A seasonal feast

This week I spent a hugely enjoyable evening at Anna Colquhoun’s Cooking Club, sampling some very moreish Swedish Glögg (or was it Danish Gløgg?) and looking at some creative ways to cook seasonal veg, supplied by Riverford, the organic box people. It was comforting to hear that Riverford have the exact same problem purple sprouting broccoli issue as i do – that the PSB is mature and ready for eating NOW rather than in March/April as normal. I loved the purple sprouting briefly blanched with dollops of Hollandaise sauce, but the standout dish for me was Anna’s butternut squash and sage risotto.

The risotto was a revelation, very sweet with onions cooked very slowly to melting tenderness and the squash roasted first in the oven. It has made me realise that although I think I make risotto in the classical manner, I actually rush it. I will definitely take my time with risottos in the future. Anna also used industrial quantities of butter, which I may only emulate for special treats rather than everyday suppers. I’ll certainly adopt her finishing touch though: a drizzle of sage leaves and squash seeds fried in brown butter.

The Cooking Club takes place on the second Tuesday or Wednesday of each month. Apart from the delicious food and drink, it also seems to be attended exclusively by friendly and engaging people. I’ll be back.

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.

Secret Garden Club

This Sunday, November 20, I’ll be taking a Secret Garden Club smoking workshop – food-smoking that is. I’ll be demonstrating techniques for tea-smoking, and hot-smoking a variety of food and vegetables and then I’ll show how to build a simple cold-smoker using everyday materials for a minimal outlay.

This is the first in a series of Secret Garden Club food and gardening workshops and a joint venture with MsMarmiteLover of the Underground Restaurant Supper Club fame. While I’ll be providing the gardening tips and info, MsMarmite will be showing how to turn garden produce into delicious food for attendees to sample. Click here for more details and booking information.

Smoking might not have too much to do with horticulture, although we’ll be using homegrown foodstuffs as far as possible, but we’ll return in December with an alliums masterclass – a discussion of the onion family from chives and garlic to onions and leeks and taking in exotica such as Egyptian walking onions and Walla Walla sweets along the way. We’ll plant out some garlic and harvest some leeks.

In January we have a workshop on herbs and medicinal plants. This session will also look at growing produce in a restricted space – you don't even need a garden to grow herbs – a pot or windowbox will do nicely.

Beating the limitations of a small or non-existent garden will be addressed again in February when we investigate at some ingenious ways to raise potatoes and also in March when we’ll show how to have homegrown salad leave son your doorstep all year round.

The sessions will be informative but informal – there’ll be lots of interaction and lots of time for questions and to discuss your own particular gardening issues. The food and drink will be stellar and there will be goodie bags to take away and inspire you to successfully grow your own however big or small your plot.

Interested? Go to http://www.wegottickets.com/undergroundrestaurant for details of timings and prices. You can also keep in touch with our Secret Garden Club blog which details the sessions as they happen and where you can comment and ask questions.

Not the biggest pumpkin harvest ever – a labelling mix-up meant I ended up with three more courgettes and three fewer squashes than I thought I had – but some good eaters here. The grey-green fruit are Berrettina Piacentina, from Seeds Of Italy, whose flesh is bright orange in colour with a dense sweet flavour somewhere between sweet potato and chestnut. Similarly, Marina di Chioggia, which has knobbled skin and that distinctive ‘Turk’s turban’ bubble at the bottom. For some reason, my Marina di Chioggias are always smoother-skinned than most, but again, fine eating. Only one Butternut this year: they started fruiting very late, and had the warm start to October continued, ooh, for another six weeks, I might have had a much more substantial crop.

A sunny end to the summer helps to ripen pumpkins and squash here in the UK, but they must be lifted before the first frost – freezing temperatures will turn them to mush. Once harvested, they need to be ‘cured’, left in a dry well-ventilated sunny place to further mature. If you eat a squash straight form the plant, it will taste very raw and green. Left for a couple of months the flavour develops and deepens. As with any stored fruit, they need to be inspected regularly for signs of rot, but most will last happily into the New Year and I find are at their best around Christmas-time. I have stored squash successfully right through until the next year’s harvest, but they are usually all eaten up by February-March.

Proper Northern leeks

They grow fantastic leeks up north. You see them in greengrocers and supermarkets: long fat sturdy stems, fresh green splayed tops and sometimes a little mud still clinging to the frill of roots at the base. Obviously grown locally, these always seem to me to be proper Northern leeks. With a white stem like a small tree trunk, these leeks were made to be sliced thickly into casseroles or simmered whole and served in white sauce.

'Southern' leeks from 2008

I, on the other hand, grow Southern leeks. Slender, pale green stalks that could be mistaken for an overgrown spring onion, they have an elusive, sweet, almost nutty flavour. They would be lost in a casserole: better steamed and dressed with a vinaigrette when warm, or hidden in a tart with blue cheese. It's not that I'm growing a dwarf variety, both the Musselburghs (a pretty standard leek) and Gigante d'Inverno (even without speaking Italian, I can tell that's not supposed to produce baby-sized crops) have turned out this way.

