Mellow fruitfulness - autumn harvest

Along with the smells of mellow earth and burning leaves, autumn also brings aromas of vinegar, honey, sugar and fruits in our house. I only have a small freezer and no room to install a bigger one, so if I'm lucky enough to get a produce glut (and there's usually something that runs riot and produces far more than we can reasonably eat while it's still fresh), it needs to be preserved some other way.

Liqueurs, pickles, jellies and chutneys will use up a satisfyingly large amount of excess produce and keep for months - indeed, liqueurs and chutneys are often at their best if kept for months before you start to use them. You can happily experiment with ingredients and the balance of spicing to suit your palate and nearly always end up with something delicious - although I am still haunted by the spiced quince chutney which tasted fine but looked exactly like Pedigree Chum.

Jellies

Jellies are I think particularly rewarding. They look beautiful: clear and in jewel-like colours. Quince jelly sets to a rich tawny amber colour; the golden lemon chilli jelly is almost irridescent when it catches the morning sun. They are versatile:can be spread on bread, rolls or toast, can accompany meats and cheese, a scant teaspoonful will lift a gravy and I did once, in extremis, use damson jelly as a filling for a Victoria sponge when I found the strawberry jam jar quite empty. They use up loads of fruit (and, it must be said, an industrial amount of sugar) and make good gifts for friends, school fairs and harvest festivals.


The quince jelly (above left) is made using the classic method: chop up quinces and boil in water with a little lemon juice for about an hour, then strain overnight through a jelly bag. The next day, boil up again using 450g sugar for every 600ml of juice, and boil rapidly until the setting point is reached.

The lemon chilli jelly (left) is made with an apple juice base: chop up apples, simmer in water with a little lemon juice* for an hour then strain through a jelly bag. Next day, boil up again using the same juice-to-sugar ratio as above - I find apple jelly very quick to set compared to others. While the liquid is boiling away, chop up around 60-80g of hot lemon** chillies and one yellow sweet pepper - I put them in the mini food processor to get the pieces very fine and it means I don't have to take my eye off the jelly pan for too long. Once the setting point is reached, turn off the heat and stir in the chillies. Stir the mix again when you're just about to pour into jars to ensure the chilli pieces are distributed evenly.





* This year's batch, very poncily, uses fresh bergamot juice as the citrus as I've had a big fat bergamot hanging from my Citrus bergamia bush all summer and hadn't yet found a use for it.

** I use yellow chillies to highlight the gorgeous honey blonde colour of this jelly, but finely chopped red chillies (and a red sweet pepper) would be visually stunning suspended in the pale jelly as well.

Pickles

I'm not as adventurous with pickles as I could be: sweet peppers, and also chilli peppers, in glut years, will be preserved this way. I also regularly go through the shallots to pick out the smallest ones and pickle these in white wine vinegar, salt and tarragon. Peeling tiny shallots, even after they've been soaked in boiling water, is a pain, but once that's been done, it's a quick and easy method.

There is also always one pumpkin that you know won't be a keeper, whether it's been damaged, or as happened this year, because the fruit grew through the plastic mesh supporting the plants and ended up looking more like a Penny Bun than a pumpkin. Non-keeping squash will also be pickled: peeled, sliced into slim wedges and steeped in white wine vinegar, spiced with coriander, allspice, mace, ginger, chillies and a little star anise. This year I took inspiration from Karon Grieve's recipe at Larder Love and added a spoonful of sherry to the pickling liquor. Pickled pumpkin, served with pickled walnuts (sadly, not having a walnut tree, I have to buy these) and burrata or very fresh mozzarella, makes an excellent no-cook Christmas Day starter to keep everyone quiet while you finish off the main course.



Liqueurs
Flavoured liqueurs are an rewarding way to use up a glut of fruit while creating something delicious. The basic method is to steep fruit, with sugar, in your chosen alcohol - I often use vodka because it doesn't have a strong flavour of its own but it's fun to experiment. Brandy and gin are both excellent vehicles for making a fruit-based liqueur and impart their own flavour to the finished drink.

You can leave the fruit and sugar gently infusing the alcohol for days, weeks, even months. The amount of sugar to add is really down to your own taste and also depends on the natural sweetness of the fruit. For the damson gin, shown here still at the infusion stage, I will add half the weight of the damsons in sugar, ie, 500g of sugar to every 1kg of damsons.

For blackberry vodka (creme de mure), below, you can use less sugar as the blackberries tend to be sweeter than damson and to use a similar amount would give you quite a cloying liqueur.

The infusion needs to be kept somewhere cool and dark and the process can't be hurried. At the beginning, you can up-end the jar every couple of days to get the sugar to dissolve; once it has, leave the mixture severely alone.

