Floral treats

I’ve always know that courgette flowers were edible but never been quite sure what to do with them. However, following the success of the artichoke fritters (link), and an allotment full of flowering squash, I thought it was high time to make more use of more of the plants. Sifting through various recipe sources, a few golden rules became clear. A stuffing for the flowers shouldn’t be overpowering in flavour, and also needs to cook through quickly – the flowers themselves will deep-fry in one to two minutes. The flowers shouldn’t be overstuffed – they’re fragile and you don’t want them bursting open in the pan. In the end I decided on a herby ricotta mixture and added lemon zest for fragrance. With a delicate combination for the flowers themselves I thought the dish could take a more punchy accompaniment and chopped up a fresh salsa with mint leaves added.

The batter used to coat the stuffed flowers varied quite a bit but all of them leaned towards a tempura-style batter so I decided to use my default tempura batter mix.

The resulting dish was pronounced delicious by everyone. It’s particularly pleasing for the cook as it has that indefinable air of showiness about it, as though you’ve done something very clever. Yet it’s simplicity itself and also given that the flowers are picked more as a by-product of the courgette plants, I get the satisfying feeling that somehow it is food for free.

Deep-fried courgette flowers with fresh minty salsa

Serves 4

8 courgette or squash flowers

Vegetable oil for deep frying

For the stuffing:

250g ricotta

Zest of two lemons

1 tbsp marjoram leaves

2 teasps thyme leaves

Salt

Pepper

For the batter:

125g self-raising flour

100g cornflour

1 teasp vegetable oil

Chilled (ie, from the fridge) sparkling mineral water

Salt

For the salsa:

2 large tomatoes

1 sweet Spanish onion

½ teasp salt

Handful mint leaves, chopped fine

Lime juice to taste

Pick flowers that have fully opened and are in perfect condition. You also want to use them as fresh as possible, ideally straight after picking, but they can be stored in the fridge in a sealed container for a day or so.

Carefully clip out the stamens in the centre of the flower (I use a pair of manicure scissors with slightly curved blades) and trim the stalk to about an inch or so.

To make the salsa, chop the tomatoes into evenly sized dice. Chop the onion finely. Toss in a bowl with the sweet onion, and mint add the salt and lime juice to taste. Leave for half an hour for the flavours to mingle.

To make the stuffing, finely grate the zest from two lemons and add to the ricotta in a bowl. Strip the thyme leaves from their stalks. Chop the marjoram leaves finely and add both herbs to the ricotta. Mash the ricotta, lemon and herb until it’s smooth and creamy and add a little salt and pepper to taste.

Spoon about a dessertspoon of stuffing into each courgette flower. The amount will vary according to the size of each flower, but you don’t want to overstuff them or they will burst. Gently close the petals over the ricotta mix to make a little parcel out of each one.

To make the batter, put the flour into a large bowl, add a generous pinch of  salt and the vegetable oil, then pour a little sparkling water in a whisk lightly with a fork. Keep pouring and whisking until the batter has the consistency of double cream (not the extra thick kind). At a guess it’s about 200ml of sparkling water. It doesn’t matter if there are a few floury lumps in the mixture.

Pour the vegetable oil into a deep-sided pan and heat to 180 degrees Celsius – ideally using a thermometer. When the right temperature is reached, turn the heat down, and holding the courgette flowers by the stalk, dip and twirl them in the batter one at a time. Then drop into the pan and deep fry each one for about 2-3 minutes until the batter begins to turn golden at the edges. Lift out of the oil with tongs or a slotted spoon and rest on kitchen paper to drain off any excess oil. It’s easiest to fry on batches.

Serve two deep-fried courgette flowers per person, along with the salsa.

Beans, blue cheese and cider

Home from Asturias, that enclave of Spain known, improbably enough, for beans, blue cheese and cider, all to be eaten and drunk to a backdrop of mountains and forests of fig, eucalyptus and sweet chestnut. This is Spain's north-facing coast, the Costa Verde, named for its lush vegetation, since it rains pretty consistently between October and April. In between times, the locals hope the sun shines, because when it does, this is heaven on earth.

It has over 200 beaches nearly all of which are either spectacular and/or delightful. With clear water, pretty little coves nestle under cliffs alternate with long sands over which the surf rolls relentlessly in. It’s reminiscent of Cornwall, until you turn your gaze inland to the mighty backdrop of the 6,000ft Picos de Europa. Even the foothills are dramatic enough.

The Picos, which straddle Asturias, Cantabria to the east and the northern edge of Castilla y Leon, are the reason the Moors never made it into Asturias: the principality is Celtic in heritage and tradition.

