Damsons, cats, more soya milk and a deeply rich tomato sauce

Part two of my So Good soya milk tasting took part today, when I collared my lovely next-door neighbours, Tom and Megan, to blind taste two smoothies: one cow's milk and one So Good milk. It's my standard Sunday morning mixture of banana, honey and milk whizzed together, with the addition of the flesh of a mango I bought last week at Shepherd's Bush market. Here we have Tom swigging down glass B...

...while Megan samples glass A. They liked both smoothies, although they thought glass A, the soya version, was sweeter. Now that I've used So Good, I could tell which was which just by smelling them. In the end, and before I revealed which was which, Tom preferred the soya while Megan liked the cow's milk best. I much preferred the cow's milk...but then, I don't have that sweet a tooth and a smidgen of bias is creeping in. But clearly, So Good did work well in this experiment, and Tom happily finished off the soya smoothie.

After the romanesco cheese debacle, I'd mentioned my concern about the sweetness to Emma at Wild Card PR agency - she replied: 'In answer to your question re. why it is so sweet, all soya milks tend to be sweetened to improve the taste and make more milk like (soya beans aren’t naturally sweet). Some soya milks use fruit juice to sweeten the taste – So Good uses sucrose and vanilla flavouring. So Good held extensive consumer research to investigate the taste preferences of both soya and non soya milk drinkers. They found that the new recipe was most popular with both sets of consumer groups and was more highly favoured compared to the old recipe and its biggest competitor for creaminess, smoothness, thickness and taste.' Hmmm - maybe many of today's consumers have grown up with much more processed and therefore sweetened food than when I was a lass.
Yesterday, I spent a lovely day in the Bucks countryside with J, scrumping damsons which I cooked down and pureed to go with a fantastic lunch dessert of rice pud and a new find of J's - Tesco's Finest hazelnut yoghurt. Yummylicious. One of the many joys of visiting J is spending time with Daisy, here resting with a monkey...

...and Freida, caught here on patrol, trying to find out why J and I were laughing so much at poor Daisy.

The main cooking today has been using up the final good-sized harvest of tomatoes from the allotment and the garden. Q and I are now in digging mode, getting ready to plant onions and garlic, and clearing the ground of bean and tomato plants.
Nigel Slater had a recipe for green and red tomato chutney in last Saturday's Observer, and after much rummaging in the recycling bin I dug it out. Nigel's version is here, but I didn't have quite the weight of tomatoes - about 100g short - so I added some celery. I didn't have enough raisins either, but I discoverd some sticky prunes lurking in a cupboard.

In went the green toms, onions, raisins, prunes, sugar, salt, vinegar and a chilli from the garden. It bubbled away happily for half an hour before I added the red toms.

After a total of an hour's cooking, it looked a little bit liquid and not very jammy. And I don't think I cut the big toms into small enough chunks. Still, the flavour was fantastic, so I decided to pass the mixture through a sieve and come up with a sauce. It tastes lovely: richly sour and sweet and perfect, I reckon, for adding to some porky sausages or a jacket spud on a cold winter's day. Quite an autumnal jarful.
The sky has now turned grey so Mouse has settled into her basket while I type away.

A spicy supper

The wonderful tomato harvest continues - this is the haul from the allotment on Sunday. In the top container we have the San Marzanos, which have finally ripened, and Amish Paste. Both are cookers.

Setting aside a good number for salads during the week, I got to work on a tomato sauce that would be the basis for a rather mongrel curry. My normal sauce has a base of slowly cooked onions; then in with the toms, some salt and maybe some herbs from the garden. Then I strain the whole lot through a sieve to give a silky texture.

To add heat and spice, I decided to use a couple of spoonfuls of my black (or goda) masala - a wonderful discovery from Anjum's New Indian. It's a mix of dry roasted dessicated coconut, sesame seeds, coriander, cumin and caraway seeds whizzed together with pepper corns, star anise, cloves, black cardamon, chilli flakes, cinnamon and bay leaves. It smells absolutely heavenly. I made up a jar in the spring to use in a biryani, so this was a bit of an experiment...which worked. The sweetness of the masala seemed to suit the toms. I added a spoonful of yoghurt just to balance up the sourness of the curry.

Then in with a couple of hard boiled eggs - I get eggs every week with my Abel and Cole veggie box, and this week's have a particularly yellow yolk.

Accompaniments were one of my favourite rice dishes: lemon and cashew rice. First cook your rice then set it aside to drain. Add some oil to a saucepan and fry a handful of cashews until they're golden. Then add half a teaspoon of turmeric before bunging in the rice. Mix carefully with a fork then add the juice of a lemon and some curry leaves. Let it heat through. To my astonishment, Tesco are now stocking curry leaves, which are up there with kafir lime leaves for aroma. Don't eat them though - they're there to add flavour by scent alone.

