Around a Squash in Eight Days

Last year's hot, sunny summer brought trouble and triumph to the plot - while our potatoes and salads struggled, our tomatoes and squashes had a glorious time and produced like crazy, and we're still eating some of those squashes now!

That's the biggest - a 'Musquee de Provence' squash, which is only just ripening (my fault, I think, for planting out rather late) and weighs a whopping 12kg! We're eating its smaller brother this week, and it's gorgeous - chestnutty brown on the outside, vivid orange on the inside, light and moist, and sweet with a slightly citrussy tang about it.

It's quite a challenge, getting through a whole squash that's more than a couple of kilos in weight, and once you've cut one open you know you have a limited time to finish it up! This is how we've been doing it so far:

Day 1 - Sunday: Sausage and Pumpkin Casserole - currently one of my favourite recipes ever, and previously featured on the blog here. It's packed with goodness and just tastes wonderful. If you haven't tried it, DO!

Day 2 - Monday: Vegetable Tagine and harissa couscous from an old blog post here.

Day 3 - Tuesday: Squash and Kale Tart, from this recipe in the Telegraph, as recommended by Jono from Real Men Sow a couple of weeks back. It's cheesy and aromatic and delicious, and I'll definitely be making it again. This first attempt was slightly on the soggy side - you need to drain the cooked vegetables very well before adding them to the tart!

 

Day 4 - Wednesday: Squash and Chorizo Pasta Bake, inspired by this recipe and then made up on the spot, by roasting chunks of squash, pan-frying chopped chorizo with red onion and lots of Swiss chard from the garden, seasoning with nutmeg, pepper and sage, then mixing it all up together with cooked pasta, a splash of milk and some grated cheese, and bunging it in the oven for a while. It was easy, very tasty and satisfying - though it took a while to make, what with having to roast the squash separately first.

Day 5 - Thursday: Squash and Stilton Pie, a lovely recipe which I adapted from a food magazine last year and will share with you now!

Squash and Stilton Pie
(serves 4 quite generously)

• Preheat the oven to 180°C.
• Sauté around 180g leeks and 180g cabbage in a little oil with a pinch of rosemary for 6-8 minutes, until soft.
• Add around 480g diced squash and cook for 2-3 minutes.
• Add 3 tbsps plain flour and stir in thoroughly, then add 400ml stock, stirring well, and simmer for another 10 minutes until the squash is cooked through. Remove from the heat.
• Meanwhile, butter a pie dish (20cm diameter and 4cm deep is a good size), roll out two thirds of a block of ready-made pastry and line the dish with it. Roll out the other third to fit the top.
• Into the vegetable mix, stir about 120g crumbled Stilton and another pinch of rosemary. Check seasoning, then spoon the filling carefully into the pie.
• Brush the edges of the pastry with water and lay the pastry top over the pie. Crimp the edges with your fingers and cut off the excess pastry. Then brush the top with milk or beaten egg to glaze, poke a hole in the centre to let hot air out, and place in the oven for 20-30 minutes, until golden brown.
• Serve with buttery mash and peas.

A photo of a wedge of pie is probably never gonna look that good, but here goes:

Day 6 - Friday: A couple of weeks ago we dined with some friends at Rabot 1745 in London - a new restaurant from Hotel Chocolat, featuring cacao as an ingredient in every dish! See the menu here - ooooh, it was good! Here is my cacao-marinated steak with root veg, white chocolate horseradish mash and red wine cacao jus...

Before our meal we each were served an amuse-bouche of delicious and sweet butternut squash soup, and though we could only guess what was in it, my friend Dave and I decided to try our hands at recreating it for lunch! We roasted chunks of squash, a wedge of red onion and two garlic cloves, infused some chicken stock with a star anise, then blended the roasted veg with the stock, grated in a little nutmeg, added some butter and melted in three squares of quality white chocolate! It was very nice - buttery and nutty with a hint of vanilla - and pretty close to the soup we were trying to imitate, though I'm planning on having another go at perfecting it... I always find squash soup recipes overdo the spices and don't truly make the most of the flavour of the squash - you'd think pumpkin actually tasted of nutmeg, ginger, allspice and cinnamon, the amount people add all the time! - so this is an approach I really liked to bring out the rich and sweet qualities of what should be the star of the dish!