So while you can enjoy a glass or two of wine from nearby Rioja, or neighbouring Galicia (the flowery white Alborino in particular slips down beautifully at sundown after a day on the beach), the locals drink cider. Sidrerias – cider houses – are everywhere, serving the local sidra by the bottle, and usually complete with a special machine for pouring it. This cider is flat, like scrumpy, and your glass should only be filled with about an inch of sidra   at a time, poured from a great height in order to aerate the drink and give it a bit of a fizz. Pouring can be done by a skilled waiter – to tell just how skilled, see if he is looking at the target glass while he pours (beginner), or whether he is carrying on his conversation over one shoulder while looking the other way (expert). In many establishments you’ll be treated to this high-pouring floorshow for your first taste and then left with your bottle of cider attached to a little machine which will aerate the drink for you.


Sidrerias tend to be good places to eat too, and to go with your cider, Spanish bread is always good. Rick Stein was spot on about that when he visited the area for his TV show. The seafood is always superb, sparkling fresh from the day’s catch. Particularly worth looking for on the menu are plain steamed mussels (mejillones), grilled razor clams (navajas), large juicy prawns (gambas), and anything to do with crab (centollos, or the little blue crabs called necoras, or the magnificently named buey del mar - the ox of the sea). If you like calamares, try smalled squid grilled whole (chipirones), or the larger cuttlefish (sepia). If you’re keen on whitebait, there are a wealth of small fish available to eat whole such as parrochas – which are more sardine sized) or boquerones (anchovies, often marinated).

Away from seafood, every establishment serving food will offer fabada Asturiana. For Asturians, this is a thrifty stew of the local beans (fabes, often denoted with the town of origin), flavoured with morcilla (a herby, aromatic half-sibling of black pudding), and ham hock or salted pork belly. The fabada is itself a distant cousin of the cassoulet of south-west France. However, no two fabadas are ever quite the same. Some will contain hunks of breads soaked in the broth, some are distinctly soupy, others more oily. Whichever way, the beans and the liquor should be intensely savoury from the slow-cooked meats and usually from saffron and smoked paprika. Crush the meat pieces into the stew if the dish hasn’t already been served this way and enjoy.

The fabes turn up in other dishes too, such as beans and clams (fabes con almejas), a dish which can be sublimely creamy, flavoursome and delicately aromatic ... or as dull as ditchwater and much the same colour.

Other regional specialities include kid stew (cabrito guisado), and escalopines al Cabrales, where veal is flattened into an escalope, coated in breadcrumbs and served with a sauce made from another great regional speciality, the incredibly stinky Cabrales cheese. Matured in caves, Cabrales should be moist, creamy and very strong-tasting. You will also be able to find it offered dotted on to crisp corn tortillas and drizzled with honey, a powerhouse combo of sweet, and intensely savoury. 

Many dishes can be sampled as tapas: look out for chorizo cooked in cider, which is meltingly soft and tangy. Also pulpo - octopus tentacles cooked, sprinkled with paprika and always, always, served with a boiled potato in the middle of the dish to mop up the juices. From neighbouring Galicia come pimientos de Padron, the nuttily bitter little peppers fried in olive oil and sprinkled in salt. Eating Padron peppers is a sort of gastronomic Russian roulette - although generally mild, around one in ten peppers will pack a chilli-hot punch, although on our visit this year, we were regularly assured that all the peppers would be mild. 

At the more expensive end of the scale is the jamon Iberico, a plate of which will set you back about €12-€15 depending on the establishment (several places will cure their own meats and they are well worth seeking out), but which should be sampled at least once during a visit. Thinly sliced and arranged on a large platter with no further adornment, the wafer-fine slices of cured ham will melt in your mouth, sweet and nutty at the same time.
This isn't haute cuisine: it's hearty, rustic cooking. It's always unapologetically full of flavour, simply cooked and accompanied and it's designed to fill you up. After a bottle of sidra, some jamon, followed by seafood and maybe an Asturian rice pudding to finish, I always feel as though I won't need to eat again for days. 

Courgettes and cake

Incorporating vegetables such as courgettes, carrots, beetroot and squash into cakes can be seen as a gimmick, a way to use up a glut, or a way to get children to eat vegetables. But it also does wonders for the cake, helping to keep it moist. Cakes made with veg definitely keep for longer in my experience and also have a satisfying fudgy texture rather than being dry and crumby.

Your choice of veg will make a difference. I’ve made Nigel Slater’s beetroot chocolate cake a few times and the beetroot adds richness and an earthy tang (as well as making the cake a glorious oxblood colour). The flesh of a pumpkin or squash will give it a fruity sweetness. Courgette is the one that will add little in the way of flavour of its own. A single cake will happily absorb a large courgette, indeed one that has passed the point of being a true courgette and is well on its way to being a marrow.

This is my chocolate courgette recipe. In writing it out, I’ve surprised myself slightly with just how long the ingredients list is, but I do put it together as simply as possible: mix the dry ingredients, mix the wet ingredients, blend the two, and bake. The white chocolate icing is very quick and easy to make – which is necessary because the hordes will be clamouring to eat the cake from the minute it comes out of the oven. You want an icing that can be whipped up and slapped on as soon as the cake is cool enough.