After a couple of months, you might want to taste the infusion - just to see how it's doing. It probably won't taste quite ready, so re-seal and leave alone again for another couple of months. But once it does taste a bit more rounded, a bit more full-bodies, strain the liqueur through muslin or a fine nylon sieve into a clean jar, reseal, put it back in the cool dark place, and leave again for a good couple of months before tasting.

I made the blackberry vodka at the end of July and I'm planning to use it in a celebratory Kir Royale to toast in the New Year. The damson gin above still has a way to go; I think we'll start sipping that with our first outdoor suppers next spring.

Note: when making any of these preserves, including the liqueurs for long-term storage and use, make sure all your jars, bottles, utensils, etc, are sterilised. This can be done easily enough in a hot dishwasher cycle, followed by drying them off in an oven at 120 degrees. Don't forget to do the lids as well!

Veg in a box

I've resubscribed to an organic veg box scheme to keep us going until the allotment produce kicks in again in June or thereabouts (assuming the sugar snaps, asparagus and lettuce don't all shrivel up in the drought, that is). We've managed without for the last couple of years, but the hungry gap seems to be particularly ravenous this year. And Abel & Cole were offering a free bottle of wine and cookbook for returning customers. I am that easily bought.

There's always a sense of anticipation opening up the box: this week it included a big flossy lettuce, a mango, aubergine, red pepper and purple sprouting broccoli. The basics - onions, carrots, potatoes, apples - I'd taken for granted.

I earmarked three of the carrots for an Easter weekend carrot cake (at least a day late, I know), for which I follow Nigel Slater's recipe to the letter. I'm sure it's my carrot cake of choice mainly because the quantities of icing that the recipe makes are so absurdly lavish that there are plentiful bowl scrapings to be had.

With the cake safely in the oven, I surveyed the rest of the contents of the box and decided to put the basics to good use with some brunch-style potato and apple cakes, which go so brilliantly with bacon rashers, or for non-meat eaters, a poached egg on top.

Potato and apple cakes
3 medium to large 'old' potatoes, not waxy salad potatoes
1 shallot or onion
1 dessert apple
1 egg
Salt
Pepper
Butter
Olive oil

Grate the potato, apple, and onion/shallot. Beat the egg quickly and stir in, a little at a time until the mixture glistens without being sloppy. Season well.

Heat around 20g of butter and 1 tbsp or so of olive oil in a non-stick frying pan over a medium heat. Place a cookie cutter (about 3 inches or 75mm in diameter) in the frying pan and spoon enough mixture into the cutter so that the potato cake is about 1cm thick. Leave for around 20 seconds, so that the cake starts to cook on the bottom, then lift the cutter carefully and place elsewhere in the pan to make the next cake. This amount of mixture will make 6-7 potato cakes.

Fry for 5 minutes, then flip each cake over and fry for another 5 minutes until cooked through. The top and bottom of each cake should be nicely browned. Dish up on to kitchen paper to drain off excess oil, then serve hot.

Notes from the Secret Garden Club

 I've posted the notes from this month's Secret Garden Club session on The Allium Family on the Club's blog here.
Fortified by MsMarmiteLover's warming glögg, We discussed varieties from garlic, onions, shallots and leeks - how and when to plant, how to look after them and how to harvest and store so that you always have them to hand. 
After the garden session, we enjoyed an allium-themed tea prepared by MsMarmiteLover and some lively discussion about alliums, and kitchen gardening in general.

Attendees took home a pot of chives, a 'lucky dip' of onion sets and garlic cloves ready for planting out, and a packet of authentic Walla Walla sweet onion seeds.


Menu

Glögg

French onion soup
Garlic bread
Warm salad of leeks

Chocolate chip and garlic cookies 
Home-made mince pies

Next month, the Secret Garden Club meets on Sunday January 29th, when we'll be looking at herbs and medicinal plants and talking about how to plan and plant your own herb garden, no matter how small your space. Click here for details and how to book tickets.

All about alliums - next week's Secret Garden Club

I’m getting ready for my second Secret Garden Club workshop next week. I’ll be talking about alliums – garlic, onions, shallots, leeks, and a few other more unusual specimens – with some practical planting and harvesting advice and lots of tips for successful growing. As with last month’s successful session on smoking, MsMarmiteLover will create a delicious feast from the alliums we talk about – there’ll be some unexpected treats in there, I expect.

I'm afraid I’m rather predictably calling the session ‘Know Your Onions’ – if I can think of a better name between now and Wednesday December 21, I’ll change it. We don’t normally run the Secret Garden Club in midweek, but we chose December 21 deliberately, as the old saw has it that you should plant your garlic on the shortest day of the year ... come along next week (book here) and find out if there’s any truth in that.

