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.

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.

Something New

It is always a pleasure to come across a new combination of ingredients, a new dish, that works, especially if it is simple. With a glut of broad beans from our allotment (no complaint there, just an observation) I was looking for a way to do something different with this vegetable that doesn't lend itself to all that many exotic uses. There are dips and hummuses (hummi?) that suit it well, but none met our needs on Friday. As so often the divine Hugh F-W offered a direction, if not the solution itself.

HFW suggests zapping the cooked older beans (once the grey and bitter skin has been removed) and mixing with a little garlic and a thrutch of ricotta. He may not have used the word thrutch. I had ricotta in the fridge, and am never without garlic, but as our beans are fresh and young making a puree of them didn't appeal, indeed it seemed just wrong, so I warmed six thinly sliced cloves of garlic (HFW suggested two) in a little butter and olive oil, added a heap of the jade gems, and stirred in half a container of ricotta (about 125g).

When the lot was well mixed and warmed through it was piled on a toasted flatbread and became the nearest thing we had to a main course that evening. All three of the ingredients (discounting the flatbread) married beautifully, the garlic was very present but not dominant, the texture moist and toothsome, and The Dear Leader (all hail our Dear Leader, ever vigilant guardian of the homeland) fulsome in her praise.

The combination was so good that to demonstrate it to the returning Sternest Critic I repeated the exercise and served the beans as an accompaniment to the customary fatted calf (thick steak) enjoyed when he is just back from university. He is not a big fan of the broad bean, but made short work of these.

Only one thing bothers me slightly about the dish, and that is the thought in the back of my mind that it is not a million miles from The Fast Show's cheesy peas.