Thursday 29 October 2015

The league of vegetables

It’s definitely starting to feel like winter is on the way. The nights are drawing in, the trees are turning spectacular shades of reds and oranges and yellows and the place is once again overrun with dyspraxic pheasants from the local shoot with about as much sense of direction as the confused looking groups of Duke of Edinburgh expedition youths that we see trudging gloomily past now and again. Temptation has yet to get the better of us but it’s only a matter of time… The one advantage of losing the light so early is that it assuages the guilt of watching TV in the late afternoon. A happy coincidence given that the Rugby World Cup has pretty much taken over our lives these past few weeks. My dear devoted husband has religiously watched every single match and not one in real time (God bless Sky Plus). In these times of social media, texting and general 24/7 connectivity I remain utterly astonished that he has managed to avoid finding out the scores for hours, days, even whole weekends when he’s been away at work (i.e. in the middle of nowhere in deepest, darkest Scotland). I, alas, clearly a) give much less of a toss about the scores (and indeed sport in general) and b) am much more addicted to my smart phone than he is so I always seemed to know the results before he watched the matches.  This led to slightly awkward situations where my (pretty rubbish) poker face belied the result or I made myself very scarce towards full time knowing that the outcome was going to send him into downward spirals of depression and grumpiness. As indeed was the case with the Scotland match, after which he announced an official day of mourning, sported a black arm band and flew his tartan underpants at half-mast on the washing line. In a bid to escape the bitter disappointment of all of the Northern Hemisphere teams being knocked out of the tournament (not to mention the added sting that we had once again lost out to Ladbrokes) I took myself off to the veg patch to start clearing the beds. Nothing like wrenching some shrivelled up plants from the earth to cheer oneself up. Pausing to reflect and take stock of our relative successes and failings, I starting to construct a league table of sorts in my head (seems that the annual performance management cycles of the City are more ingrained in me than I thought!). If vegetables were teams who were the winners and losers of our first growing season?

Group A – Legumes
A tough group this one, with all the super star players that everyone wants to eat. The peas put in a good performance, plenty of form early in the season but after a full-on two weeks where we couldn’t eat enough of them it all went off the boil and we were left with a load of unripened pods, peas too small to eat and the pods too tough to bother with. Similar story with the broad beans – a short, sharp fortnight of glory then nothing. I like to think of them as the Chesney Hawkes of my veg patch – fairly easy on the eye, a ‘one hit wonder’ after their victory at the village show and then it’s all over and you never hear from them again. No I’m afraid the winners of this group have to be the runner beans. Slow to actually produce any pods but once they got going they’ve been loyally plodding away providing us with meal after meal of non-stringy, tasty greens. They also make wonderful snacks when you’re wandering past and fancy a munch and even the kids are big fans. Plus a very useful vehicle on which to load up dips and hummous. And of course they are fast (of course, being runner beans, *groan*) to grow: I can literally strip them of every bean and the next day there are a ton more. Group A winners sans doute.

Group B – Brassicas
The veggies that everyone feels they ought to eat but no one really genuinely enjoys (if we’re being completely honest here). Bad breath and flatulence central, otherwise known as ‘superfoods’.  This category is all about what actually managed to come up, stay up and then escape the jaws of the hungry bunnies and the plucking pheasants (who mysteriously seem to have no issue with direction when it comes to homing in on my broccoli the opportunistic buggers). The kohl rabi (one might say the ‘Accrington Stanley’ of the season…. “Who are they?” “Exactly!”) didn’t even turn up. Hundreds of seeds planted and not a single one germinated. Bottom of the group. We’ve had sprouts the size of peas and cabbages the size of sprouts. Dismal to say the least. The chard and the spinach has bolted and now tastes bitter. The one thing that has grown well and actually looks and tastes like something you wouldn’t mind parting money with at a fancy farmer’s market is the Cavolo Nero kale. Gwynnie would be so proud of me. I’ve used it pretty much every day, usually surreptitiously hidden in sauces and purees for the kids, but also out and proud in stir fries and it is pretty much the only thing I can confidently put in the dehydrator to make guilt-free kale crisps (if you don’t count the lashings of salt, oil and soya sauce I coat them in of course). Kale – you’re through.

