From Plot to Plate

Tags

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, River Cottage, Sarah Raven, Waitrose

A few pickings from the plot

It’s July, no really it is. I know it feels more like autumn, doesn’t it? We’ve just had the wettest June on record and apart from 2 weeks at the end of May it has rained pretty consistently since the start of April. We had so much rain on Thursday morning from thunderstorms that our shed flooded. It wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, except I’d put a few cardboard boxes of seaweed meal fertiliser on the floor and when I discovered the sodden floor and went to salvage them the bottoms fell out of the boxes showering fertiliser everywhere. I managed to scoop it up but my shed now stinks with a fairly strong whiff of seashore. Normally a smell I love, as I can imagine I’m in Cornwall by the sea, in the confined space of my shed it doesn’t conjure up such pleasant memories; it’s more stagnant rock pool. Mmmm lovely. And it just continues to rain so I can’t leave the door open to dry out the floor or try to shift the smell. Still I realise it is a tiny problem in comparison to all those people who’ve had their homes flooded in what seems like a regular feature of our summers now.

In an attempt to cheer myself up I’ve been using the produce from the allotment to make some tasty food in the vain hope I can transport us, with food, to something that feels vaguely like summer.

The first meal was what I call ‘plot minestrone’ and is a great dish for this time of year when there is so much fresh, young produce about.

Plot Minestrone Serves 2

I simply sweat some onions down in oil, on a low heat, until they are soft and then add some tinned tomatoes and 250 ml of vegetable stock. This is your base, you can then add whatever you’ve got to pick from your vegetable patch. I used some baby carrots, peas, broad beans, beetroot and some shop bought courgette. Kale and spinach are also lovely additions. Chop the vegetables small and then chuck into the pan and bring up to the boil. A good sprinkle of paprika, some black pepper and a pinch of salt and then simmer until the vegetables are cooked but still have some bite, about 30 40 minutes. Ten minutes before it should be ready, cook some pasta separately and when cooked, drain and add to the tomato and vegetable pan. Serve with plenty of parmesan.

My version of spanokopitta

On Monday we had my take on the Greek dish Spanokopitta. We had some for lunch when we visited Sarah Raven’s Cutting Garden and it was gorgeous. I couldn’t find a recipe for it but I’ve had it before so was vaguely familiar with the ingredients and just decided to give it a go. A pie made from filo pastry, it’s much lighter than our own pastry pies. In Greek, it means ‘spinach pie’ but it works well with other greens. It’s a little fiddly to make but tastes gorgeous.

Spanokopitta Serves 2

A pack of filo pastry

150 g Feta cheese

Leek

A variety of leafy greens such as chard, spinach, russian red kale.

Oil/Butter

Wash and slice the leek into thin rounds and then sweat gently in oil in a frying pan. The leek wants to be soft and not browned. This should take 10 minutes.

Whilst the leek is cooking, steam the greenery. I used baby chard leaves and Russian red kale, a good handful of each. Spinach works well too. You want the leaves to wilt in the steam and this should only take a minute or so. When they’re soft and reduced down remove from the steam and run under a cold tap to cool them down and then using some paper towels squeeze out the water and place in a bowl.

Into the bowl add the cooked leek and the feta cheese, broken up into small cubes. I like to use a feta that already has a little bit of chilli, lemon and herbs added to it that I get from Waitrose. If you can’t get hold of something similar you could add some dried mixed herbs such as oregano and thyme to the mix. A good amount of black pepper and then mix it all toether.

Now assembling the pie, take a sheet of filo and fold it in two, brush with melted butter or olive oil and then place some of the leek and feta mixture in the centre. Take another sheet of filo and fold this in half and place on top, again brush with the butter or oil and add some more filling. repeat once more and then taking another sheet of filo, place it over the top of the filling and tuck under the pie. Brush the whole pie in butter/oil and then bake in the oven at 180C for 20-25 minutes until golden.

The great thing about filo is its versatility. Rather than stacking the mixture like this you can make individual little parcels, folded into triangles which are great for buffets and picnics. It’s up to you really.

Frittata

And then, for lunch yesterday, we had a frittata using the first Charlotte potatoes of the year. I love making frittatas because you can use so many different fillings.

