A Survival challenge

Here in the UK it definitely isn't gardening weather at present, and I'm sitting indoors "building castles in the air", as they say. This is one of the ideas that came into my head...

Imagine you are studying at a Food + Gardening + Self-sufficiency school (nice thought!). Your homework assignment for today is:

 "You are marooned on an unpopulated island in the middle of nowhere (assume the presence of fresh water and fertile soil). If you could have one food item, one plant/packet of seed, and one self-sufficiency tool/object delivered to you right now, what would these items be? Describe and justify your choices. Time allowed: 30 minutes. Marks available: 20."

Here is my answer.

My chosen food item would be a pack of dried beans, e.g. Borlotti.

Photo from 2010

I would like the beans because they would provide me with a reasonable amount of protein and fibre, and could easily be cooked simply with water. Furthermore, I could save some of the beans for planting. If some of the beans did germinate and grow, I could save seeds from them in turn, thus hopefully providing me with an ongoing supply of food

My chosen plant/seed packet would be the biggest pack of tomato seeds available - e.g. from Seeds of Italy, whose packs are well-known for their generous quantities! The fruits of the tomato plants that I would grow from these seeds would combine nicely with the beans (see above). I would choose if possible a pack of mixed varieties, which would provide me with morale-boosting visual and taste variety.

Photo from 2010

My chosen self-sufficiency item would be large and durable knife, which would help me to make some further tools (assuming wood to be available), and it would also help me with food-preparation, and possibly (before I had the chance to make other tools) it would serve as a garden-cultivation implement. Furthermore, this knife could also if necessary be used as a weapon or for killing food animals - if there any on my island.

Arrrgh, the thought of using my best 8" Henkel as a trowel...!

So those are MY choices (at present. I'll probably change my mind tomorrow. I'm just wondering whether a mobile phone counts as a self-sufficiency item these days!) Would anyone else care to tell me (in a comment) what THEY would chose?

Our eating habits...

Here in the UK this week there has been a lot of discussion about food, food supply and people's eating habits, in the aftermath of the emergence of the fact that many of the beef hamburgers sold in many well-known supermarkets have been found to contain significant quantities of horse-meat. The problem is not so much the fact that the burgers contain horse-meat (in many countries, e.g. France and Belgium, horse-meat is considered a delicacy) but that the products did NOT contain what they were alleged to contain. Somewhere along the line either someone has been very dishonest or very incompetent. Either of these would be a good enough reason to reconsider whether you really want to buy or consume mass-produced processed foods. I am deliberately choosing this moment to write a little about what my wife Jane and I eat.

Food purchased on the market at Ferney Voltaire, France

Let me say first that we are not fanatical about any aspect of this subject. If we find a genuinely good mass-produced product, we have no qualms about using it. In general though, we like to cook food that is made "from first principles", using raw ingredients. Wherever possible we like to use fruit, vegetables and herbs that I have grown in our garden, but of course the garden is not very big, so it is not possible to be self-sufficient.

Fresh veg from the garden, prepped for cooking

In default of home-grown produce though, we try to buy wherever possible from Farmers' Markets and small local shops. As an example I cite the little butcher's shop about 300 yards from where we live (the Linkway Butchers).

Slow-cooked Jamaican pork

Their meat is just so much better than what you get in the supermarkets. It is consistently more tender and more tasty, and its (local) origins are known. Most of their meat  - and especially game - comes from very close by. Their bacon is particularly good: when you cook it, it goes crispy, not hard, and it doesn't exude loads of watery white gunk like mass-produced bacon does!

Unfortunately the greengrocer's shop that used to be in the same small line of shops as the Linkway Butchers closed a couple of years ago, priced out of the market by its massive competitors, and in our town we only have a Farmers' Market once a month.

Pizza

Our eating habits are strongly influenced by the cuisine of the places we have lived in or visited. I was born in Malaysia and in my Army days served extensively in Brunei, Hong Kong and Nepal. When we were in Hong Kong, Jane at one stage taught British-style cookery to the wives of our Gurkha soldiers, and in return learned a lot about Nepalese cuisine, along with the local Cantonese style.

Jamaican patties

Later on we both became keen on trying to re-create dishes we encountered on our travels around the world on holidays. The result is that we have an exceptionally wide repertoire of recipes.