Group C – Roots
Source of all of our rude comedy veg moments of the summer. Misshapen and forked carrots looking like weird, Tangoed versions of you can imagine what. Taste good too. In fact out of everything that we have grown this year, the carrots are the one thing that genuinely taste completely different to anything you can buy in a shop. The parsnips are not ready yet, nor the celeriac so to all intents and purposes they are disqualified. That leaves the beetroot, a good cropper, dual purpose as you can eat both the roots and the leaves, raw or cooked (as long as you stand downwind from anyone you are trying to impress later that day). And of course you have the added bonus of its sheer ability to make one believe that one’s innards are leaking out every time you visit the lavatory. It’s a close call but given that there is now a whole body of sports science evidence suggesting that beetroot juice can make you run faster, for the purposes of this whole tenuous analogy it pips the carrots to the post.

Group D – Alliums
Living in Wales you’d think growing leeks would be a piece of piss wouldn’t you. Apparently not. My leeks still look like blades of grass, seemingly trapped in some kind of stasis (in fact, they might actually be just grass, better go and check that out to avoid the ridicule of my fellow countrymen… serves me right for taking a shortcut and buying plants at Homebase I suppose).  The onions have put in a sound performance – they’re as big as anything you can buy in the shops and they make me weep like a Scotsman at a Twickenham quarter final (ouch, sorry) every time I cut them up. But I still can’t help but feel that by buying and planting sets (i.e. tiny baby onions) I’ve kind of cheated as all I’ve done is just made something bigger. There’s no real alchemy at play there. Unlike the garlic. You take one regular garlic bulb, split out the cloves, whack them in the ground in the dead of winter, remove the occasional weed and lo! six months later you magically have these huge bulbs, bursting with plump, pink cloves. They might as well be dancing the bloody haka on the raised bed.

Group E – Salady stuff
My greatest disappointment of the season. And where I have invested the most of my time, money and effort. The tomatoes in particular are the ultimate divas of the patch. Talk about high maintenance. To start with you’ve got all the potting up through two, sometimes three sizes of plant pot before the little darlings can possibly begin to contemplate dipping their precious roots into a grow bag, which incidentally cost a small fortune. You’ve then got to give each plant its own bamboo cane, attach it with expensive cable ties (adding more each week) then prick out the side shoots every couple of days. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough you’ve then got to water the bloody things every night, despite us investing huge sums of money on a fancy watering system (which seemingly was not enough to quench their insatiable thirst). All of this of course whilst they live in the lap of luxury in the balmy climate of the greenhouse, sunning themselves daily whilst the rest of us freeze our nuts off in Wales’ poor excuse for a summer. Oh and did I mention the riders? Do you have any idea how much Tomorite (a top of the range fertiliser) costs? It might as well be a Class A narcotic…. And then they don’t even bloody well get on the stage. I’ve had 4, yes FOUR, red tomatoes this year. And one of those was a complete mutant. I’m eliminating them from the competition for being complete time wasters. The cucumbers were not much better. Put it this way, no man worth his salt would want to brag about being endowed like one of these meagre specimens (although to give them the benefit of the doubt, they may actually have been gherkins but the seed packet got lost in the maelstrom of toddler chaos earlier in the year). The peppers and chillies never even made it onto the pitch. Which leaves the squash and courgettes. Once again a crazy array of different shapes and sizes, none of which I intended to grow but I was told by a horticulturalist that they are ‘free-pollinating’ which means I have effectively created my own Frankenstein pumpkins. Awesome. They get the winner’s slot on the grounds of that alone. Never mind the fact that they are the most low maintenance to grow and prepare (just whack a seed in the ground and a few months later pop the whole thing in the oven – job done) and have provided me with a solid meal on many an evening when I have forgotten to prepare anything else.

Fright night - mutant tomato

Frankenstein veggie genetics - these all started out life as the same variety of squash...


