Culinary adventures with hops

Last year I planted a hop plant in the garden. Hops used to be a common crop in Kent and East Sussex for centuries until the late 1970s, when big brewing companies started using imported pelletised hops. I liked the idea of growing something that was such a part of the agricultural heritage of my part of the world. Hops are mainly known as an ingredient in beer. I wanted to see if they had other culinary uses. When I was a student I had a summer job working on a farm where they grew a few hops, and I had done a bit of hop picking. I remembered the amazing smell that hops had - a bit like an IPA beer, but much fresher - and wondered if I could capture that flavour in food.

Hops

Leeks vinaigrette

Leeks are one of the stalwarts of the winter vegetable plot. At this time of year most of the available green vegetables, such as cabbages, sprouts and kale, come from the brassica family and have a certain similarity in flavour. Leeks, which are alliums and related to onions and garlic, provide a distinctly different flavour. Leeks are fully hardy, and will stand through the coldest of weather. They are often a bit player, appearing in stews and pies alongside many other veg, but are such a tasty vegetable that sometimes they deserve to be the star of the show. One of my favourite leek dishes - and very easy to prepare - is the French bistro classic: leeks vinaigrette.

Growing puntarelle in the UK

I first came across puntarelle on a winter holiday to Rome a few years back. Puntarelle is a variety of chicory, with distinctive pointy leaves. It's very popular around Rome, where it is in season in late autumn and winter. The best bit is the heart, which can be used to make a refreshing, slightly bitter salad. The outer leaves can be a bit tough, and are best braised. Puntarelle is very hard to buy in the UK. I thought I'd have a go at growing some this year, and found it grew very well.

Puntarelle

Chanterelles preserved under oil

Mushroom hunting can be a fickle activity. On some occasions, one returns from a walk through prime woodland in mid-autumn with hardly anything to show. Usually, especially if you know a few good spots, you will find enough for a meal. Occasionally, you find a huge bounty of mushrooms - more than you can eat in several meals. These are the days that mushroom hunters dream of. When it happens to me, I am like a child on a trolley dash in a sweetshop, and pick frenetically until I have picked much more than I can eat in one go. I am then bound to spend the rest of the day cleaning and preserving mushrooms.

Pickled green tomatoes

By early to mid October, as temperatures drop and daylight hours shorten, tomatoes grown outside stop ripening. At this point it is best to pick all the remaining fruit on the plants. There are always a lot of unripe green tomatoes that need using. Last year I wrote about making green tomato chutney, one of the classic ways of using green tomatoes. This year, I thought I would also experiment with pickling green tomatoes whole. Pickles are prominent in Turkish cuisine, and a bowl of mixed pickles, or tursu, often appears in a meze spread. I have a lovely Turkish grocers round the corner, which sells a wide range of Turkish pickles. Earlier this year I bought a jar of pickled green tomatoes. They were delicious, and inspired me to have a go at making my own pickled green tomatoes. Pickled green tomatoes have a fresh clean flavour and crunchy texture, and can be added to a meze spread, but are also delicious with cheese and cured meats.

Elderberry sorbet

Elderflowers are very popular in early summer, when cordials, cakes and other elderflower-flavoured products abound. Their early autumn iteration, the elderberry, is comparatively neglected. This is a shame, as elderberries are tasty and very common. Elder trees are quick growing and colonize any neglected land. They can be found almost as easily in the town as the countryside. Returning from buying a paper at the weekend, I found several in a neglected plot just round the corner from my home, and picked a bag full of ripe juicy berries.

Damsons - and what to do with them

Damsons are a variety of wild plum in season in September. They are smaller than domesticated plums, with a dark purple skin, often covered in a whitish bloom. They have a tart taste raw, but once cooked with a little sugar, have a delicious fruity flavour. Damsons can be found growing wild in hedgerows, but are also cultivated and can be found lurking in gardens and elderly orchards.

Kohlrabi slaw

In the last few years, I have discovered kohlrabi - a particularly odd looking vegetable. It has a relatively mild flavour raw, like a tart apple with a hint of cabbage. Although at first-glance kohlrabi appears to be a root vegetable, the bit one eats is in fact the swollen base of the stem. It is a member of the brassica family, but lacks the funkiness or pepperiness that most other brassicas have raw. It is also lovely cooked, where it takes on a fuller creamy flavour, with a hint of artichoke. The leaves can also be cooked and eaten like spring greens.

kohlrabi

Roast Partridge with puy lentils

Roast partridge on puy lentils

Partridge is one of my favourite game birds. Many game aficionados get excited about the beginning of the grouse season, and I do too. But it is the unheralded arrival of partridges in early September that really gets me excited about game. Partridge has a pretty long season - from 1 September to 1 February in Great Britain. Like pheasant, partridge has relatively pale, pink-tinged flesh, with a more delicate, sweeter flavour than pheasant. It is a smallish bird, and conveniently a whole bird is just about the right size for a single portion. Like most game birds, it is fairly lean, and can easily become dry. The secret to roasting partridges so that they stay moist is to brown them off in a frying pan, and then pop them in a hot oven for just a few minutes. The same method also works well for grouse and wood pigeon.