Day 7 - Saturday: Well, I'd like to tell you I made something else new and exciting, but it was a long and tiring day and I really needed something easy to throw together... So we made another pasta bake (similar to Wednesday's) with frozen spinach, lots of sage, a handful of toasted pine nuts and oodles of melty cheese. Lovely jubbly.

Day 8 - A couple of days later I remembered I just had a few extra chunks of squash left from roasting the last wedge on Sunday, so I mashed it up and whipped up these cheesy squash fritters for lunch. They were yummy, but I'd use just a little less salt next time. And I should probably have served them with a salad instead of munching them down just on their own...

So there you go - that's how we get through a great big squash without boring everyone silly. When it's time to eat the 12kg one, though, I'll have to give some away - or have a big dinner party! (I make that enough squash for about 24 meals for four!)

We'll definitely be growing Musquee de Provence again this year, along with our reliable favourite Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato squash (still got one of those waiting to be eaten too), some Crown Prince (another new one on us last year and it really is as good as they say - such rich, sweet flesh!), Uchiki Kuri (which we've never succeeded with yet but I'm determined!), the rare Blue Banana, and whatever pumpkin seeds I've got left over from last year. With their versatility, variety, low maintenance plants and great storing ability, I just love winter squashes!

Winter catch-up!

By the end of October our garden beds were looking good, full of pak choi, turnips, kale, radishes, winter lettuces, perpetual spinach, kai lan, lamb's lettuce, purple sprouting broccoli and carrots, not to mention self-seeded claytonia everywhere.

The greenhouse was full of pots of rocket, mustard, pak choi, lettuce and spring cabbages.

The saffron came up but didn't flower, which was disappointing. I've been feeding it all winter to try to build it up for next year. I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be this floppy...

On the plot, we had a few leeks doing well, and our over-winter onions and garlic got off to a great start. We even managed to pick a couple of big bags of chickweed for the dinner table, and turned them into a creamy green sauce to serve with rostis and poached eggs with lots of parmesan.

In November, I was given a mushroom growing kit for my birthday, and proceeded to grow lots of lovely pearl oyster mushrooms. The kit, from Fungi Futures, is easy to grow indoors and produces three flushes of mushrooms over a couple of months.

Good, huh? Growing mushrooms like this is fun and a great experience, and it's amazing to watch how fast they grow! This kit makes a great gift, but it's a rather expensive way to get your mushrooms and there must be more cost-effective alternatives to grow them long term... I've always been a bit put-off by 'gourmet' mushrooms as I find some varieties rather rubbery and weird, but now I can safely say I like oyster mushrooms so maybe I'll see what I can do about growing some more...

In December I discovered this wonderful recipe for Seville orange cheesecake - the best orange cheesecake you're ever likely to taste and possibly the bestest ever cheesecake ever. And, being someone who doesn't like traditional fruity spicy Christmas desserts, I made this equally awesome choc-and-nut Christmas pudding for the big day. The recipe is adapted from a Delicious Magazine recipe, but after a trial run I decided there was plenty of room for improvement, so here's my version.

