The Opposite of Glut

I've written here before about how the kitchen gardener copes with gluts. Last year one of those, for us at least, was quinces, used with apples in pies and breakfast purees, added to lamb stews, poached in sweetened wine, baked... But sometimes the opposite happens, with a crop failing, as indeed is the case in 2019 with.. quinces.


Our tree had a few small fruits visible in early summer, but one by one they've dropped off, or more accurately been washed off by the heavy and all too frequent showers of August, or been blown away by this summer's equally prevalent gales.


It's not disastrous, as quince is hardly an essential in the kitchen. But one of our major reasons for kitchen gardening is growing things that are either absent from the shops, or rarely seen and very expensive. Things that improve our quality of life; fruits and vegetables that make cooking and eating a pleasure.


My apologies for widening this out, but our agriculture is fragile: weather extremes happen all too often; industrial farming is weakening the soil; the B word threatens to hit the sector from all sides. The British Retail Consortium just said Michael Gove's statement that Brexit would not bring any fresh food shortages was categorically wrong. We may find that the opposite of glut is not just a gardener's problem soon.

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.

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).