This week we shall mainly be eating...

... leeks!

I couldn't wait any longer. They were still occupying the bed that I have earmarked for the beans this year, so they had to come out this weekend. The biggest ones are probably only fit for making stock, but there are still enough for several meals there. I'm not sure yet what to do with the middling leeks, but the babies need to be enjoyed quickly.

Way back when, in the days when my garden was the tiny back yard of a terraced house in Manchester, and I could only dream of a proper veg patch rather than a couple of dozen pots, a South-facing windowsill and a cold frame, I had a book entitled, "The Weekend Gardener", or something like that. It gave fortnightly lists of jobs to do in the garden, most of which didn't apply to me due to lack of garden. But the entry I liked most over the Summer months was "Eat at least one meal a week outside", and it is something R and I always tried to do whenever the sun was out.

The window of opportunity for doing that here is very short, so it is even more important to make the most of the sunshine.
R's parents gave us the table when we moved here. During the Summer it lives under the big sycamore tree in the rather grandly-titled "orchard". This was where we would shell peas and beans together, share a glass of wine when he arrived back after a week away and, after a weekend of work outside, would just sit with our tired bodies and watch the sun go down over the hill, kept company by the ever-busy swallows and house martens, while we waited for the bats to make their entrance, signalling a change in temperature and time to go indoors.

I firmly believe in the principle that the better the food, the less you need to do with it.
A handful of peas picked, shelled and eaten in the vegetable garden tastes better than just about any dish that can be cooked with them. A perfectly-ripe strawberry picked with the early morning sun on it just cannot be imitated by any supermarket's Finest range. And a new-laid egg still warm from the nest box makes a poached egg that most top chefs would be hard-placed to beat.

So, for a Summer lunch take a bunch of asparagus from the farm shop, the final few broad beans from the freezer (after removing their dull grey coats to reveal the vivid green kernels) and some just-picked baby leeks. Steam until just tender. Perhaps add a little freshly-ground salt and pepper, and just enough butter to make everything pleasingly glossy. Poach the eggs discovered in the nest box this morning and attempt to place them attractively on top. Carry outside and eat in the warm sunshine.
The shop-bought apple and tomatoes add a sour note of commercial realism to the picture, but perhaps the home-made elderflower cordial mitigates this a little.

The remains of the day

My ongoing quest to eat the freezer contents continues.

Lamb isn't a problem as such. I think I could eat it every day without ever becoming bored. Sadly both my doctor and my waistline would prefer it that I don't.

A leg roast once in a while is a Sunday treat, though, particularly after I have earned it by working outside in the garden all day. Cooked hard and fast, the joints from my little Hebridean sheep are as good as they come and are ready in about an hour. That's just long enough to walk Moose and get back in time to put the potatoes on.

Brown and deeply savoury on the outside, pink and succulent inside, and with enough fat (but not too much) to stop them drying out in the hot oven, I really don't think they can be beaten. For this little beauty I had a few left-over anchovies, so I studded the meat with them and some slices of garlic for added umami, but they weren't essential. On the other hand, a good ten-minute rest was.

Meal 1 was straightforward. Roast lamb, mash made with some of the last spuds from store, lots of spring cabbage and gravy made from the meat juices and a dollop of rosemary jelly. No problem. The hard part is to stop going back to the joint for just one more little slice!

Then, if it's Monday, it must be hash. Lots of onions, cubed potatoes and meat, all slowly pan-fried with the remaining gravy. Patience is a virtue here. It takes time to achieve the right amount of crispy edge, and of course a big handful of chopped parsley is needed just before that moment is reached. You could add a fried egg if feeling very greedy, but that would be painting the lily.

And so to the very last remains. The bone and the last few scraps of meat clinging to it.
Soup, of course, but where in the world shall we go?

One of the advantages of a longer than normal winter is that it gives plenty of opportunity to try out a few things in the kitchen. As citrus fruits were plentiful and cheap at the same time, and as R wasn't here to nag me to make Seville orange marmalade, I spent a couple of pleasant afternoons making lime pickle and preserved lemons.

With this in mind, it was destination North Africa!