Chicken Satay, rice, Gado-Gado and peanut sauce

Actually neither of us feels obliged to follow a recipe too closely, and we often cook meals "inspired by" a recipe, a book, or a chef's style.

Pasta salad with garden veg and boiled eggs

In a typical week we might eat a Chinese stir-fry on Monday, Caribbean Brown Stew Chicken with Rice and Peas on Tuesday, Italian pasta with meat sauce on Wednesday, British-style roast beef with Yorkshire Pudding on Thursday, an Indian curry on Friday, a North African tagine or Middle Eastern meze on Saturday, and something "simple" like Bangers and Mash on Sunday!

Tomato soup with pesto palmiers croutons

We are not vegetarians of course, but we love veg, so our meals often include several different ones. We also love salads and eat them at every possible opportunity.

"Jamie Oliver" salad, with peaches and Prosciutto

Sometimes we eat a snack with a cocktail, before dinner. It's possibly something like this:

Pre-dinner "nibbles"

Jane is diabetic, so we seldom eat puddings - especially not sweet ones - but we do often have fruit (such as home-grown raspberries or blueberries) for dessert.

Raspberries and Blueberries

 I hardly need to remind you that we are very fond of cheese, both used as an ingredient and eaten after the Main, in lieu of a sweet dessert.

Loosehanger cheeses

One final thought: For most of our married life I have been the "Primary Breadwinner", going out to work each day, while Jane has most often been at home, initially looking after the children and subsequently running her own one-person business, so understandably she has done most of the routine cooking. Latterly however, I have been able to take a greater part in the culinary regime.

Reindeer steaks with soft polenta

For health reasons I am now on an 80% working contract, which means that I normally have a 3-day weekend, giving me more opportunity to participate in food shopping and in cooking. That's fine by me. I love cooking and am trying hard to make up for lost time. I feel that if I were to have my time again I might even have been a professional chef.

Polenta with Borlotto beans

A mutual love of food and cooking is one of the things that brings us closer together, and I have had the enormous advantage of having full-time one-to-one tuition! Must dash now, Folks - back to the chopping-board...

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P.S. Jane can take a lot of the credit for our adventures with World Cuisine, by virtue of winning so many foreign holidays - all in a day's work for the editor of the prestigious Competition Grapevine magazine! She writes a blog about competitions, also called The Competition Grapevine and another one called Onions and Paper - named after the most basic ingredients of her two main hobby areas - cookery and crafting.

How to care for your plants in snowy conditions

In view of the current wintery conditions, I offer those of you who don't already know about such things, some advice on how to help your garden cope.

1. Snow looks very pretty, but it can do a lot of damage. If the branches / leaves of your plants get loaded -down with massive amounts of snow, they may snap. Maybe you can lighten their load by gently shaking the branches? And I do mean gently. Because of the cold temperature the branches / leaves are likely to be quite brittle, and  vigorous shaking may cause them to snap. Perhaps brushing the snow off would be better. In the case of shrubs / trees / large plants a garden brush or broom may come in handy (and it stops your hands getting too cold).

2. Plants covered with fleece, and small-mesh nets, are especially vulnerable. The fleece / net will initially protect them a bit, but if the snow on the fleece gets very thick (and therefore heavy) the whole structure may suddenly collapse on top of the plants, which is a lot more damaging than a slow gradual build-up of snow. If you get the chance, it's a good idea to shake some of the snow off the net before this happens.

3. Don't be tempted to brush the snow off cloches or other rigid protective structures. The snow acts as a blanket and keeps your plants at a relatively stable temperature. And unlike the fleece / nets, the cloche is unlikely to collapse. When they are cold, your plants will go into a sort of suspended animation. They like to wake up slowly (when the time comes), so artificial rapid thawing  (e.g. with hot water) is definitely not a good idea.

4. If you have plants in pots, it is advisable to protect their roots by wrapping them in several layers of bubble-wrap or even hessian (aka burlap). Of course it is too late to do this after the snow has already fallen. However, when we get a thaw maybe you could do this task just in case we get another very cold spell...?

5. Undoubtedly the best thing to do with pots is to bring them under cover, in a greenhouse, porch or garage. I sometimes put the most vulnerable of my pot-plants in the garage during a very cold spell. They don't get much light in there, but they can tolerate this for a short while. It's certainly better than dying of hypothermia. My coldframe is currently perfoming a similar task for my little pots of herbs.

