I don’t really like aubergines – but Madame does!

A week of rain has given me lots of time to work in the kitchen and I’ve employed (and enjoyed) every moment of it. I’ve written before about my aversion to ratatouille – (which Madame loves) and so one of my aims has been to work up some alternative ways of dealing with the aubergines, courgettes and tomatoes that I genuinely enjoy. The problem is always that they tend to ripen in numbers at roughly the same time, so being frugal means eating them up or finding a way of storing them.

Of the three vegetables, tomatoes are by far the easiest because they have high acidity and we can bottle them and keep them for a whole year. I’m ultra careful with bottled fruit and veg and I usually give them a decent time in the oven – say 40 minutes at 110C – before I screw the lids down. I mentioned a couple of days ago that we produce 3 kinds – straight passata, roasted passata and Hazan no 1. They’re all marvellous standbys to have in the kitchen and all taste quite different so they suit different dishes. Today I made a second batch of roasted passata using mainly plum tomatoes from the polytunnel. I was surprised just how different the final flavour and texture was – really delicious and a perfect accompaniment to the Hake we bought from the mobile fishmonger at Newton Park Farm Shop this morning. The fish will only need a tablespoon of the passata as a dressing, with some brown butter and a scattering of fried capers and served with some of our own new potatoes and a bed of spinach, all from the allotment. I’ve fallen in love with Hake over the last few weeks, but it usually turns up at the supermarket fish counter looking a bit sorry for itself. Today’s fish came up from Brixham after being landed at 4.00am. Trust me, super fresh fish is lovely!

So what about courgettes – which can grow from six inches to a seedy blimp overnight. Aside from the dreadful rat it usually gets used in some kind of bake with tomato sauce and almost always mozzarella cheese. I got my original recipe from Patience Gray’s “Honey from a Weed” – in my view one of the great cookbooks but also filled with a tantalising account of life in Puglia. Patience Gray was not one to send off to Fortnum and Mason for exotic or unobtainable ingredients; she always cooked from what was to hand. The recipe for Zucchini al forno – can as easily be used for aubergines. I think from memory that she used mozzarella cheese, torn into shreds between the slices of vegetable with tomato sauce, all cooked in the oven. I’ve cooked it dozens of times, but the cheese is always a disappointment – the supermarket versions are too rubbery and bland so you rarely find it soft and smelling of buffalo. Yesterday I worked up a new version using Taleggio cheese and home-made straight passata with slices of courgette fried quickly in very hot oil to give them colour and finished with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. The cheese turned the topping brown in the oven and it was delicious and full of intense flavour.

My other favourite way of cooking courgettes comes from Elizabeth David who pre-boiled them before dicing them. I don’t bother with that any more because they tend to get rather soggy, so I dice them and fry them in hot butter with a dash of olive oil and then chuck a bit of finely chopped parsley and some lemon juice into the pan to finish them. It’s lovely with fish. My next adventure will be to slice one of the fat ones – marrows really – laterally into thick discs and then stuff them with a risotto and bake them in the oven. We’ll see how that one shapes up.

So finally to the aubergine. Aside from rat we do stuffed aubergines to a Middle Eastern recipe from Rick Stein’s Spanish book – always good. They’re good in slices on a barbecue but they seem to respond best to some fairly strong spices. Our youngest cooked for a season in Greece and he brought back a recipe for baba ganoush which was very good. But here, marooned in a flat with no access to a gas stove or barbecue unless we cook outside, and festooned with smoke and fire detectors it’s hard to get the smoky flavour. Yesterday I prepped some aubergines halving and scoring them through to the skin and then smoked them over hickory chips in our middle sized Cameron’s Smoker for 15 mins before finishing them in the oven (still inside the smoker) for around 40 mins at 180C. The resultant puree with the usual spices and tahini and a bit of good olive oil was a revelation. There was a huge difference between burnt and smoked and although Madame doesn’t really like smoked food she said nice things about this one – so I need to scale it up a bit and learn to make flatbreads.

When I say it rained today I mean real heavy stuff; but nothing daunted we added another three pots to the little container garden outside on the pavement and got very wet in the process. There’s still work to do but we’re getting close. While we were out there it suddenly occurred to me that we should call it Gwen’s Garden after my mum. She loved flowers and was an inveterate thief of cuttings and seed heads wherever she visited. I don’t suppose her little old lady act would fool anyone, but flowers gave her, and us, such pleasure. You may find it shocking, but we’ve still got her ashes in the wardrobe at the Potwell Inn and I’ve met any number of other people who do the same thing. Can’t bring ourselves to part with them. Anyway, I haven’t asked my sister yet if she minds calling it Gwen’s Garden but she reads this blog from time to time so I’m sure she’ll tell me! I washed the trowel off in the flooded gutter when we’d finished. The water was warm. This weather is deeply troubling!

