Original Sin - Pasta Caring

As anyone who has read a few of these posts will have gathered, I may not be hidebound, but I'm packing for the journey as it were. My preference has always been in food terms for the authentic, so what was a passing fad a few years back - fusion cuisine - didn't really work for me. Which is not to say that I won't try new things, or enjoy tweaks to recipes and dishes that don't rip the heart out of the original.


The trouble is that as we eat lighter and healthier meals, and with less meat than of yore, I end up looking for alternatives to the meat protein. Take pasta as an example, so often in the past accompanied by a rich Bolognese sauce - and nothing for me wrong with that; or meatballs with toothsome pork. Having tried and not enjoyed textured protein stuff, pretend mince, etc, and put it down to experience, I now go for something radically different to make the pasta interesting. Simple fresh tomatoes and olive oil for one; or a sauce made with mushrooms, including dried wild mushrooms, though I don't think they are a great combo with tinned toms so look to use them sweated down with maybe just onions, garlic and celery.


I can justify this to my (in culinary terms) conservative self by saying that Italian peasants until recent days are unlikely to have eaten much meat either, and you need something to make the spag or what have you more palatable. Which reminds me of an episode from my distant youth: on a campsite in Switzerland we had Italian neighbours who for most lunches and evening meals prepared a massive pan of spaghetti, that they seemed to eat with nothing on it, much to the surprise of my parents, who thought - it was the 1970s - that spag meant bol. They probably had olive oil and garlic, or maybe butter and cheese with it.


In the end if you can make things work well, what the hell? Arriving home hungry on Saturday we had linguine with tiny broad beans fresh picked from the garden, some equally young fennel, chopped fine and cooked briefly in butter, and a load of herbs including the fennel top, basil, parsley, tarragon and oregano. With a generous amount of Parmesan it was satisfying, had our B12, and most importantly, was absolutely delicious. My politics have tended to drift leftwards of late, and so maybe my culinary tendency towards the liberal instead of the absolute is not out of step with that.

Is It My Imagination, or...

Two weeks ago we ate our first home-grown new potatoes of the year, rushed from the pot in the greenhouse that had protected and warmed them to the pot in the kitchen where they were simply boiled. Some things need nothing fancy doing to them, indeed are better off served as simply as possible. Yesterday we ate our first new potatoes fresh from the kitchen garden, same speed of processing. Unless my taste-memory is playing tricks, or I'm simply imagining it, yesterday's were vastly superior in flavour.


I guess the difference is the growing medium. The ones grown under glass (well, polycarbonate) were in compost with a tiny bit of soil, the ones in the kitchen garden enjoyed a richer environment with plenty of manure and topsoil. When we buy lettuce (not from the start of May to late October) it is stuff raised in industrial polytunnels, in industrial growing media, and while welcome then it cannot hold a candle to our own for crispness and taste.


Some crops, however hard we try are not actually as good as the best (generally organic) locally grown stuff, tomatoes a case in point. But for the majority of things we can grow without major problems the effort is repaid on the plate, if not always in the purse. Too often, however, what is grown for its shelf-life and yield, and how it performs under glass and in compost, is third rate.


Along with the small picking of spuds yesterday we had our first broad beans of the year, pods no thicker than my middle finger, and only an inch or so longer. Too good to cook, the minute beans were eaten raw, with all that's best and sweetest about them to the fore, and almost none of the bitterness that like the rest of us they'd inevitably succumb to when more mature.


A cook's daily task is helped enormously by having even a few freshly dug/picked/cut veg to hand every evening - choose what is at its best and prepare it in a way that plonks its charms front and centre. It can only be a week or two before the first tiny courgettes are begging to be eaten. And they, more than anything else, prove that home-grown in good rich soil outdoors, and on the table within an hour of being harvested, is so much better in most cases than the supermarket can ever provide. These days you can, sometimes, find small courgettes in the supermarket, worth it if you don't have your own. Forget their swollen, watery, leather-skinned brethren, however. At least you would if you had ever tasted how good a small courgette, cooked within minutes of being cut, actually can be. Sad that only a small percentage of the population will ever know that pleasure.