Choc-and-nut Christmas Pudding

• Grease a 1.5 litre pudding basin and dust with cocoa powder to prevent sticking.
• Beat together 175g unsalted butter (at room temp), 100g caster sugar and 60g soft brown sugar until light and fluffy.
• Beat three medium eggs into the mix, a little at a time.
• Stir in then sift in 100g plain flour, 45g cocoa powder, 2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda and fold in thoroughly.
• Fold in 50g chopped hazelnuts and 50g ground almonds, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 2 tsp mixed spice, 75ml full-fat milk, the zest of one large orange, and 150g chopped dark chocolate (or dark chocolate chips).
• Pour into the pudding basin and seal with greaseproof paper, foil and string - Lesley Waters shows how here. Then put the pudding basin in a large pan with a lid, add enough hot water to come halfway up the sides of the basin, cover, and simmer for two hours. Make sure the pan doesn't dry out.
• For the sauce, place 125g dark chocolate (broken up) in a jug with 2 tbsp golden syrup and a good splash of brandy. Heat 250ml double cream and 150ml full-fat milk in a pan until almost boiling, then pour over the chocolate and stir until it makes a smooth, glossy sauce. (If it doesn't come together, transfer to a bain marie and keep stirring, or microwave it for a few seconds at a time, stirring in between, until it does.)
• Unwrap the pudding, run a knife carefully round the edge, and turn it out onto a serving plate. Dust with icing sugar or add other decoration as desired, and serve hot with the chocolate sauce.

It's dense and crumbly and rich, just like a Christmas pud should be, and full of chocolatey goodness with lots of nutty crunch and just a touch of spice to keep things festive. It's best served hot, and don't forget the brandy and chocolate sauce!

In January, during a mild spell, we harvested our Jerusalem artichokes. The crop was smaller than I was expecting - I don't know if they didn't do very well (I didn't notice them flower) or if we just missed them in the heavy clay soil! I read somewhere that they were good for breaking up heavy soils but they were extremely hard to dig and even harder to find, caked in clay! I'll soon find out how many we missed when those we left behind start growing in spring...

I picked a few more bits and pieces from the garden, and was delighted to find I could put a whole meal together with homegrown ingredients - in January!

I slow-roasted some pork shoulder with herbs and red wine til it was fall-apart tender, and served it up with pureed Jerusalem artichokes, fresh patio-grown new potatoes, braised turnips and baby onions (stored from summer), and garlicky kale and chard. It was a fab meal and so satisfying to be able to do that in January, even if it was just the once! The Jerusalem artichokes were a new one on us and we were both very pleasantly surprised by their sweetness and flavour. I do hope we get more next year!

I've had three chilli plants overwintering on my windowsill, all full of fruit which I seem to use up terribly slowly (I'm too used to just chucking some powder in), so I picked them all, strung thread through their stalks and hung them up to dry.

We're in February now and the garden's looking a bit sorry for itself, having spent several weeks under snow recently. My remaining radishes are rotten, the pak choi is bolting (already??), and the outdoor winter lettuces have vanished. The carrots are doing about as well as they always do for me - I might as well give up sowing carrots altogether! The greenhouse lettuces are doing really well, but a late family of caterpillars ate most of the rocket and the rest has now bolted. The broccoli is not really big enough in its containers - I'm getting the feeling it really needs to go in open ground.

I've had quite a few pickings from my winter garden - kale has probably fed me most, and the Jerusalem artichokes and winter potatoes (fleeced on the patio) were definitely worthwhile. There are still quite a few turnips, winter lettuces, lamb's lettuce and pak choi to be eaten, claytonia as always, and some very small spring cabbages which I hope will reach a useful size as spring comes on. The perpetual spinach and chard are just starting to get going again and signs of new growth are everywhere. Hurrah!

And of course, the sowing has begun for the new season, with leeks in pots outside, and slow-growing chillies, peppers and aubergines on the windowsill. I started them early this month - later than last year, as they got a bit much to cope with before planting out, but still early enough, I hope, to give them a decent head start and an earlier crop.

Writing this, I've just remembered I started my first early potatoes about this time last year, and this year I haven't even bought my seed potatoes yet! I must get a move on! The plastic greenhouse is on its last legs, poor thing, and needs replacing, and I must find a pot for the plum tree I've ordered too. I haven't even thought about broad beans yet and I dread to think what the allotment is looking like right now! February 21st? It's practically March!

Figs

When you start growing food, one of the first pieces of advice you get is to grow those foods you eat a lot, and those that represent the best value; things that are expensive to buy in the shops. Well, I don't eat figs very often but it's purely because they're so expensive - I love them. So when I wanted to expand my fruit plant collection this spring I splashed out on a fig tree.

