Storms and an Open lunch

It's one of those British three-seasons-in-a-day. Mouse woke me at 0700 demanding breakfast, and it was already grey with the occasional flash of hot sunshine. So I headed up to the plot early, hoping to get in a couple of hours' work before the rain arrived. I took my camera only to discover, once I was there, that the battery was flat. Huh. The newly-planted broad bean seedlings are all doing well, there are tiny fruit on the squash plants, and the tomatoes are thriving and full of fruit. I tied in all the new tomato growth, weeded, watered the shed plants, and found I had the first crystal apple cucumber!

I got home just before the first heavy shower. Rang Q, who was now on the plot and soldiering on with weeding the empty onion bed, and heard that he's had swine flu - the first person I know to get it. Thankfully, he's fine now.

Back home, I did some tidying in the garden. This is the dill that I bought from Walthamstow farmers' market a couple of weeks ago - growing very well. Next to it is the squirrel-proofed Sicilian rocket mix.

Here are my Amish toms - already developing their beefsteak ribbing.

Then it was time to make lunch and settle down in front of coverage of the Open championship. I have no idea why I like watching golf but it's become a bit of an addiction. And this Open has become a real thriller. Go Tom! Go Ernie! Anyway, back to lunch. First up, a beetroot salad with an Ottolenghi-adapted dressing of maple syrup, peanut and olive oil, sherry vinegar and garlic. I've added the last of the Barkham blue, rocket, sorrel and radish sprouts.
Then I fried up some of last night's lottie potatoes in walnut oil.

Add a scotch egg pasty and there you have it. (And the pasty tastes even better today.)

Mouse is not too impressed with the golf and has settled down to some heavy duty snoozing.

The scotch egg pasty

There's a brilliant idea in the August Good Food mag - scotch egg pasties. Instead of deep frying the assembled scotch egg, you wrap it in pastry and bake it. I liked the idea so much that I nipped over to Stoke Newington farmers' market first thing to get some Muck and Magic sausagemeat. I spotted these fabulous sweet peppers and had a great chat to the lady from Stour Valley lavender farm - last December I bought some wonderful marrow chutney from her. I liked it so much that I returned to get another three jars as Christmas presents. She also sells lovely lavender and lemon marmalade. Another market purchase was some sweetly swollen purple goosegogs, and some beet from Sarah Green.
A quick stop at Fresh and Wild over the road (except it's not Fresh and Wild anymore) to stock up on cheese and olives, then back home to get cooking.

There's something oddly satisfying about de-skinning sausages...into a bowl they went, together with a handful of breadcrumbs and oregano, chives, parsley and sage from the garden. A good squish and that's it. The original recipe calls for shortcrust pastry, but I'd got a pack of the puff variety in the fridge. It also recommends medium eggs - but I think small would be better. Having hardboiled your eggs, it's assembly time.

The recipe suggests lining the pastry with the sausage mix, then putting your egg on top before folding the pastry up and over (a la Eddie Wearing) and crimping, but this was tricky with my larger eggs. So I tried another method.

Encasing the egg, as for scotch eggs, was a bit more successful. There was some pastry and sausage meat left over, so I made some mis-shappen sausage rolls. Then they all go into a hot oven (gas mark 7) for about half an hour.

Here are the sausage rolls...

...and here's the oddly shaped pasty. Tasted good though! I think these would be even better made with quail's eggs, except I'm sure someone told me that the quail's eggs in supermarkets come from caged birds, which is a horrible thought and out of the question as a purchase. I'll have to do some research on the matter. I'd also love to make them with Simon Rimmer's veggie alternative to the scotch egg - he replaces the meat encasement with a falafel type shell.

Supper for a cool summer's day

It's not exactly the barbeque summer we were promised, and yesterday's downpour had me yearning for a pasta supper. There was a chunk of lovely Barkham Blue cheese in the fridge, left over from my Rye Harbour trip, and broad beans from my veg box. Time to combine the beans with my favourite and easy-peasy blue cheese sauce.

This is so simple and so delicious, and the original comes from an old Fratelli Camisa cook book. Simply pour double cream into a saucepan and add your small chunks of blue cheese. I first made this with Gorgonzola, but it's grand with Shropshire Blue, Devon Blue or - most heavenly of all - Beenleigh Blue. Add a good grinding of black pepper and heat gently until the cheese has melted. Then it was time to tackle the beans.

