Tag: ratatouille

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.

More weeds

 

The family land holding just increased by 135 square metres, although when I say “holding” I mean rental because our middle son has just taken on a somewhat neglected allotment about 8 miles away from us. We spent Sunday morning there together with a 100 metre tape and some wooden pegs marking out where the beds would go and sampling the soil, the aspect and generally establishing some kind of route from where he is to where he wants to be. I’m immensely proud, but mindful of the huge effort of balancing his working hours as a chef with his family life with his partner and their three children, as well as growing an allotment. But ironically I was also a bit envious because the work of breaking an allotment and bringing its soil up to scratch is so rewarding. The pioneer days have their charms. His main challenge is the covering of rampant Blackberries across the whole plot.  Even no-dig demands at least one season of the usual hard work to clear the soil of the worst of the noxious weeds.

But following on from Sunday’s posting, I’ve been thinking a lot about weeds and I went back to the bookshelf to re-read Richard Mabey’s book – “Weeds- the story of outlaw plants”  It’s an absolutely lovely book from a writer who’s hardly written a dud word in his life and it’s definitely one for the Potwell Inn library. You’ll look at weeds differently once you’ve read it, and I realized, as I turned the pages, how much of his book had soaked into my memory and formed my own attitude.  The history of weeds often includes periods when they were immmensely valuable as medicinal herbs, and if you read the labels of many beauty products you’ll see that they’re still in use today. My favourite discovery is that a well-known brand of natural fibre sold as a laxative, uses the seeds gathered from a member of the Plantago family.  The plantains still have their uses, and instead of composting them I’m now inclined to let them fatten up and then harvest them as I might harvest  any other useful food plant. Quite apart from their use to us, weeds are of the utmost importance to many of our moths, butterflies and other insects, and a large part of the ecological crisis that’s unfolding is the result of the chemical war on weeds. We should love them for all their irrepressible vulgarity and powers of survival.

Back in the Potwell Inn kitchen, the incoming vegetables – particularly the unstoppable flow of courgettes and gherkins is testing our ingenuity.  I confess I’ve never been a fan of ratatouille – it’s a reaction to being force fed the stuff many years ago while camping. I can still see the cook crouching behind a windbreak muttering incantations and boiling it down into a dreadful slush that tasted mostly of methylated spirits. But in the interests of harmony I’m suspending all my food prejudices in order to find a way of enjoying all the stuff we grow.  Madame and I have between us tried just about every recipe for ‘rat’ that’s ever been written down.  Today it was the turn of Simon Hopkinson whose recipe Madame found in one of the cookbooks (we’ve probably got over a hundred). The advantage was that the vegetables were fried to the point where they still had some bite, and then they were anointed with some of last year’s tomato sauce, a couple of black olives and a handful of fresh basil from the windowsill. It was without doubt the best ratatouille I’ve ever tasted.

I’ll write one day about the dynasties of chefs – it’s a subject I’m very interested in because we have two in our immediate family and they are both very much the product of the mentoring and training they received.  More on that one another day, but now we’re getting to the start of jamming, pickling and freezing. Some of the brine pickles we experimented with last year have been quietly dropped, and we’re hoping that this year we’ll pull off some really decent pickled gherkins.

But on top of all this there are grandchildren to be looked after from time to time, and our campervan which has a fridge that won’t work as it should on LPG. Mechanics are expensive and I’ve come to question their skills over the years so I’ll have a go at anything I’m legally allowed to do. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours measuring voltages and resistances and pondering over the service manuals.  Most problems are stricly logical ones – X doesn’t work because Y – and so forth. The difference between mending it myself and paying someone else to do it can amount to hundreds of pounds so I’m eagerly awaiting a package with what (I hope) will solve the problem inside. It’s important because in a few weeks we’re celebrating Madame’s birthday with a week in the Yorkshire Dales and then onwards into the Borders and Scotland. With a bit of wildcamping in view we need the gas fridge.

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