Seriously Slow Fast Food

I made this meal for our dinner on Saturday night.

As beef burger meals go it was pretty amazing and I basked in the glow of having created something I would have happily paid a premium for in a restaurant. With such a popular and obvious restaurant sort of a dinner it was inevitable that I found myself comparing it to meals I have had when eating out or even fast food I have taken home. For a moment I scoffed - after all the burger had only taken 15 minutes to cook from frozen (whilst I busied myself with chopping salad vegetables) and yet the end result was so much better than something I could have ordered at a fast food place.

As I sat down to eat, I found myself analysing the meal to work out why it was so much better than a McDonalds. Slowly it began to dawn on me that although it had taken only about 20 minutes to cook and assemble, it had in fact required a good deal more time and effort than the finishing flourish may have suggested. Like a swan swimming effortlessly over the water, the time to make dinner belayed the hours of background effort this meal had taken.

Earlier that day, with dinner in mind, I had made a batch of purple coleslaw. This is made by chopping up red cabbage, a small red onion and grating in some raw beetroot. A little salt and pepper and several generous heaps of mayonnaise are then stirred in to finish the job. It keeps well in the fridge for several days so it is a good one to make ahead.

Even earlier in the day I had measured ingredients into my bread machine, set that off for an hour and half and then proved and finally cooked 8 bread rolls. I had sprinkled 4 with sesame seeds to have with dinner and bagged up the other 4 to have with soup for lunch on Sunday.

It had been last week when I had mixed some minced beef with some salt and pepper and a little umani paste and then carefully formed them into pasties. I had frozen the eight beef burgers to have a quick and convenient meal at a later date.

It was the micro leaves salad on the side of the plate that had taken the most amount of forward planning. It being winter and not the ideal growing conditions, these tiny leaves had finally become big enough to eat some 6 to 8 weeks after I had sown the trays of seeds in my greenhouse. They are a new venture for me and a bit of an experiment but they made an interesting and nutritious addition to our evening meal.

So there it was. Where exactly should I place my time-marker to work out how long it had taken to make dinner? At the 20 minutes it had taken to cook and assemble? At the beginning of the day when I had made the bread and coleslaw, or as far back as when I had batch made the burgers? Or was it reasonable to stretch it as far back as when I had sown the seeds for the salad leaves? Even McDonalds could claim time for growing salads in their production line, time for making their buns or chopping their chips. It isn't something the customer troubles themselves with when waiting for their order on a Saturday night. So maybe we should only go back to the 20 minutes I spent in the kitchen making dinner. It's amazing what you can do in just 20 minutes!

Tarte Citron (avec rhubarbe et confiture de framboise)

Whilst reading a magazine article in January about how the latest gadgets could help you achieve your "New Year New You", I came across Duolingo - a free app that can help you learn a new language. I have for a while wished my French wasn't quite so embarrassingly awful so I wondered if I could use the app to polish it up a bit. I do have a GCSE in French but given that that was achieved some 25 years ago, to say I am rusty would be an understatement. When my daughter is doing her French homework I like to "help" just to see how familiar the words are but I can't begin to string a sentence together. This is evident too when we travel to France and have to mainly get by with a good deal of arm waving with the occasional word thrown in. It is not elegant and certainly not something to be proud of.

So, for the last 34 days (it keeps count), I have been spending 20 minutes a day using Duolingo to practice French. Sometimes when it comes up with sentences along the lines of "The cat eats when the cow eats" I wonder where this is getting me but on other occasions when I come across a sentence that means, "It is difficult to choose," I think, wouldn't it be nice to have phrases like this on hand when pondering which cakes to buy in one of the many amazing patisseries in France. Some days I feel as if I am making huge progress and on other days I still struggle to string a coherent sentence together. Still, come June when we next go to France I shall have a better idea if my efforts have been worthwhile.

With this daily focus on French, I now find myself often thinking about our trips to France - both past and future and I have to admit that shopping for food is one of the aspects I love the most. We do particularly enjoy visiting the patisseries and each of us has our favourites. My husband's favourite is Tarte Citron so when I was staring at the lemons lurking in the bottom of fruit bowl, wondering what I should make with them I suddenly thought of Tarte Citron.

