language, literature and history at university, and plenty of it stuck. As I was cooking last night a strange thing came back to me. I once read that when the Lenins were living in Switzerland Vladimir Ilyich was driven from their block of flats by the smell of his wife's cabbage soup, the beleaguered beardo rushing off to do revolutionary plotting with the blokes down the pub. After a few pints I likewise tend to think I have the solutions to the world's problems, but that's by the by. Mine, in case it's of interest, don't involve the deaths of millions.


That detail was meant to illustrate what a poverty stricken and miserable life the exiles had. But had the book from which the anecdote came been written by someone with more culinary experience they may have put a different slant on it. Last night's main course, soft food again given that the Dear Leader (a great dictator in her own right) is still suffering with her jaw, was a version of cabbage soup. And it was utterly delicious, though I say it as shouldn't.


There is no reason why relatively mean ingredients should not result in something wonderful, and in this case they did. Half a white cabbage shredded, a carrot, two small potatoes, and two onions chopped, plus the magic ingredient of half a small pack of smoked pancetta cubes (Aldi's, and so much better than the pasty-faced efforts from Sainsbury's). A bit of butter and oil to lubricate them as they cooked gently before the cheating chicken stock was added, and then the pot left to simmer for half an hour. Though it was unnecessary a final flourish did lift the soup further - a few tablespoonfuls of cream, added just before serving.


The pre-cream soup was carefully liquidised (rather than liquidated, like the Mensheviks), and actually tasted more like split pea than cabbage (traditional Russian cabbage soup is called Shchee by the way), with a gorgeous smoky background from the posh bacon. The lot cost by my estimate less than £1.50. It was a very cheap great leap forward in culinary terms, though only altered a little from a Lindsey Bareham idea.

Simply (Sometimes) the Best

Given my undoubted obsession with variety, and ensuring our nutrition is tickety boo, main course dishes here accordingly tend to include quite a few different veg etc. Sometimes it's good to focus on one thing, however, to give it due respect and a chance to shine.


Last night's main course, with The Dear Leader still struggling with her jaw (a corn cob injury, weirdly) and needing softish foods I went with something from the classic repertoire - a fancy version of French onion soup (think the posh French name is Panade). It is my kind of cooking anyway, in several ways - onions are, like me, cheap. It requires slow cooking and a lot of therapeutic peeling and slicing (without tears for once), and watching carefully until it achieves that perfect mahogany shade of brown. And this version entailed opening a bottle of wine that forms part of the cooking liquid, (along with beef stock), so we had to finish off the rest. Thickened with flour (darling, nobody does that these days), then enriched with loads of grated Gruyere and a good slug of Cognac (best thing for it, I'm a (married) single malt man), it was the ideal thing for a gloomy autumn evening.


That approach, focusing on one big element, is suited to soups, though I'm a fan of the French hotel using-up-bits-of-leftover-veg option too. Recently we had an enjoyable Jerusalem artichoke soup, though that had the backing of carrots and onions, with the fine flavour of those tubers given free rein; and on Saturday a pumpkin was very much to the fore in another potage (not so fine, but TDL like it). Having mistakenly overdone the carrot purchasing we're likely to have Potage de Crecy this week too. I need to go to my favourite Asian supermarket to buy another net of their excellent and incredibly cheap garlic, to go for a Spanish sopa de ajo, using three or four heads of the stuff. All this veg may be good for us (and especially our blood apparently, as far as the garlic and onions are concerned), but it is just as well we have the heavy winter duvet on the bed. Enough said.

Old Friends

Yesterday was - whisper it gently - the sixtieth birthday of a friend from university days, now living in Texas. Yee, and indeed, ha. I ordered as a gift for him - and in spite of the company saying it took about three days to deliver the goods, they are only due to arrive at the end of the month, making it nine to get there - something rather sentimental.


That gift - he doesn't read this as far as I'm aware - comprises foods that are reminders of home, and in two cases of undergraduate times. Amazing - or not - how often food is at the forefront of memories. In that case it was Jammie Dodgers, a very seventies biscuit somehow, and the ginger biscuits he took to buying when he realised they were not my favourites, so I'd be less likely to take any when (if) offered. There's other stuff in the package, all of it the sort of foods that make dentists rich.


