Veggie Barbies

The title is in fact a lie, if only partially, given that at both of our recent barbecues we ate meat, but we did manage to enjoy loads of vegetables done over the coals, and indeed in them.


I'm taking a wild guess that this is not news to those of a true vegetarian persuasion, but vegetables respond as well to the BBQ treatment as meats do. The best veggie thing we did - both times as the first was so enjoyable - was sweet potatoes, double wrapped in foil and buried in the very white hot ashes. The best results were with medium sized tubers, cooked in that way for a good 45 minutes. The skin was somewhere between burned and caramelised, but once cut into the flesh, with a bit of butter and salt, was totally delicious.


Those sweet spuds however, didn't benefit from the smoke and grill elements of the process, which mushroom kebabs (brown shrooms with garlic cloves between them) did, likewise courgette kebabs done with bay-leaves as separators.


Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'd like a totally veggie BBQ, but neither these days would I fancy one of the total meat-fests of the not too distant past. Another veggie winner was whole medium-large onions left in their skins and slotted on a metal skewer to help the heat get to the middle. The skin was charred, the next layer overdone and not worth eating, but the rest was - again - sweet and delicious. I tried white onions and red, and the latter was the tastier.


We love garlic, and had a head each done in foil on the grill, with a few herbs and a bit of oil to keep them company. The cloves could be squeezed onto the meaty bits for an instant sauce, and the second time I did enough to have some left over to make a sauce - with leftover onions too - that two days post-BBQ went with some roast chicken. Magnificent, but one of the most fart-inducing concoctions known to man.


Even Swiss chard, one of those things that we kitchen gardeners grow and end up not using all of, was a winner, cooked in foil with some butter and crushed garlic - I said we like it - leaf and stem.


We owe some vegan friends - health rather than conviction I think - a BBQ, so with a little tweaking I'm confident we can feed them well without too much need for bought-in veggieburgers. Up the mushroom quotient, and with a few more different varieties added, and it should be proof positive that Fascinating Aida were wrong with their classic lines 'Inviting a vegetarian to a barbecue, it's taboo, it's taboo, it's taboo.'

Breaking My Fast

As these days the Dear Leader and I undertake a 600 calorie fast every Monday we actually do break a more meaningful fast than normal on a Tuesday morning. Strangely we neither of us wake up ravenous, nor horribly early, on the morning after the slight deprivation before. In fact what we have on the Tuesday is only a variation on the Monday fast breakfast (and yes, it is fast to do as well) of a boiled egg and a bowl of fruit.


Lest this all begin to be too too virtuous, I am looking forward to a short holiday in Scotland in not many weeks' time, where I hazard a guess there may not be bowls of fruit available on the hotel breakfast menu. With luck there will be black pudding, and I am certain sure bacon and sausages will feature, things reserved now for high days and holidays. For the sake of my - love that euphemism - digestive transit - I hope they will have given in to brown bread as an option.


That bowl of fruit is a major pleasure, but given my constant wish to have diversity in our diet it is something of a challenge too. It's April, so imported strawberries make the grade occasionally now, along with blueberries. Citrus is a must for some sharpness (but as per my previous post, not as sharp in the case of grapefruit as was once the case), kiwi for the beautiful green and the eye-beneficial compounds signaled by that colour, and plums for some crunch and their purple or yellow skins. Pomegranate seeds (the trick is to bash the back of the halved fruit over a bowl with a heavy wooden spoon) strewn over the lot once or twice a week bring a touch of Aladdin - it takes little imagination to see them as drifts of rubies in a bandit's treasure chest. But back to my less camp self now.


The rather limited fruit range offered by my local supermarkets is bolstered by visits to the excellent Asian shop we use more or less weekly. Today I bought dragon fruit, golden plums, guavas and a bright yellow-skinned mango (along with a load of non-fruit items). The white with black dots of the dragon fruit, cut in elegant dice, and even the light-green-beige of the guavas, will add to the richness of the breakfast palette. It is not too long too until we will have our own rhubarb, gooseberries, greengages, mirabelles, pears, apples, quince, blackcurrants and even with luck apricots to add to the mix.


I will enjoy the contrast of hotel bacon and eggs for a few days (they can keep any hash browns on offer, I'm yet to encounter one anywhere that's not oily and badly cooked), but at the same time will miss the burst of colour (and flavour) that breakfast at home brings.

Changing Tastes

Now in my very, extremely, exceptionally late thirties I find that my tastes have changed. Or has the taste of the things I taste changed?


Two specific examples. First, chicory/endive. A few days ago I cooked an Italian-ish dish as a starter, the basis of which was purple-tinged chicory picked fresh from the garden. It was served with griddled bacon and mozzarella, but that's not to the point. A good thirty or forty years ago when I first encountered chicory (not something that featured in my 1960s and 1970s Norfolk childhood and youth) it was so much bitterer. Before ours was usable I bought something very similar from Waitrose, and regularly purchase the version with yellow highlights from a variety of sources. They all taste sweeter than they once did.


That could be my taste buds becoming less sensitive - certainly children have far more discerning TBs than adults - but I think it is the bitter quality being bred out of the shop stuff and the seed stock alike.


Same thing with grapefruit, that even ten years ago was sharper and again bitterer. Sadly, though ten years ago I may have been childish I was not a child.


Given that the bitter quality of chicory, and the mouth-puckering sharpness of grapefruit were their defining virtues this is rather sad. To suit palates perhaps trained by the processed and fast food industries to like sugary sweetness in all things we are losing - we are being robbed of - character in our food, or some of the ingredients at least.


I am not a complete Luddite as regards changes to the stuff we grow and eat. Apples have definitely been bred to brown more slowly when cut into. That's fine by me. But I also think that along with breeding nearly tasteless varieties like Golden Delicious, the ultimate misnomer as they're light green and lack flavour, growers have reduced the sharpness in many (but not all, so it's not my taste buds) apple varieties found in the supermarket.


Sadly my usual remedy - grow it ourselves - does not fully resolve this problem. Apples perhaps, as we have established trees whose fruits remain sharp and tasty, with their own individual character, not just a vague apple-ness and different colours. But not chicory, as the experience recounted above demonstrates. Except - maybe this is pushing me to rejoin (again) Doubleday Research, or Garden Organic, or whatever they are called now. The joy of membership there is that once a year you get a small selection of 'heritage' seeds, chosen from a fairly long list. Part of the value of that is retaining bio-diversity; part that the vegetables grown from the seeds have individual character. Yes, I have to rejoin, on both counts.