A quick search of the interest and I got to grips with the basics and realised I had everything I needed to make 6 individual tarts. Because it required me halving a recipe, I was left wondering if I should use one and a half lemons (what to do with the remaining half?) or if I should just use one. In the end I decided to use one lemon and compensate for the missing half with two generous spoonfuls of Roasted Rhubarb Curd from the fridge. Traditionally a Tarte Citron is decorated with dark chocolate - sometimes spelling out the word "citron", sometimes just as a sort of chocolate button in the centre with the word written on it in edible gold and sometimes just in a zig-zag drizzle. As Steve isn't a huge fan of dark chocolate and I couldn't be bothered with the faff of melting and piping chocolate, I decided to use Raspberry Jam instead. As it happened, I was making a fresh batch of jam this afternoon anyway so I drizzled it whilst it was still warm and it turned out to be an amazing flavour combination. A curl of homemade lemon ice-cream on the side and, although not as perfect in presentation as a French patisserie, it was a lovely dessert. Apparently I am currently 41% fluent in French and I guess I'm similarly competent in patisserie making.

Individual Tarte Citron (makes 6)

165g plain flour

45g cold butter

15g icing sugar

Splash of milk

2 eggs

50ml double cream

70g caster sugar

1 lemon - zest and juice

2 heaped teaspoons of rhubarb (or lemon) curd

Some raspberry jam or dark chocolate to decorate

Rub together the flour and butter until it has the consistency of fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the icing sugar and add a splash of milk to bind. Wrap the pastry in Clingfilm and chill for about 15 minutes. On a floured surface, roll out the pastry until about 5 mm thick. Grease 6 tartlet cases. Use a small dish or bowl to cut around to make pastry circles to line each tartlet case. Place in the fridge to chill again. Preheat oven to 180°C then put a piece of greaseproof paper into each pastry case and weight it down with baking beans. Blind bake the pastry for 7 minutes then remove the paper and beans and bake for another 5 minutes. Leave to cool completely. 

Turn the oven down to 170°C then make the filling. Start by whisking together the two eggs then add the cream, caster sugar, lemon and curd and whisk again until smooth. Place the pastry cases on a baking tray and put the tray on the oven shelf. Carefully pour the filling into the cases then carefully push in the oven shelf and close the door. Bake for 15-20 minutes until just set. Remove from the oven, cool completely then chill. Drizzle over the jam or melted chocolate then serve.

Cream Horns Connecting the Generations

It was a day in February when I was stood in my parents' kitchen helping my mum put the finishing touches together for a family meal in honor of my birthday. The kitchen, although changed slightly from my childhood, is a familiar one and I can still move around it, reaching for the right drawer or cupboard to find whatever utensil I require. I can't remember what it was that made me open "that" drawer. You know the one, the one that every kitchen has. The one that contains all those useful but not daily used, oddly shaped, impossible to categorise or stack neatly utensils.

I would have pushed the drawer closed after retrieving whatever it was I needed except my daughter had her nose in it, fascinated by the array of odd and sometimes alarming looking utensils inside. They were things that my mum had collected over the years. Some dated from gifts from her wedding day, others she had bought and more still that she had inherited from her own parents or in-laws. She took delight in spending a few minutes with my daughter, holding up objects, asking her if she knew what it might be used for and then explaining or demonstrating it.

It just so happened that in this drawer were a neat stack of 6 metal cones which my mum explained were cream horn moulds. My daughter is, of course, an avid Great British Bake Off fan and had enjoyed watching the contestants making cream horns in the last series so her eyes lit up at this. "Here," my mum said to her, "have them, you are more likely to make cream horns than I am." She couldn't remember ever making cream horns herself and suspected she had inherited these from her father-in-law who was a pastry chef by trade.

Back home I chucked the moulds into my own version of "that" drawer, knowing it wouldn't be long before they were out again. Then, as Mother's Day approached I suggested to my daughter that I would enjoy a cream horn or two for that special day.

We looked up GBBO winner, Nadiya's recipe and bought some puff pastry, cream and mascarpone then on Mothering Sunday my daughter set about the task of making them. As we only had 6 moulds (and there are only 4 of us), we halved the recipe. We used bought puff pastry too as it is perfectly good and a lot less time consuming. I was required now and then for holding various things as they are a little fiddly but other than that my daughter got on with it on her own. She decided she didn't fancy the "mocha" aspect of the recipe so she splashed in some homemade raspberry cordial instead to have a raspberry cream filling.

