Garden update April/May

We've been planting new things. I've been growing stuff from seed. The last couple of weeks of heavy rain then sunshine has meant everything is going crazy.

Cut and come again salad leaves outside my kitchen back door. Even when it's dark, it is easy to nip out with a pair of scissors and make a quick salad.

Our jicama experiment is on going. They are a mix between a vine and a squash.

My friend the robin. Always comes out for a snack when I'm gardening.

 The very definition of pot-bound. It's actually burst the terracotta pot.

Finally my first fucking gooseberry. Had these bushes in for 3 years and not a sausage. Up to now. Gooseberry curd on it's way.

 Figs do not like being moved. Repeat: figs do not like being moved. Finally a decent sized fig on its way. But you can even use small unripe green figs. Simmer them with sugar and water to make a gorgeous figgy syrup.

 Elderflower suddenly blossomed. Time to make fritters, cheesecake, champagne and cordial.

 A few wild foxgloves. I like my garden to be an organic mix of wild and structured, decorative and useful.

 Zia Mays putting in some of my tomatoes grown from seed. She got this idea from the Chelsea Flower Show: three canes and garden twine.

 Wallflowers are such a good deal in the garden. Three years of non stop colour.

 Rose and allium with perennial Jerusalem artichokes. They'll be ready in Winter.

I've grown so many tomatoes, they are now everywhere but you can never have too many. This beautiful pot is next to my Big Green Egg BBQ. A 'pot to grill' plant.

My next supper club date is 21st June:

3rd Annual Swedish Midsummer Supper Club

Come to my Swedish midsummer supper club with Linn Soderstrom. This time we will also have Swedish chef Marian Ringborg, who is currently working at Skye Gingell's restaurant Spring. 
This is the third year running we have hosted this. If it's nice it'll be in the garden. We will probably construct a birch Maypole. 
Look: Wear flower crowns or Viking gear if you feel like it.
Food: home cured/smoked salmon, different kinds of herring, Swedish cheeses, berries, crisp breads. Some bbqed food. Strawberry cake. Salty liquorice. Aquavit. Blaabar. All kinds of Scandi yumminess. 
Tickets: £50 (I'm flying chefs over from Sweden).
BYO.
Date: June 21st.
Time: 7.30pm
Where: my place in Kilburn, The Underground Restaurant.
Book at this link: http://www.edibleexperiences.com/p/69/The-Underground-Restaurant/1450001/3rd-annual-Swedish-midsummers-night-meal

Jerusalem artichokes in autumn

As relatives of sunflowers, you can see why Jerusalem artichokes are called 'sunchokes' in the US.

We are trying a batch in the garden. By mistake, I pulled out a root. The choke was tiny, scarcely bigger in girth and length of my little finger. They need more time. Zia told me to cut off the flower heads:

 'Too much energy is going into those and you need it all in the tubers'. 

I shoved the untidy but cheery blossoms into a vase. 

This is a perennial plant that originally comes from the New World, cultivated by native Americans. It isn't as starchy as it tastes, containing inulin. This is a good food for diabetics. The problem is the resulting wind, but if combined with cumin seeds, say in a soup or roasted with olive oil, that should help with the 'fartichokes'. 

Après summer garden catch up

This is the list I sent Zia Mays just now, an update on the garden.

Rose arch gone mad.

Bramble tentacles everywhere.

I need to mow lawn but missed dry weather window.

Planting for winter.

Clearing up for winter.

The tomatoes have been wonderful: dark beefy tomatoes and droopy plum pomodoros

Good amount of jalapeños, froze some, ate some, smoked some. 

 A few padrons, that I've fried in olive oil and sprinkled Maldon salt on.

Not many tomatillos.

No gooseberries.

1 mature fig so progress. Lots of baby fig buds, but there isn't enough season left to ripen them.

Lots of cobnuts but I picked them before fully mature, they were creamy and milky and then- they were all gone. Squirrels?