Some of my strongest childhood memories are likewise linked to food. Watching a cartoon while eating creamed kidneys on toast (still love them); freaking out when I found at one restaurant that the fish I had chosen from a tank was going to be killed for my meal (doesn't stop me loving fish now, though); discovering real fondue at a café while on a camping holiday in Interlaken; the gargantuan turkeys we had for at Christmas, lasting well into January and not lamented once finally finished; warm-from-the-oven real Cornish pasties on holiday there... I hope and expect that Sternest Critic will have his own versions, and that they will mostly be of stuff he will want to eat again in his later years, as I do with mine - except those stupidly huge turkeys.

The Chosen Ones

Looking at the post I wrote yesterday focussed on the threatened fiasco of Brexit, what it may mean to our food supplies, and similar woes, all the good stuff I feel about matters culinary was squeezed out. That's sad. As I hope is evident, food, cookery and all related matters actually bring me enormous pleasure. The resilience of providing some of our own food and the economy of using what we have intelligently, and what can be the joy of food, can be closely linked.

One of my food habits illustrates that. When we are at home I try every day, year round, to pick something from the garden, the (soon to be vacated) allotment, greenhouse or conservatory that we will eat that day. There is a comforting, or perhaps complacent, pleasure in choosing what to gather in. In the autumn it's very easy: fruit from our growing collection of trees; the remaining salads; crops various, and so on all need picking and using. In the winter it gets tougher, and often I'm limited to picking a herb or two - bay, sage, rosemary... But they're still fresh additions that perk up innumerable dishes. They are in their own tiny way life enhancing, and certainly flavour enhancing - sage picked seconds before going in the pot is vastly superior to the musty leaves sold in supermarkets, and I resent being asked to pay £0.75 for the privilege of using them.

Similarly one of today's culinary tasks, baking bread, fits both the careful husbandry (how apt) and the epicurean sides of my existence. It started yesterday with the preparation of a biga - the Italian version of a (very much sort of) sourdough starter, that isn't sour (unless forgetfully you leave it much more than 24 hours before using). This afternoon I'll be making dough - rather a sensual process in itself - to which a ladle of the biga will be added, and cooking it up for the evening meal, fresh, warm and scenting the whole house, with a loaf or two for the freezer as well. Sadly, as the currently absent Sternest Critic is wont to point out, I never manage a decent crusty crust, in spite of which only crumbs remain when I do have time to bake my own, which will cost a lot less than £2.50 for a Waitrose grand pain, excellent though they are (and with a good crust). And baking is far more fun than the work to which I'll now return.

Necessity, Simplicity and Invention

Returning from Anglesey yesterday to an under-stocked fridge I had to rely on the garden, what little we had left by way of supermarket veg, and the store cupboard. I enjoy such petty challenges, making something with not very much to hand. It also seems healthy, using what is in season, and enjoying (relative) simplicity.


What resulted was what we decided was a sort of Mexican bean soup. Onion, garlic and carrots as the major part, Swiss chard (I guess not very Mexican at all) stalks and leaves, and a big handful of herbs - basil, parsley, sage, tarragon and chives - plus what was the defining ingredient, a green chili picked fresh from the conservatory. It was surprisingly hot, maybe because unlike previous pickings from that plant the chili was used in seconds, rather than kept for later. Liquidised carefully to make a satisfyingly velvety bowlful, and eaten with that staple of serving suggestions, good bread, the meal only needed a bit of cheese to round things off.


Prompted by the Dear Leader, we again discussed cooking and education, this time musing that given our litigious culture it would be very difficult now to teach large groups of kids the basics of cookery, even were the schools to have the teachers required, and the facilities. Little Jimmy gets a minor burn from a hot pan and his parents see the prospect of a six figure payout. Sad. So school reports will feature media studies instead of meal-making skills.


I missed a trick with that soup, I decided today. The fridge did (and does) have a packet of cooking chorizo tucked away at the back, and still in date. Adding fried slices of that as croutons would have finished it nicely, added to the nutritional range, and been in keeping. As my own school reports so often said, must try harder.

Barra Could Do Better

The Dear Leader and I spent a few days in Barra last week. Well, we arrived Monday and left Saturday. The people were lovely, those working in our hotel very helpful and friendly. But our culinary experiences were decidedly mixed.