I'm pleased to say that the end result was both delicious and beautiful and I am proud of my daughter's cooking skills and willingness to tackle a recipe. I emailed a photo of the cream horns to my mum and she too was impressed and said that my granddad would be very proud if he knew his great-granddaughter had used his moulds to create such a lovely Mother's Day gift for his granddaughter. Mother's Day is a special day to think about family members and these simple utensils, passed down the generations, made me feel a link to my family both present and past.

Learning to smoke food in Milton Keynes

When one of those A5 flier magazines drops through my letterbox I always make a point of flicking through it from cover to cover. Admittedly, often after a quick flick the magazine ends up in the bin but on some occasions my attention is caught by an article that seems worth reading or an advert for a local service that strikes a cord of relevance. It was on one such flick in January that I came across an advert for the Coldsmoking Cookery School. Stopping to read further I discovered that it was based in Great Linford in Milton Keynes and that they offered day courses on how to smoke food.

I have dabbled in smoking food for a couple of years now. I bought myself a small "stove top" hot smoker and I have experimented with using it to smoke things such as cashews and almonds. I have also used it to smoke both plums and tomatoes in order to create my Smoky Plum Chutney and Smoked Tomato Chutney. This limited success made me want to learn more about the possibilities of smoking. However, I was equally motivated by my failures. Despite smoked cheese being one of my favourite foods, I soon discovered that it is not something you can hot smoke! And, having had a conversation with Chris from Upton Smokery, I was intrigued by the possibility of smoking things such as salt and maybe even sugar.

With these ideas jostling in my head, I decided to look the course up on the internet to find out more. It was here that I discovered that the course would cost £125 for the day so I figured it would make the perfect birthday present for me from my husband. Steve isn't one for picking up on subtle hints so rather than leaving the magazine open on the advert I just came out and said, "Can you get me this for my birthday?"

My place on the course was booked for Saturday 5th March so I drove up to Great Linford and parked in the lovely setting of Parklands near to the arts center and Linford Manor. The course is held inside the "North Pavillion", an historical looking building on the outside but holding a purpose built kitchen on the inside. I was greeted warmly with a smile and a question about which flavour of soup I would prefer for lunch. Then inside I found a place at the large central table whilst the remaining delegates trickled in and helped themselves to tea and coffee. In all there were twelve of us booked in that day so every seat was taken.

The course got underway at 10am, with Turan introducing us to the basics of smoking food and outlining what to expect from the busy day. As smoking food is a lengthy process, we had to quickly get stuck in to some food preparation in order to have things in the smokers by 11am. Soon we were chopping up such tempting delights as various cheeses, peppers, olives, dried tomatoes, eggs, chirozo and salmon. Then it was time to go outside to assemble a couple of cardboard box smokers. It is around this point in the course that you begin to realise a couple of things - 1) creating a coldsmoker is not an expensive or difficult thing to do, and 2) cold smoking really is done at cold temperatures (cold enough not to set fire to a cardboard box).

Before the morning was out we had set up a hot smoker with a chicken and a bulb of garlic inside and had spent some time smelling the surprising range of different aromas released by different wood types. Oak, apple and hickory are all familiar to anyone who likes to eat smoked food but others, such as mesquite, pecan and bay were new and intriguing. There were lessons too in the art of curing, giving a glimpse into areas of the other courses Turan runs in meat curing and charcuterie, and sausage making.

With all the talk, sights and smells of food all morning, lunch was very welcome. It was a simple but tasty soup with bread.

After lunch there were more techniques to learn as Turan demonstrated how simple it can be to smoke cashews and almonds and he put a couple of trout on to smoke whilst we went back outside to check on the cold smokers and to learn more about the principles of creating a gentle smolder rather than a rapid burn.

Back inside it was time to taste some of the food that had been tantalising us all day. It is fair to say that the cashews and pecans were better than the ones I had smoked in the past. Not a keen fish lover myself it was hard for me to judge the smoked trout but it was beautifully cooked and the smoking was evident but subtle - perfect for this naturally mildly flavoured fish. The chicken was amazingly moist and tender as well as beautifully smoked. Even in the absence of a smoker,  in the near future I shall be using the brining and slow cooking techniques I learnt to try to recreate that kind of perfectly moist roast chicken.

