Interlude

Still having problems with this sodding network.

Here's a picture of a sausage to be getting on with...

Ramsons

There are those who would say that my planting wild garlic in the garden is an act of folly, and I'd be amongst their number when I'm grubbing them out of the path. But this time of year they provide a nice picture of glossy fresh green leaves and starry white flowers and I forgive them quite a lot. Especially as they also taste nice, the leaves having that flavour of strong spring onions with a small back-note of garlic about them.

Tonight I made some garlicky mushrooms to go with the pizza. I melted some butter in the frying pan, added a glug of olive oil and then slung in some finely-sliced mushrooms. I'd grubbed up a coiple of wild garlic bulbs, so I cleaned and trimmed these, squashed them with the heavy chopping knife and added these to tne mushrooms. Finally I rolled up a handful of garlic leaves and finely shredded them then added this to the pan.  A minute or so later they were in the serving dish ready to eat.

The intellectual rigour of the English sabbath

The quiet English Sunday is an opportunity for sober reflection of the big issues of life and the prolonged digestion of the issues and outcomes of our current affairs media.

Today we have mulled over:

• The merits — or not — of the lamb chop, roast potato and minty peas smoothie;


• Queen Victoria's moustache cup; and


• Cats' bottoms.

Entropy

Back in the Dark Ages, when I was a kid, the school nature table was arrayed with objects found, all grouped under the headings: " Alive," "Dead" and "Never Alive."

I may do the same with the contents of this fridge…

Show us yer plums!

I'm almost wondering where Summer went: the Michaelmas daisies are in bloom and already swallows are congregating on telephone lines ready for the off.

My garden is a riot. Quite literally (I suspect foxes, though the goldfinches have a guilty look about themselves). The blackcurrants and boysenberries have performed nicely and the rowan groans with fruit. Yet again the cherry disappoints, which is entirely my fault, the tree's doing its best in the circumstances. My dad's trees have provided enough fruit for every beggar and his dog for miles around and I spent part of yesterday picking for the freezer. It still looks like nobody's bothered. The plums and damsons are the same: my brother's Victoria plum is absolutely weighed down with fruit that's starting to go coppery purple and my dad's damsons are also colouring up nicely. My garden's at a higher elevation (well, I'm just up the road) so mine are usually a week or two later. It's looking like the makings of a bumper crop, so we'll be giving the jam-making kit a bit of a pacing this year.

Bad news: no figs. I think the tree needs a lot of TLC after the past two winters.

Taking home the bacon

My dad's got the habit of picking up a 5lb bag of bacon from the butcher's every Friday, whether they need it or not. Because it's a bargain. Weekends are spent farming rashers out to the rest of the family. He called on my brother...

"Do you want any bacon?"

"Yes please."

"How much do you want?"

"How many can I have?"

"How many do you want?"

"Can I have twenty-seven?"

"Can I talk to somebody sensible?"

The brother turned and shouted to the small girl niece.

"Come out here, your grand-dad wants to talk to you."

Damsons in distress

The cold snap has arrived and I've wheeled out the slow cooker again. Chickpeas, carrots, leeks and walnuts: a stew on day one, a vegetable accompaniment to sausages on day two and soup on day three. Nothing special but at least comfortable.

I think I've taken the last of the fruit from the garden. I've put a big bag of rowanberries in the freezer for the family jelly maker (my sister). For the most part it's been a productive year. The pear and the fig disappointed (badly-timed frosts put off the bumble bees and chalcid wasps) and the damson has underperformed again (frost and exposed site; I'll have to sort something out over the winter). So I had enough damsons to be too many for everyday use and not enough to start jam-making with. I didn't want to waste them so I had a bit of a think. In the end I decided to make a sauce, a keeper for in the fridge.

• A dozen or so damsons
• Some vegetable oil
• A small red onion
• Two or three hot green chilis (Jalapeno or, if you're up for it, the hot sweet ones that you get in Asian markets)
• A good-sized lemon
• Cinnamon
• White wine vinegar

Stone and quarter the damsons. Finely chop the onion. Coarsely chop the chilis. Gently stew them in the oil with about a third of a teaspoon of cinnamon until the damsons have broken down. The skins will start to colour the pan. When it becomes a violently rose pink it's ready for the next step. Grate in as much lemon rind as you fancy then add the juice of the lemon. Let it simmer for a few minutes until it's quite thick then pour it into a sterilised jar. Deglaze the pan with a splash of wine vinegar and top the jar up with it.

