Salad days

 At this time of year I start to think longingly of the new season’s vegetables. We’re eating up the last of the winter roots and greens somewhat wearily now. The leeks are all finished as are the parsnips and cabbages – still a few maincrop potatoes in store and a never-ending supply of cavolo nero.

This ‘hungry gap’ between the old year’s produce and the new makes me very thankful for the mixed salad leaves which are giving us some variety on our plates. From oriental leaves like mizuna and mustard to lettuce seedlings picked as single leaves, a pot of mixed leaves on the windowsill will keep us going until the soil warms up and we can grow lettuces outside.

Usually I throw together some leftover salad seeds from last year to make my own leaf mix, but back in January I was distracted by a 2 for 1 offer in a local garden centre and came home with a Speedy Mix and a Winter Blend from Thompson & Morgan to add to a packet of Marshall’s Salad Finest Mix lurking at the back of the seed box.

Each type was sown in a 6-inch pot on January 8^th this year, using a mix of multipurpose and seed and cutting compost. The seeds were sprinkled over the top of the compost and covered very very lightly with more seed and cutting compost. The pots were all placed in an unheated propagator and set under a north-facing skylight window to germinate.

Each of the pots had seeds germinating after 5-7 days. They were then taken out of the propagator and placed on a sunny south-facing windowsill, watered regularly and turned each day so that all the seedlings didn’t lean too much into the light.

Six weeks later, and they are at that lovely tasty stage just past microleaf. Big enough to handle, but still beautifully tender and fresh-tasting. We’ve had a light salad of raw peas, feta cheese and the leaves and green salads dressed very simply with a smidgeon of balsamic vinegar. The leaves are still too delicate, I think, to be soaked in oil.

  

 

Winter Blend (left) contains Kale Scarlet and Blue Curled, Mustard Red Frills, Rocket Dentellata, and Mizuna.

Speedy Mix (right) contains Salad Rocket Victoria, Greek Cress, Mizuna, Mustard Green & Red Frills, and Pak Choi Canton White and so is a bit of a cross-cultural mix with mainly oriental style leaves.

According to the packet Marshalls’ Finest Mix (centre) contains rocket, spinach, lamb's lettuce, red and green lettuce and leaf beet, but even on the closest inspection I can only find one or two spinach seedlings – everything else in my pot is leaf beet.

Speedy Mix is heavy on the feathery leaves and the Winter Blend is more substantial, especially when some of the leaf beet from the Marshall Finest Mix is added. These cut and come again salad pots can be sown throughout the year although I do find that in high summer they are prone to bolting.

Enjoyable though these salads are, I’ll probably never look quite so ecstatic while eating them as these women.

Sowing Sunday

Today has come to be known as Sowing Sunday here at the Zia Maison. The Mediterranean vegetables that like a nice long season are sown today: tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, peppers, and also the first tranche of basil and lemon grass, if there is none left from last year (and there never is). It feels like the right time to sow all of these, although I have started tomatoes earlier and will sow another batch later – the first lot will hopefully begin to ripen before any blight strikes and the second wave can take advantage of an Indian summer, should we be lucky enough to have such a thing.

However, there’s nothing significant about the date except that it’s the Sunday at the end of half-term, which makes it easy to remember. Most of the packets for the seeds I used today say ‘Sow Feb-Mar’ or ‘Sow in early spring’ and it can be frustratingly difficult to know when the best time within that window might be. It’s not even so much about whether we’re under snow in February or enjoying early spring sunshine, since the seeds will all be sown in a  heated propagator anyway. It’s more to do with what the weather will be doing in 4-6 weeks time, when the seedlings need potting up, on, or even outside altogether. Kept in tiny windowsill pots too long, they’ll grow leggy and weak; transplanted too late they won’t set fruit until late summer, but then again, plant out too soon and the cold nights could finish them off.

It’s no wonder gardeners have come up with some easy-to-remember traditions for sowing and planting. 'Plant garlic on the shortest day and harvest on the longest', for example. In truth, garlic will grow best if planted just before the temperature plummets towards zero for a 10-day chill … so, yes, just before Christmas seems like a good bet. Leeks should be transplanted on the longest day as well, apparently. Mine are usually more like blades of grass in mid-June, but the saying does serve to remind me that it’s a job moving inexorably towards the top of the to-do list.

It’s also traditional to plant potatoes over Easter weekend, which could make you a hostage to fortune given that Easter can fall at any time between late March (which would leave your spuds very vulnerable to frost) to late April (fine for maincrops, but cutting it fine for your earlies).

Whiter than white

A snowy visit to the allotment today. The fresh snowfall has flattened out the landscape and deadened any sounds, so that it seems perfectly quiet and still, just the crump-crump of my wellies stumping down the path.