Finally the cold smokers from outside were unloaded. Even after all I had learnt during the course of the day I still somehow expected the food to come out too hot to handle and showing signs of being cooked. But that, of course, is to miss the whole point of cold smoking. Inside it came out looking as fresh as it did when it went in, having never got hotter than 10°C, just now with smoky aromas.

The food was laid out for us to try and to take home tasters. It was a beautiful sight and the flavours were amazing. Having started the course with smoked nuts and cheeses being my favourites, I ended it having reconfirmed these foods as my favourites but certainly having had my eyes opened to numerous other possibilities and the potential for many food/smoke combinations that I would like to experiment with.

Back home, and smelling very much like a kipper myself, I jumped in the bath to freshen up then cooked dinner. As it happened I wasn't particularly hungry, having eaten well on the course, but the rest of the family expected dinner and were keen to try some of the tidbits I had brought home. I used the smoked Cheddar to add an extra dimension to the flavours of our homemade burgers and then I added little tasters of other foods to the side of their plates. There were definitely murmurs of approval throughout dinner.

Having been lucky enough to bring home the bones of the smoked chicken, the next day I boiled up the carcass to make a smoky stock which then used to create a smoky flavoured minestrone soup.

So what now? There is no doubt that I want to take what I have learnt and apply it to creating some smoked food of my own and to build on what I have previously done. I think I shall be visiting Turan's shop in order to buy some essentials such as a smoke generator and some smoke dust. I now need to decide if I want to use the instructions provided in our information pack to construct a cold smoker out of a cardboard box or whether I want a more permanent and robust structure in my garden. Smoked chutneys will be back in the autumn for sure but I shall also be enjoying my own home smoked cheese, nuts and maybe even fish.

It is such a delight to have discovered yet another amazing food place in Milton Keynes and I would urge anyone with an interest in food smoking, charcuterie, sausage making or cheese making to seriously consider booking themselves on one of the Coldsmoking Cookery School's courses - you will not be disappointed.

Smoky Minestrone Soup

Smoked chicken carcass
2 red onions
2 cloves of garlic or 1 elephant garlic clove
Pinch of mixed spice
Olive oil
1 pint (500ml) sieved tomatoes (passata)
Half stick celery
1 large carrot
1 medium potato
50g spaghetti - cut into small lengths

Put the chicken carcass into a large pan and pour over boiling water until just covered. Bring to the boil then simmer for an hour or so. In the meantime, preheat an oven to 180°C, gas 4 and peel two red onions and chop into quarters. Place in a small ovenproof dish and add the garlic, mixed spice and a dash of olive oil. Stir well until the onion is well coated then place in the oven and roast whilst the chicken boils. In another large pan, pour in the passata and add the drained stock from the smoked chicken. Add the vegetables and bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer (uncovered) for 45 minutes. Tip in the onion and spaghetti and continue to simmer for 5 to 10 minutes (with the lid on) until the spaghetti is tender. Add more water if necessary and taste and season as preferred. Serve hot with bread and butter.

Book Review "First Bite" and general musing on fussy eater

Throughout the year I make various homemade soups from the stuff we grow on the allotment. The vegetables I use are ones that I like to eat and the soup smells delicious when it is cooking and a sip off the spoon confirms that it tastes good too. It is baffling to me, therefore, why I cannot bring myself to eat a bowlful of this soup. Having only eaten Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup as a child, to my mind this is the ONLY soup. I cannot even blame my parents for this odd conclusion because my parents eat a whole range of different soup flavours, brands and even homemade versions. It is completely stupid and yet I cannot apparently get over it. Recently, having made a batch of beautiful borscht, I made a pact with my daughter that we would both be sensible and adult about it and sit down together to eat a bowl of it each. We did quite well but before she had finished my daughter asked, "Can I stop eating this now?" to which I said, "I have already given up, Love."

In a similar vane, when I flick through my monthly edition of The Good Food Magazine I see a whole bunch of dishes that I just don't fancy eating at all. Years ago I would have looked at food like that I just thought of it as "adult food" and be confidently assured that one day I would grow up and like food like this. I would suddenly delight in a couscous salad, would welcome quinoa or polenta on the side of my plate or would fancy filleting a fish. Now over the age of 40, it has dawned on me that I am now very definitely an adult and yet I still flick past these pages, looking for something more appealing. It is certainly true that the food I eat now is far removed from the food I ate as a child and to my mind more "grown up" but I am still not someone who would struggle to make a decision in a restaurant on the basis of liking everything on offer.