After I had removed any decent-looking scraps of meat from the bone, it went into the stock pot with the usual aromatics. I wasn't looking for a thick, unctuous sort of stock; just some lightly-flavoured liquid for my soup.

To make the soup, I sweated the usual suspects (onion, carrot, a little garlic and a stick of celery) until softened, then added a good teaspoon each of cinnamon, ginger and cumin. Boy, does that make the room smell nice! These were followed some precooked chickpeas from the freezer, the end of a yellow pepper, a squeeze of sundried tomato paste and the chopped preserved lemon rind.

Simmer gently on the stove until all the vegetables are soft, then throw in the meat scraps to heat through and serve.
Light, warming and absolutely delicious!

Eating those weeds

Here on my hilltop I am blessed with rich, free-draining soil and, being Wales, there is always plenty of moisture to go around as well. It means that I can grow pretty well anything - provided, of course, that it doesn't mind constant winds, snow, late frosts and a shortage of sun throughout the summer months.

One thing that grows very well is the nettle.

Some weeds like buttercups and dandelions are attractive enough that it is difficult not to admire their beauty when flowering en masse in my pasture. On the other hand, there is not a lot to be said for nettles from the aesthetic viewpoint. Oh, I suppose they have a certain stature and presence, and the colourwash effect from bright acid to dark sagey green works as an effective counterfoil to more showy plantings, but I dislike them intensely.

There, I said it.
I know that as a yoghurt-weaving self-sufficiency type I am supposed to love them. But I don't. They are nasty, invasive, stingy weeds and the world would be a better place without them.

When R was here to do the mowing, it left me with enough time to keep the nettles and docks under control. Now I have to do both, the nettles have won most of the recent skirmishes, and if I am not careful will win the war as well. I am very reluctant to do it, but napalm death may be required (or at least a bit of glyphosate).

In the meantime, however, I have been doing my bit to stem the advancing tide by eating them. Nettle soup is always a favourite, provided there is some good chicken stock available. I have a friend who makes a fantastic nettle champagne, and last year I discovered that saag made with nettles is truly delicious.

I was recently sent a recipe for nettle pesto, and wanted to try it out.
As usual, I didn't follow it exactly, but pesto is a forgiving dish so it didn't seem to matter.
So, with a trug full of freshly-plucked nettle tops (which barely made a dent in the forest out there), I put a pan of water on to boil. Blanching is, of course, an essential step if you don't want your pesto to have a unique, tongue-swelling piquancy that isn't a usual feature of the dish.

A minute in boiling water is enough to kill the stings. Then you simply put the now bright green nettle tops in the blender with some garlic. The recipe also called for pine nuts which I did not have, but a goodly handful of walnuts took their place. Press the button to whizz it all up together, add some salt and start pouring in a mixture of sunflower and olive oil. Parmesan is traditional here, but I like to make pesto in large batches and freeze it for later use, and I prefer my cheese added at the point of consumption.

I made this with no great expectations of culinary excellence. In fact I expected it to simply taste "green". That isn't a bad thing in itself, but hardly a basis for an enthusiastic recommendation. But I am not ashamed to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised. The nettles have a sharp freshness and slight bite that I wasn't expecting, and the vivid green makes it particularly attractive.
Pesto alla genovese it is not, but a tasty use for an ever-present resource it certainly is. I fully intended to freeze half of this batch, but I found that it also went rather well on crackers!
(I have a sneaking suspicion that it would be nice mixed half and half with coriander too).

Jammin'

It has taken two and a half years, but last week I finally used up the last of the jam that we made the Autumn before R died. It is probably a good thing that home-produced food doesn't come with a Use by label!

The fact that it has taken so long to use it up is a sign of the way I have almost entirely stopped eating bread. These days I make a few loaves when I have people to stay, and there is normally a bag of rolls in the freezer for defrosting individually to have with soup. But that's it. No toast for breakfast, jam butties or anything like that. A spoonful in my daily yoghurt is a very slow way to use up a shelf full of jam.

A quick examination of the freezer contents found several bags of fruit. I didn't fancy gooseberry or rhubarb, but there were quite a lot of blackcurrants and raspberries, and a single bag of damsons. So mixed-fruit jam it was then!