Group F - Fruit
Not strictly vegetables of course, but in the competition to make up the numbers, much like Italy at the Six Nations. The rhubarb will always hold a dear place in my heart being the first edible thing on the patch and seeing us through most of the summer (until we read that eating too much of it can cause kidney stones and the hypochondriac paranoia set in). The strawberries were a bit of a blink and you miss it affair, although partly our fault for not covering them up properly. The gooseberries and the raspberries were tasty enough but never plentiful enough to do anything with once I’d snacked my way through them whilst working in the garden (well there have to be some perks to the job!). The mulberry tree was a source of great excitement as it did actually produce fruit this year but like a cheap whore’s drawers it looked like a million dollars but dropped all its wares to the ground in the blink of an eye. Nowt left for us sadly. The pears are looking good, still rock hard but we are avidly awaiting the seven minute window when they are actually ripe enough to eat before they go over and spoil. That leaves the apples. One tiny little tree, one bloody enormous box of apples, which took me a good week to tackle into pie fillings, chutneys, jams and jellies. It has to be the winner.

I’ll spare you the painful, drawn out analogy of quarter and semi-finals (plus with six groups I’ve just realised that it doesn’t actually work out numbers-wise) and cut to the chase of the winner. It’s got to go to the garlic on the grounds that it is the only actual vegetable in which we are truly self-sufficient. We have not bought garlic for over seven years now and have been recycling the same ‘family’ all that time. It also has the ability to transform a fairly quotidian meal into something so wonderfully reminiscent of lazy Mediterranean holidays and expensive French restaurants (have you ever tried scrambled eggs with butter and finely sliced garlic? You should). Oh and apparently it’s good for you. And keeps the vampires away. I’m off to arm myself with some of my prize bulbs and a crucifix. Happy Halloween everyone!

Champion garlic

Sunday 18 October 2015

Burn, baby, burn

 Ah autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Crisp afternoons crunching through falling leaves and the homely smell of gently smouldering bonfires. Or, in our case, the acrid stench of burning plastic and plumes of black smoke filling the air like downtown Mogadishu. Yes we’ve finally got around to clearing out the first of many barns and having a good ‘burn up’, the term we have fondly adopted round here to refer to ‘the act of getting rid of any old shit through the medium of fire’. It probably then comes as no surprise to learn that my husband’s business used to be called ‘Twisted Firestarter Bushcraft’. Trouble is he’s much more Disco Inferno these days than Prodigy if I’m truly honest, hence we’ve recently rebranded to the hopefully less alarmingly titled ‘Wild Bushcraft Company’, (depending of course on your interpretation of ‘wild’).

Ok, dictionary masterclass and shameless plug over (sorry), let’s get back to that fire. The conversation one morning last week went something like this:

Him: I’m going to have a big burn up today.

Me: Are we allowed to do that?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I mean don’t you like need a licence or permission or something before you burn the entire contents of a barn to kingdom come? Are we even remotely qualified to do this?

Him: It may have escaped your notice that I pretty much do this for a living. Plus it’s our land and we can do whatever the hell we like.

Me: Whatevs. I’m staying well out of your way. And I’m putting the local fire brigade on standby just in case.

Him: Shut up *or words to that effect*

And off he trots down the drive, firelighters and matches in hand (sorry to shatter the illusion for anyone that knows him as a bushcraft instructor and imagines him painfully labouring away over his fire-by-friction bow drill set each day). To start with it was all looking rather tame – burning up the piles of scrub and dead wood left around the place. Then he got his tractor and trailer out and parked up outside the barns and started heaping old bits of furniture, rabbit hutches, plastic feed bags, tyres, old buckets, you name it, on it went and straight onto the fire. Now there is something incredibly therapeutic not to mention trance-like (original sense not the techno-house meaning – Paul Simon’s Gracelands was blaring out of the back of the Landrover while all this was going on… rather than Paul van Dyk) about watching something go up in smoke. We were drawn, mesmerised by the dancing flames on the piles of random stuff that vanished before our very eyes in no time at all. Another step towards making the place a bit tidier and feeling more like our own. And to give him his dues, it was all very controlled and passed without incident.