This is an island that sends truckloads of fish and shellfish to the mainland, and to Spain and France, just about daily, weather permitting, yet not a crab, lobster, cockle or mussel was to be seen on the menu of four different establishments. Crab being absent maybe was down to seasonality, but not so lobster or the bivalves. Like the décor in our hotel (big on brown) and the offerings of the Craigard Hotel, the one next doorish to ours, that seems to reflect a 1970s mindset. The Craigard's menu included prawn cocktail, breaded mushrooms, Scotch broth and a few other dishes entirely lacking in inspiration, straight out of the Berni Inn cookbook 1973. Like the journalists of the little missed News of the World, we made our excuses and left, happy to eat again in The Castlebay.


The Castlebay was far better (with a good beer list, hurrah), but still needing some oomph. Hats off to them for our last dinner there, huge scallops simply cooked with pancetta and served with (our addition) chips and salad. Scallops also featured at the best, brightest and most imaginative place (by far) we tried, The Café Kisimul, which serves Punjabi cuisine, with simple pasta dishes as the alternative for those who shrink from spice. Scallop pakoras were fab, and the prawn bhuna a delight. Sadly out of season it only opens Fridays and Saturdays, or we would have returned. And they played Doobie Brothers, The Doors, The Beatles and similar relaxing and enjoyable stuff, instead of the bloody loop of There Was a Soldier, a Flamin' Scottish Soldier, to be heard elsewhere. And they acknowledged the existence of colour, with blue walls and bright artwork.


Barra is out of the way, no doubt, but that probably means those who travel for pleasure there will be better off and with better educated palates than average. People who would happily pay premium prices for fresh local lobster and crab, simply presented or done with cheffy cleverness. Even frozen local crab used in crab cakes or soup would have been welcome. Walkers (even on the rainy Tuesday we got our hike in) enjoy filler-uppers, so the steak and ale pie one night and haddock and chips another were pleasant enough, and well cooked, but not the sort of fare that would make real food lovers want to return. It doesn't have to be Michelin-starred stuff (in fact, I'd rather it were not), but make the most of great local resources for goodness' sake. As an example of that unadventurous attitude, what well-run Scottish hotel bar has just three or four single malts?

Red in Tooth and Jaw

I had to apologise to Sternest Critic this week. When we were talking about making risotto he asked if red wine could be used at the start of cooking the rice, rather than the standard white. Out of prejudice rather than knowledge I said probably not. Days later I came across, by chance, a risotto recipe using red wine.


The picture accompanying that recipe was so strikingly colourful, and having some cooked beetroot (a main ingredient) to use up, I tried it, or my own version at least. The taste was good (infusing the oil for it with rosemary, sage, bay and peppercorns helped hugely), but the colour was amazing.


That beetroot was to hand as I'd made a sort of borscht the day before - The Dear Leader, clearly targeted by the GRU or CIA, strained her jaw eating corn on the cob several weeks back when we had a bunch of friends over for a mezze-type meal, so she's to avoid chewing until it's better. That too was vibrant, the trick being to simmer the raw veg various (beets, turnip, onion, the last of our summer squash) together, then when it is liquidised add a cooked beetroot. Followed by a leafy salad with tomatoes, roasted pumpkin, and avocado (guess which wasn't home grown) that was equally bright, it has been a good couple of days at the table for the eyes as well as the taste buds.


My pretend borscht wouldn't have suited one good friend of ours, who dubs beetroot 'the devil's vegetable', and dislikes soup as a concept. We could never have made a couple. Beet at a pinch I could forego; soup never. I'm not a big fan of chilled soups, maybe making them once or twice at most through the summer. But autumn, winter and spring in this household will see three or four a week served up.


Perhaps the problem with her dislike of soup, and we're back to the colour thing again, is that so often it can be murky brown, camouflage green, or vaguely red. In another post somewhere I have written about French hotel soup, delicious and economic (stock from the previous day's or days' meat leavings and bones, and veg a little past their best), something I love but which it has to be admitted is never a delight to the eyes. But it doesn't have to be that way, surely? So my tiny personal task over the next few weeks is to make Technicolour soups. First idea - avocado and green chili. We'll see.

Another Damn Glut

Quinces, apples, courgettes, beetroot, lettuce... and the latest in the line of our gluts is pumpkins. Not the ginormous ones really only good for carving at Halloween, and maybe for feeding the five thousand, but Uchiki Kuri, Turk's Turban and another whose name escapes me, though it may be Tom Thumb. The Uchiki Kuri in particular is just the right size, providing enough sunburst flesh for a dish for two to four people.