With two children of my own now, one an enthusiastic eater who apparently loves everything except Indian spices and the other "fussy", I can't help but wish to "cure" my fussy eater to help unburden her from these socially awkward moments when she will feel worried or embarrassed about not liking food she has to eat. That is not to say she has an enormous problem, probably having a wider range of tastes than I did at her age, but it is normal for mothers to wish only for the best for their children.

Somewhere along the line I came to the desire to "fix" my own stupid soup issue, to learn to like "adult food" and to help improve the food repertoire of my daughter. And this year I decided to make these my New Year's Resolutions. It was therefore fortuitous that on 5th January I came across an article online by Bee Wilson about how to relearn the art of eating. Not only was the article hugely thought provoking but it mentioned her book "First Bite" and I instantly decided this was the book I needed.

There is no doubt about it, First Bite is a brilliant book and one that would help pretty much anyone anywhere who ever has to eat food... oh, that's everyone then! In it she talks about how and why we end up liking the food that we do. It is such a complicated subject with influences from our families, society and our own bodies. She takes the reader through the way we learn to eat as children, the battles that can start in childhood and how we end up with the relationship with food that we have as adults.

I would say that this book is helpful if you are about to embark on weaning a baby from milk onto solid food, if you are a parent responsible for feeding your children, if you work with children and are there when they are eating, if you have a child who is a fussy eater, if you are an adult who is unhappy with your weight, if you have a recognised eating disorder or know someone who does, if you are embarrassed by the limited range of what you eat, if you wish to eat more healthily but struggle to stick with it or if for any other reason you wish to change what you eat but are finding it difficult.

Although I embarked on reading this book principally for myself it straight away made me think about the way I feed the family and particularly the way I deal with my "fussy" daughter. Before I was even half way in I started to change this relationship and immediately saw results. There is so much psychology associated with this topic that it is helpful to have a book explaining what things definitely don't work and why other things do work. They seem blindingly obvious once they are pointed out but are still difficult to stick to, battling as we do with old doctrines about eating everything on your plate, only being allowed dessert if you have eaten vegetables and being expected to eat foods we don't like.

It was pleasing too to have some of my natural ideas re-enforced by this book. The importance of structured meals and family mealtimes at a table cannot be over-rated. Treating children as miniature adults rather than "children" is also crucial. It does seem strange to me now that we should ever just assume that we will somehow grow out of our childhood eating habits and just naturally take up eating healthy food. Why not instead just trust that child will eat healthily if fed well. I have long believed that you cannot make anyone do anything but you can lead by example. When I realised that my pre-school child was shy I decided it was my job to be less shy myself and, my goodness, what a change that made to my life as well as demonstrating to my children what confidence looks like. If I expect my children to eat a wide range of food then I too must eat it and be seen to do it naturally and with enjoyment. Equally it is OK to show that there are just some foods that I don't like but that is not a reason not to offer it to them or expect them to dislike it too.

The journey that Bee has taken through her life has been a tough one, having been a binge eating in her teens and overweight from an early age, and with an anorexic sister thrown in for good measure. She has managed to move on from her unhappy relationship with food and to have made her peace with it now. Personally, I have never really had an unhappy relationship with food. I don't battle with my weight, I don't beat myself up about what I eat or forbid myself food pleasures and I have never put myself on a diet. That is not to say that I have some miracle metabolism or that I wouldn't mind being a little more comfortably within the box of "ideal" on the weight charts. Somehow I just want to eat food that is OK for me to eat and this is where Bee wants us to all be - actually feeling desire for food that is good for us. As I have already said, I don't eat what I would consider to be "adult" food - salads and weird grains - but instead just eat straight forward food but not much in the way of junk so maybe I should forgive myself for flicking past some recipes in the magazine and accept that there are some foods I don't have to like. My favourite food is pie, we eat cake every day and chips several times a week. But the food is homemade so I know what went into it and I can take a couple of ounces of sugar out of the recipe without anyone noticing and use only a tablespoon of oil for frying potatoes. I now actually find myself unhappy when I go into supermarkets as it just seems to be an assault of over-processed junk food at every turn and it is a battle to work my way through it to the ingredients that will allow me to make the food I want to eat. For some this might be a battle of will to resist temptation but to me is a battle to avoid being grossed out and appalled. I'm much happier shopping online from my list of "favourites".  Not actually wanting to eat junk and feeling an uncomfortable ache in the stomach when you see it is probably a good thing.