The raspberries were R's favourite.
The canes were the first thing we put in the new vegetable garden way back in our first winter here. I always intended to set up a system of posts and wires, and to train the canes along them neatly, but like so many things it never quite happened. Yet the raspberries keep coming in abundance, even with competition from the local blackbird population. It pleases my sense of order to line up serried ranks of berries on trays for freezing, but the greater delight is taking out a couple of handfuls in the middle of winter for a smoothie or pavlova, giving a little flash of summer on a dull day.

Then there are the blackcurrant bushes. When we built the fruit bed, I bought a couple of bushes from the garden centre at great expense. Shortly afterwards I was offered some cuttings from a friend's garden - at the time I didn't realise how easily they root. And naturally the nameless freebies are consistently bigger, sweeter and more flavoursome than the bought variety. The blackcurrant harvest is one of my biggest garden pleasures. Rather than picking berries from the bushes, I always combine harvesting with pruning and simply lop off the currant-laden branches, take them to the table beneath the sycamore tree and strip the branches there, usually accompanied by a glass of wine.

And the damson tree deserves a mention too.
When we moved here, it was in such a sorry state. The previous owner's sheep had practically ring-barked the poor thing, and there was a huge foot-long scar in the trunk. It was spindly and top-heavy, and I was all for chopping it down there and then. R persuaded me to give it one year and then decide on its fate. So I gave it a good feed of manure, kept the grass down around it - and it rewarded us with a harvest of damsons that far exceeded all expectations. They aren't very large or particularly attractive, but they are sweet and delicious. The season is all too short as the wasps eat them if they are left on the tree too long, but for a glorious fortnight it is good to gorge on the little purple plums, and to freeze a couple of bags for moments like this.

I can't give a recipe because I didn't really use one. But all three fruits are fairly high in pectin, so setting isn't a problem. You just have to remember to boil them for twenty minutes or so before adding the sugar, otherwise the skins of the blackcurrants and damsons can be a bit tough. It is also a good idea to remove the stones from the damsons unless you like playing Russian roulette with your teeth and breakfast confiture!

My preference in jam is for as little sugar as I can get away with. 1 pound of sugar to 1 pound of fruit is nicest, but often isn't enough to keep the mould at bay, so I normally plump for a ratio of 1.25 : 1 which is still low enough that the flavour of the fruit isn't overpowered by the sugar. Then just dissolve the sugar in the fruit and boil furiously until a blob of jam on your cold plate passes the wrinkle test. It won't take too long because of the high-pectin fruit, remember.

That's it. Ladle into sterilised jars and seal. You can mess around with wax discs or water baths if you like, but none of it is necessary - clean jars and hot jam are all you need, and put the lids on before the mould spores have a chance to get in there too. And once you have opened the jar, always use a clean spoon to remove the jam and not the crumb-covered knife that you have just used to spread butter on your toast. Follow this little rule and your jam will remain pristine from the day you open the jar to the day you sadly scrape out the last dregs for your breakfast.

A lunchtime treat

Flushed with my triumph over the roofing sheet mountain, I felt that I deserved a little pampering on my Saturday shopping expedition.

The first port of call, as ever, was Derek the Fishmonger, where I found a nice piece of Cornish plaice for my Sunday lunch. Then I spotted the scallops. And dive-caught scallops at that.

I don't know why I like scallops so much. There is something ever so slightly indelicately gynaecological about their appearance, but I can rarely resist buying them. Sadly these didn't come with their built-in plates, but I was sure they could form the basis of a lunchtime treat.

Back at home, I checked the greenhouse to see if there was anything edible.
Still very little unfortunately, apart from a few radish and rocket thinnings. The herb bed yielded some very healthy chives and a few leaves of lemon balm and fennel that were starting to poke their heads above the soil.

Fortunately I had visited the farm shop on my way back home, and bought some crunchy romaine lettuce and a few self-indulgent cherry tomatoes. I know they don't really taste of anything much at this time of year, but I fancied a bit of colour with my lunch. They also had in chorizo from Wenlock Edge Farm. I hadn't tried their chorizo before, but their coppa and salami is excellent, so it was worth a try.

Lunch was more an operation in assembly, rather than cooking as such.
Chop the chorizo into coins, dry fry until the fat runs. Then add the scallops and fry for a minute on each side.

