Herbs really are at their best at this time of year. Even the woody herbs, such as rosemary and thyme, have got beautiful tender green leaves. Now is the time to use as many as you can in your cooking. We’ve currently got rosemary, thyme, sage, chives, parsley and mint, and we use lots of each. The only one that didn’t make it through the winter was our oregano. I cut it right back after the snow, but there is still no sign of any growth. It doesn’t look dead all the way through however, so we’ll leave it a couple more weeks just in case. Our herbs seem to double in size each year. Rosemary and sage leaves are excellent whatever the size of the plant, but we find thyme can get very woody as it grows larger, and so tend to replant it every 2-3 years. We’ve currently got 3 small thyme in pots that we grew from seed, ready to replace the large one in the veg patch.
Fantastic Herbs
Harvest from the Sea
Not only do we harvest from our garden, we also like to harvest from the sea, and last weekend’s harvest was very exciting indeed. We were in Dorset visiting my parents. Sunday afternoon turned out lovely and sunny so we headed for a beautiful bay. Charlie (aged 9) did a spot of shore fishing, but without any luck. David went one step further, donned his wetsuit and entered the cold cold sea (9°) to see what he could find. After about an hour he could hear something knocking together, and it took him a minute or so to realise that it was his own teeth chattering! A couple of large mullet escaped him, but then he spotted a spider crab clinging to the rocks. He had fun trying to get it in his bag whilst the crab wrapped it’s legs around his hand and nipped him with his claws. This is the first spider crab he’s found, in fact his very first catch from the sea, so we were all very excited. We are hoping for many more spider crabs as the meat is beautifully sweet. We only got a morsel each as there were 8 of us and we all loved it! Spider crabs come into shore around May and June, so this one was quite an early arrival. If you fancy one, grab a mask and snorkel (a wetsuit helps too) and get searching. There is a minimum landing size of 12cm (female) and 13cm (male) from ‘nose to tail’, so don’t keep anything smaller than that. We’re not sure how to tell the difference so we go for 13cm and above.
Bunch of Salad Leaves
These salad leaves look good enough to put in a vase on the table. Unfortunately, they just taste too good for that, and so these ended up in the most wonderful egg sandwich. Everything was fresh. We had freshly picked salad, freshly picked chive, freshly laid eggs (although they are a devil to peel when they are very fresh) and freshly baked sourdough. And it was the BEST egg sandwich ever. Sorry no photo, was too busy enjoying!
First Asparagus
It’s been a long wait, but after two years we have finally tasted our first asparagus. As you might guess, they really are delicious. There’s nothing quite like freshly grown veg that’s on your plate just 10 minutes after picking. We’ve been steaming ours for about 7 minutes, coating them in butter, and then just eating them off one large plate. Everyone likes them, which is great news as we planted 40 crowns, but at the moment means you get only 3 spears per sitting! We have found that the lower portion of the spear is very woody, and are wondering whether this might be due to lack of water when they were growing. There’s certainly no lack of water now, but initially we’d had dry weather for weeks. The best way of getting just the tender part of the spear is to bend it until it snaps. The spear will break where it becomes woody. As this was our first experience of home-grown asparagus, we wanted to be absolutely sure we weren’t wasting any of it and so cooked both parts of the spear. Sure enough, they had snapped in the correct place. The lower sections really were tough.
Wild Garlic Soup
After making 9 batches of Wild Garlic Pesto, we still had a whole bag of wild garlic leaves in the fridge. Today I used half of those in a double batch of wild garlic soup. This recipe comes from Riverford and is very simple to make. You do need a blender though. If you’ve only got a stick blender then it would be a good idea to chop your wild garlic first.
Ingredients:
- large knob of butter
- 1 onion or 2 leeks, chopped
- 1 large potato, cubed
- 750ml chicken or vegetable stock
- 3-4 handfuls of wild garlic leaves
- 100ml double cream
- a few gratings of nutmeg
- salt and pepper
Melt the butter and gently fry the onion or leek until soft. Add the potato and cook for a minute or two. Add the stock and cook until the potatoes are soft (10-15 mins). Then add the garlic leaves and cook for another couple of minutes. Blend until smooth, then add the cream, nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste.
This soup is a beautiful light green with dark flecks and tastes fresh and garlicky. It makes a great lunch full of the flavours of spring.
Wild Garlic Pesto
Last weekend we went wild garlic picking in our favourite woodland. This is something we do every year and has become one of those lovely family traditions. The wild garlic is perfect for picking at the moment. The leaves are still fresh and tender and the flowers are only just beginning to appear. The leaves were looking so good that we picked a LOT this year, 3 carrier bags full. We spent the afternoon washing the leaves (they looked pretty clean but we washed them anyway) and making pesto. We put 8 bags of pesto in the freezer and had wild garlic pesto for tea. We fried some bacon until it was really crispy and sprinkled that on top with a little extra parmesan – delicious. We probably added a little too much pesto to the pasta, as the garlic certainly had a bit of heat to it, and was a little too strong for some of the kids this time!