As I look at this now I’m thinking that it would be lovely to have a Banksy portrait of my mum on the wall behind.

Think of your Sole

Fishing boats hauled up on Cadgwith beach – January 2022

A couple of days ago I mentioned the sinking of the Crig-a-Tana off Cadgwith last November and the rescue of the two man crew by the Lizard Lifeboat. Both men were ironically members of the lifeboat crew and even more darkly ironically the boat was named after a pretty vicious looking reef off Kuggar called Crig-a-tana rocks. The sinking of the boat had nothing whatever to do with the rocks because she went down 6 mile southeast of Bass Rock and they are waiting for a report from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch to discover what happened. Fishing and farming remain two of the most dangerous industries in the country.

Anyway, all best wishes to the crew who have been through a horrendous experience, but this raises once again the insecurities and dangers that the inshore fishing fleet have to contend with, and lends support to the idea that unless we support these industries by buying their produce they may not survive for the future. Interestingly the Government published their proposals for the ELMS scheme today – this is a payment support scheme that offers farmers subsidies in return for public goods – like environmental schemes. Once again the big arable farms will be able to claim most of the subsidies while small farms and hill farms will be competing for the scraps. I needn’t mention again the betrayal of the inshore fleet by the brexit debacle.

And that’s why we at the Potwell Inn try to buy as much as possible of our food from local sources, preferably direct from the producers and bypassing the supermarkets. With that in mind we trogged off to Porthleven yesterday for a walk and to buy some fish. Who knew that fish are seasonal? I sort of knew it in the recesses of my mind but when we got to the fishmonger she had some Lemon Sole on display, as well as Haddock – not a major fish around here, and of course crabmeat. Lemon Sole are bang in season at the moment and I think I must have cooked them badly at some time in the past and never bothered again. Madame on the other hand absolutely loves them so we bought a couple of fillets each of Haddock and Lemon Sole (more expensive!) plus a tub of mixed white crab meat with the brown splodgy bit). The brown meat is much cheaper and yet it’s full of flavour. So we’ve been gorging ourselves on fish, which in Cornwall has sometimes been tricky in the past – because apart from supermarkets you never see it fresh. Unlike the Continent, the local fisherman don’t sell their catch off the boat as a matter of course.

So £23 for three meals seems a lot, except fish prices have escalated; but think that we paid £6.00 for the crab meat and made three rounds of crab sandwiches which would have cost something like £30 in a cafe. We also lashed out on a £10 bottle of Muscadet which would have been marked up to £25 or £30. That looks like value for money to me. The haddock, which we had for supper cost about £8 – compared with £15 a portion for fish and chips. Then we had the Lemon Sole today – dusted with seasoned flour – and simply fried in butter and olive oil. The trick is to hammer the skin side until it’s crisp and then turn the heat down and turn the fish for a minute – it cooks quickly. Once again delicious with 1/2 bottle of cheap Albariño. Learn to cook – it’ll save you a fortune and you’ll eat like a Russian oligarch!

Seasonal fish isn’t always to everyone’s taste – I love Cod Roe – which is almost unobtainable now due to the complete absence of any other customers. You can buy smoked roe for taramasalata at almost any time but the raw roe probably looks too much like a pair of giant testicles to attract the faint hearted. These were the last I ate, seven years ago.

But the take home point is that fish have their seasons and like every other food it’s best to eat them while they’re ‘in‘ and when they’re local because they’re that much fresher and come without a contrail of air miles.

But we haven’t just spent the past few days eating. I finally got to scrambling up a cliff path to a patch of promising looking gorse and managed to identify the two most common gorse species in this part of the world. Growing next to each other made it relatively easy tpo see the differences and I’m reasonably sure of my ID because the larger Gorse/ Furze Ulex europaeus was in flower and the smaller Ulex Gallii – Western Gorse wan’t, and it fitted most of the other descriptors. Clive Stace – who must be obeyed in all matters botanical – demands the mean of ten measurements of certain flower parts before identification is made – but since one of them wasn’t in flower and wasn’t expected to be in flower until June I decided not to wait. It is quite absurd, the amount of pleasure to be gained from nailing the names of two plants so similar you need a magnifying glass to distinguish them but honestly it’s the best fun you can have while keeping your clothes on. Naked botanising among gorse plants in a brisk offshore wind is an overrated pastime. Finally, just to complete my joy I noticed a Cornish Heath nestling among its taller neighbours. I believe some vulgar botanists refer to this as a slam dunk. Here they are.

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