At Christmas I told my sister-in-law about my desire to eat more soup and adult food and she said that I already eat really well and that I shouldn't beat myself up over it. Having read this book there is definitely an element from it that would agree. It is important to be in a happy place with food and largely I am. Nonetheless, as with most things in life, there is room for qweeking and improvement and I would like to continue with my resolution. The desire within oneself for change is the only way that change will ever happen so I would say if you have a desire for change then read this book to help grow that desire and to give you pointers as to how you can achieve it. She herself says that just telling someone what they need to do will never change it and she does not preach or even advise - merely provides a whole load of examples that in themselves provide that role-model experience that is probably missing from our lives.

It is rare to get to the end of a non-fiction book and feel that sense of loss that is so common when finishing a novel. However, that is how I feel now as I want to learn more. Also, when I finish a book I hate to just put it on a shelf as a book on a shelf is a sad thing. Instead I like to pass it on but now I have the dilemma of knowing who to pass this on to as anyone would benefit from reading it.

"Minding my Peas and Cucumbers" Book Review

Around Christmas time I was unexpectedly given a book entitled "Minding my Peas and Cucumbers" by Kay Sexton, quirky tales of allotment life. Given my love of my allotment and everything I do with the stuff I grow, it was a thoughtful and touching gift. I put the book on my coffee table and have read it, a little at a time, over the past few weeks. It is a light book with short chapters so it is easy to dip into to and not so gripping that you accidentally stay up all night to find out what happens at the end.

Having said that, I did also find the book weirdly unsettling. The book follows Kay (a real person) as she spends 19 years on an allotment waiting list. Desperate to grow her own food, she spends that time doing holiday cover for other allotment holders, or "co-working" with others and eventually agrees to take on the unwanted role of committee secretary in order to work the committee plot. She is even tasked with digging over and improving plots before passing them on to the next person the waiting list. I can't help but think that largely she is exploited by people just wanting unpleasant and heavy work to be done.

As much as I love allotment life, there are some aspects of it that I really dislike and this book seems to highlight them all! I don't like the whole concept of waiting lists and it is a shame that people who want to work a piece of land can have to wait so long to do so. I don't like the monthly inspections to ensure your plot is up to scratch and the warning letters and evictions that can follow. When you have put in all that hard work, the feeling that you are only renting the space and that you can be thrown off at the whim of some bureaucrat who has no understanding of seasons or how to work a piece of ground is really unsettling.

Reading this book has made me wonder if I have just been lucky with my allotment experience. We didn't have a waiting list 19 years ago when we took on our first plot so I have spent my time consisting working the same plot all that time and felt as if it were "ours", within the context of it being rented and having to follow (sometimes odd) rules. Kay, on the other hand, has moved from place to place, working allotments she knew were not hers and others that were "nearly" hers. I admire her dedication and persistence but it gives the book a sad feeling and not one that would encourage someone keen to get an allotment to put their name on a waiting list.

She talks too of some of the battles faced by anyone running an allotment plot - pests, weather, weeds, politics. It would be wrong to suggest that it is an easy thing that requires very little effort but, again, if I were reading this book as someone thinking about getting started I think I would hang up my trowel and walk away without attempting it. Maybe the fact that I knew nothing about growing fruit and vegetables when I started was in fact a good thing because no one and no book had put me off. So, to put the record straight, it is something you have to dedicate time to but, like with so many other hobbies, if it is something you love you don't notice and certainly don't resent the time. Time spent growing is like therapy.

It is hard to pinpoint this book and I have certainly never read anything like it before. It flits about with no apparent order, sharing moments from her allotment experience. There are characters I can identify with and some of the anecdotes raise a smile or a sympathetic nod. And towards the middle of a box she introduces a "story-line" that runs until the end and you can't help but be intrigued how that will turn out. She also chucks in some helpful growing tips and a recipe here and there so it is almost a handbook.

