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.

Back to Blighty

So August is over. While we never quite the blazing skies one hopes for in August, this year has apparently been the coldest in 14 years. Add to that the considerable rainfall - so good for the allotment in many ways - and it's no surprise that the tomato blight has arrived, streaking the stems of the tomato plants with dark blotches. On a verdant, untrimmed plant, the telltale black stems can be hard to spot at first, but when the leaves take on that characteristically sooty look at the edges, it's time for drastic surgery.
 

Every year is the same: I do know that nothing will stop the march of the spores, and that all I can do is to delay the blight's spread, hopefully until some fruit have ripened, but I always find myself unwilling to do what I really should do - remove EVERY SCRAP of diseased material, even if that means uprooting whole plants.
Some people advocate removing all the leaves, so that just stems (blotchy or not) and the immature fruit remain. This seems to hold up the spread of the blight so that the fruit has a fair chance to ripen. I prefer to cut out everything that looks unhealthy, removing fruit to the kitchen to ripen on a windowsill. Last year, the blight hit in mid-September, but the fruits were all very green. I picked them off and laid them out indoors, where they stayed green until the middle of October and then slowly ripened. Indoor-ripened tomatoes are never as good as those which mature on the plant, but home-grown tomatoes in November are a bonus. 
So far, I've dug up the three Razzleberry plants and disposed of them (not in the compost), as the more I cut off the more blackened stems and leaves I found. I've saved the best of the fruit which will hopefully ripen before they rot. The Black Russian plants - which always seem to be the first to succumb to blight - have been pruned back almost to stem and fruit only. The outdoor Sungolds - the one variety that has yielded anything like a crop so far - have had a major trim, and while the greenhouse Sungolds and the Pink Brandywine (miraculously - another variety that is often a blight magnet) show no signs of infection so far, I will be inspecting all tomato plants daily from now on. 
This is the horticultural equivalent of shutting the door after the horse has bolted, of course. There is some excellent advice on preventing tomato blight from taking hold on the Garden Action site, here, which boils down to good garden hygiene, ie, don't unwittingly spread the infection from plant to plant yourself, and also explains why it's a good idea to find a way of watering tomato plants that doesn't involve getting the leaves wet.

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.