As with the other gluts, there's great pleasure to be had in making the best of the plenty while it lasts, though with pumpkins - for accuracy I should be saying 'winter squash' - they keep very well if dry and clean, lasting into the spring.

Their iron skin (especially Turk's Turban, which has all the give of a battle tank) is doubtless what keeps them from going off, but can be a hard slog to cut through to get at the good stuff inside. The cooked flesh, by way of contrast, is melting and delicate. Thus far into pumpkin season we have had pumpkin in soup, risotto, mixed roast vegetables, and tea bread with walnuts.

No repetition needed in the next few assaults on the orange stockpile, either, as I've made pumpkin curry and (an HF-W idea) pumpkin-centric salad in the past, and in the dim and distant pumpkin pie (which was delicious).

I can't help feeling virtuous when eating them, as they are chock full of fibre, beta carotene, and a spread of vitamins. But I trust that health remains a secondary, if important, consideration in my cookery. They are above all tasty. Sternest Critic, when visited at our flat in Trearddur last week, cooked us an absolutely superb mushroom and pumpkin risotto, roasting slices of an Uchiki Kuri we had taken with us, then cooking the flesh stripped from the skin down further in the rice until it was almost part of the stock, but not quite. The flavour was wonderful, and the mouthfeel very satisfying and sensuous. Healthy can be delicious.

A side-note here: much though I love mushrooms, I find their colour - that flat grey - somewhat dispiriting to look at. The pumpkin-flesh orange in that risotto, not in your face but a background to the dish, was far more pleasing. And given we're now being told to have a rainbow on our plates (will the gold at the end be a problem?) it covers the 'of' bit of the old spectrum jingle nicely.

I just counted up our resources, and there are 16 of the things left. Writing this has made me think I really need to cook another one tonight. At this time of year, and pretty much only this time, you don't need to grow your own to enjoy pumpkin. In Morrison's the other day they had bowls wood sized ones (so manageable) for, I think, £0.70p, which if they're anything like as good as ours is a bargain.

Quinces Galore

Anyone who has read a few of my posts will be aware that we grow a lot of our own food, and that the inevitable gluts that come along provide me with enjoyable challenges.

Maybe some of the gluts are not totally inevitable, with successional planting of veg etc, but big fruit trees suddenly yielding huge crops are another matter. The most interesting of these recent gluts has been the bumper harvest from a quince tree we planted about 15 years ago. Last year we got three fruits, the previous year we had a good haul, enough to give some to friends. This year is undoubtedly its biggest ever effort, with quite a few given to friends and our own diet enhanced by them.

What to do with quinces? I tend to think that membrillo is best left to the Spanish, pleasant though it is on occasion, and we don't use much jelly either. I have trawled through quite  few cookbooks for ideas, and those that appealed most have been explored, along with old favourites from harvests past.

The most accommodating in terms of using up a lot of fat fruits (they are things of beauty btw, or our variety - name long forgotten - is; there's something very Beryl Cook about their plump pear shape and blowsy yellow colouring) has been to add cubes to a lamb braise, then 20 minutes before the end of the cooking time throw in a load of slices. The cubes perfume the juices, and thicken them as they dissolve, the carefully cored slices keep their shape and yellow hue (gaining a hint of orange to be totally accurate), looking very lovely when served on a plain plate.

That dish was a big success, and I'm sure the fruit would work well with pork, ham and maybe Guinea fowl.

We've also had several variations on the theme of quince slices poached in syrup, with cinnamon, allspice, pepper, nutmeg, and coriander and fennel seeds adding weight, as have one-at-a-time  Marsala, white wine, and cider brandy. They've been stewed with apples (our variety cooks down as quickly as apples, contrary to the indications of most cookbooks) for breakfast, and even used - successfully - in a mixed vegetable stock for soup.

Again, contrary to several written sources, ours don't look like they'll store, though we have tried to keep them dry and separated. But that's part of the fun of the glut for the cook, making use of a fine ingredient while it lasts, and in many different ways so the rest of the family, while fed well with them, don't get fed up of them.

Nuts, Fruit, Blossom

One of the things I will miss most when we have given up our allotment will be the two cobnut trees planted (probably contrary to the rules) on the plot. It's not the trees themselves of course, elegant though one in particular may be, but the nuts they produce. At home we have planted a reasonably-sized sapling, the offspring of one of them, so it's to be hoped that we only have a brief gap between crops. We have a walnut tree in the garden too, though I could have counted the number we got this year on two hands and one foot. The rats with good PR got the bulk, as they generally do.