Frittata Serves 2

The basic are eggs and potatoes and to this one I added broad beans, peas, dill, chives and a few purple mangetout from the plot and a little bit of a hard goats cheese like Swaledale. You’ll need a frying pan with a metal handle so you can put it into the oven or under the grill. Start by cooking your potatoes. Once they’re done put them to one side to cool. In your frying pan put a generous glug of oil and sweat off some sliced onions. These want to cook gently to soften but not colour and should take 10 – 15 minutes. In a jug add 4 eggs and beat lightly, add some ground black pepper, and whatever filling you want to put in. I added some chopped dill and chives, some baby broad beans and peas and the cooled potatoes that had been sliced. Mix everything together and once the onions are lovely and soft add the egg mixture to the frying pan. You can add cheese to the egg mixture or place the cheese on top. Cook the frittata on a low heat for 5 minutes or so and then place in the oven at 180C. This should take 15 minutes, if the middle doesn’t look like it has set just give it a few minutes under the grill. Frittatas are particular good cold and I like to make it as an alternative to sandwiches for Wellyman’s lunch. It’s great to experiment with different flavours. My tip is not to use anything that is wet though, such as tomatoes, as they egg won’t set. Use sundried tomatoes instead which work very well with roasted red peppers.

It might be grey, dull and wet outside and I got soaked and covered in mud harvesting the spuds but I’m trying, at least, to transport us to the Mediterranean via food. I’m not sure it worked but at least the food tasted good. I’d love to hear about your foodie ideas for using produce at this time of year.

Growing Your Own – is it worth it?

Tags

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Incredible Edible, Landshare, Which Magazine

Growing Your Own

If you had to say what was the biggest trend over the last 10 years I think most people would agree it has been the incredible growth in the popularity of growing your own. Sales of vegetable seeds now outnumber those of flower seeds and the last 2 years or so has seen an increasing interest in growing fruit. Waiting lists for allotments are up to 30 years in parts of London and the demand for land to grow produce has inspired many an ingenious project such as Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall’s Landshare, which puts people with land in touch with those who want some and the Incredible Edible project in Todmorden, Lancashire.

Much of this has been attributed to a desire to know where our food has come from. Interestingly however, a survey commissioned by Which Magazine last year showed that the top reason for growing your own was not because of the health benefits but because of the increase in food prices people thought growing their own would save them money.

I say this is interesting because it has always been of some debate in the Welly household whether you do actually save money growing your own. This has come to the fore again as I contemplate growing carrots for the coming season. Simple you might think, seed aren’t that expensive, just buy some, sow them and then several months later you’ll have carrots. But as all you fellow carrot growers will know it’s not quite that simple. I tried some last year at the allotment and they were decimated by carrot fly.

Keeping out the carrot fly with wood and enviromesh constructions

Fellow plot holders went to extreme lengths to keep the flies out with wooden contraptions constructed and covered in fine mesh but they admitted it would have been much cheaper just to buy them from the supermarket. The other problem is the soil isn’t fine enough for carrots with a high proportion of clay in the soil on my plot. So that was that, at the end of last season I had decided not to bother with them. But the addiction to grow things won’t go away. So I’ve now decided to grow them in pots at home, away from the allotment carrot flies and in compost mixed with some sand to give them the right conditions. I have suitable pots but there is the purchase of compost, which isn’t cheap and some sand. So is it really worth it?

We don’t weigh our produce so it is difficult to know how much, if anything we actually save. You need to factor in your allotment rent and any expenditure, for instance any fertilisers, equipment and compost. Even if you can produce enough compost for your plot you still need to buy it to sow the seeds. There are some plants that are better to grow if saving money is a key, what I call high end produce. Soft fruit is one of the worst offenders for chemical residues and buying organic is expensive but even after purchasing raspberry canes last spring and not expecting much of a crop in the first year we were certainly up by the end of the autumn. This was partly due to discovering the variety ‘Polka’ which was especially high yielding even in it’s first year.

Bountiful Raspberries

Anything that crops over a long period and that keeps producing are a cost effective use of space. Courgettes, for example will happily overwhelm you over a good 2 – 3 months. This year I’m growing broad beans based on it being difficult to get organically produced ones and that they were expensive last year. I plan to weigh this crop, although I’ll probably forget, to see how we do on cost.

One crop we’re definitely not growing is sweetcorn. We’ve tried it twice and  it has succumbed to our cool, dull summers. I know it’s meant to taste sublime when picked and cooked immediately but weather is the one element I can’t do anything about.