Hot dog

Except, that is, for the point in proceedings where he very nearly razed the entire place, outbuildings, farmhouse, the whole kit and caboodle completely to the ground. Rooting around in a small antechamber of the elderly Dutch barn, he flicks on the light switch in the hope of finding any final old clobber lurking away in the corners. Satisfied that he’s found everything he wanders off thinking, “that fire smells pretty close now, wind must have changed direction, huh.” It was only when he realised that he had forgotten his chainsaw gloves that he went back to the barn to find a swallow’s nest happily smoking away on the lightbulb, literally but seconds away from igniting and sending the whole place up like a tinder box. It doesn’t bear thinking about what might have happened had he not been such a forgetful klutz on this occasion. Mind you, in some ways it might have solved a few demolition and redesign problems for us, albeit in a very dramatic and extreme manner!

Panic over, we retired to the house to light our log burner which has recently creaked back into action (burning the arses off any poor unsuspecting birds nesting in the chimney over the summer) now that the nights are drawing in and we are getting frosts at night (already!). Word on the lane has it that Siberian swans have been sighted in the area which is apparently a sure fire sign that we are in for the mother of all cold winters. Bring it on. We are already moving into full-on ‘prepper’ mode, planning trips to the Cash ‘n’ Carry for apocalyptic type quantities of tins (sod being self sufficient when it's -10c and you're up to your arm pits in snow quite frankly) and dead-of-night forays to the council salt mountain down the road to stock up on grit for the drive. There have even been semi-serious conversations about investing in a snow plough attachment for the tractor. You watch, it will turn out to be the mildest winter on record. Probably no bad thing given that we have now burnt up every last flammable object around the place in the event of things getting desperate. And on that note, I'm off to chuck another log on the fire. 

Wednesday 7 October 2015

Wild gourmet

I suspect that most wives don’t get asked to lend a hand with their husband’s day job other than perhaps taking a quick glance over a PowerPoint deck or enduring a nonsensical dry run of a presentation on a subject matter of which they know little, and care even less.  Given my husband’s line of work usually involves copious amounts of mud or guts and quite often both together I usually treat any requests for help with a high degree of suspicion.  On this occasion however, he was preparing for a ‘Woodland Banquet’ - a high end dining experience in the woods with a five course menu based solely on wild, local and seasonal produce. Sounded delightful.  “I need your help”, he says in a tone of mildly rising panic, handing me a tattered piece of paper with a long, list of wild ingredients scribbled on it. Now usually he is, to give him his dues, impressively well prepared for his events, and I am rarely called upon to assist. However, matters had somewhat overtaken us this week what with the excitement of finally finding the leaking pipe that has been pissing water all over the place since we arrived at the rate of 3 litres an hour (we worked out that’s over 25,000 litres a year equating we reckon to over £500). This discovery did come at a price though as my husband, rookie digger operator that he is, accidentally managed to sever the mains water supply to the house in the process. You know those geysers in Iceland….? Yep another ‘you couldn’t write this stuff’ classic.  A panic trip to the farmers mart at high speed (well, high speed for the Landrover – i.e. 33mph) to purchase essential widgets and luckily the tide was soon stemmed: we now have a fully operational, non-leaky water pipe providing us with the purest, Welsh water at, we hope, a fraction of the price that we were paying hitherto. Just as well, as I think we are going to need every spare penny given that the architect we had round this week to discuss our grand plans spent nearly three hours urging us to “think big” and “consider the master plan” as we attempt to bring our ideas to fruition. Three hours that should have been spent in the kitchen preparing for this soi-disant banquet.  Anyway, the upshot of all that was that my services were called upon to help.

Finally! Found the leaky pipe

A quick scan down the list revealed that we did in fact have all of the wild ingredients and I was pretty sure that I could pinpoint their whereabouts on my new mental map of the place. That wasn’t the hard bit. The hard bit was trying to collect all this stuff with the kids in tow. Trying to coax my now ‘threenager’ into her wellies and out of the house took over twenty minutes. I then felt like the Welsh rugby pack against the monstrous Fijians trying to gain precious yards of ground towards my hedge lines using whatever tactics I could to move her slowly in the right direction, i.e. lobbing toys and current objects of her affection (dog lead, plant pots, slightly freaky plastic baby – which travels through the air surprisingly well) to get us to the right place. Once there, I was picking berries and leaves like a maniac before she was off again and onto the next field. Goodies gathered, it was back to the house, I thought for a rest and a nice cup of tea. Oh no. This small favour ended up with me still in the kitchen at 11.30pm at night, sweating, knackered and a little bit tipsy*. I’ll tell you for why…