It's kept a week so far. Hot and tart, it's a nice add-on to a cheese toastie.

(I'd always wondered how a Turkish restaurant I know got such an interestingly-coloured chili paste.)

Drizzly

It would be churlish to complain about the noise from the children's party down the road, so I won't.

I've pigged out on blackberries and apricots and strong Cheddar cheese laden with blackcurrant ketchup. Green tea with rose petals. A young Annie Lennox bopping away with the Tourists.

My life may be a hollow shambles but it's comfortably accessorised.

Old black magic

It's not been a bad year for fruit so far. I had an over-sufficiency of blackcurrants. I off-loaded some on my parents but as I'd already taken a few pounds off their bush they were getting a bit fruit-packed. Especially as they're not supposed to be eating a lot of sweet stuff. I don't have a sweet tooth myself (he says, hiding the evidence of a tube of fruit pastilles I accidentally scoffed in one while shouting at the television news), so I've not been making tarts and the like. Picking at the raw blackcurrants is fine but let's be honest, that faint whiff of cat is always a bit off-putting. Then I had an idea, which is why I've now a couple of jars of blackcurrant ketchup. As always with me, the recipe is very approximate.

• A pound or so of blackcurrants
• Two or three or four chopped cloves of garlic
• A chopped shallot, or a couple of chopped silverskin onions, or you can cheat and cop up a couple of pickled onions, which is what I'd have done had I been planning this
• Oil for cooking; I used extra-virgin olive oil because that's what was on the worktop
• White wine vinegar

Wash the blackcurrants and remove all the bits of stick, leaves and spiders and stuff because this is a vegetarian recipe. Gently fry the blackcurrants until the juices start to run. Now add the garlic and onion and cook until the onion starts becoming translucent. Add enough vinegar to cover the mixture and bring to the boil. As soon as it reaches this stage, bring the heat right down and let it all simmer gently. Now decant the mixture into sterilised small jars. You'll be left with a very messy pan with bits of caramelised blackcurrant in it. Deglaze the pan with a big splash of vinegar and pour this into the jars. Warm another tablespoon of vinegar in the pan and use this to cover the mixtures in the jars. Seal them and put them somewhere darkish for a couple of days.

After a couple of days you'll have a thick, dark purple spreadable mass. The cooking and the vinegar both bring out the sweetness of the blackcurrants (but it still comes as a surprise to me that the result is as sweet as it turns out to be). Spread on some bread with a bit of iceberg lettuce and crispy bacon and the job's a good 'un. It works well with a well-flavoured cheese, too.

I was going to try this on a sausage butty but when I opened the packet they'd gone all furry. I had that bachelor moment where you reckon that a hot grill would burn all the fur off but then common sense took over. So the blackcurrant ketchup works quite well with a last-minute Co-op pork pie.

MacNosh

Nachos.

Crisps and mince.

However did the Scots not invent that first?

Herbidaceous

I'm a bit over-run with marjoram and lemon balm at the moment, which is no bad thing. I literally can't sit in the garden without having to sit on a bunch of one or the other, which is rather lovely.

A friend asked what I'd use lemon balm for in the kitchen. Most lemon balm recipes involve fish but my friend is a vegetarian and I'm no fish cook. I use it a lot in tisanes (a load of crushed leaves and a teaspoon of honey) but usually I just snap a few leaves off to chew absent-mindedly. I thought I'd have a go at putting together a sauce for pasta using it.

It works well with a white sauce with a little (very little) bit of wild mushroom, the flavour infuses the sauce but you have to look for it to realise that it's there. Not a hard sell, I know! All you have to do is make a simple white sauce (or cheat and use a half-tin of Campbell's condensed cream of mushroom), warm it through until it's more-or-less ready then add a handful of finely-shredded lemon balm. Stir it through, give it half a minute on a very low, or even no, light and then stir in the pasta.