I chose 'Brown Turkey', apparently the most reliable in our climate, bought it in March and potted it up by the back wall, where I hope in the spring and autumn the house can provide it a bit of extra warmth and shelter. Figs thrive in pots, with their roots restricted, so this is where it will stay - and I'll perhaps move it into the summer house over winter for frost protection. It was not much more than a stick in a pot when it arrived, but after a few weeks and a bit of sunshine, it began showing buds and its first little fruit. How strange to see fruit forming without first seeing flowers and leaves!

Leaves followed, of course, but no further figs, sadly. The brown spots on a couple of leaves appear to be rust, due to too much moisture either in the pot or in the air. It's not spreading, but I think I'll pinch the worst offenders off to be on the safe side, and give it some extra seaweed treatment. Apart from this, the plant has been healthy and trouble free, and its proximity to the house means it's unlikely to get any attention from birds (fingers crossed).

Now, when I first looked into fig-growing, several sources informed me that figs forming this year would not be ripe until next year. The tree starts to produce tiny figs throughout the summer, and at the end of the growing season any small ones which have formed late should be pinched off to concentrate energy on the earlier-formed ones and get them ripe next season. At least that's what they say. As you can see, my fig didn't hang around, but to my surprise, ripened up over the last couple of weeks!

A few days ago, the fig was hanging straight down and its skin starting to look papery and wrinkled - the signs that it was ripe. It seemed a little small still - elongated rather than plump. I guess I must have underwatered or underfed it at some stage although I have been careful to give it plenty since it started ripening. (I just now read that too much water during ripening can make them split - whoops!)

I ate my one fig all on its own, savouring every moment, and it was wonderfully fragrant, earthy and sweet. I only hope I get to savour more than one next year! I'll be feeding the plant often to encourage it...

My own fig harvest may have been small, but while I was still in a figgy kinda mood I noticed Sainsburys has an offer on Turkish figs at the moment - just £1 a pack! - and, inspired by a fig and dolcelatte tart recipe I spied in Delicious magazine, I rushed out and bought some.

Figs pair well with smoky meats, ripe cheeses, nuts and bitter greens, as most will know; figs and ham, or stuffed with goats cheese, are classics. In our house ripe cheeses are a bit risky (blue? "too socky", goats? "too farmyardy"), so I went for a nice safe bit of brie instead of the dolcelatte, and there's lots of Swiss chard in the garden and leeks are in season, so I added some extra greens to the recipe. And I didn't have any walnuts for the nutty pastry, but I did have a handful of pistachios... Well I never really follow a recipe; I just use it as a starting point... The bacon in the recipe is entirely optional - this would be great without it as well.

Chard and Fig Tart
(serves 4 or more)

• Combine 250g plain flour, 50-80g finely chopped walnuts or similar and a big pinch of salt, and rub in 150g cold unsalted butter with your fingers until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.
• Combine an egg yolk with 2 tablespoons cold water, and add gradually to the butter/flour until it comes together (you may not need it all). Knead briefly to combine, then chill for 15 minutes.
• Roll the pastry out (it's very crumbly - try rolling it out between two sheets of greaseproof paper for ease) and transfer to a 30cm square baking tray or flan dish. Prick the bottom all over with a fork, and chill for a further 15 minutes.
• Trim the edges, line the flan case with greaseproof paper and fill with baking beans or uncooked rice, and bake for 10 minutes at 180C. Then remove the paper and beans/rice and cook for a further 10 minutes.

• Finely slice 4 baby leeks and fry gently in a little oil over a medium-low heat, along with a handful of lardons, or 3-4 rashers of smoked bacon, chopped. Meanwhile, strip the leaves from the stems of around ten large chard leaves, finely slice the stems and add them to the leeks. Chop the greens and add them after a couple of minutes. Cook gently until the chard is wilted and any juices are reduced away.
• Time to assemble the tart: Spread the leek/chard/bacon mixture evenly over the pastry base. Beat two eggs and the extra egg white with 100ml milk, season, and pour evenly over the veg. Quarter 4-6 large figs and arrange them on top. Finally, slice/tear up 100-150g cheese (blue-veined, goats cheese, or brie) and scatter over the tart.
• Bake for 20 minutes at 180C, until the figs are caramelised on top and the cheese is oozing and golden.