I'm not the pheasant plucker, I'm the pheasant plucker's son...

Autumn brings with it an abundance of seasonal foodstuffs. One of my favourites is game. The game season starts with much hoohah on 12 August, the 'Glorious Twelfth', when the red grouse season opens. Restaurants fall over themselves to have grouse on their menus on the evening of the Twelfth, or at latest the 13th. (Given that grouse benefits from several days hanging, and that a huge premium is charged for these mid-August birds, I usually wait several weeks before indulging). The partridge and mallard season opens on 1 September, with pheasants and woodcock following on 1 October.

Pumpkin tart

I do enjoy a good bit of pumpkin carving at Halloween. And where there are carved pumpkins, there is pumpkin flesh to be used. My favourite thing to make with it is a pumpkin tart - essentially a variant on a custard tart, flavoured with pumpkin, nutmeg and cinnamon. It is a bit like an American pumpkin pie, but with a lighter, slightly French feel to it.

Quince crumble

Quinces are one of those funny, old-fashioned autumnal fruits. A relative of both the apple and pear, they look a bit like a large knobbly yellow pear. They are not the most user-friendly of fruits, in that being quite starchy they need a fair bit of cooking before eating. They are, however, delicious, having a fragrant yet tart flavour, which is best brought out by a long, slow cook. They make a great crumble. Because the quinces require cooking before the crumble is assembled, this is not a quick pudding for a weekday evening. It is, however, well worth the effort. This recipe should give about six servings.

cooked quinces

Green tomato chutney

2014 has been a great year for growing tomatoes. My outdoor-grown tomatoes continued to ripen nicely in the dry sunny weather we experienced throughout September. However, there comes a time every autumn when the longer nights and weakening sunshine mean that the tomatoes stop ripening. In cool wet Septembers that point can come sooner rather than later, especially if the plants contract late-season blight, in which case it is best to cut your losses and pick all the remaining healthy fruit. Last weekend, the last in September, we decided to harvest the remaining tomatoes. I might have been tempted to leave them for another week or so, but we are about to move house, and I thought we should pick them before we left.

Drying porcini

Most mushrooming expeditions yield enough fungi for a meal or two. Occasionally, one finds a huge number of mushrooms. This poses a dilemma - most wild mushrooms do not keep well, even in the fridge, so what to do with them? Preserving is the answer. (Although, if you know you are not going to have enough time to preserve them, stop picking and leave them to someone else, or to the wildlife.) The main preserving options are drying or pickling. You could also make a big batch of mushroom soup and freeze it.

Cauliflower fungi

Cauliflower fungus  (sparassis crispa)

One of the most unusual looking of edible mushrooms is the cauliflower fungus (sparassis crispa). When you see one, you understand how apt the name is (at least in terms of appearance, not taste!) Cauliflower fungi are usually found at the base of mature pine trees, and tend to grow in the same place year after year (although in some years they do not appear). I have never found one in the same place twice in the same season, so I assume they only fruit once a year.

Hedgerow crumble

For the forager, autumn is the season when nature gives the most. Out for a walk at the weekend, we picked some lovely blackberries, which seem to grow more or less everywhere. We also found a hedgerow full of bullaces, which, like damsons and sloes, are a variety of wild plum. Bullaces are slightly smaller than damsons, and usually ripen a few weeks later. They are pretty sharp raw, so best cooked. I decided to make a crumble, to which I also added in a couple of apples. Apples and blackberries are a great combination. There are some fine English apples available at this time of year. I used Discoveries, one of the earliest English apples, which have a lovely floral flavour.

Globe artichokes in the autumn

When I started this blog back in April of this year, my very first post was about my attempts to grow globe artichokes. I thought I would post a brief update about what the artichoke plants have been doing; not least as I have found it difficult to find much information about what the growing habits of globe artichokes are in the UK. I would be interested to hear from anyone else who grows globe artichokes to see if their experiences are similar to mine.

Wild mushrooms

Autumn heralds what for me is the highlight of the foraging year: wild mushrooms. Although there are a few varieties of mushroom that arrive in the spring and some that will appear during any damp period in summer, the main season for mushrooms in the UK stretches from about mid-August until the first frosts. Visiting my parents over the August bank holiday weekend, I went on my first mushroom hunt of the season, and found a nice array of boletes, chantrelles, hedgehog, field and parasol mushrooms.

In praise of the turnip

For many years the turnip has been a deeply unfashionable vegetable - more likely to be found as the butt of a joke on Blackadder, or as cattle fodder, than on a restaurant menu. It is, in my view, a useful vegetable, ill-deserving of its down-at-heel reputation. I suspect that harvesting when too large and over-cooking are both, at least in part, to blame.