I didn't manage to come up with a sauce that didn't involve cream, which is a bit of a shame I feel. The truth of the matter is that even if you leave it to the very last minute to add it to an oil-based sauce some of the flavour's still cooked out. Which still left me with a pleasant little herb sauce:

• Some extra-virgin olive oil
• Some garlic (probably a couple of cloves) not especially finely-chopped, it'll be flavouring the sauce but also providing the texture
• A couple of button mushrooms if you really must
• Two large handfuls of marjoram, tear off the leaves and chop the stems up finely
• A large handful of mint (a small handful if you're like me and have been lucky enough to have some black mint growing in the garden), tear the leaves up and chop the stems very finely
• A handful of shelled walnuts
• Pasta of your choice

Warm the olive oil (be careful not to heat it too fast or it might burn). Chuck in the garlic and cook it gently. Cook the pasta, throwing a handful of walnuts into the water a couple of minutes before the end (to blanch them). When the pasta's nearly cooked it's time to put the herbs in with the garlic. Fold the herbs into the oil until it's wilted. Then fold in the pasta and walnuts. Stir it all together to make sure that everything's had a touch of everything else then serve and eat.

It's a bit nice, honest.

Still not got a lemon balm recipe sorted, though.

Add-on:

I should have mentioned that you can, if you want, spice this up a bit by adding a bit of pickled Jalapeno pepper. It has to be pickled because if you're adding chili to this you also need the bite of the vinegar. Or you can change the vibe, in a nice way, by adding some finely-chopped dill pickle. Some salted capers doesn't hurt, either.

Some days...

...only a crisp butty will do it.

Feeding the five thousand (well, two, very hungry after they'd spent two hours in a traffice jam)

Just for the record:

• Pease pudding
• A wild mushroom and wine pâté I'm feeling rather smug about having made
• Mushrooms marinaded to a Russian recipe that quite scared me but turned out OK
• Baby new potatoes sautéd with haloumi
• A confit of red peppers, fennel and garlic

I can do it every so often after all.

Converzationi

A couple of my friends are from Lanarkshire. The lady of the pair is tall and lean and possessed of that loud, clear diction so beloved of the finishin schools of Hamilton. Dressed up in her Women's Institute bondage gear she looks quite scary. In fact she's a real pussycat, though she'd strongly object to such a slur on her character. At first, and second, glance you'd think her partner a quieter, more contemplative sort and the steadying influence in the relationship. Looks can be deceiving: he's the one who'll tell a coach party to stop rustling their toffee papers because he's trying to watch the play.

We were in a restaurant the other day. Nice place, good food. The party next to use were a group of young blokes in their cups talking bollocks. One in particular was issuing forth with his banalities in an especially loud bray. I could see my companions tensing up. I wasn't much fussed myself: my inner recording angel was enjoying the cabaret.

"If I shaved my beard off I'd look just like my twin brother. It's uncanny!"

"Look, I'm all in favour of the European Union. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't have anything to do with it except as a controlling power to stop Brussels taking over the continent."

"How many of us have got a Gilette razor? I've got a Gilette razor. I bought it so that if I shaved my beard off I'd have a Gilette shave."

In the end my friend snapped:

"Excuse me. Please could you keep the volume down? It's not as if you're interesting."

They muttered apologies and settled down and we resumed our conversation. Being a very serious foodie, the lady had been annoyed by a recent promotion that had concentrated on the size of the pizza rather than the quality. As she told our now very quiet corner of the restaurant:

"Och, seven inches should be enough to satisfy anybody!"

Nature's bounty and that

I started the weekend seriously depressed. The reasons for this are entirely rational - worrying about a pile of stuff which were sensible to worry about but which I couldn't resolve - but as usual I took this as an opportunity to beat myself up for not being a particularly practical person. Which I'm not, I have to hold my hands up. Mind you, I must have had my moments: every so often I'll look at something about the house and wonder how on earth I did it (the hall mirror being a case in point - six foot by four, plate glass on oak frame, mounted on the wall single-handedly by my own fair hand). Sigh...

Yesterday I cheered up modestly. A pair of problems I was concerned about are determined to turn a scary incident into a jokey anecdote (I wonder where I get that habit from?)

I picked a few apples and plums from my parents' garden for them. Coming home I had a nosey round and took a few pounds of nuts off the hazel bush. Technically they're cobnuts, I suppose. I like hazel nuts picked in the green when you can crack the shells with your teeth and fingers and the kernels are white and moist and rich in oil. The best thing you can do with them in this state is to just crack and eat, though they'll go well enough with a decent salad, especially if you include a few bitter herbs such as rocket or chicory. Later on, when the shells are brown and woody, they're great toasted lightly on a dry frying pan. This brings on the flavour, which is great for making pastes, dips and sauces.

