Green chicken curry

At this time of year, the chillies are beginning to ripen on the plants. Caldero fruits turn from pale green, to cream, to orange, to red - like a Tequila Sunrise of the chilli world. Black Hungarian darken from green to, well not black, but a deep aubergine purple. It reminds me that if I want to cook anything that specifically requires green chillies, then I only have a limited time left.
With several aubergines ready to pick as well, I've been thinking about a green Thai curry. With home-grown shallots, garlic, lemon grass, and Kaffir lime leaves, I can put together a fresh and zingy Thai spice paste just by stepping outside the back door.


Serves two


Spice paste
Half a teaspoon of coriander seeds
Quarter teaspoon cumin seeds
Quarter teaspoon (about 5-6) green peppercorns
3 fresh green chillies, trimmed and deseeded
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
2 shallots
2 stalks of lemon grass, trimmed
2 large Kaffir lime leaves
Half an inch of fresh ginger
3-4 coriander roots and lower stalks - reserve the leaves, see below
Pinch of salt
Half a teaspoon shrimp paste


Grind the coriander, cumin and green peppercorns to powder in a small food processor. Add the remaining ingredients and pulverise until you have a smooth green paste.


Curry
1 tbsp vegetable oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 chicken breasts, cut into bitesize chunks
Handful of French beans, trimmed
1 large or 2 slim purple aubergines, trimmed and cut into 2cm cubes
2 Kaffir lime leaves, chopped
150ml coconut cream
Half tablespoon fish sauce
Half teaspoon sugar
2 tbsp stock/water
Handful Thai basil leaves
Coriander leaves, see above


Bring a panful of water to the boil, add the French beans and blanch for 2 minutes. Drain and rinse in cold water. You can save the cooking water to use in place of the stock/water in the ingredients list. 
Heat the oil in a wide pan or wok. Add the garlic and saute for about 30 seconds. Throw in the green curry paste and stir until well mixed. Add the coconut cream, and heat up until it bubbles and thickens. Add the chicken and aubergines, stir well and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for 5-10 minutes. Add the fish sauce, sugar and stock/water and stir well to mix. Keep simmering until cooked through - this could be just a couple of minutes more. Add the French beans and chopped lime leaves, stir well.
Taste the curry and adjust the fish sauce/sugar if necessary. Chop the coriander leaves roughly - add these and the whole Thai basil leaves. Stir well to mix, bring back to simmering, and then serve.

Every year, one of my ‘banker’ vegetables, the ones that reliably produce a crop year in, year out, will mysteriously fail. Last year it was the courgettes: the plants refused to grow, the leaves were spindly, the fruits – those that didn’t rot at 3inches or so – were skinny and tasteless. While everyone else bemoaned their glut, I thought how nice even one-tenth of a glut would be.

This year, it’s the beans. And worryingly, I mean all the beans: the runners, the Asturians, the borlottis and the Frenchies. The runner and borlotti beans almost certainly have bean common mosaic virus. I say ‘almost’ because while they’re definitely got something, I’ve been scouring Google images and the only BCMV picture that definitely looks like my sickly plants is one illustrating the effects of BCMV in western Africa. The mottling in my leaves is more like dark green bubble wrap than yellowing and curling.

The Asturian beans, which might normally be the prime suspect for introducing a virus, since I buy culinary Fabes de la Granja from the supermarkets of Asturias and sow these instead of ordering certified virus free seeds, look relatively healthy.

The French beans stubbornly refused to germinate at the first sowing ... and again at the second ... and so finally I consulted the small print on the back of the packet and discovered that, yes, they were three years past their sell-by date. Then the Blue Lake and Trionfo Violetto did germinate at the third time of asking and produced a few straggly plants that are still struggling to climb their canes. But at least they look healthy.

I’m going to miss the beans this year. There are usually enough French beans to give to friends and neighbours and the Asturians and borlottis keep us in dried beans throughout the winter. My Internet research – and also Pests, Diseases and Disorders of Garden Plants, by Stefan Buczacki, Keith Harris and Brian Hargreaves – suggests that even if I get off lightly, yields will be much reduced.

Frost in May

Back in May, I arrived at the allotment on a chilly Thursday morning to find my newly-emerged potato plants soggy limp and brown. Some of the more exposed parts of the allotment site had been hit by frost overnight. In May ... normally I consider this area frost-free by the end of March. May is unheard of – until now.

Only a couple of plants, including the one on the left were completely unaffected. Most showed similar levels of damage to the two right hand pictures.