Here’s the basic recipe that we used:
- about 100g wild garlic, chopped
- 50g pine nuts (you can use walnuts too)
- 50g parmesan
- 50ml olive oil
- salt and pepper
To make, just blend all the ingredients together. We didn’t use all the olive oil it says here, just enough to be able to blend it.
If you haven’t picked wild garlic before, get your foragers hat on and give it a go. Wild garlic tends to grow in or near woodland close to water. Our patch is right next to the river on the edge of the woodland. Wild garlic can be used in lots of ways: soups, pestos, garlic butter, layered in dauphinois potato, added to frittatas. And it’s free. What can be better than that?
Not PSB but YFK
I can guarantee you will never find YFK in the supermarket or the greengrocers, or even in a Riverford veg box. This is for gardeners alone, and only those who grow their own kale and keep it into the following spring. YFK is our Yellow Flowering Kale. It tastes a little like PSB, but with a distinct kale flavour, and is delicious. Our kale has sat in the ground all winter and we haven’t got round to eating it all, let alone digging it up. With the lovely early spring weather, the kale has decided it is time to flower, and the YFK we have been enjoying are the flower heads before they open into little yellow flowers. The shoots looked so nice and tender that we thought they just had to be edible, after all that’s the part we eat from PSB. If you’ve got still got some kale in your garden, harvest the flower heads and give yourself a real treat. You won’t get a lot, but you’ll savour every mouthful.
Kale that is running to seed does so quite rapidly. The main stem suddenly shoots up with a large flower head on the end, and then lots of smaller flowering side stems. They go from unopened flowerheads which are perfect for eating, to bright little yellow flowers very quickly, so keep a close eye on them. The best way of harvesting the stems is by breaking them off the plant. If they break easily then they shouldn’t be too tough to eat. Treat them as if they are PSB and you can’t go wrong. We just lightly steam ours for about 4-5 mins, it’s nice if they still have a bit of crunch. If you can’t eat them all at once, then cut the stems off the plant and keep them in the fridge for a day or two in a sealed plastic bag. We had both PSB and YFK for dinner last night, and whilst they are similar in flavour they are distinctly different. PSB is the winner in our household, but the YFK was a close second.
If your kale looks like this, then you’re too late!
Ha Ha to the Pigeons
The Battle of the PSB has been won and we are victorious! And it’s all thanks to the humble garden fleece. The pigeons have been foiled in their attempts to eat the PSB, and we had our first picking yesterday. As always, it was delicious. Purple sprouting broccoli has got to be one of our favourite veg. It disappeared before the rest of the meal was even touched. I’d forgotten how much we all eat when it’s our own freshly picked veg. Next time I will have to pick twice as much.
PSB is a great vegetable to grow. It’s relatively easy, very hardy (ours has been covered in snow) and you get your own veg just when you really feel you need it. It does spend a long time in the ground however, but it should all be over by the time the beans need planting out.
First Scorzonera EVER!
Scorzonera was our new crop this year that we’ve never grown before, and never even tasted before. We were confident that it would be good though as many of the vegetable books rate it very highly and the French and Italians love it. So what is it? Well, it’s a root vegetable which is very easy to grow, can be left in the ground until you need it, seems to have no pests and diseases and which is absolutely delicious to eat. You have to be quite careful digging them up as the roots break very easily, and beneath the dark skin is a creamy white flesh. After scrubbing them, we blanched ours for 3 minutes, peeled them, boiled them for about 10 mins until tender, and then coated them with butter. They were really really tasty. In fact, the whole bowl went in a flash before the rest of the meal was on the table.
The only difficulty that I can see with scorzonera is that the white sap/juice that flows from it is incredibly sticky (I had to wash my hands 3 times before it all came off) which may put some people off. But don’t let it because the flavour is superb, especially when enhanced with a little butter! I can see why some people become evangelical about them. You just want to tell everyone how good it tastes. If you’re looking for something new to try then give scorzonera a go. You won’t be disappointed.
You often find scorzonera and salsify mentioned together. They are indistinguishable in flavour but salsify are paler and narrower whilst scorzonera are darker and thicker.
Final Greenhouse Harvest
Here’s our final harvest from the greenhouse, lots of tomatoes and quite a few red peppers. Not a bad crop at all! It’s hard to believe that we’re picking tomatoes right at the end of October. We’ve never had them this late before, but then the weather has been unseasonably warm. Now that the cropping is over we’ll be clearing the greenhouse out. Some of the hens are in there at the moment and hopefully they’ve found all the pests that were nibbling our crops. All we have to do is remove the plants and canes. Later on we’ll dig in all that lovely manure the hens are laying down for us!
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