Quick recipe that works well with hazelnuts or walnuts.
(Quantities are extremely approximate!)
Toast the nuts lightly in a pan. Let them cool down a bit. Dump them into a food processor. Add some garlic - depending on your taste, one or two cloves per handful of nuts. Add roughly a tablespoon or two of not-very-expensive olive oil. Whizz until smooth. Empty into a container you can cover and stick it in the fridge to let the flavours mellow. Eat it tomorrow with some nice bread and a decent strong cheese. It doesn't keep long.
If you want, you could add stoned green olives to the mix before processing - a one-to-one ratio of olives and nuts gives you an interesting paste.

I noticed last night that the figs were colouring up and, much to my delight, I find that despite the lousy weather I have half a dozen of them ripe. Splendid.

Feeling a bit chipper I had a nosy round the bottom of the garden and discovered that I was wrong to be disappointed with the damson this year. It had flowered well but I couldn't see more than just a couple of scabby articles of fruit. I discovered that one branch, well back in the lee of a big rose bush, was absolutely chocablock with fruit, so I've taken a couple of pounds off for now. I do like damsons: they're a bit rough-and-ready and extremely sour straight from the tree but they make superb jams and sauces. I like them simply washed and halved and fried in the pan with a Cumberland sausage. Besides which, I like the wildness of a damson tree, it appeals to the romantic in me.

The final treat was to find that a bramble I'd missed was fully in delicious fruit. The fruit was picked and the bramble plucked. It's not so bad when even the weeds are productive.

Now then... where were those elderberries?

Breakfast

More proof, as if 'twere needed, of the determinate logic of small female children...

My niece has taken to the habit of having her breakfast at home (porridge, lots of toast and a yoghurt) then toddling round to my parents' place to cadge a lot of toast and some beans. My dad, soft touch as he is, does the honours.

"Don't they feed you at home?" asks my mother.

"I thought you loved me," replied the tot.

Memorial to the unknown herbivore

I was having a friendly argument about vegetarianism. I'm not a vegetarian but do go days without eating meat, not as a conscious effort "to be healthy," just that the meals didn't happen to include meat in them. Most of the vegetarians I know are pretty relaxed about other people's choices and don't impose their views on others unbidden. I do know a few meat-eaters who get a bit evangelical about it, however. Sometimes it gets silly...

"You'd not catch me sitting around eating roots and seeds!"

"What's that you're eating, Bill?"

"A chip butty. Why?"

Herbidaceous

I mentioned a while back that my brother had bought me an aquaculture unit and I promised to let you know how it was going and I haven't. Sorry about that.

I'm growing the set of herbs that come with the kit.

• Chives sprouted almost immediately but have been generally sorry for themselves. Not a success.
• Parsley germinated fitfully and eventually, as parsley does. It's OK but unspectacular.
• An early spectacular success was the dill. It loves the conditions but is a victim of its own success - dill wants to be a tall plant and my hallway is scented by its burning its leaves on the lightbulbs. The only remedy is to keep chopping and eating (it's a hard life). I like dill with potatoes, particularly with creamy mashed potatoes accompanying a decent sausage.
• Thyme was a slow starter but does splendidly. This is a major success and I only wish I did enough cooking with meat to do it justice. It does well with a bit of mousetrap to make a decent cheese on toast.
• Mint was another slow starter. I would have thought the conditions would have suited it to a T but it's frankly disappointing. Perhaps it's the variety. Perhaps it's the environment. Perhaps I've been spoilt rotten by the tub of black mint I've got out in the garden.
• Basil took its own sweet time a-coming but was worth the wait. The pack included two varieties: an obvious Genovese and a probable Black Opal, which tends to lose its colour a bit under these conditions.

So all in all it's a pretty good show. Perhaps the best thing about it is that I can pick a sprig of something to chew in passing. Pretty good.

Red cabbage

I did a few jars of red cabbage the other day, preparatory to the coming hostilities. My sister finally sold her old house the other day, which is some senses is a shame as it was very productive: we'd get stones of fruit from the redcurrant bush; the apples and cobnuts I planted for her are starting to be promising; and there's a big old pear tree of the "almost a William" variety that you could buy cheap from the newspapers in the seventies. This last is perplexing: there are thousands of fruit but they only have a day's grace between having the texture of parquet and being a liquefied mess. We found, by a process of scientific guesswork, that there's about a week in which you can chop and freeze the fruit so that you've the basis for a tasty pear puree throughout the winter. This recipe takes advantage of these pears and some of the five pounds of redcurrants I found when I was looking for the beefburgers. Red cabbage should either be snap-in-your-fingers crisp or meltingly soft, anything in between disappoints. This is meltingly soft.