In the garden, I discovered an overlooked mini cucumber which had swollen to improbable size, and a recipe from Anjum looked like a good way to deal with it. Chop up your cucumber and remove the seeds. In a pan of hot oil, add cumin seeds (you can add mustard seeds too); then add your cucumber and some fresh or frozen peas. More spices go in - turmeric, red chilli powder and coriander. Let that lot cook for around five minutes, then add a spoonful of yoghurt. Finish off with some chopped mint leaves.

And finally, some coconut and coriander chutney. This is unbelievably yummy and easy. I'd always adored it when it appeared in Southern Indian restuarants, but never made it until I found a recipe in Vicky Bhogul's A Year of Cooking Like Mummyji. In a little oil, fry some black mustard seeds until they pop - then whip them off the heat. Then mix them together with yoghurt, grated ginger and finely chopped garlic, garam masala, half a chopped green chilli, salt and lime juice. Finally, stir in some chopped coriander leaves.

I love this so much that I sneak down to the fridge and eat it by the fingerful. This version isn't very green as my coriander in the garden has bolted, and the new seedlings aren't ready for harvest yet.

Off to Hertford later today: on the train to St Margaret's then a walk into Hertford along the Lea Valley Way.

A walk to Limehouse and some crabby business

I'm on holiday at the moment, and tomorrow's Kent adventure meant that a stomach reducing walk was in order. My first thought was a walk from St Margaret's to Hertford, but Hertford friend Ian was otherwise engaged, so Plan B was the Lea Valley Walk from home to Limehouse. I've done this walk several times before, and it's a gentle seven or eight miles down to the mouth of the Thames.

Just past Ferry Bridge, this huge narrow boat came chugging past. About a mile on, I wondered if David was around - he lives on the narrow boat Essex Buoy.

But it looked shut up. David must be busy working. The walk is almost all towpath along the Lee and Stourt canal. It's an odd mixture - for most of the walk there's enough green to keep the human London softly at bay. But every so often, there's a reminder of what we get up to.

I rather liked this graffiti, while deploring the spelling. Still, patched up, it would be a good slogan for a food blog.

For quite a while, I was walking past the site of the Olympics, but it was hard to get a decent picture. Here are the lock gates at Old Ford Lock, deep into Hackney. And just around the corner...

...clear site of the evolving Olympic stadium, just visible above the canal. I can't wait. I'm a big athletics fan and I've been glued to the Berlin World Champs this week. I signed on to volunteer for 2012 as soon as we won the games.

This sums up the walk for me: cranes sprouting like improbable flowers above the vegetation. You're never more than a literal stone's throw from some wharfs or houses. As I walked, I wondered how nature would take this route back. I'm reading The World Without Us, and it seems that Earth will get along pretty well minus humans. If we don't get our climate act together, this will all be under water.

Around noon, I arrived at Three Mill Island. It's a lovely collection of buildings, including what was once the largest tidal mill on the Thames. Shortly afterwards, you get to the Limehouse Cut, a couple of miles away from Limehouse. Sadly, this is the most boring part of the walk, unrelieved by any greeness. But the curve into Limehouse Basin is great.

And all at once, you're into the flowering of modern flats and stowed narrow boats. And then over to Narrow Street and a clear view of the Thames in its full majesty.

This walk always reminds me how huge the Thames is to the east: a world class river.

I followed the Thames path round to Canary Wharf and slumped on a grassy knoll to scoff my pesto pasta. Then it was back home, mostly overland, via the Docklands Light Railway and a train from Liverpool Street.

And at home I had a pot of crabby goodness waiting. Last week, my Abel and Cole box arrived with a flyer promoting the yumminess of crab from Seafood and Eat it. Enough persuasion already - I love crab, so put in an order for brown Cornish crab. It arrived this morning and I've been mulling over the possibilities. Then I pierced the plastic pot and stuck an eager finger into the goey browness: fab. There's a Tamasin recipe I've memory marked and this was the occasion to use it. I've adapted the quantities for the amount of crab meat.

Little Crab Custards

Mix together 110g crab meat, 2 beaten eggs, 210ml double cream, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, a knife tip of cayenne, 1 tbsp Parmesan, a good pinch of salt. Pour into ramekins, or in my case, the lovely soup dishes I bought on a walking weekend on the Isle of Wight.

These will go into my Remoska for half an hour...let them cool for 15 minutes then serve with toasted sourdough bread and some watercress and orange salad. And some tomatoes...my allotment bushes have provided a fantastic harvest.