This was delicious - a perfect combination of crumbly nutty pastry, tasty greens, salty bacon, sweet figs and oozy cheese - and certainly passed the family supper test, with the additional of a few roast potatoes to make sure no-one could possibly go hungry. Lil sis discovered a new food she likes and lil bro (I probably shouldn't call him that) told me it was good three times without being asked!

New Potatoes

As well as my usual maincrop of Kestrel potatoes on the allotment, I'm growing spuds in sacks in the garden this year for the first time. I started the first ones - three 'Foremost' earlies - in late February, with a covering of fleece, against the wall of the house where it's a little warmer than in the open. They were growing by March 20th, when I sowed more 'Foremost' and some 'Charlotte' in two more sacks.

They all grew pretty well, and I earthed them up periodically until the sacks were full to the top. The foliage was so big and healthy I eventually had to stake it back to keep the walkway round the side of the house clear. But they took a long time to flower and I'm not even sure they all did - I blame the gloomy weather - and when I had a rummage around in the soil of my earliest-planted potatoes in late June I was dismayed that I couldn't find a single spud! Early potatoes are supposed to take 10-12 weeks from planting to harvesting - this was at around 17 weeks!

 
But I had broken quite a lot of the foliage off by accident when I was trying to keep the walkway clear, and realised that that first early planting wouldn't be able to grow much more anyway, so a couple of weeks later I gave in to curiosity and emptied the sack. I found the soil rather dry - apparently all the rain we've been having didn't reach them enough in the shelter of the house and didn't penetrate deep enough into the sack - but at the bottom of the bag I found several handfuls of beautiful firm white tubers. Phew! Some of them were tiny and I expect they still could have got bigger with more watering and more time (and without having their leaves broken off).

Fresh potatoes are so delicious, and we ate them up quickly in a Ligurian pasta dish with green beans and homemade pesto, and boiled and buttered with a pie. My faith is restored that something really is happening in the other sacks, and I quickly replanted the first with my last two 'Charlotte' seed spuds - I have ten 'Melody' spare too so I'll keep the cycle going when I harvest the others. Shrivelled-up seed potatoes that have been chitting since spring grow like the clappers - they were up in less than a week and growing at an incredible rate!

I'm a bit confused that all the potatoes harvested were right at the bottom of the sack - I thought the whole idea was that earthing up encouraged more tubers to form higher and higher up. I did find a tuber high up in another sack while rummaging, so this obviously can happen to some extent. But another piece of advice is to plant tubers in levels, so that you have more plants per sack, each producing tubers at different heights - I suspect this may be more productive and I think I'll try it next time...

Nome's First Purple Sprouting Broccoli

Yes, I finally managed to produce some psb this year!

My homegrown seedlings last summer, if you remember, died of... ahem... drought, and I bought some new ones from Homebase later in the year and planted them in big pots in early October. Well, I guess early October was too late, as the plants didn't really get that big. But a couple of them finally produced their first spears a few weeks ago.

I cut them as soon as they got to a decent size, to encourage more shoots. They were delish, even if they didn't add much to a meal!

And the side shoots grew and grew... They were pretty thin, but I thought they might get fatter with time. They didn't.

This morning I went out and cut most of them for breakfast - like asparagus, psb is lovely with eggs.

What a disappointment! Even though the first spears were good, these were bitter and the stems were really stringy and tough! Ugh!

So where did I go wrong? I can't find an answer on the internet. Someone hinted that a mild winter may lead to bitter broccoli, but I haven't heard any other home-growers complaining about theirs. Other than that, I can only think that it might be down to planting out so late, or letting the spears get so tall. Anyone know better?