These were whoppers, so after a few minutes in boiling water, I drained them, dunked them in cold water and nipped off the tops with a thumb-nail so that the inner green beans popped out. Into the sauce they went to heat through. Meanwhile, the pasta was reaching tenderness. Once drained, it joins the sauce and gets gently stirred in.

A final shaving of parmesan over the top, and my supper was ready, with a hunk of Turkish olive bread to mop up every last smear of the savoury sauce. Yum!

The best chicken (and the first potatoes)

I spent all morning on the allotment (and forgot to take my camera). After trimming, weeding and sowing beet, spinach and rocket, it was time to dig the first potatoes. Here they are, my first buried treasure of the season.

On Friday, Big Bro and I dashed over to see Todd, soldier turned farmer and purveyor of the best chicken I've ever tasted. The chickens - Sassos - spend their lives at Wickham Manor Farm near Winchelsea. Todd is a member of the Slow Food movement, and the chickens taste full of a happy long life.

I first came across the chickens at Marylebone farmers' market, but you can also find them at Rye farmers' market and, I think, another London venue. Sadly, Todd doesn't have a website, but if you chance across him, buy that chicken!

My normal procedure is to roast a la Simon Hopkinson - season, whack on some butter then pour over the juice of a lemon and push the lemon halves into the cavity. Yesterday I added some tarragon from the garden.

Here's the chicken after I'd demolished it for yesterday's supper.

In winter months, bread sauce is essential, but in the summer, I turn to Claudia Rodin and her tarrator sauce. It's a mix of walnuts, soaked bread, garlic and olive oil - as ever with my favourite recipes, it looks like wallpaper paste, but it tastes wonderful. Rodin suggests it as an accompaniment for veg or fish, but many years ago I discovered how well it goes with roast chicken.

It keeps well in the fridge and I often scoop it up neat by the fingerful.

Looking ahead to tomorrow's lunchbox, I made my fave noodle sauce, based on an Ottolenghi recipe.

My noodle sauce

2 tbs rice wine vinegar

zest and juice of one lime and one orange

1 tbs grated ginger

1 tbs of jaggery, if you've got it, or soft brown sugar

2 tbs sesame oil

2 tbs peanut oil

1 tbs chilli jam

1/2 tsp salt

Mix well with a whisk.

Now you're ready to add to noodles (soba are my choice but egg noodles take this treatment well too).

To the noodles I added some thinly sliced radish, spring onion and red pepper, pine nuts and cucumber. Tomorrow I'll add some coriander and mint.

And some sprouted radish - I used to be very sniffy about sprouts, but in the past year I've been converted to the these yummy little plants. To the right is what Thomson and Morgan call 'salad mix', but there's not detail on the packet as to what the seeds are. No matter, they taste hot and very green. These are only four days old - a brilliant way to get cheap and easy greens.

Rye Harbour

I spent a wonderful day with Big Bro yesterday, in his haunts of west Sussex. After scooping me up from Battle station, he suggested we pick up picnic provisions for a lunch at Rye Harbour reserve. Excellent idea. So it was off to Great Park Farm , an enchanting nursery and farmshop.

First we had a nosey round the plants - a lovely selection of shrubs and perennials. Big Bro and I showed admirable restraint in not buying anything.

The farmshop is everything you'd hope for: bags of produce grown on the farm supplemented by local cheeses, meat, preserves and bread, with the odd favourite (Patchwork pates) from further afield. We stocked up with local ham, Sussex charmer and Barkham blue cheese, Somerset brie, Lighthouse Bakery bread, spring onions, radishes, and Big Bro grabbed a couple of bottles of Fentiman's ginger beer. Then we made a mad dash over to Todd at Food Fore Thought to buy a couple of what I think are the best chickens in the country. More of the chicken later.

Back at BB's house at Rye Harbour we added to the picnic with some sprouted alfalfa, Kent tomatoes and cutlery. BB hoisted his unfeasibly large viewing implement and we were off through the town to the start of the reserve.
Rye Harbour reserve has to be one of BB's favourite places on earth - when I ring him, he'll often say, in a dreamy voice, 'I'm on the reserve...' The reserve is a triangle of land - the top of the triangle is Rye, and it spreads out to Winchelsea beach at one point and the mouth of the river Rother at the other. I swear there's not a plant or bug that Big Bro doesn't know.