In my final assessment of this book I would say, it makes a nice coffee table book and would actually work well as a waiting room book where someone could dip in and read a chapter without committing themselves to the whole book or the lifestyle. If you have an allotment already then it can be read for comparison and amusement but beware of that unsettling reminder about the precarious nature of renting an allotment. If you are thinking about starting out then please don't in any way take this book as a guide to what allotmenting is necessarily like or you will never get started!

Perfect Roast Potatoes from Rubbish Spuds

This weekend I partook in that odd tradition of all kitchen gardeners, and carefully arranged potatoes in egg boxes. The potatoes are my seed potatoes and the arranging is also known as chitting - a way to encourage strong, short green shoots to grow on them prior to planting them out next month. I don't honestly believe that chitting potatoes makes much difference to how quickly they grow away or how big the final yield is but the fact of the matter is that they have been delivered by the seed company and if I leave them in a dark paper sack until next month then they will have long, white sprouts on them that will probably get knocked off when I plant them out and I don't suppose that will help improve yields.

Anyway, this for me is the first dabble into the season ahead and there is a tingling of excitement with it, like those weekend mornings when you throw open the curtains to bright sunshine and actually feel as if you want to clean something! Potatoes are an important part of our kitchen garden and I feel a plate of food without a potato is a sad one. Well, I suppose if there is pasta, rice or bread in its place then that is OK but I'm certainly no caveman, happy with a hunk of red meat and a green salad. I like a good helping of complex carbohydrate on my plate, thank you very much! And being able to provide that straight from one's own garden is a satisfying thing.

Despite the feeling of a new season, the potatoes won't be planted until March and April and the first harvest will have to wait until June. So in the meantime, we are left with the old potatoes. With each passing day they become less and less good at being an eating potato as they slip into their natural springtime state of becoming a seed potato; shrinking, shriveling and sprouting. We have no choice but to either make use of these slightly springy, sprouting things or eat nothing but pasta, rice or bread until summer. I'm not adverse to any of those but I do like a roast potato with my Sunday dinner.

As I have said previously, old potatoes make rubbish roast potatoes, chips or sautees. Too much of the starch, which helps a potato crisp and turn golden, has been converted into sugars, making the potatoes over brown whilst never crisping up. Where is it easy to make a decent chip or roast from a freshly dug up potato in summer, it is a struggle at this time of year. However, if you have ever read the ingredients on a bag of Aunt Bessie's "roast" potatoes, you will see that the secret to faking that crispiness in the absence of good quality ingredients is the addition of a floury coating (rice flour and potato starch in this case - you may like to avoid the environmentally unfriendly palm oil and the sugars dextrin, dextrose and caramel that they also add). At home this can be achieved easily by tossing the potatoes in a mixture of flour and semolina between the par boiling and roasting steps. Below are my steps for making lovely roast potatoes whilst we wait patiently for that glorious day when the new season potatoes to be ready for harvesting.

1) Peel the potatoes (yes, a lot of the fibre and nutrients of the potato are to be found in and just below the skin but at this time of year the skins are rubbish to eat so get rid of them).

2) Cut the potatoes up into roast potato sized chunks and place in a pan of boiling water and boil for about 5-8 minutes until just beginning to soften at the edges.

3) In the meantime, preheat the oven to 200°C and place a roasting tin in the oven with fat or oil in it. Saturated fats, such as dripping, goose/duck fat or lard, are best able to withstand the high temperatures of roasting without degrading so use these if you can, otherwise use vegetable oils. It is a misconception that vegetable oils (unsaturated fats) are better for you because when exposed to high temperatures they degrade and create new chemicals, some of which are harmful and even carcinogenic. It may go against everything you were ever taught about healthy eating but dripping, lard and goose fat are probably better for you when roasting potatoes - and they taste great too!

4) Drain the potatoes then put the lid on the pan and give it a good shake to roughen up the edges of the potatoes. Take off the lid and let them steam dry for a couple of minutes.

5) Put a handful of flour and some semolina on large plate or chopping board then tip the potatoes onto the flour and turn each one so that it is coated. If you are making roast potatoes in the summer with fresh potatoes you do not need to bother with this step.

6) Remove the roasting tin from the oven and tip the floured potatoes into the hot fat. Carefully turn each potato around in the fat so that it is coated all over.

7) Return the roasting tin to the oven and cook for an hour until the potatoes are golden brown and crispy. If you have properly coated the potatoes before putting them in the oven then there is no need to turn them part way through cooking.