So here are my tips for getting the most from your plot:

1. If your plot is small don’t grow crops, such as onions or maincrop potatoes, that take up a lot of space and can be bought relatively cheaply.
2. Do grow soft fruit. It’s expensive to buy organically and is always sweeter when picked ripe from the bush. There is the initial cost of the plants but they will soon pay you back. Any surplus can be frozen or made into jams.
3. Do grow your own salad leaves. Salad bags are expensive and have been washed in all sorts of chemicals. Franchi seeds in particular are great value for money. One packet of their salad leaves will keep you going all summer.
4. Do grow Cavolo nero, a type of kale. From a midsummer sowing you will have baby leaves for pastas and omlettes, bigger leaves in autumn and winter for steaming and you can eat the flower heads in early spring like purple sprouting broccoli.
5. Do grow french beans, which are expensive to buy in the supermarket, and give you good quantities. They lose their freshness quite quickly as well and are always bendy when bought but there’s none of that from your own supply.
6. And finally, remember you can’t put a price on flavour, freshness and ultimately the enjoyment and satisfaction that comes with growing your own. So don’t get too hung up on whether growing your own will save you money, it’s meant to be fun too. That’s why when I was up at the plot this morning, Brian was sowing his carrots in his specially built raised beds and putting in place their wooden and enviromesh covers. And that’s why I’ve just ordered some carrot seed. It might not be cost effective or easy but it is worth it.

Allotments – The Good News Stories

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allotments, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Landshare, National Trust

Produce from my plot - just to show I didn't just grow flowers!

Following on from my last post about how difficult it is to get an allotment I thought I would write about the organisations and individuals that are trying to do something to provide land to those who want it. Whilst local councils and central government might not see the need for a new approach to allotment there are fortunately others who do.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, TV cook, author and promoter of all things foodie saw that something needed to be done to match the growing demand for land on which to grow. In 2009 he launched ‘Landshare‘ a website which puts people who want to grow their own produce but don’t have the land in touch with people who might have some spare land, or a garden that is too big for them. So far the venture has proved incredibly successful with over 66,000 members. Older people with large gardens that are too big for them to manage any more now have people growing fruit and veg and sharing with them the produce. There are some people who are just too busy to garden who have released part of their garden or some who have fields that are doing nothing and have given these up to allotments.

The National Trust has also joined the fight for more land. In 2009 it announced it wanted to create 1000 new allotments by 2012. They reached this target this summer. Some allotments are in walled gardens, others on vacant land near the Trust’s properties. In Woolacombe, Devon a field owned by the Trust was turned into 50 plots including one for the local Woolacombe Primary School. At Springhill in Northern Ireland a run down walled garden was brought back to life and now there are 27 allotments. Monk Coniston allotments must surely be a candidate for best location and view. Perched above Coniston Water in the Lake District the walled garden was disused until the National Trust received a Lottery grant and there are now 10 plots for the local community to grow fruit and vegetables.

The Trust joined forces with Landshare and available plots at Trust sites can be found on the Landshare website and just because they have reached their target of 1000 allotments they don’t plan to stop there with another 200 planned in the future.

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that someone saw an opportunity to take advantage of the huge demand for allotments and set up a privately rented allotment company. The New Allotment Company opened its first site in 2010 in Kent. The charge is £150 for a year or you can pay in monthly instalments. This includes water, storage and manure. It sounds expensive and may well price some people out of the opportunity to grow their own. The other downside is that you sign up for 3 years with the opportunity to leave after the first year but after putting in all the hard work of establishing your plot it would be difficult if after the 3 years the rent rose and became prohibitively expensive. However, the plots are pre-prepared so no dreadful weeds to remove and the site provides secure storage, toilets and an all weather shelter and I know from my own experience that those would be welcome additions to my own allotment site.

It is good to know that people have taken on the task of dealing with the lack of land for growing but this should not be an excuse for local authorities to neglect their responsibilities. Politicians like to suggest they are in touch with the voter and listen to what they want but they seem to have some wax in their ears on this one. It would be nice to see a local councillor somewhere in the country to take up the issue of allotments and the lack of them.

Tasty Apple Cake Recipe

Tags

apple, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, River Cottage

I made this cake yesterday. Wellyman had an exam for his degree and he’d spent the last couple of months revising so I thought I’d make him a ‘no more revision cake’.

The recipe is from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Everyday Cookbook but he has a pear version that is available at the Channel Four website. The recipe is exactly the same just substitute apples for the pears if you want, it’s important to use a dessert variety of apple that maintains it’s shape when cooked such as Cox or Ribston Pippin. I also used less sugar, 100g rather than 125g. I find a lot of cake recipes are too sweet for my own taste. I also added a few drops of almond extract when I added the eggs to the mixture and scattered some flaked almonds on top about 40 minutes into the bake so they don’t get too brown.

I served it with some creme fraiche and thought it was a lovely light cake. Wellyman liked it too, although he does think cheese and jam is a good sandwich combination!!