 

Apart from making sure everything was all right under its blanket of snow, I wanted to dig up some leeks for supper. Despite a good 8cm of snow, the ground wasn't frozen, so the leeks were easy to lift. Disturbing the soil alerted my winter robin, who earned himself a breakfast of two fat worms while I was digging.

The brassica cage here shows what happens if you don't take the net down before the snow falls - the weight of snow on the net will have knocked the tops of most of the  plants. Last year this happened with my purple sprouting broccoli long while they were still maturing. This year, the purple sprouting broccoli cropped in September and we've been eating it ever since, so it's coming to the end of its productive life anyway.    

A land of green ginger

Ginger is a sub-tropical plant; most of the ginger root that we buy in the shops comes from India, China and other parts of south-east Asia. It's an attractive, exotic-looking specimen with deep green blade-like leaves and a red or pinkish flower spike.

Leafing through Jekka McVicar's indispensable Complete Herb Book, I came across her notes on ginger - the very last plant in the book on account of its Latin name Zingiber officinale - particularly the notes on cultivation. I've heard good reports from others on growing ginger in the UK - indoors, yes, and as much for the beauty of the plant as the cultivation of the edible rhizome - and this unearthed a long-forgotten ambition to grow my own ginger.


The first challenge is that you need to find a fresh ginger root that might easily sprout, that is, one that already has a yellow (or even better, green) bud developing, rhino horn-like, from the main root. Often the roots on sale in the shops have been treated at source to prevent sprouting so that they can be stored for longer. 


I got lucky last week. As so often happens, I wasn't really looking for sprouting ginger, but there were a cluster of rhizomes at the bottom of the box in our local mini-mart that had obviously escaped the treatment process and had tiny yellow nodules poking through the skin.


The best way to start them off here in the UK seems to be agreed upon by both Jekka and Kew Gardens - that's a good enough consensus for me.

1. Fill a 20cm pot with a loam-based compost;
2. Water well and let it drain;
3. Cut the ginger root 5cm below the bud;
4. Insert in the compost with the bud facing up;
5. Barely cover with more compost;
6. Cover the pot with a bell cloche or clear plastic bag;
7. Place somewhere warm and light. The shoot needs temperatures above 20 degrees C to develop, so a heated propagator, conservatory or warm windowsill are your best options.
8. Wait around 3-4 weeks to see shoots emerging. 

We're at stage 7 at the moment, with fingers crossed.

The Secret Garden Club does ... Herbs and medicinal plants

A hugely enjoyable and quite intense Secret Garden Club workshop on Sunday, looking at Herbs and Medicinal Plants. The full set of notes from the afternoon, including a discussion of all the herbs in the Secret Garden and MsMarmiteLover's herb-themed menu for the after-session tea, can be found over on the Secret Garden Club blog.


I've been felled by a cough and cold since the meeting; luckily one of our guests was able to supply her very own herbal remedy for easing coughs and congestion:


Rosemary and Ginger Tea

5-7cm peeled fresh ginger root, roughly chopped

1.5 tbsp well-chopped fresh rosemary. (You can add more if you like but this is a good starting point)

Simmer these in a pot with 700 ml water for about 10 mins. Strain into a cup and add a squeeze of lemon and honey to taste.

Next month The Secret Garden Club will meet on February 26th and we'll be looking at potatoes. We'll have some unusual potato varieties to try out, both in the kitchen and in the garden and we'll be discussing how to raise a fine crop of potatoes even if you have no garden - by growing them in a bin-liner. More details - including how to book your tickets - on the Events page on the Club's website.

Lithops and iguanas at Kew Gardens

 Lithops, or pebble plants. 

A wintry visit to Kew Gardens where I struggled with vertigo on the Treetop Walkway – it’s much easier in summer when I can’t see so much of the ground under the tree canopy – and made sure I spent time admiring the Lithops, or pebble plants, in the Princess Of Wales conservatory.

These remarkable plants do indeed look like pebbles, and we could only spot some of them because they were in flower. The rounded ‘stones’ are in fact fleshy leaves. In the wild, they grow – unsurprisingly – in the Namibian desert where they can expect a bare 10mm of rain a year.

There were a couple of gruesomely attractive Aristolochia in flower as well (right) and the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum, which directly translates as Giant Formless Penis, and is the largest (unbranched) flower in the world) had only just finished flowering – and the plant looked exhausted as a consequence.


A particularly charming sight was this iguana (below), peeping out from behind a pillar in the conservatory. "They get them from Heathrow," said one man as he saw me staring up at it. "All the animals they try to smuggle into the country, they donate them to Kew." I have no idea if this can be true or not; if so, this asylum-seeking iguana has landed on his feet. 

A thought occurred to me in the side room that houses the canriviorous plants – the Venus’s flytraps and pitcher plants: there are a lot of plants in this particular greenhouse and the windows aren’t enormous. Do they really get enough flies buzzing in naturally to feed all these plants or do they have to breed and release them to sate the plants’ appetites?