Courgette chocolate cake

The dry ingredients:

375g self-raising flour

1 teasp baking powder

50g cocoa powder

A pinch of salt

The wet ingredients:

One large courgette (about 500g)

3 eggs

380g caster sugar

1 teasp vanilla extract

150ml sunflower oil

1 tbsp coffee

Other ingredients:

50g ground almonds (optional)

Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees. Grease a 24cm cake tin.

Sieve the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Top and tail and peel the courgette, then grate it into the bowl of a food processor. I get good results by using the processor's fine grating disc, which pulps the courgette into a wet slurry. Add the eggs, sugar, oil and coffee to the grated courgette in the processor bowl and whizz up until blended and smooth – it will be a very unappetising greeny-grey colour and soupy.

Pour the courgette slurry into the bowl with the dry ingredients and mix quickly and roughly with a metal spoon. Add the almonds at this point, if using – they will add to the fudgy texture of the cake, but I've made the cake successfully without them.

Spoon the mix into the cake tin and bake in the centre of the oven for 40 minutes. Test if the cake is ready by plunging a skewer into the centre: if it comes out clean or without liquid clinging to it, it’s done.

Let the cake settle for 10 minutes or so, then turn out of the tin and cool on a rack. 

Make the icing by melting a 200g bar of white chocolate either in the microwave or in a bowl suspended over boiling water. Add 50g unsalted butter, remove from the heat, and beat until melted and smooth. Now add icing sugar, a little at a time, to bulk and firm the mixture up. Once you have a mix that is spreadable but not sloppy, smooth it over the top of the cake with a palette knife. Sieve a little icing sugar over the top, like snow, to disguise any lumps and bumps.

Rotten tomatoes

What is happening with my tomatoes? Brown patches on the leaves, wilted tops that don't revive with watering. Only half the plants are affected: those in pots outside. A look through Dr D G Hessayon's Vegetable & Herb Expert suggests it's a root rot, caused by poor drainage, which could fit in with the massive deluges of rain we got last month after the dry spell. There doesn't seem to be a cure, apart from mulching around the stems to encourage new root growth. Any ideas? Hope fully the plants won't keel over completely and we'll get a crop of some kind.

Rubies in the green

The raspberries are fantastic this year: Chanel red, glossy and juicy, and I’ll swear they are twice the size they were  last year. I’m relieved because in the mini-drought during April, I didn’t water them concentrating instead on spot-watering the seedlings and plants I know to be thirsty like the early lettuces. So I did wonder if I might get some rather wizened little fruits (and maybe I would have done if it hadn’t started raining in earnest this month).

So we are having a bumper harvest and may even get to store some in the freezer. Usually they get eaten en passant – I leave a bowl of raspberries out in the kitchen and they’ll be gone within a couple of hours.

However, confined to the house by a particularly squally rain shower and thinking that the current batch of raspberries might need eating up really quite soon, I thought a spot of baking might be appropriate. These are raspberry muffins, adapted from Nigella’s Blueberry Muffin recipe (How To Be A Domestic Goddess), which can also be found here, by substituting 200g raspberries for the blueberries and adding half a teaspoonful of vanilla extract.

200g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

Pinch of salt

75g caster sugar

75g butter, melted

1 egg

200ml buttermilk (Nigella also says you can mix half and half yogurt and semi-skimmed milk instead)

200g raspberries

½ tsp vanilla extract

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees. 

Mix together the dry ingredients. Beat together butter, egg and buttermilk in a separate bowl. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix lightly with a wooden spoon – a few lumps don’t matter. Fold in the raspberries and vanilla extract.

Scoop (N’s suggestion of an ice-cream scoop turns out to be just the thing) into muffin cases and bake in a suitable tin for 20 minutes.

A glut of gooseberries

I am – barely – managing a glut of gooseberries at the moment. Last year my three gooseberry Pax bushes managed a grand total of eight fruits, each devoured in situ, and in a single morning, I think. This year, each bush is groaning with beautiful, crimson-blushed fruit and with the recent downpours after the drought, some of the fruits are beginning to split.

I’ve found myself at a bit of a loss to know what to do with them. A crop that gives you enough for some fruit salads and maybe a couple of fools is one thing, but this year’s harvest requires something more in the way of mass production. Perhaps a chutney? We have been missing a good chutney over the last winter and spring: usually I make a green tomato chutney in October to use up the last of the fruits that haven’t yet turned red. Last year, I was still waiting for any ripe tomatoes in October and I really couldn’t face making chutney out of the whole crop. So a gooseberry will usefully fill a gap in the store cupboard; the sharp-sweet flavour of gooseberries seems well-suited to a chutney as well.


