All by ourselves

Look!

We grew that. All by ourselves! I know earlier this year we had radishes, and last year we got two little tomatoes, so this doesn't technically count as our first harvest from the North London Garden. But it feels like it is, because this is more than a mouthful, this is enough for a meal, a meal made from a courgette picked just moments before cooking, from a pot in our back garden.

I feel so immensely proud. Last year we lost all nine of our courgette and squash plants to disease. This year, we seem to have prevailed, and are finally beginning to see the fruits (or rather the vegetables) of our labour.

My biggest problem after picking the courgette was knowing what to do with it. We have tonnes of courgette recipes. Being veggie they are a large part of our diet. The problem was that I wanted to make a dish with our not-so-little beauty as the star of the show.

In the end I settled for a puff pastry tart. My Mum and I discovered this concept in a restaurant years ago, and have been using it ever since. It's such a basic idea, but it's so effective.

You roll out puff pastry into a rectangle or square (or any shape you like really), and then place vegetables on top, sprinkle with a little cheese, dab the edges of the pastry with milk, and cook at 190C until the pastry edges are brown and puffed up. Simple, yet oh-so good. We have many variations of the recipe. I believe my Mum does it with roasted veg and lashings of cheddar, I often forgo the roasting, and add parmesan, basil and balsamic vinegar. However you do it, it really allows the vegetables to hold their own against a flaky puffy indulgent background.

This time I sliced the courgette really thin (note to self (I must invest in a mandolin, it would make things so much easier and faster) and layered them prettily on the pastry base. I then place little cherry tomatoes in between the rows. Over this I sprinkled a very light helping of Swiss cheese and a dash of balsamic vinegar. Off it went into the oven, and out came this:


It was so nice. I can't believe how amazing the courgette tasted. It just goes to prove how much better home-grown is.

I can't wait until our tomatoes and beans start fruiting!

nom nom nom nom nom nom....

Now I know why our brassicas aren't doing very well. Grr.

The great British summer.

I have a confession to make. I've never barbecued. I've been to a few (though not that many considering how we Brits love any excuse to don an apron al fresco), but have never actually taken it upon myself to stoke the coals.

Now some of this reluctance might have had something to do with never really having had a garden (except briefly during my final year of undergrad, but all I remember of the garden that summer was the loud rave music coming from the strange neighbours and the endless task of attempting to memorise the finer details of 18 Shakespeare plays - not much room for flipping veggie burgers as you can probably imagine), however, we did have a garden last year, and even a few sunny days (though it seemed more like sunny half hours to be honest) and yet the snail-infested barbecue was left to its own pestilent devices and the disposable grills never graced our decking.


Until now!

Yep, we finally broke and decided that barbecue time had rolled around. It'd been a tense day of cricket watching (frankly, all days being an England fan are tense due to our remarkable ability to invent a sport and immediately become rubbish at it) and the Pimms had been flowing, and suddenly I get the bright idea to hunt out a disposable grill that a friend had donated, fire it up and whack on the veggie sausages, halloumi and courgettes.It was of course thoroughly overcast and blowing a gale, true British barbecue weather, but hey! that's what it's all about, and didn't detract from tasty veggies on grilled bread smothered with homemade ketchup.We've got three grills left. It's going to be a tasty summer...

Summer salads...

...are on their way. Slowly.

First harvest

They may be tiny, but these fiery radish shoots are the very first harvest from the North London Garden this year!

The fruit bushes have flowers, as do the plum tomatoes, everything else is still in little pots and are really only seedlings, but they're getting taller everyday. Fingers crossed we're set to yield a little more this year than the two tomatoes and handful of potatoes of last year's rainy summer. Every day it feels like we get a step closer, ever so slightly better and more green fingered. It's been a very steep learning curve - we lost our entire crop of nine squash and courgette plants last year to mosaic disease - but we'll get there.

There's hope yet.

The weather this summer has been awful. I mean to even call it summer is an insult, because aside from three days in June the whole period has been a wash out. We were so looking forward to a summer of mornings drinking coffee on the decking, browsing the paper in the sunshine, and then perhaps doing some plant and vegetable tending in the early afternoon. Oh no. Everything's been against us, from N working 24/7 to the weather deciding to skip the good stuff this year and plough straight back into the damp dingy greyness.

Then, on top of this, when we finally did make it into the garden to tend the overgrown veggies and make an inspection of potential autumn crops we discovered that all our pumpkins, squash and courgettes had mosaic disease. Brilliant, yeah, thanks for that.

As a result the only gardening we got to do was ditching a bunch of virus ridden plants in the compost. It's to late now to plant more too. It was so disheartening. Okay, so perhaps we haven't been the most attentive gardeners, but I have been out there watering and attempting to keep off snails, the least we could get in return is just one or two plants with healthy crops.