Tons of grapes, best to pick when not too ripe as they become hollowed out by snails.

Not many blueberries. They hide in undergrowth and are dry by the time I find them.

Saw one red currant? down near fig but wasn’t sure if it was a poison berry.

No artichokes at all. Not a one.

A few wild potatoes.

I’m doing something with the rosehips this year. Update: rosehip and chipotle jam.

Not much fennel. I've picked off the seeds.

Just picked the physalis, quite a few, but ripened late. Ate all of them in one fell swoop. 

No olives again. After cheery potential of flowers but no fruit.

Midsummer night's eve Secret Garden Club.

Secret Garden Club menu, herbs workshop 

It was all the stuff we had for midsummer's eve, Swedish style, with a few dishes added on:
Bloom's Gin with lemon balm sugar syrup, lemon verbena garnish and soda water
Canapés of skagen, egg and Kalix roe on Peter's Yard crisp bread
Smoked mozzarella with lovage and broad beans and hay smoked oil
Strawberry cake topped with wild strawberries and red currants from the garden
Apple fritters with cinnamon sugar

Zia Mays gave a workshop on herbs and microwaves as well as demonstrating her vertical palette garden ideas. More on this in our next post and recipes will be up on msmarmitelover.com over the next few weeks.

Secret Garden Club 'edible flower' lunch 21st September

MsMarmitelover with her flowery pasta

Tickets £40: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/284184
BYO or order from winetrust100.com

Girls, wear your flowery dresses. Boys, wear floral ties and shirts. Hopefully we will be sitting outside if the weather is still good during the autumn equinox. 

We will teach you what flowers are safe to eat and the lunch will be based on edible flower recipes. I will also be returning from a trip to Sicily so I may have some Sicilian treats.

Recipe for Panzanella salad with mouse melons

Mouse melons

Panzanella salad

I made this summer salad, the ultimate in cucina povera, last night using all home-grown ingredients from the gorgeous knobbly tomatoes, to the over-ripened padron pepper which had turned red and spicy, to the absurd dolls house 'mouse melons' which taste of sour cucumber. The latter are very popular in Mexican cuisine. We've grown them for the first time this summer, on recommendation from Tom Moggach, author of The Urban Kitchen Gardener, an unusual and cute addition to our repertoire. The garden is stunning right now. What a fantastic year, so needed after the depressing yield of last year.
I've had panzanella salads with flat bread and with pizza dough but proper sourdough is the right way to go, for both taste and texture.
We had most of it last night but I mopped up the rest this morning and it was even better.

150-170g of torn up sourdough bread
olive oil
1 clove of garlic, grated finely
10 tasty tomatoes
1 onion, sliced thinly
1 chilli pepper, deseeded, sliced thinly
Half a cucumber, peeled and julienned (if you don't have mouse melons)
A handful of basil leaves
Salt
2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
Black pepper
A handful of mouse melons, some sliced, some whole


Put your torn up sourdough onto an oven proof dish and toss with olive oil. Grate a clove of garlic over it and toss again.
Place in a low oven until slightly crispy at the edges. About 15 minutes.
In the meantime, slice the tomatoes, I did some sliced and some quartered.
Toss the onion, chilli pepper and cucumber (optional) with salt.
Then toss all the ingredients together with the basil leaves, red wine vinegar, adding olive oil, salt and black pepper to taste, then mix together including the sourdough.
Add the mousemelons on top.

To accompany this I did a quick bean dish:
2 red peppers from Riverford organics
1 clove garlic, minced
1 box of cannelini beans (380g)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 swirl of truffle oil

We've grown chillis, aubergines, tomatoes, potatoes and possibly sweet potatoes but no red peppers this year. So I roasted two from Riverford until the skins were black. I then peeled the skins off and ripped the pepper into soft strips, removing the seeds.
Using an oven proof dish, douse the red pepper strips with olive oil, salt and grated garlic, mix with the box of cannelini beans and heat for 15-20 minutes in a hot oven. When you remove it from the oven, add a swirl of truffle oil and black pepper.
Serve warm.