Luckily I have discovered broccoli leaves are surprisingly good eating (unless they have now gone bitter too) so I'll use the rest of the plants up pronto.

I am determined to do better this year and plant healthy home-grown seedlings out at the proper time!

Storing Parsnips

I love parsnips - they're one of those few veg I can virtually ignore from the day I sow the seeds to the day I dig them up, and still get a reliable crop every time. We grow 'white gem', sprinkling a few seeds every six inches or so in April, then as long as I remember to thin them to one plant per station at seedling stage, they get along just fine by themselves for the next eight to ten months. A few low-maintenance back-ups like this somehow help make up for the failures and the fussier, tricksier crops I struggle with sometimes!

We usually leave our parsnips in the ground over winter, where they keep just fine, but of course we can't get to them when the ground's frozen hard or covered in several inches of snow, so we usually don't get to eat them until the spring, when we have to catch them before they put on too much new growth and start getting woody. This year I thought it was time to try storing them at home.

Here they are - all six kilos! A variety of sizes but all useful and all healthy. It's important to leave them in the ground until the first few frosts, as it's the cold that makes them take on their sweetness.

Parsnips need humidity and cold to store well - ideally temperatures 0C-4C. I've read that you should be able to store them in the bottom of the fridge for up to six months, but this has never worked for me, and I don't like the idea of blanching and freezing them. So the only other thing to do is store them in soil (or sand, or coir, of leafmould) in a cold place, just as if they were still in the ground. I've packed ours into a box of soil, covered them over and put them in the shed to keep them from freezing - and I must remember to check the mice haven't got in every once in a while!

Here's looking forward to lots of parsnip bread, parsnip soup, and roasted parsnips on Christmas day! And I'll be sending a photo of some choice specimens for Matron's Christmas veggie blog post too.

Goodbye Summer...

With temperatures set to drop close to freezing later this week, and squash plants turning brown and straggly on the plot, we've had to bring in the last of our summer crops.

I am very disappointed with our pumpkin/squash harvest, which totals a measly 5.5kg. Most years we bring home whole pumpkins weighing that much! Here it is: two Baby Bear pumpkins, one stunted and underripe Atlantic 'Giant' (ha!), one miniature Sweet Dumpling, two smaller-than-usual Thelma Sanders and one very tiny and very unripe Butternut. Sigh.

I'm most disappointed with the Thelma Sanders - in all previous years they've reliably produced several big fruits per plant - this year just one small one each. What went wrong? Slugs were certainly a major problem this year, destroying two whole Crown Prince plants and eating the other Atlantic Giant pumpkin, which was looking really good early in the season. Perhaps they thrived in the cool and damp summer. Perhaps I should just be spending more money on pest control... I planted the seedlings out a bit late too, which meant they were a little pot-bound and took longer than usual to settle in. And the weed jungle which came up while we were on holiday couldn't have been timed much worse and gave the young plants a lot of competition. Hmmm. Must do better next year...

These will sit in the sun by our back door for a while now to finish ripening (hopefully) and for the skins to cure for storage (not that it'll take long to eat this little lot).

Still, it's not all bad news - we have dug up another 13kg potatoes, bringing our total to something around 30-35kg, and we even found a late handful of strawberries and raspberries!

In the garden, the tomatoes are still going - they've given us fruit since the beginning of July, sixteen weeks ago! Despite blight finally hitting the plants about a month ago, very few fruits have been affected and they're actually still producing! The plants look a total mess though... Today I will pick the rest of the ripe fruit, but I think I'll leave the green ones where they are just to see if they can continue to surprise me...

The courgettes and cucumbers have just about finished now, so I've picked the last fruits to keep in the fridge until I'm ready to use them, so that just leaves the peppers, and there are so many! I'm wondering whether to just haul the plants indoors on cold nights, rather than picking them all at once and trying to eat them all really fast! I think I'll overwinter a couple of plants anyway, but they're not small so it'll be interesting...