Oh well.

However, not all is lost. As the pictures show, the rhubarb is thriving and we might still get some late tomatoes. *crosses fingers and toes.* If we could just get some tomatoes I will be very happy indeed.

I also bought radishes and turnips today in the hope that if we plant now we can still have a few things produced of our very own. I am hoping that we might even be able to grow some things indoors to prevent the pesky squirrels getting them.

WIsh us luck.

"They're so purple!"

It was quite the exciting evening here last night. We harvested the first of our own grown vegetables! I know we've had rhubarb and herbs, but this was something we'd planted and grown ourselves from scratch, no help from friends (the rhubarb crown was a gift from friends trying to cut down their ridiculously prolific plant), no sneaky growing from things started in pots at the garden centre (most of our herbs). This was all us!

What was it we harvested? The uber potato! Remember the two random plants we discovered growing manically when we got back from LA? The ones that we had no idea what they were? Well according to my parents they were potatoes, and needed "earthing up." So we bought two massive half barrel tubs and dutifully re-potted and earthed them up. I thought this would stop their manic growing, or at least slow it down. Oh no, they continued to take over their part of the garden. We had no idea whether we'd actually get potatoes, whether we'd earthed up in time, or if it would turn out to be just one immense potato that would one day burst out of the tub sci-fi style.

We've been looking at them for a while wanting to investigate whether we'd been successful. After having had gorgeous home grown potatoes whilst at my parents, and knowing we planted our before them we figured it must be about the right time to poke about and see what we'd managed.

So last night, with N home from work before seven for the first time in three weeks, and the cupboard looking a bit bare we decided it was time. Armed with the strength gained from a pint of Guinness N began the battle with the uber potato. He poked around in the soil and suddenly little purple potatoes started surfacing! It was so exciting. We'd grown those!

What was funny was that the huge plant clearly got a little too carried away producing leaves as the massive plant only produced six mini-potatoes. However, they were shiny perfectly purple potatoes and we were very proud indeed.

We carried them into the kitchen, scrubbed them and then boiled them to be served alongside a veg and bean stew. They were light and fluffy, almost buttery in flavour. I'm not massive on potatoes, but if they're are going to be like that bring them on! I want to plant more, right now.

It was so wonderful to eat something we'd grown ourselves, especially as the purple ones are an unusual variety and apparently quite hard to grow. I can't wait to see how they other plant did, and then to start seeing the results with our other veg (assuming the squirrels actually leave us something).

I'm totally hooked to this gardening malarkey now, bring on the next round of planting!

a photo essay: hard at work

Despite the rain, we will prevail, or; dedicated to N.

July is proving a rather difficult month. It is refusing to bring us the lovely weather we'd hope for. The cricket season is in full swing, Wimbledon has just finished and the Tour de France is speeding its way across the rolling countryside, and yet the rain continues to fall. It hasn't been a completely wet month, there has been a spot of sunshine here and there, but it's hard to remember that when torrential rain is throwing itself on your struggling garden.

I want salads and picnics, chilled white wine, delicate flowers and pretty summer dresses. Instead yesterday I spent the whole time tucked up in my dressing gown with a blanket over my freezing feet, with a grumpy yowling cat. I then cooked sausages with potatoes, beans and fried onions. That's winter stodge, not my light fruity salads. If I'd have been serving it with drinks it would have been a deep rich stout. Yes, that's how bad the weather was yesterday.

And yet, there are little bits of joy to be found, even in the gloom. Our Lovely Garden (tm) is struggling to prevail. The courgettes and squash are holding their heads up in the rain and insisting on splashes of bright yellow flowers to compete with the splashes (read buckets) of rain that insists on falling on them. Then I also noticed the fuschia. Tucked in a little pot handing on the wall determinedly flowering and even glistening in the rain. It may have been a wash out of a day, but there were still things to remind me that it's not all that bad.

Today I went out again and saw the fushia smiling at me in the sunshine, as if to say "see, it's all alright." It's like the plant equivalent of N, who despite having to work long hours this week was wonderful last night when he discovered his girlfriend sitting on the kitchen floor crying about the grumpy cat that just wouldn't stop meowing. He's amazing, I don't know how he does it.

So, this post, my 100th, is dedicated to N who is my ray of sunshine in all weathers; who puts up with my cookbook and baking obsession with not even a flinch as another book arrives for our already overloaded shelves, or another strange dish is placed in front of him; who deals with my cat-stress and grumpericalness; who even takes an interest when I talk about cycling. Now there's one fantastic, amazing man. Thank you.