Tomorrow we have the Secret Garden Club session on Italian vegetables: tickets £30 for workshop and supper

Menu for Summer Fruits, Summer drinks supper at the Secret Garden Workshop

I'm a berry addict which is no bad thing, since it was discovered that they were in fact, super foods. Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, black currants, red currants, white currants, elderberries, just to mention a few we grow on the British isles, but I envy Scandinavia with their larger range of berries: cloudberry, lingonberry, sea buckthorn berries... I like the combination of sweet and sour, gooseberries should be in season but sadly I haven't seen them around. Can we grow some gooseberries for next year, Zia Mays?
Visiting Jekka McVicar's #herbfest at the Queen Elizabeth hall last night, (do go and see her remarkable herb greenhouse and garden) I saw a copy of her book, which described how to grow your own berries by keeping the pips or seeds, teasing them out from the pulp, drying and planting them. There is a bizarre interesting debate on this Paleo diet site as to whether we should chew the seeds or not.
Zia will be showing guests how to grow berries and make summer drinks while I make the food.
Of late I've been interested in using fruits with savouries and vegetables with desserts. I'm going to play around with the former in this meal. Here a few ideas I've come up with which I'll serve this Sunday. As always, expect the unexpected at the Secret Garden Club.


Berry Spritzers

Strawberry and baby leaf salad with raspberry dressing. Strawberries are still quite acid, so should complement a savoury salad beautifully.

Roasted apricot and Danish blue cheese salad. Roasting apricots makes them gorgeously sour.

Stuffed pasta shells with pickled cherries. I like to add the piquancy of cold pickles to hot savoury dishes.

Summer pudding: a British summertime classic.

Forest fruits sorbet in blueberry soup, with grated chocolate: a sorbet made quickly in the Vitamix and paired with a very Scandi blueberry soup.

Wines from Winetrust100: a new wine club which asks three masters of wine to pick a range of 100 wines, the best for their price, from all over the world.


Book tickets here £30

Lilac sugar

 I have lilac only two or three weeks a year so I like to make the most of it. This time I'm picking off the blossoms to infuse in caster sugar. Later I'll make a syrup or a sorbet.

Syrup:
150g caster sugar
150g water
a few heads of dried hibiscus flowers (optional)

Heat the water and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved then add the lilac petals. Simmer for ten minutes. You can add the hibiscus flowers for colour if you like. Then strain the flowers out of the syrup into a jar or bottle. Keeps in the fridge for 2 weeks.

Use on icecream or in cocktails.


This Sunday we are having a grow your own oriental food workshop and supper at the Secret Garden Club. Tickets for workshop, supper and goody bag are £30.
Book here: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/197293%20£30

Herbs, Jackie magazine and hot and sour soup recipe

Starting Vietnamese rice paper rolls

For me, fresh herbs can transform your cooking from dull, slightly dead food to something living, vibrant and fresh. When I was growing up, herbs were dry things in pots that went unused at the back of your cupboard. There are some herbs that are just as good dried, different even, such as mint but the vast majority are better cut straight from the pot.
Have you ever used micro greens? They are mini versions of some of the classic herbs and leaves (parsley, basil, pea shoots, tarragon) but also some unusual ones such as pink stem radish, salad fennel, red chard, borage and bulls blood. These not only taste great but make a fantastic garnish. The top chefs use them. Zia_Mays will tell you how to grow these and full size herbs in the next blog post.
We've had the odd celebrity guest at the Secret Garden Club; this week we had another thrilling guest, a lady who used to model for Jackie magazine!

Wendy Rigg who is now an associate editor at Reveal magazine! Love the afro and the 'fashion shawl'. I remember when everybody had grown out perms and mohair jumpers were big. 