This is wild carrot - BB showed me the very centre of the flower which is the only bit of red among the frothy white. The flowers were covered with metallic green insects. BB pointed out some other wild relatives of our modern veg - parsnip and fennel.
The path leads down along the Rother, with the odd World War 2 concrete battlement dotting the landscape. The reserve is the largest shingle habitat in Europe, with a unique ecosystem. BB has spent a happy spring and summer watching wading birds raise their young.
These Sussex cattle were grazing quietly in the sunshine. Something I'd been looking forward to was snacking on the marsh samphire - otherwise known as glasswort. Here it is growing amongst sea purslane. BB had got permission from the warden for us to sample the glasswort - it's a tiny succulent plant that's crunchy and tastes of the sea. An excellent appetiser.
Another edible plant that grows all over the reserve is sea kale. After flowering, they're covered in green bobbles. BB says greenfinches love them.

Near the mouth of the Rother, there are WW2 gun emplacements: thank god we never needed to use them.
We were now very near the point where the Rother meets the sea. Small fishing boats were returning from work, heading back to the harbour.
We finally settled down on the shingle shore for our lunch, having worked up a fine appetite. BB set up his spotting scope and scanned the horizon for huge container ships travelling from Rotterdam to British ports. He found one, bobbing up and down on the swell. The sea was very fierce on the shore and it got a bit chilly when the sun went in - it was one of those English summer days when you need t-shirt AND fleece, just in case.

We swigged our ginger beer and toasted a fine day out.

The big unfreeze

I opened my freezer door yesterday and felt a familiar blast of icy air and guilt. The inside resembles a cross between a snowdrift and something the Titanic bumped into. There are ominous white bulges and sparkly hard edges; the drawers knock against frigid lumps and I have to wrench them to get to the contents. In short, it's a frozen disgrace. I wouldn't be surprised if a flock of penguins came waddling out.

I think it was the blessed Nigella who counselled against using your freezer as dustbin, and I've tried to stick to this advice. I know there's sensible stuff in there, like home-made chicken stock, cubes of grated ginger and garlic for my Asian cooking, vine and lime leaves, sausages and mince from Muck and Magic, home-made tomato sauce and pesto, an Abel and Cole venison pie, peas and broad beans.

But there's elderly stuff too: a kipper that I bought but didn't fancy eating straight away, the end of a block of puff pastry, a beetroot pesto that I made ohmygod two years ago. And lord, there are the beet gnocchi I made earlier this year.

And when I really root around, there are solid blocks which I can't even identify - is that a soup? Or a sauce? Can that be the last of the lamb keema I made heaven knows when? What is this brown stuff?

Action is required. Over the next four weeks, I plan to Eat the Freezer, and then defrost the monster. I inherited the freezer with the house, and it's pretty elderly. There's gonna be a lot of water...

H/t to National Geographic for the fab frosty animal pics

Summer things

Ooops - life/work hiatus intervened for a bit there - back now after a scorching week that had Mouse roaching for maximum cool air coverage.

On the allotment, the June surge has pushed into the July harvest - this weekend's crop included the first mini cucumber, speckled french beans, the first of the Tricolour courgettes and a good crop of peas. Meanwhile, out in the garden, the story is just as good.

My first crop of blackcurrants! Sprinkled with sugar and warmed through then sieved, they made a perfect pudding with a splurge of double cream.

These Black Cherry toms are just outside the back door - the first truss has set. It's a small plant compared to some of my other toms, but so far, looks healthy.
I've sown more broad beans (the Sutton) to try and replace the ones overwhelmed by black fly on the allotment.

My brugmansia (one of the few flower-only plants in the garden - I'm such a utilitarian) is growing like a triffid. Enormous.

Another monster grower is the hyssop anise that I bought from Jekka's Herb Farm back in the spring. It's threatening to outgrow the cucumber and achoba fat baby beside it.
I sowed this Thai basil in May - it's also doing well.

And in the chilli shed I have my dedo de mocha (amputated finger) pepper - they look a bit unhappy at how hot it is, but they've calmed down a bit now it's cooler. I've got a couple of window boxes full of Plants of Distinction's Sicilian seven-seed rocket mix, plus some mesclun mix and another box of sorrel. Should keep me in salads for a while.