Gooseberry chutney with cranberries and fennel

Made with sweet amber gooseberries, this cooks to a glorious deep maroon colour. The cranberries were included as an alternative to the more usual raisins and actually may help more with the colour than anything else. The fennel notes, which cut the sharpness of the gooseberries, are quite subtle even with the addition of a whole star anise. I did consider using fennel seeds in the spice mix and would normally do so, but on this occasion thought it might just overload the chutney with aniseed.

1.2kg gooseberries

300ml cider vinegar

500g light brown sugar

1 onion, chopped

1 fat fennel bulb, chopped

100g dried cranberries

2cm cinnamon stick, ground

1 star anise

2 tspcrushed black peppercorns

1 tsp Szechuan pepper

3 cloves

1 cardamom pod, crushed

½ tsp turmeric

Rinse the gooseberries, then top and tail them. In a large pan, bring the gooseberries and vinegar to the boil and simmer until the gooseberries are disintegrating – about 10-20 minutes depending on how ripe the gooseberries are.

Add the onion, fennel, cranberries and sugar and stir well to dissolve the sugar. Bring to a simmer. Lightly pound the spices, apart from the star, together to a coarse powder and add to the pan. Simmer gently for about 2 hours, until the mixture has cooked right down and is sticky rather than soupy.

While it’s cooking, sterilise your jars so that the chutney can be potted up and sealed as soon as it’s ready.

Nut cutlets, fake bacon and other horrors

Some of my favourite meals don't involve meat or fish: a Spanish tortilla, a Greek salad, cauliflower cheese made with gruyere and cream, a vegetable curry - perhaps an aloo gobi or a Thai style dish with coconut and snow white rice, a wonderful artichoke casserole with tomatoes and preserved lemons picked up from Skye Gyngell, aubergines stuffed with tomatoes and mozzarella ... the list goes on. 

Every so often I’ll consciously cut down my meat intake and stick to vegetables. What I won’t have is fake meat. I simply don't get the point of vegetarian sausages, fake bacon, or a pretend roast such as Linda McCartney’s Vegetarian Roast, which describes itself as  a "chicken style roast with sage and onion stuffing". It’s probably unfair to single out the Linda McCartney range: there are plenty of other vegetarian roasts that parade their ‘meat-like’ credentials. Why?

I don't mean dishes like vegetable lasagne where lentils, or mushrooms, or squash are used instead of meat, sometimes these are preferable to a heavy meaty version. Or maybe even a nut cutlet, although what is that word ‘cutlet’ trying to imply in this context? I mean food that pretends to be meat but isn't. Why is that remotely attractive? Why is it remotely attractive, especially, to a vegetarian, who has rejected meat?

As a non-vegetarian, I probably shouldn’t make presumptions about why people don’t eat meat, but I’ll have a go anyway. Perhaps …

• They don’t like the taste of meat;
• They believe that a vegetarian diet is healthier;
• They believe they can eat more cheaply on a vegetarian diet;
• They believe that a vegetarian diet is more environmentally sustainable;
• They believe that a vegetarian diet is more economically sustainable for food producers;
• They believe that eating meat is inevitably cruel to animals;
• They believe that killing animals for food is morally unjustifiable (the humaneness of treatment and death being immaterial).

I’m sure there are more. They all seem valid to me and most lead me periodically to try to eat more meat-free meals. But what I don’t understand is why if you have rejected meat for whatever reason, you would then want to eat something that tries to emulate the look, taste and /or texture of meat. Doesn’t this in some way contradict the reason you stopped eating meat in the first place? At the very least it must generate some degree of cognitive dissonance.

Most veggie sausages, veggie burgers, veggie rissoles are highly processed, so hardly healthier. Or cheaper (Linda McCartney’s Sausages are £4.07 per kg at Waitrose when on special offer; their Essential pork sausages are £2.14 per kg, though admittedly organic versions cost more than Linda’s). If you are a vegetarian on moral grounds, then eating something that makes itself resemble meat as closely as possible is hardly a good look. If you are veggie on economic or environmental grounds, then eating a Deli Bacon Flavour Rasher makes you look a bit wistful, as you are admitting that it’s a sacrifice, that you didn't choose to stop eating meat, but felt you had to give it up.

The last time I tried vegetarian sausages was at a barbecue. “The children love them,” I was told by my host, himself a vegetarian. So I tackled one. It tasted mainly of monosodium glutamate with a bit of yeast extract and had the texture of sage and onion stuffing. Why on earth would you want to eat that at a barbecue when you could have, say, corn cobs marinaded in soy and honey and five-spice, or kebabs with green peppers and halloumi, or aubergines seasoned, wrapped in foil and cooked in the embers until they are all soft and smoky?

My final argument is, quite simply, quorn. I don't think any more needs to be said.