On Sunday, the Secret Garden Club celebrated Chinese New Year as well as herbs. Here is my menu:

Muddled basil in rhubarb vodka from Chase and raspberry fizz cocktail

Tempura sage leaves

Chinese hot and sour soup with mint and coriander 

Vietnamese spring rolls with mint, coriander and basil (I didn't have holy basil so I cheated with mint and basil)

Plum and green tea buckwheat noodles with ponzu, black sesame seeds, toasted sesame oil and fresh herbs such as micro shiso leaves

Herb salad including chervil, tarragon, curly parsley, coriander, basil, mint, and lettuce with a smoked lemon and olive oil dressing.

Rosemary gelato, sour cream gelato and forest berries simmered in fresh thyme.

Lemon grass tea

Herbs were either grown in the Secret Garden or provided by The Fresh Herb Company. Micro herbs by Wow! Micro Leaf.
We handed out seeds and fresh herb pots as goodie bags to our guests at the end, again generously provided by @thefreshherbco

Here is my recipe for hot and sour soup which really hit the spot on the chilly rainy day.

This is a bit of a mix between a Thai sour soup and a Chinese one. I found just the black vinegar wasn't sour enough so I added lime. A proper Chinese hot and sour soup has jelly ears and bamboo shoots in it. I didn't have any so this is my bastardised version. Fear not, it was damn good even if not entirely authentic. 
It's also very Chinese if all the vegetables are julienned (cut into fine strips) and the tofu precisely cut into squares.
PS: just discovered that not everyone knows what a punnet is. It's a small container of fruit or vegetables. 

Serves 6
3-4 tablespoons of Groundnut or vegetable oil
3 garlic cloves minced
1 inch fresh ginger, grated ( I keep mine in the freezer and use as and when)
1 punnet (150g) shitake mushrooms
1 punnet (150 - 200g) brown mushrooms
2 red chillis, seeded and thinly sliced
a big glug of rice wine or dry sherry
2 litres of vegetable stock
4 (ideally fresh) lime leaves (grow a kaffir lime plant to always have some around)
40ml of light soy sauce
25 ml of dark soy sauce
50ml of Chinese black vinegar
The juice of 4 limes
 3 tablespoons of cornflour mixed with 6 tablespoons of cold water

At the end add these vegetables:
1 punnet (100g) baby corn on the cobs, sliced in half down the middle
1 punnet (100g) sugar snap peas
A few carrots, finely julienned (optional)
1 punnet (150g) silken tofu, diced into 1.5cm squares. Hold it and cut it up in your palm over the pot before adding it. 
You could also add ramen noodles (but then don't add the cornflour mixture as it will be too starchy)

Garnish
1 bunch of spring onions, julienned. 
1 handful of well washed beansprouts
Fresh mint leaves
Fresh coriander leaves

Heat the oil and fry the ginger, garlic, mushrooms together.
Then add the chilli and rice wine.
Add the vegetable stock and the rest of the ingredients until the limes. Taste for the required balance of heat (chili) and sour (lime and vinegar) and salt (soy sauces). Adjust.
Then add the cornflour paste and simmer for 30 minutes, unless you are adding noodles.
Next add the baby sweet corn and tofu and the noodles if you wish.
When serving add some spring onions, beansprouts, then the mint and coriander. 

Recipes: smoked tomatoes and smoked caramel

Preserve them in olive oil.

Yesterday the sun shone and The Secret Garden Club showed how to hot smoke, cold smoke and smoke with tea. In addition to things we've previously smoked (tofu, salmon, trout, peppers, cheese, garlic, salt), we added:
Tiny smoked waxy Cypriot potatoes in their skins (with sour cream)
Smoked 'sun-dried' tomatoes

Smoked vodka from Chase with smoked lemon juice
Smoked halloumi (in a red pepper salad)
Smoked camembert, heated up like fondu and served with freshly baked sesame pitta breads

Semi-dried and dried

Smoked cherry tomatoes recipe:

The tomatoes can be dried on a low oven or in the simmering oven of the Aga. I often find sun-dried tomatoes in the shops to be too tough, reminiscent of rubbery ears. I prefer a semi-dried tomato.
But ooh the taste! So intense, I don't think they will last long in my house. Too good. I bottled them in olive oil.