High up on a pillar in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, he'll be competing for insects with the carnivorous plants.

Pumpkin pasties and other squashy delicacies

The pumpkins harvested from the allotment in October have been sitting on top of the kitchen cupboards maturing over the autumn and winter. The dark green Futsu is now a rich ochre colour (see picture, left) and the butternut squash have mellowed from a creamy jade skin to buttery yellow.

It's around now that I cast around for ways to cook them, versatile as they are. Pumpkins are often useful at Christmas time as they will easily feed a crowd, and also I think they always feel like a 'special occasion' food.

Smooth pumpkin soup

A straightforward pumpkin soup – this works best with a dense fleshed variety such as Berrettina Piacentina, which tastes like a cross between sweet potato and chestnuts and has a texture not dissimilar to sweet potato as well. Butternut squash is also good here; anything more fibrous than a butternut might require more in the way of pulping and sieving.

Peel and remove the seeds from half a medium-sized pumpkin. Chop the flesh into roughly 3cm cubes. Put on a baking tray, season lightly with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and roast for 20 mins or so at 200 degrees.

Meanwhile, chop up an onion and two cloves of garlic and sauté them lightly in a splash of olive oil a large pan. They might colour slightly but don't let them brown. When ready, add the squash pieces and enough vegetable stock (eg, Marigold bouillon if none fresh to hand) to cover generously. Simmer for around 15 minutes, then whizz up in the blender.

Taste and adjust seasoning. Divide into bowls for each person and finish with either a swirl of crème faiche, or a dusting of smoked paprika, or a swirl of rose harissa, or a splash of walnut oil, or extravagantly, truffle oil.

For a Thai-flavoured version, add a tablespoonful of red Thai curry paste and some chopped ginger when you mix the roasted pumpkin pieces with the onion and garlic. Stir in a 400ml can of coconut cream with half the amount of stock.

Roast pumpkin slices glazed with soy sauce

Halve a medium-sized pumpkin and remove the seeds. No need to peel. Cut into slimmish wedges and place in a shallow dish. Splash over some olive oil and soy sauce, season and toss the pumpkin pieces until well covered. Leave for 15 mins to an hour, then either tuck the individual pieces around a roasting meat joint, or transfer the whole lot to the oven and roast for around 30 mins at 180 degrees.

Pumpkin pasties

These are mentioned in Harry Potter which might make them tempting to children. On the other hand, it might not, as the pasties served on the Hogwarts Express are clearly meant to be sweet, whereas I can’t bring myself to treat pumpkin as a dessert.

Pastry:

Either – one pack of ready-made shortcrust pastry, or,

225g plain flour

105g butter

Salt

Iced water

1 egg, beaten

Filling:

1-2 shallots

400g flesh from a small butternut squash or similar pumpkin, peeled, seeded and chopped into chunks

125g ricotta cheese

I tbsp Parmesan

1 tbsp chopped fresh mint leaves

Salt

Pepper

Heat the oven to 200 degrees.

First, make the pastry. If you’re making your own, cut the butter into little pieces and whizz with the flour and a pinch of salt in a food processor until it just begins to look like breadcrumbs. Add the water a tablespoon at a time, the then pulse to mix. Stop as soon as the dough looks as though it’s beginning to come together.

Turn out of the processor bowl on to a floured worktop and mould the mixture lightly with your hands until it forms a dough. Wrap in greasproof paper or clingfilm and chill in the fridge for at least half an hour or until needed.

Or, unwrap a sheet of ready-made shortcrust and roll out thinly.

While the pastry is chilling, toss the squash/pumpkin in olive oil, season lightly with salt and pepper and bake/roast, uncovered for around 30 minutes until soft and just beginning to brown at the edges.

Meanwhile, chop the shallots and fry gently in a little olive oil until soft. Pile into a bowl, and add the ricotta and Parmesan. Once the squash chunks are cool enough to handle, chop into 1cm cubes and add to the ricotta mixture. Add the mint leaves and stir well. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Roll out the pastry on a floured worktop until it’s nice and thin. Have the beaten egg and a pastry brush to hand. Up-end a 10cm circular cereal bowl on the pastry to make a template for the pasty and cut around the bowl with a short sharp knife. Put around 1½ tbsp of pumpkin mix in the middle of the pastry cut-out, then brush the outside edge of the circle with beaten egg. Fold the pastry over into a semi-circle and crimp the edges together with your fingers so that they stick together. Place the pasty, crimped edge upwards on a baking sheet and brush the outside all over with more egg. Repeat to make around five more pasties – you may need to roll out the pastry again.

Put the baking tray with the pasties in the oven for 30 mins. They can be eaten hot or cold.