This year we've had a bumper crop of cobnuts, enough to make me feel it was right to give some to a friend and neighbour, a good cook who will accordingly have made good use of them. It's another glut, but an especially welcome one. Among other uses they have gone into pesto as a substitute for pine kernels (which weight-for-weight cost about as much as gold these days), chopped into a breakfast dish of apple puree (our own Bramleys) along with oats, honey and raisins, and as a simple salad ingredient teamed with cos lettuce, blue cheese and apple (yes, our own Discovery). I'm tempted to use those left in the basket (not the last of the year unless the squirrel bastards have had all those left on the trees) in a curry as an alternative to cashews - they are when still relatively fresh off the branch very like milky cashews.


Don't keep the shelled nuts in the fridge, btw, they sog rapidly. I've also learned to keep the stillin the shell nuts in a basket rather than a bowl, the latter home causing them to sweat and deteriorate, and to stir them about daily to keep them aired.


It is the productive trees in our (admittedly larger than average) garden that are dearest to my heart. We have a fine willow that is architecturally splendid, but other than gnawing the bark if post-Brexit times get so tough that aspirin is unavailable it has little practical, and no culinary, value. Not so the apples, quince (this should be the best year ever for them), pears, plums (admittedly they yield very little) and even in pots peach, lemon and lime. I am not a gardener - the Dear Leader (may her opponents dry to dust) is in charge of that side of things, merely assistant water carrier, third class - but they don't seem at all difficult, even the citrus trees are pretty robust, though they winter in a greenhouse or the conservatory. Trees are also great for the environment.


Free food, lovely blossom, help the environment... Shouldn't everyone lucky enough to have the space be planting more fruit and nut trees? There's also something very life-enhancing about venturing into the back garden and picking breakfast, lunch or supper, or at least major contributors to them. And it is life-enhancing too when what's picked, as is so often the case, tastes ten times better than anything you can buy from the supermarket. Our Discovery apples this year have been a revelation, their flesh tinged with pink, and eaten minutes after picking their taste clean and bright, unlike their dull imported cousins sold at the shops (even British-grown ones have probably been in storage and transit for weeks).

Odd Companions

I am not a fan of fusion cooking. Neither the imaginary version involving a nuclear-powered stove, nor the one where a chef tries to meld cuisines from radically different cultures and geographic locations. A bit of borrowing works, but pak choi with a red wine sauce and turmeric meringues doesn't. Nor am I one to experiment too radically with new (to me) combinations. But last night one (rather timid) attempt at introducing otherwise normally unconnected ingredients worked beautifully.


Pressed for time having returned from the cinema (The Equalizer 2 - not as good as the first one, but still a pleasing romp for a wet Sunday evening) we were to have the legs left over from the previous night's roast chicken - cooked by the Dear Leader no less (may her enemies shrivel like raisins) as I had been doing macho decorating stuff all day, and absolutely delicious - with a tomato salad, and needed something vegetal as a starter.


With kohlrabi aplenty at the moment I wanted to use some of that, so peeled and sliced two (raw) with a potato peeler into see-through circles (the secret is holding it with a fork so no blood is added involuntarily); cut thin slices of goat's cheese on top; crumbled some walnuts; and added a good handful of tiny basil leaves picked fresh from the plant. Dressed with walnut oil and cider vinegar, along with sea salt, it looked fabulous - which is a good start - and the four forthright flavours worked as well together as a string quartet.


That point about how it looked is important, more so for restaurants than the home, but still helpful in getting the gastric juices flowing. It actually looked good enough to cost £7.50 on a posh eaterie's menu. The dressing was not artfully drizzled in zig-zag patterns, there was no bloody silly lavender biscuit or similar to accompany it, but nonetheless looked fit for the commercial table. It also cost maybe £1 for two servings. When we arrived at the cinema around 6pm we passed a lengthy queue at the nearby McD's, where others were getting their treat of fat, sugar and carbs for rather more than that. Each to his or her own.

Numbers for Dinner

Do you find yourself at the end of the evening meal totting up the number of fruits and vegetables you have ingested that day? I all too often do, partly because I am far more aware of health matters these days than used to be the case, partly because of a residual sporting competitiveness.