1 kilo cherry tomatoes
Sea salt
White caster sugar

Halve the tomatoes and lay them, cut side up, on a baking tray. Dry on a low heat (100-150ºc) for around four hours.
I sprinkled them with sea salt and white sugar (winter tomatoes haven't had much sun to bring out their natural sweetness)
Then lay the tomatoes on a bed of foil and cold smoke for 5 to 8 hours.
Put the tomatoes in a jam jar and cover with good olive oil.
Eat them in salads, on toast, out of the jar! Give as gifts!

Smoked caramel

200g of sugar (I used white caster sugar but use whatever you've got)
200ml of double cream
75g of butter
1 tablespoon of good sea salt
Slug of Bourbon/ Jack Daniels/whisky/Drambuie (optional)


Put the sugar in a sheet of foil. Tuck up the sides so that the sugar doesn't fall out but leave the top open. Put this in the cold smoker for about four hours.
Then using the dry method of caramel making, pour the sugar into a heavy bottomed saucepan and let it melt. Do not stir. Brush around the inside of the pan with a pastry brush and water to prevent crystallisation of the caramel or put a tight fitting lid on (mind you have it on a low heat or it'll boil over) which has a similar effect.
Once the sugar has begun to melt, move the pan around, shifting the sugar. But don't stir.
When the sugar is all melted, add the butter and stir in the cream. Keep stirring now.
Add the salt.
Add some alcohol if you like.
Your smoked caramel will taste even more gorgeous. Pour on icecream, on meringues, use in hot chocolate.


I used a ProQ smoker kit. This is ok for smoking small things/thin things but isn't stable enough for whole sides of salmon. I find it cooks the salmon in parts.

ProQ smoker kit which you can put in an existing BBQ and tomatoes waiting to be smoked

The next post Zia will tell you how to tea smoke and give more cold smoking recipes! 

Downton Abbey at the Secret Garden Club

The Secret Garden Club has been visited by a celebrity! Do you remember Cousin Patrick, the mysterious Canadian bandaged possibly fake long lost heir who poor Edith (of course) started to fall for? Yes, he who is also indelicately known in Viv Groskop's Downton columns as 'melty face', came to the Secret Garden Club for dinner!!
He even wrapped some napkins around his head so we could recognise him better.
Anyway even actor Trevor White, for that's his real name, thought the storyline was rather abruptly finished. I thought we were in for a long 'Return of Martin Guerre' type story. Spoiler alert: Trevor has not been asked back. So it seems we won't see the imposter Patrick Cousin Meltyface again.
We ate an autumnal feast of roast pumpkins, roast chestnuts, puffball mushrooms, truffle tagliatelli, pears poached in red wine and drank lots. We didn't do any canning at all. I was too tired and the guests were too drunk.

Puff ball mushrooms fried in butter and garlic

Spaghetti squash being forked at the table, tons of butter in it.

Riverford Organic pumpkin box and our own Secret Garden Club pumpkins. Plus one 'chestnut' flavoured pumpkin from Israel, where I met the guy who 'designed' it. 

Pumpkins roasted with achiote paste, red peppers, smoked paprika. 

Truffle tagliatelli and pink peppercorns.

Never mind, we do have a canning demonstration/workshop and jar meal set for next year. On March 3rd, we have the hugely talented and probably only British expert on pressure canning, Gloria Nicol of The Laundry, coming down to London to teach. We will go through pressure canning, water bath canning and preserving. Jars will be provided by Le Parfait (love their jars). Gloria and I will then make a stunning supper, using our home-canned goodies, all in jars.
March 3rd 2013: Sunday, starts at 2pm. Book here: £60 for workshop and supper. Bring your own alcohol.