Preserves day

Up early this morning at the start of my preserves day...I snapped up Pam Corbin's River Cottage Preserves handbook as soon as it was published last year, but failed to make one of the most intriguing recipes - Pontack sauce. It's a mixture of elder berries, vinegar and spices. So I hiked up to Tesco to get cider vinegar and sugar, as I was planning a repeat of last year's fabulous blackberry vinegar too.

There's an elder tree in the garden, so armed with a plastic bowl and secateurs, I grabbed several bunches of berries and gently squidged them off their stalks. Next door neighbour Tom is has other plans for the berries - he's going to make some wine.

The first stage of the Pontack involves a very slow cook of the berries steeped in vinegar, so into the oven they went. Meanwhile I was on to stage 2 of the day - off to the Paddock for blackberries. The Paddock is a lovely little nature reserve tucked off Ferry Bridge Lane, and last year the blackberry crop was superb. It's pretty good this year too, but the first thing I spotted was sloes.

I think sloes are normally more a September crop, but there were quite a few ripe berries which I bagged to put in the freezer. I spotted some by the allotments last Sunday, so I'll gather more tomorrow and make sloe gin during the week. On to today's main harvest...

The berries looked really good. But I'd stupidly forgotten that nettles love growing round brambles and I was wearing sandals. But stung toes and scratched fingers make it feel like you've really worked. I picked for just under an hour, visiting my favourite bushes. And I noticed that my hands smelled faintly of vanilla - not a scent I'd ever associated with blackberries before.

Back home, there was a pleasant vinegary smell coming from the oven. My bramble harvest weighed in at 1.5 kilos - brilliant! Pam's fruit vinegar recipe calls for 1k of fruit which is steeped for 5 days in 600ml cider vinegar. You just press the fruit gently so that the juices mingle with the vinegar. I'll do a later post on what happens next.

The allotment toms are ripening beautifully - they look so pretty. The tastiest are the orange ones - I'm kicking myself for not transferring the labels into the ground. The mini cucumbers are doing well too.

Out in the garden, my oriental lily - an impulse buy from B&Q - is heavenly. Smells divine and the flowers are magnificent.

Plot news

The sun really came out and beamed on us yesterday, and I spent all morning on the allotment. My tomatoes are finally beginning to ripen - I think these are Golden Berry: having carefully labelled all the seedlings, I didn't transfer the labels into the ground. But these guys were soft and acid and sweet.

I was thrilled to see that the squash (Japanese varieties) have really taken off. Here's the biggest nestling behind a flower.

The courgette Tricolour is also doing well, but it's determinedly yellow in fruit.

The runner beans (Red Rum) are going great guns: at the top right of the picture, you may see a bumble bee making its approach.

Q and I made a big potato harvest - lots of Charlotte and Burgundy Red. The only problem with digging potatoes is that the ground throws up lots of biting soil bugs (thrips?) which make a beeline for me. So I'm happy but very bumpy and itchy.

Tomatoes by the gallon

Seedlings at home

Spent a sunny afternoon potting up more tomatoes. At the last count, I have over 50 seedlings...the little darlings have had an astonishing germination rate. I'm a bit tomato bonkers, and this year I'm growing:

• Gardener's Delight - always a favourite, and last year's from the allotment were the best I've ever tasted


• Tigerella - another lottie hit from last year


• Sungold - my favourite yellow/orange cherry


• Sun Cherry - meant to be even better than Sungold - we shall see


• Golden Sweet - another orange contender


• San Marzano - didn't do too well in the damp of 2008


• Costulutto - ditto


• Black Russian - new for me this year


• Black Cherry - so is this one


• Rosada - top in the RHS taste trials last year, so I'm looking forward to tasting this one


• Millefleur - lots of tiny yellow fruit and no pinching out


• Bicolour - huge yellow/red fruit - another new one for me


• Amish Paste - another heirloom and apparently grows very big

Seeds are from Thomson and Morgan and The Real Seed Catalogue. Real Seeds are great - all heirlooms and none are hybrids so seed can be saved for next year. They do amazing veg, including the Fat Baby exploding cucumber and Dead Fingers chilli - both waiting in my pop-up greenhouse to be potted on.
I thought that 13 varieties of tom was enough until Big Bro showed me the Plants of Distinction catalogue - I was smacked gobless by their collection of tom seeds, which is the best I've ever seen. Lots of varieties from the US and eastern Europe and many I'd never heard of before. So even though it's nearly May, I went a bit mad and ordered their black tomato collection, comprising Chocolate Cherry, Black Sea Man, Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Japanese Trifle Black and Nyagous. Please let it be a long hot summer so that all these little beauties do well.