Festival of the asparagus

The asparagus came early this year, the first heads peeping out from the soil at the end of March and the first spears ready to pick a week later. We seem to have a head-start on the local supermarkets as well – their asparagus is still coming in from Peru. From now until the beginning of June we will be enjoying a Festival Of The Asparagus. This starts with lots of suppers of simply steamed or simmered spears, sometimes with melted butter, more often with a vinaigrette or mayonnaise-based dressing.

Steamed asparagus with balsamic dressed salad

I don’t have a special asparagus pan – a tall thin pan in which the stalks simmer in water while the tips cook in the rising steam. But I do have two frying pans, one small, one large. Short chunky asparagus stems cook in the small frying pan, long slender stems are laid in the larger one. Either way, the spears are simmered for around 3-5 minutes: I find just-picked, homegrown asparagus cooks in about half the time you would cook shop-bought spears for.

Asparagus spears are usually ready to pick just as the first of my salad leaves – usually the mustard and oriental leaves, and maybe some chervil – are big enough to constitute a salad, so the asparagus is served on a bed of mixed leaves. The dressing is just olive oil with a splash of balsamic vinegar and a very small pinch of salt and pepper.

Roast asparagus with saffron mayonnaise

I would love to write lyrically about the pleasure and the labour of love that is hand-making mayonnaise. Occasionally I will stir myself to make mayonnaise from scratch but only when I have thought of uses for about a pint of the stuff as inevitably my first batch will curdle and I will have to add the curdled mixture to a new starter to get it all to emulsify again. (Incidentally, why is it that the second batch of mayonnaise never curdles when the first batch so often does?)

Most of the time, however, this saffron mayonnaise involves two good tablespoonfuls of Hellman’s (the real stuff, mind, not reduced fat, or the sunflower oil version), with a crushed (small) clove of garlic, and a pinch of saffron strands warmed in a tablespoon of the best olive oil in the house whisked in. If possible, it helps to leave this in the fridge for an hour or so before you eat it.

Roast asparagus – get the oven on at 200 degrees, and put a little olive oil in a shallow pan or roasting tin – something that will go over a flame on the hob and then into the oven. Heat the oil gently on the hob and add a shallot, skinned and very finely sliced.  Leave to stew quietly until the shallot slices are soft but not browned. Then lay the asparagus spears in a single layer on top, drizzle with a little more olive oil and sprinkle a few sea salt flakes over. Transfer to the oven and roast for around 15 minutes. Stir carefully before the serving: the sweetness of the shallots seems to accentuate the asparagus flavour.

After a couple of weeks, I begin to wonder if there isn’t something else I could be doing with the asparagus and start thinking about incorporating them with other ingredients.

Asparagus omelette

A conventional two-egg omelette filled with diced cooked asparagus and a dusting of Parmesan inside and on top to serve is beautifully savoury but I also like a Chinese style omelette. Here a teaspoonful of soy sauce and a slug of mirin, or rice wine is added to the beaten egg, and the omelette is cooked in oil (ideally a relatively tasteless oil,not olive oil) rather than butter. I’ll also add a handful of beansprouts or sugar snap peas to the filling as well as the blanched and diced asparagus spears) to give it a crunchy flavour. Prawns are good too and make it a properly substantial dish.

Asparagus slurry, sorry, stock, made from the stalky bits you would otherwise discard

Rather than throwing away the fibrous ends of the asparagus stems which don’t pass the snap test, you can make a sort of sloppy puree with them which can then be used as an asparagus base for risotto, pasta or soup dishes.

Scrub the discarded stalks well and peel away any obviously fibrous bits. Don’t obsess too much about this or the job will become far too fiddly. Chop the stalks into 1cm long pieces. Put them in a pan, cover – just – with water and bring to the boil. Simmer briskly for around 12-15 minutes: once the green parts start to lose their brightness remove from the heat. Add a pinch of Marigold bouillon and stir in. Pour the whole lot into the liquidiser goblet and whizz up well, or, pass the softened chunks through the coarse disc of a mouli. Whichever one you choose, push the resulting pulp through a sieve. You will end up with a very loose, jade green slurry. It will taste better than it looks or sounds – let’s call it a puree.

Loosened with a couple of spoonfuls of cream – or crème fraiche – and maybe a little water or a mild vegetable bouillon, this makes a great-tasting asparagus soup. It can be served either hot or chilled – if the latter, I’ll add a bit more seasoning. The soup is a beautiful pale green, like eau-de-nil, and a garnish of mint sprigs or a swirl of basil oil (lemon basil, olive oil and a pinch of salt, blitzed quickly together) makes a striking contrast.

The slurry also makes a great base for asparagus risotto, in addition to the hot stock, and gives the risotto a punchy, intense asparagus flavour.