The trouble is I get a bit confused about what counts, according to the official rules of the game. How much is a portion? Does a medium tomato count as one, or do I need (daftly) to suck up another couple of cherry toms to hit the tape? A few weeks back I ended up googling whether nuts (a frequent ingredient and my snack with post-prandial coffee) counted - as I recall there may be a committee working on it, though meantime the sane think of course they bloody do.


Another part of the game that bugged me was the smoothie dilemma. Not whether Hugh Grant should use Grecian 2000, but why a smoothie only counts as one, whatever you put in it - when the Dear Leader (may her enemies suffer watching reality TV for all eternity) is absent planning world domination my breakfast tends to be just coffee and a smoothie, with three or four good portions of fruit. Apparently it's because of the fruit sugars released, but given I process to a lumpy consistency does that apply?


I read yesterday that only one in four Brits reaches the five-a-day target, which is sad in health terms but also taste, and culture. Are we still brought up here to think meat and potatoes, or bacon and eggs, or fish and chips are good everyday? Nice on occasion, but missing out on so many great flavours in fruit and veg, so many options. And cheaper options too - we are not short of cash but I reel at the price for meat currently, or good meat anyway - you can buy cheap grey mince for example for not very much, except your long-term well-being.


On the competitive side, we hit eleven yesterday by my reckoning, ignoring the smoothie rule and counting ours as two, and (I'm not sure if this works according to Hoyle) counting the lettuce eaten at lunch and in the evening as two. Yet more bloody French beans were part of that total, as was kale with anchovies, boiled eggs, garlic and olive oil. Delicious. But yes, we did nail the duvet down.

Gluts and Coping With Them

This year's great glut - greatest glut, we have had several including globe artichokes (not something to decry) and courgettes (as ever) - is French beans, so called because they come from South America. Coping with that involves freezing some, as they are ok for a few months like that, but also a bit of creativity and some delving into cookbooks.


French beans, btw, as opposed to the 'fine beans' ubiquitous in supermarkets now, which it seems are actually a type of runner bean. To my palate 'fine beans' have more than a hint of stewed tea, or had the last time I bothered to buy some, several years ago.


Salade Nicoise is a good starting point, especially earlier in the season when our new potatoes were at their best. There are (a link to the last post) many variations on that theme possible with little effort. More toms no spuds. Substitute pancetta cubes for the anchovies. Fried or grilled courgette instead of the cucumber and/or tomatoes. Beyond that I came across an idea for a sort of sauce in the Moro cookbook that took my fancy, though it was intended there to go with asparagus and I think globe artichokes. It used a lot of chopped boiled egg, plenty of herbs (we've had gluts there too, happily, even of basil), some pine-nuts, along with garlic, olive oil and perhaps a few other odds and sods. It made a main course of the French beans, boiled to retain a bit of squeak, and had the virtue of requiring a lot of them but not feeling like it in the eating.


As we're giving up our allotment the need to be less cavalier about planting, one of the reasons for the gluts, is in our minds now, with plans for successional planting and reducing quantities (do we really need five sorts of summer squash?) to the fore. But as a cook it is actually quite fun finding ways to use such bounty, without the Dear Leader threatening to declare me an enemy of the state.

Two New Flexible Favourites

In my last post I mentioned Ursula Ferrigno as my latest hero. Heroine? What is PC? Her books are both interesting for the Italian cultural and heritage side, and full of very cookable recipes, unlike the vegan tome the Dear Leader (eternal damnation to her enemies) kindly bought me recently, where each recipe has about 20 ingredients, some of them rarely seen in this part of Lancashire. And yes, the author looked exactly as you'd expect him to look, though as Al Gore and Bill Clinton are both vegans now, they don't all look the same. But most do. I like some vegan food, but not because it is vegan, if that makes sense. I like good food, and if it happens to be vegan, alright.


Two of Signora Ferrigno's dishes have now entered my regular repertoire. A vegetable tian, and a potato cake. Both are the sort of dishes I like - easily adapted to use alternative ingredients while sticking to the principle of the thing.


The essential tian is made with courgettes trimmed, boiled for about 12 minutes, then mashed to bits in a bowl when slightly cooled. Some short-grain rice is boiled, again cooled slightly, and added to the bowl. In too go plenty of Parmesan, a beaten egg or two, and some shredded spinach. She fries an onion and some garlic, I just bash some garlic. The Dear Leader's darkest dungeons are full of those who used three pans in cooking one thing. Mixed together, the mushy mass is seasoned and added to a flattish Le Creuset dish, topped (my touch) with more Parmesan, then baked at 180C for 35 - 45 minutes depending on how watery it began life. Fab and healthy, and with a glut of courgettes currently it is one to feature weekly for a while.


