26 July 2015

Braised artichokes and pearl barley with summer veg


I am a huge fan of artichokes. They have a great meaty flavour, and are much more versatile than many people think. I have written before about my attempts to grow artichokes, and they are a vegetable that I love growing. When we moved into our new flat earlier this year, as soon as some space became available, I planted half a dozen plants. One of these fell foul to some aggressive sabotage from a seagull, but the others grew well. By July, several small artichokes had appeared.

14 July 2015

Apricot jam


Mrs Room for a Radish and I recently took a road trip round North West France. France is well known for its strong culinary traditions. What I like most about the food culture in France is not so much the restaurants, but the quality of raw ingredients on offer. What particularly excites me is the markets. Even a small town will have a market once a week, and larger towns several. Often there will be stall after stall piled high with fruit and veg. Some specialising in onions and garlic, or salads, or maybe a fishmonger or two, a cheese stall, a charcuterie stall. The range and quality of produce is often high, and the prices reasonable. Canny old French ladies flit from stall to stall, comparing produce before deciding on what’s the best value for money.

2 July 2015

What's in season in July

Instead of listing what is in season in July, it may be easier to say what is not in season in July, at least in terms of fruit and veg. The high summer months of July and August are when vegetable growers reap their most significant harvest. In some cases being overwhelmed by gluts of beans, courgettes and other veg.

26 June 2015

What vegetables should I grow in my garden?

When starting to plant a new vegetable plot a question asked by many gardeners is what should I grow? This is particularly so for the novice gardener, faced with the huge range of seeds and plants available. Over the last eight or so years, I have had three vegetable plots of varying sizes, plus lived in a flat with a balcony, which I crammed with as many plants as possible. Over this time I have tried growing a fair few varieties of veg, with differing results, and have built up a list of favourites.


18 June 2015

Emmer sourdough

One of the joys of baking my own bread is experimenting with different flours. Sometimes that might be seeking authenticity baking a ciabatta using an Italian type 00 bread flour, or baguettes using French T55 flour. What I particularly enjoy is baking with heritage flours, from grains such as spelt or emmer. Humans have a long history of growing grains, and over the millennia have developed and cross-bred countless varieties. The pace of this advance has been particularly fast since the Second World War. As I wrote in another post, mainstream varieties of wheat grown commercially today are quite different to those grown 50 or even 30 years ago. Often, yield and disease resistance, rather than flavour, are the major driving forces behind the development of modern cultivars. (And in many ways this is understandable, we live in an increasingly crowded planet and have only a finite amount of agricultural land.) By baking with heritage flours, we can inject more complex flavours into bread, as well as getting a taste of the breads our ancestors ate.

9 June 2015

Fritto misto di mare

After a week of gales and rain, the weather finally came good last weekend, and we got our first real dose of summer. One of the great joys of living by the seaside is that when the weather turns good, it feels like you are on holiday, without having had the hassle of catching a plane or train, or endless hours of driving. I decided to go with the holiday vibe, and cook an Italian classic, fritto misto di mare (literally ‘mixed fried seafood’ – like many food descriptions, it sounds sexier in Italian).

6 June 2015

What's in season in June

June is the first month of summer (although at times in the fickle British weather it doesn't always feel that way). In the veg plot, June can herald something of a hiatus - the sowing and planting out of spring has finished, but most of the main crops are not yet ready to harvest. Excitingly, June heralds the beginning of the British summer fruit season, giving a real taste of summer. If you fancy a bit of foraging, elderflowers are at their peak in early June and can usually be found in both the town and countryside.