*actually quite hammered

First off I was asked to prepare the fresh horseradish root which, if you’ve never had the pleasure, is a pretty potent substance and needs handling like one of this wanky molecular gastronomy chefs using dry ice – gloves, glasses, protective coats and everyone to stand well back. This stuff could melt the tarmac from the roads. Hence we only needed a tiny bit to mix into the crème fraiche to go with the smoked trout canapes. Once I had finally mopped up the floods of tears from the floor and wiped the rivers of snot streaming down my face (nice), it was onto the dressing for the wild pigeon salad. At last we have found a use for our rowan berry gloop, which actually tastes pretty nice, if a little bitter and earthy. Perfect for this occasion. Meanwhile my husband is stood next to me, meat cleaver in hand, with an assortment of dismembered animal body parts in front of him on the kitchen worktop. And on the wireless we have not Radio 1 Dance Anthems but find ourselves instead humming along to Desmond Carrington’s easy listening classics. Oh how my Friday nights have changed.  

I think it was at this point that we decided to crack a bottle of the red cooking wine and have a “wee taste” just to check that it passed muster for the sauce to accompany the venison steaks. “Mmmm, I think that’s ok, let me just have another little check…” You know the way. It was our Friday night after all.

Marinating and vacuum packing done, hubby then disappears behind clouds of flour as he starts preparing the dough for the nettle flatbreads. I have never seen or heard such a performance coming from him as he worked up a sweat kneading, knocking back (correct lingo he assures me), folding and repeating the process over and over again. Who the bloody hell did he think he was? Paul sodding Hollywood. That Great British Bake Off has got an awful lot to answer for…

By this point, the red wine was flowing quite nicely, albeit down our gullets rather than into the stock pot. So nicely in fact that we decided to have a little taster of the sloe gin, again just to check it was up to scratch for the sloe gin chocolate truffles, which was my next (rather exciting) task. Actually, I realised we would have to finish the bottle as I needed the berries to add into the mix (although it was only half (ish) full to start with before you get on to AA). Glug, glug.  Chopped up the berries, melted the chocolate (had a little taste), added the cream and the butter, (had a little taste), rolled them into balls (had a little taste), and dipped them in hazelnuts and icing sugar (had a little taste). I haven’t had any caffeine to speak of in over five years. Dark chocolate apparently has 150mg per 100g. I think that’s quite a lot. It’s certainly more than I’ve had in a while. I felt like someone had injected me with jet fuel. I suddenly became a lot more efficient, frenziedly beating the living crap out of the toasted hazelnuts for the blackberry cranachan with a ten inch meat tenderiser. Without doubt the most culinary fun I’ve had in a long time. I suspect the kitchen worktops might beg to differ.  

All in the name of lending a hand...

Time to turn our attention to the all-important elderberry sauce.  Accompanying the main course, this was to be the star in the banquet, the glue holding the rest of it together. Now elderberries are what I like to think of as a ‘tier 2’ wild ingredient (clearly a hangover from a previous life spent working with call centres and helpdesks). You’ve got all of your ‘entry level’ wild fodder, like blackberries, nettles, dandelions etc. which are unmistakable and I’m pretty confident about what to do with them. Elderberries are a bit more of an unknown quantity in our house. We’ve made a few potions with them over the years and suffered them in hot water as a tincture for colds (quite successfully) but using them in sauces and gravies is a bit more of a voyage of discovery. And so it was that we found ourselves cackling away like Macbeth’s witches as we stirred a bubbling cauldron of steaming black liquid full of elderberries, roasted meat bones, red wine and juniper, tasting and adjusting the seasoning until we created something really quite special. We thought. Although by this point I think it would be fair to say that our judgement may have been a tad impaired…

As it happens we needn’t have worried. On the night, apparently our banqueters also partook somewhat enthusiastically such that I suspect the subtle piquancies of the different flavours may have perhaps been slightly overlooked. That said, I'm told that the whole banquet turned out to be a very special occasion, illuminated only by candlelight and accompanied as it was by our story-telling and harp-playing friends.  I look forward to many more (although given the time it took me to recover from preparing for this one, perhaps not too often!).

It'll be alright on the night