You'll need:

• A red cabbage. All the finely-tuned weights and measures in this recipe are based around your having a lump of cabbage about the size of one of those spherical plum puddings they always had in the comics. Slice it up finely; if you're to be trusted with a mandolin then go for it.
• Two cloves of garlic, mashed if you can be bothered, otherwise finely chopped.
• A pickled onion chopped finely.
• About a litre of fruit juice: what you don't use you can drink. Apple juice is good. Cranberry juice or pomegranate juice are excellent, if extravagant (if you've some dregs of these left in a carton you could usefully add them to the apple juice). Blackcurrant juice doesn't quite work, the flavours become off-note.
• Some vinegar. Balsamic vinegar's great for colour but red wine or cider vinegar's fine.
• Fruit: the equivalent of two roughly-chopped pears; three roughly-chopped large, dark plums, the riper the better (or a dozen ripe damsons).
• Berries: a large handful of redcurrants works best; cranberries are fine; you can think of better things to do with raspberries (but they work nicely if you want to do it). Blackcurrants don't work. Blackberries give a great colour but don't add anything to the flavour.
• Spices: half a stick of cinnamon; two dozen turns of the black pepper mill; two cloves and half a teaspoon of Chinese Five Spice Powder (or a couple of Szchewan peppercorns).

If you've got a slow cooker, great. If not, use a big pot and the very lowest heat your hob will allow. Chuck the red cabbage, garlic, onion, fruit and spices into the pot. Add a slug of vinegar (you don't need much: the acid in the fruit juice will keep the colour). Now pour in enough fruit juice to just be visible near the top of the cabbage (you don't want to completely cover it - the liquor will expand when heated). Put it on the lowest available heat and leave it for a few hours. Come back, give it a stir, leave it to cool overnight. Next day, put it on a very low light and leave it for a couple of hours. Now it's ready to pack into sterilised jars. You can eat it straight away but it's nicer after a few days.

This goes well with all the usual stews. For the vegetarians, it's nice with pease pudding. It's also good on a butty with fiercely strong cheese.

If you're wanting a white cabbage recipe, Willow had one the other day.

Salami di fichi

My tiny niece amuses me once more. Sat at her breakfast table she suddenly announced:

"Oh I am fed up of this. I need something delicious."

Bearing this in mind, and with an eye on Chrimbo, I have been making some salami di fichi. Now's the time to do it if you want them for the forthcoming hostilities. You'll need:

• Some dried figs
• Some rice paper
• A mixer or mincer
• Soap, water and a towel
• An air-tight container
• An absence of small children, unless they are going to be active particpants
• A complete absence of small, furry animals

You might also want to either leave the front door open or resolve that you're closed to all men until the job's done and dusted. There is a point in the proceedings when you'll be like the tar baby.

• Chuck the dried figs into the mixer. Chop them to bits until it becomes a fine paste. You might need to stop it every so often to persuade the paste not to hide under the blades.
• Wash your hands again. You've picked your nose since the last time.
• Take the figgy past and roll it out into a sausage, same as you did with Plasticene at school. You want it to be about a couple of inches in diameter. If there's lots of figgy paste you may want to make two or more sausages.
• Wrap each sausage in rice paper.
• Wash your hands again. You know why.
• Place them all in the container. Put it somewhere safe for a month or two.

When you retrieve your salami and unwrap each you'll find that you've got a rich, brown, sticky mess that makes you giggle childishly. Don't serve it like this! Cut the sausage into coin-thick slices (you chose which coin). Now eat one. You'll find it tastes rather good: sweet, rich and quite a bit decadent, with the seeds popping in your mouth as you chew.

This is the absolute simplest version of the recipe. If you've got some other dried fruit - apricots, raisins, or whatever - chuck them in. Generally speaking, I'd make sure that at least 60% of the fruit is fig because it makes such a good binding agent. Don't use dried pineapple: that does funny things to the binding. Dried cranberries work surprisingly well and are suitably festive.

You can also add chopped nuts (fresh walnuts are good, toasted hazelnuts are splendid) and orange or lemon peel. Be sure to put them in right at the beginning to make sure they get blended in properly.

I know from experience that these will keep for months. But your tooth might be sweeter than mine!