Those two big pots in the foregrond, outside the coldframe - topped with domes of snow - are Greek Oregano (a Mediterranean herb you understand). I hope they survive. Likewise this Rosemary:

6. My final thought: when there is snow on the ground, avoid walking around your garden / plot unless you are absolutely sure where things are. It is all too easy to trample on something by mistake! Put a cane or stick at the end of a row to show you where it starts.

Open Kibbeh

The other day I wrote about one of the books I received as a Christmas present - "Jerusalem", by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. The book is full of dozens of things I would like to cook, but as Jane often says to me "we only eat 3 meals a day"! My post today describes a dish called Open Kibbeh, adjusted slightly due to the absence of one or two ingredients that are mentioned in the recipe. For instance I didn't have any sumac, so I used a Za'atar mix, which includes sumac. I am confident that it was quite similar to the authors' original concept!

The target to aim for. The book is beautifully illustrated.

Making Open Kibbeh is like making a kibbeh quiche. Normal kibbeh are a sort of stuffed meatball, but this dish is made in a cake-tin with a removeable bottom and served like a quiche or a cheesecake. It has a base of bulgur (aka, bulgar, bulghur or cracked wheat), on which is heaped a spicy mixture comprised mainly of minced lamb with pine nuts. It is topped with a tahini (sesame paste) sauce. This is how the book describes it:-



Here are some of my ingredients: bulgur wheat, pine nuts, Zatar (or Za'atar), ground Allspice and green Cardamon pods. The latter are very strongly flavoured, so I only used a couple. Ottolenghi's recipe does not call for it, but I'm "on" Cardamom at present, and I needed a flavour to replace the Coriander.

I'm not going to describe the recipe in great detail, because I don't think that would be ethical. If you want to know the details, buy the book!

But in outline: The first step is to cook minced lamb with onions, garlic, pine nuts, chopped parsley and loads of spices. The smell at this point is unbelievably good!

You make the base with bulgur wheat, self-raising flour and water, combining it into a sort of dough, which you then pack into the cake-tin.

The spicy lamb is then placed on top of the bulgur, and pressed down firmly, prior to baking at 200C for 20 minutes.

When the dish comes out of the oven you cover it with a Tahini sauce made with tahini, lemon juice and water, sprinkle it with more parsley and pine nuts and put it back into the oven for another 10 minutes.

The dish is finished when the Tahini sauce is semi-solidified and the pine nuts are golden brown.

The recipe recommends serving the dish warm or tepid, so you can afford to leave it to cool a bit - during which time it firms-up, allowing you to remove it from the cake-tin in one piece.

There, I told you so: it looks like a savoury cheesecake!

I served ours with a selection of salads: grated carrot with raisins; beetroot with shallot, and mixed lettuce and radicchio.

We loved this dish - especially the spicing in the lamb - but I think if I do it again I may try serving it hot, or at least warmer. I would also put the second batch of parsley on the dish AFTER the second cooking, not BEFORE, as the recipe states, because it did go a bit crispy and brown.

Snow, Snow, Thick, Thick Snow

I apologise to any readers from Siberia, Norway, Iceland, Alaska etc, for whom deep snow is a normal feature of their lives. In England, we are not used to having snow in large quantities. We reckon that an inch of snow is a Big Deal! I hope you will therefore forgive me if I publish a few photos of my garden covered in snow...

I'm writing this post on Saturday 19th January, after a full day's snowfall on Friday.

During Friday, we had this much snow:

No, we had this much snow...

Or this much. Suffice it to say, that by our standards we had a fair bit of snow!

See how the wind carved out a "saucer" around the base of this plant pot.

I wonder whether the Curly Endive underneath this cloche will survive. It's probably pretty cold inside there!

I'm not going to suggest that we sit out on the patio and enjoy the scene.

Why does this next one remind me of making a Swiss Roll?

He went that way... (Probably a fox. The prints are too big for a cat.)

The forecast is for more snow on Sunday. Thank goodness we had no plans to go anywhere this weekend. In fact I don't have to go anywhere until Wednesday, so let's hope the roads are fully passable by then.

Arf ! Arf !

"Arf ! Arf !" ?? I expect you think I am barking mad. Well, I am, in a sense. When did you last look closely at the bark of a tree? It's amazing what you see when you do. Here is a little collection of bark photos, to demonstrate the point.