That's it - simply serve with a nice salad and balsamic dressing, and arrange as attractively as a person with limited artistic abilities can manage.

Using it up

Our last pair of porkers went off to the abattoir not long before R died.
We had the usual sausage-making fest, but on a smaller scale than in previous years. We also sold a lot of the meat to family, friends and R's work colleagues, but for one reason or another a lot more ended up in our freezers than had in the past, and most of this was in the form of large joints.

My eating habits have changed so much since I have been alone. There is precious little chance of me actually turning totally vegetarian, but I would say that probably over 50% of my meals now contain no meat.

Which hasn't helped very much with consuming the stockpile of pork in the freezer.

As I would like to get another pair of weaners this Summer, it really does seem incumbent upon me to eat what I already have - that and the fact that it really does need to be used up very soon or it will only be fit for Moose to have.

So I need to find ways to use it up that do not simply involve me gnawing my way through a 6lb slab of roast pork!

This is what I did with a piece of belly pork.

The weight was in the region of 5 lb. There is a very small patch of freezer burn on the rind, but otherwise it is fine.

When our porkers came back from the butcher, I had asked for each belly half to be cut into three halves, but for the bones to be left on, for reasons that will become apparent.
The first step, though, is to remove the bones using my best filleting knife.

I then cut the meat into three equal portions.
The first was just crying out to be slow-roasted.
Now this is possibly not a meal for someone on a calorie-controlled diet, but it makes a splendid feast for someone who has been digging the garden all afternoon!

My feeling when it comes to roasting home-reared meat is that the less you do to it the better, so I simply scored the rind and placed it on a bed of chopped onions and a couple of large sprigs of thyme from the garden.

This went into a very hot oven for 20 minutes to flash roast and get the fat running, then I turned down the heat to about 160 C and largely forgot about it for a couple of hours, other than to pour off the fat every 40 minutes or so.

Meanwhile I turned my attentions to the remainder of the belly, which on this occasion I decided to turn into bacon.
The first step is to make up the curing mix. There are many recipes available in books and on the Internet - some use nitrites, some don't. I prefer to use them as I like my bacon to look pink, rather than grey, but it isn't essential if you are going to use it up quickly or store it in the freezer.

On this occasion I went for a simple mix of salt, demerara sugar and curing salt, which I rubbed thoroughly into the remaining two pieces of pork.

And then did the same with the sheet of bones that were removed from the belly.

The whole lot went into a plastic bag and then into the fridge for 3 days. And that folks, really is all there is to making bacon!

Recipes using the bacon will follow, but in the meantime I shall devote my attentions to the slow-roast belly pork...

Beets

For such an unprepossessing, mild-mannered vegetable, beetroot certainly polarises opinion - or at least it does in my family. On the one hand we have my younger sister who believes it is the work of the devil; my whole family is still traumatised by the time that she demonstrated in full Technicolor why it is a bad idea to force children to eat something they have really taken against! In contrast the rest of us adore it any way you care to serve it.

R was never great with traditional pickled beets, though, as he wasn't a great fan of anything vinegary.

I can't remember exactly who introduced me to the idea of roast beets. It may have been the late, great Christopher Lloyd in his lovely book The Gardener Cook. Whoever it was, they were absolutely right. Roasting the beets gives them a sweetness and depth of flavour that just doesn't happen with the plain boiled variety.

R's favourite way to serve them was as an accompaniment to mackerel, either smoked or fresh. Mixed with sharp green apple, spring onions and a good dollop of freshly-grated horseradish, and then stirred into a mix of greek yoghurt and mayonnaise, this sharp, crunchy salad was perfect to cut through the richness of the fish.

I keep coming back to soup, however.

My freezer still holds plenty of chicken stock and the tomato or tomato/courgette sauce that I froze over the Summer. The recipe is simplicity itself: mix peeled and roast beets, chicken stock and tomato sauce in roughly equal quantities. Heat through, then whizz up with a hand blender and season to taste.
Serve with the usual crusty bread and a sprinkling of cubes of feta cheese.

This may possibly be my very favourite soup of all. Why not give it a try. You won't regret it, even if you think you don't like beets.