Despite many kind plot neighbours offering reassurance that the plants would recover, that it was only an air frost, that the worst that would happen would be a slightly late harvest, in fact these first earlies never really recovered.

The maincrop Pink Fir Apples seem to be OK – they were still underground when the temperature dropped below zero.

Lots of germination problems this year: French beans and parsnips mainly, but also with the calabrese. Having sowed seeds in 30 modules, I have just four (perfectly formed) calabrese seedlings coming. To give myself a head start, I headed off to the Cottage Garden Nursery today and bought 12 very healthy Calabrese Samson specimens, now transplanted into the brassica bed and under the butterfly net.

Also lifted the rest of the garlic – a really good crop of 25 good-sized bulbs, that winter chill must have done them good – and harvested the blackcurrants. I always cut the fruit on the branch so that the bushes are pruned as the fruit are harvested and the crop has filled four rubble sacks. I haven’t mustered the energy to strip the fruits yet, so I don’t know exactly how much we have, but I do remember they only filled three rubble sacks last year.

Beetroot in the gutter

For the last couple of years, I’ve sown my mange tout and sugar snap peas in lengths of half-guttering. It seems to ensure near 100% germination – especially in the sugar snaps, which I’ve had very variable results with when sown direct. We also get a lot of pea weevil damage at the allotment – those distinct U-shaped bites which make the seedling leaves look very crenellated – and the plants withstand that better if they are bigger when transplanted into pea weevil territory.

(I transplant the pea seedlings when they are about 3 inches tall. I water the plants in the guttering until they are soaking wet, then slide them out of the gutter into a shallow pre-dug. So long as the soil is uniformly very wet the plants slide out with little or no root disturbance.)

I hadn’t thought of starting any other crops off in half-guttering until I was wondering aloud to my plot neighbour why his beetroot were regularly the size of grapefruit while those of mine which germinated were mostly the size of ping pong balls. He suggested sowing the beetroot in half-guttering the same way as with the peas.

In the end I sowed four 1m lengths more or less successionally and while it’s obviously more labour intensive than direct sowing, I got pretty much 100% germination – even from the Burpees Golden variety which are notoriously poor germinators – and a crop which looks as though it’s going to be very uniform in size. I have moved up from ping pong balls to tennis ball sized roots which is also pleasing and will definitely be sowing in guttering again next year.

Why I grow what I grow

1. Unobtainable in shops
Golden beetroot; Beetroot Chioggia; Padron peppers; elephant garlic; Pink Fir Apple potatoes; Sungold, Brandywine, Black Russian tomatoes; Marina di Chioggia, Berrettina, Spaghetti squash; chervil; Thai basil; Kaffir limes; lime leaves; wild garlic; blackcurrants; garlic chives; borlotti beans; Asturian beans (Fabes de las Granjas).

2. Obtainable in shops but stupidly expensive
Asparagus; Rhubarb (£3.99 for a few stalks in Waitrose); Swiss chard (see rhubarb); rocket (grows like a weed); blackberries; quince; cavolo nero; radicchio; mixed salad leaves; lemon grass; shallots; globe artichokes; Jerusalem artichokes; raspberries; runner beans; all fresh herbs.

3. Tastiest varieties are not available in shops
Potatoes; leeks; tomatoes, strawberries; chillies, squash, courgettes; aubergines; French beans; radishes.

4. Availability – an extension of the store cupboard
Salads; parsley, basil, chervil, fennel, sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, chives, garlic chives; onions, shallots, garlic, squash, Borlotti beans, Asturian beans (Fabes de las Granjas).

Do parsnips taste sweeter after the first frost?

Do parsnips taste sweeter after the first frost? I say it’s a no-brainer. Picked before the first frost, parsnips smell of soap when you cook them and taste a bit like banana Angel Delight. Wait until they’ve had a chance to freeze in the ground and that’s when you get that sweet nutty taste. Apparently, freezing the parsnips causes the starchy walls to expand and release sugars … or is it just that they taste better for having been left for longer in the ground?.

What this means is that I spend late autumn in a frustrating waiting game. I can see that the parsnips are maturing, I can see that there are some broad shoulders lurking below the soil surface and all I need to do is to wait until we’ve had a frosty night before I start digging them up.

Once or twice in recent years we’ve missed having roast parsnips with the Christmas lunch because of the mild weather, so this year it seemed perfect when the frost, snow and ice appeared at the start of Christmas week. I was fully expecting a thaw within 24 hours as is the norm in London … and the ground has remained frozen solid ever since. I’m now hoping for our first parsnips this weekend since our temperature is due to struggle up to 4 degrees by this Friday.