The potato cake is equally good, equally cheesy. And not vegetarian. Leftover boiled spuds are made into a sloppy mash with milk and melted butter, a Mozzarella chopped and added, plenty of grated Parmesan, and some chopped salami, along with just-cooked cubes of Pancetta. A veggie version with fried cubes of courgette (so many bloody courgettes) worked well too. In a greased pan or fireproof dish the bottom is lined with breadcrumbs, the mash etc added and flattened gently, and more breadcrumbs patted into the top. Baked for 40 minutes or so at 200C it comes out nicely browned. Put a plate over the pan, tip it up, and the cake comes out more or less intact. And it is delicious, a filler-upper that if ever it were allowed to go cold (and this would probably merit more egg in the recipe) would, cut into squares, make a fine nibble with drinks. The thought does strike one, however, that almost anything with tons of cheese, bacon and salami is likely to be a winner.


A general point from this. Dishes that are flexible are the lifeblood of the home cook. Not molecular cuisine, not painstaking measuring of precise quantities of ingredients, but an idea that will work with a snip and a tuck here and there. HF-W, another of my heroes, does tend to include variations on a theme in his books, and not be over-worried about fractions of a gramme; not really so the blessed Delia, which may be why I only turn to her at Christmas.

End of the Allotment

Now, where was I? The answer to that is in a rather more (but by no means strictly) vegetarian place than before.

For health reasons more than economy (though I love a bargain), and because we produce a lot of our own fruit and veg, I have over the last two or three years cooked far fewer meat-based dishes than used to be the case. I have a new hero too, the cookery writer Ursula Ferrigno, who appears to be of a similar mindset given I have two books of hers that are solely vegetarian, and a third on trattoria cooking that has plenty of meaty stuff in it.

As the Dear Leader (may her enemies perish in despair) and I near our second 30th birthdays anno domini looms far larger in the imagination, so we pick up more readily on the health-page articles than previously, and getting five-, seven-, ten-a-day is a fixation there, and thus now with us. We have also both made successful efforts to lose weight, part and parcel of the new view of our diet.

The big thing, however, as ever as far as I am concerned, is taste and pleasure. The two big things. Amongst our weaponry. It is now mid-July, our soon-to-be abandoned allotment (fed up with people nicking stuff, have lost strawbs, broad beans and blackcurrants this year already) is producing loads of wonderful and next-to-free produce, and our garden likewise. The broad beans (we have still had the majority of what we grew, but I hate being abused by thieves) are picked small and some eaten raw they are that good. Our fennel, likewise picked when tiny, is packed with more flavour and of a texture that is silk to supermarket worsted.

There are gastronomic possibilities too in growing your own that are pretty near impossible in this country otherwise. We have for example had lots of artichokes already, again taken small and sweet. And for the first time ever we have beaten those far more relentless produce-thieves, the squirrels, to our walnut crop, still only perhaps a dozen picked green, but now macerating in a Kilner jar with spices and a bottle of unwanted clear spirit, nocino for Christmas 2019.

The Dear Leader (may those who fail to bow before her suffer endless agonies) is expanding our kitchen garden, already quite a size, we spent a happy Sunday last week building a second small greenhouse (my how they laughed at the instruction book, apparently a surrealist statement of merely possible realities) and we have plans for more trees - this morning's smoothie contained three of our homegrown plums - to add yet more unbuyable varieties to our basket. We seem to be looking forward to the best ever quince harvest too.

I will miss the allotment, and wish the two users who will inherit our ground (and trees, and artichokes, and fruit bushes, and...) well of it. But I fear that as we head into uncertain political times, and very probably poorer economic conditions thanks to a generation of politicians of all stripes who couldn't organise a fart from a can of beans, we will see more and more desperate people reduced to raiding allotments to keep from hunger. I'd prefer it if they had an allotment of their own though.

In case anybody thinks I'm a heartless sod begrudging food to the desperate, I regularly donate a bag of tins and packets to the Sally Army. I do wonder if those stealing things are desperate, or just greedy idle bastards - a while back the plot next door lost a giant pumpkin just before Halloween; and another guy had an entire row of spuds dug up.