Home-grown "Crudités"

For those of you who don't speak French, the word "crudité "means literally "rawness" or "harshness", but it is used in the culinary sense to mean raw vegetables or salads. Crudités are normally served during a meal as a starter, often with dips like garlic mayonnaise or hummus.

I like to serve home-grown vegetables in this way whenever I have something appropriate for this style of eating, and we often eat small plates of them as a "Nibble" with a drink before dinner. The best season for such things is definitely Summer. This basket of veg I harvested yesterday clearly contains some suitable candidates (not the spuds maybe, though we do sometimes eat the tiddlers from a batch of newly-dug potatoes in this way, after cooking and cooling to lukewarm temperature).

The best thing about Crudités is that they require only minimal preparation. When you grow your own veg you know whether they have been subjected to any nasty chemicals (hopefully not!), and probably they will just need to be washed and perhaps gently scrubbed. If vegetables like carrots are picked young and tender they usually don't need peeling. In fact, the skin is often the tastiest and most nutritious part of a vegetable.

The carrots in my basket were a mixture selected from my 5 different varieties so I can't identify them for you, but the tomatoes are "Sungold" (golden), "Maskotka" (larger red), and "Losetto" (smaller red). The potatoes are "Nicola" (2nd Early).

I'm not very proud of the radishes. Most of my June-sown ones have gone long and lanky, probably due to lack of light. Not only have we had precious little sunshine during the month of July, but also my Runner Beans have grown tall and dense and have blocked out much of the light that would otherwise have fallen on the radishes! The few that you see in my photos are probably all that I will get from my two 2.4 metre rows, which would be a very disappointing result. Still, radish seed is cheap, and the plants don't tie-down the space for very long.

The logical conclusion of the above is this...

No dips with these ones - just plain, unadulterated veg.

I know you'll say I'm greedy, but I just wish I had had a cucumber ready to use at the same time. It would have gone well with this little lot!