I enjoy growing them for the taste, but am always slightly embarrassed about their fragile skinniness, especially when the relatives make the journey down the M1 to stay, and on the customary allotment visit, end up staring at them, puzzled. Have I only just put them in the ground? Are they meant to be baby leeks? Or are they, indeed, spring onions after all?

This year's leeks

I do think that the presence of leek moth at our allotment has had an effect in previous years. These days, I cover the crop with Environmesh from July, when I plant out the pencil-thin seedlings, until now, when the leek moth caterpillars will have done their damage and settled down into their pupae.

Leeks eaten by leek moth can be saved by cutting the plant right down to the ground and waiting for it to grow again, hopefully unravaged. But they are never going to grow back to gargantuan proportions.

So I was beyond delighted last week when I removed the Environmesh to find the majority of the plants this year are indeed, if not actually Winter Giants, then definitely Proper Northern Leeks. It may just be a one-off, a happy combination of weather and well-nourished soil in that particular bed, but at least I now know that I don't have to settle for spindly leeks.   

Tomatoes on the turn

Having lost the bulk of the outdoor tomatoes to blight, it was left to the Sungold plants and a single potted Marmande in the patio greenhouse to provide us a with a crop this year. The Sungolds didn't last much longer before the leaves started looking sooty and black blotches appeared on the stems. Stripping the plants of their leaves meant we managed to salvage a small crop, but by the beginning of October the plant was fit only for the incinerator.

Strangely, the Marmande plant, not hitherto known for its blight resistance, soldiered on unaffected. I almost forgot about it. Then, in the last week, just as I was beginning to think I should dig out my stand-by green tomato chutney recipe, I noticed two of the fruit just beginning to ripen. The weather has helped: sunny days and cold but dry nights.

I doubt these Marmandes will be bursting with sweet sun-warmed juice as they might have been in August, or in the south of France, but a few ripe tomatoes - in November - will be a welcome end to what has been a pretty poor tomato season this year.

Here today, corn tomorrow

Much as I enjoy seeing the first corncobs swell and arch away from the main stem of the plant, ready for picking, in just a few days I always feel as though I am inundated with ripe cobs. They need to be harvested and eaten quickly as well, if they are to enjoyed at the peak of sweetness and tenderness.

This year, the sweetcorn seemed to ripen and then go 'over' with astonishing speed. Just two weeks after collecting the first cobs, I noticed that the smaller ones were looking dry, the kernels shrunken under the yellowing wrappers. All the more reason to seize the moment and deal with the glut as it happens.

Spiky sweetcorn soup
(serves 2)

2 sweetcorn cobs

1pt vegetable stock, eg made with Marigold bouillon

1 or more small fresh red chillis

6 spring onions                          

A pinch of turmeric

Freshly ground pepper

Crème fraiche

Put the vegetable stock in a large pan on medium heat. Slice the spring onions finely. Deseed the chilli and slice it very finely, keeping a few slices back for garnish. Scrape the kernels from the corn cobs with a sharp knife. Add the corn kernels, sliced chilli, spring onion and the turmeric to the stock.

Bring to the boil and simmer for about 10-15 minutes, until the corn kernels are soft. Take off the heat and leave to cool slightly, then pour the soup mixture into a blender and whizz until smooth. You could even then strain the soup through a sieve if you want it really smooth.

Return to the pan and reheat through. Serve with a dollop of crème fraiche per bowl, the reserved spring onion and chilli and some freshly ground pepper. 

Sweetcorn fritters
Sweetcorn fritters seems to be an Antipodean thing. I have recipes for them in Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion, Cook At Home with Peter Gordon and in the (Australian) Marie Claire Cookbook.

Stephanie Alexander’s flour, milk and corn fritters were easy but frankly a bit bland and a bit stodgy. Michele Cranston’s used very similar ingredients but pepped them up with the addition of smoked paprika, spring onions and some red pepper strips. This helped a lot – I used green pepper, as I had one handy, which added a bit of crunch and the paprika cut the sweetness of the corn. Peter Gordon's recipe looked more promising: eggs and sweetcorn bound with cornflour and polenta (cornmeal) instead of plain flour, and sour cream (I used crème fraiche), The batter was very liquid compared to the others and made a less tidy-shaped fritter in the pan. The flavour and texture were much more interesting – the polenta made it slightly granular and the crème fraiche added lightness to both texture and taste.

We ate them, just as Gordon suggests, with bacon and maple syrup. Very satisfying.

Corn cobs with chive and paprika butter
I always think there's something quite classy about flavoured butters. They look neat and attractive on the plate and can add all sorts of extra tastes to a dish without overpowering it. A knob of parsley butter in a halved baked potato works well for in lieu of a more substantial filling if I'm in a hurry.

Smoked paprika seems like an obvious partner for sweetcorn. There's a sweet/smoky contrast in flavours and the red speckles of the paprika look enticing against the bright yellow corncob. The chives bring yet more colour and flavour to the dish.

For every 25g unsalted butter, add a heaped teaspoon of finely snipped chives, half a teaspoon of smoked paprika and mash together well. Add a turn or two of salt from the grinder, taste and see if it needs any more. Reshape the butter into a cube and chill in the fridge until firm, when you can cut into dice or shapes to serve with cooked corn on the cob.