P.S. We ended yesterday (having chucked the grumpy cat into the garden determined not to worry about him being out at night) with blueberry tofu cheesecake. It was originally made for the garden party, but I overcooked it, it cracked and it wasn't really presentable enough. Plus the blueberries used in it were rather disappointing. I can't bear to waste food though, and knew that if did various things to spice it up it must be edible. We've tried various things, but last night I went for the indulgent addition of blueberry whipped cream and it was just what it needed. I simply added three teaspoons of blueberry conserve (a wonderful find by N) into a bowl of whipped creamed and whipped it a bit more. It was exactly what the evening needed. A little bit of comfort and indulgence.

You don't have to be the Queen to have a garden party!

A couple of months ago we got thinking; we've got a garden, we've got friends, we like food and drink, June might have good weather. Hmm...how could be combine all of these things into a cunning plan? A garden party of course! Plans were laid, invites were sent and it mostly went out of our minds. Then suddenly it was the week before, N was projecting the possibility of forty people arriving and I began what I do best: making lists. The responses to the invite clearly demonstrated the difference between our male and female friends. The men replied asking if they could bring anything for the BBQ, the women if they should wear dresses and bring cucumber sandwiches. When men see "garden party" they think BBQ, when women see "garden party" they think garden party!

Since we actually don't have a BBQ - okay, there is one out there, but it's an old gas thing that during the winter months was aptly nick-named "snail city". We weren't going to go there - we stuck to the garden party plan and I began planning and plotting the cakes, breads and salads that would satisfy a potential group of 40 of our friends.

Sounds stressful and hard work, but truth is I loved it. I love having to be that organized; making lists, choosing foods, planning recipes, and most of all I love spending an entire day (or in this case a day and a half) pottering in the kitchen producing things to share with other people.

With a lot of consulting with N our ideas looked like this:

Pecan and cranberry loaf
fig and orange loaf
walnut and apricot soda bread
focaccia
ciabatta
parmesan biscuits
veggie sausage rolls
roasted tomatoes
roasted beetroot and feta salad
mango and bulgar wheat salad

scones with homemade strawberry jam and cream
white chocolate and raspberry tarts
mixed berry tarts
Victoria sponges (two vegan, one normal)
vegan French lemon cake
vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream
lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream
chocolate cupcakes with rum buttercream
Mini-chocolate and vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream (child safe just in case)

Not bad eh? I spent all of Friday creaming, whisking, baking and icing cakes, kneading, resting, proving and baking bread and then most of Saturday morning (the party kicked off at 3pm) rolling puff pastry, mixing, rolling and cutting scones, cutting and roasting tomatoes and beetroot and generally have a good ole time in my summer frock with N and K (who arrived early and was the best kitchen assistant ever). It was wonderful, and it produced this:



There are so many recipes to share that I won't do it now, instead I'm going to follow this round up with a series of posts about the delicious things we tucked into all afternoon (and evening, and the following morning, and evening and stocked the freezer with and gave to people in goody bags!).

It was a roaring success, the food went down well, the cocktails went down very well and everyone mingled and had a good time and to top it off we got great weather!

The real star of the show though was Sniff. He hasn't been allowed in the garden yet, so the poor chap had to be put in the study so he didn't escape. We also weren't sure how he'd be with other people. He was brilliant. He didn't complain, but lounged on his hug chair and was very compliant with all the people who wanted to visit him. Most importantly he clearly loved K, which is brilliant as she's our on-hand cat-sitter. I think their combined love of cake, cream and sleeping on the sofa helped! When we finally all came into the house and shut the French doors Sniff's door was opened. We were worried he'd just hide in the study and be afraid of all the people (there were still at least 10 of us at this point). How wrong we were! He was slightly timid at first, but was soon out and showing off his goal-keeping skills with a ping-pong ball.

What a little star. That was a cat that definitely got some cream.

A photo essay: North London Veg Garden update

No kitchen garden would be complete without it's herbs. In the barrel are mint, rosemary, coriander, sage, thyme and bay, in the little pot is oregano.

The greenhouse is serving us well. Despite a snail invasion we have some strong tomato vine (back row) and are attempting a second batch of pepper (front row) having killed the first lot off in the colder weather earlier in the year.

Hanging basket "Tumbling Tom" tomatoes on the top of the boiler cupboard (and to the far left our resurgent lemon tree)

Pots of courgette and pumpkins currently sitting on the table to keep the slugs at bay until we get more copper tape

In the foreground our butternut squash, one of which is doing so well it flowered today! In the background our uber potato "tree"!

Our collection of berry fruits. (L-R) Raspberry, blackberry and blackcurrant.

Despite being harvested once our rhubarb is well on the way for another crop.

A photo essay: Total bliss, or; al fresco dining in Our Lovely Garden (tm).