Detoxing - Do it with weeds and home-cured bacon

DANDELION AND BACON SALAD

Detoxifying dandelions are the perfect January food. You can fry them and add them to a thick bowl of  pulses, add them to a soup of green lentils and Jerusalem artichokes or eat them in a lemony salad with squid and giant garlicky sourdough crumbs. One of the best combinations of all is a bowl of bitter dandelion leaves dressed with vinegar and fatty bacon fried to a crisp. This  is lucky for me as I have just been making my own dry cure streaky bacon - trying out some home curing recipes for my new book, The Modern Peasant.

My friend Fred got me some fantastic free range British Lop belly pork from Mary Holbrook's farm in Somerset. I cut the 1.5 kg piece into two big slabs and rubbed them with a salt, spice, sugar mix (fennel, coriander & juniper), draining off the liquid each day and adding more mix. Over about 4 or 5 days it cured the belly to perfection.

Weeds have been on my  mind a lot lately. In November I under took a thrilling pilgrimage to Patience Gray's house in Apulia. Gray was evangelical about the energy giving properties of weeds. If you have a garden or access to one then you will probably have dandelions. Its probably one of the easiest form of foraging (and doubles as weeding too) but just avoid places where dogs get walked. The recent unseasonably warm weather means there's plenty of fresh growth.

Dandelions boost energy but they are a powerful detoxifier, always helpful at this time of year.
What better way to start 2012 then by detoxing in a way that is utterly pleasurable?


Dandelion and bacon salad with a hot vinegar dressing

This recipe is an adaptation of a Richard Olney recipe from the French Menu cookbook. At this time of year you are unlikely to find large, intact edible heads. You will find the outer leaves of dandelions are a bit tough but you can cut these off and use only the crunchy base of the leaves where the leaves meet the stump. It's probably best to cut as many as you can find and trim off only the choicest, juiciest bits. Later on in the year you could follow Mr Olney’s excellent advice and use the dandelion, whole, as a head. His other terrific piece of advice is to warm the salad bowl (ceramic need you ask) and serve the salad straight away so that the bacon fat doesn’t cool and harden.

Serves 2 or 4 as a side

2 big handfuls of dandelions cut at the base of the root (washed carefully and dried well in a tea towel or salad spinner)

3 or 4 rashers of good quality streaky bacon cut into thin strips (about 90g)

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

Fry the bacon in a cold pan over a low heat until the fat starts to run. Turn up the heat and fry until the bacon is crisp on all sides.

Warm the salad bowl by filling it with hot water and then drying it or by popping it in a low oven for a few minutes.

Put the dandelions in the warmed salad bowl and when the bacon is crisp tip the contents of the pan (bacon and fat) over the leaves. Quickly rinse the pan out with the vinegar (turn the heat up high). When the vinegar boils tip this too over the salad and serve immediately with plenty of good crusty bread.

Vintage Chutney

Chutney with tomatoes and fresh chilli peppers

For anyone who attended the Vintage fete on the South Bank and didn't get a jar of chutney. Here is the recipe so you can make it yourself. Go to  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vintage_books  for some pictures of the great chutney making demo.

Makes about 5 x medium jars (350ml)
1.5 kg tomatoes (cooking tomatoes are tasty and cheap at the farmer's market right now)

450ml distilled vinegar (clear not dark brown for better colour)

400g onion, finely chopped (2 good sized onions)

6 red chilli peppers, seeded and finely chopped

3 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly crushed

250g sultanas
1 tbsp freshly grated ginger

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

500g soft light brown sugar

1 tablespoon of pickling spices (a mix of cardamom, dried chillies, mustard seeds, cinnamon bark, fennel etc)

1 teaspoon sea salt

Blanch the tomatoes, skin, chop roughly and set aside. Put the pickling spices into a little bag. In a large pan put the onions and half the vinegar, simmer for 10 minutes then add the chillies, garlic, tomatoes, sultanas and ginger. Simmer until the tomatoes have broken down and the chillies have started to soften. Add the sugar, the rest of the vinegar, the mustard seeds, the bag of spices and the salt. Stir until the sugar has dissolved and then simmer very gently until the mixture thickens and starts to look jammy.

Spoon into hot, sterilised jam jars. Leave the chutney in the cupboard for at least a month before eating.

Hollyhock and Vine

        

Hollyhock & Vine sounds like a cross-street rendezvous in an L.A noir, in fact its a happy accident of planting on the allotment. The ancient vine I found strangled by hogweed and nettles ten years ago is now cascading over my shed in beautiful contrast to the reds and pinks of the hollyhock's beside it. The vine's tenderest and shiniest leaves make excellent dolmas.

This year circumstance and inclination mean the allotment is teetering on the brink of barely controlled chaos. I planted rye and clover as a green manure and inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's book, The One Straw Revolution I am trying to garden in a more natural way, using weeds and grass as a mulch to condition and nourish the soil and letting nature set the tone. So far its been a lot less work and everything seems to be cropping well. I've been busy visiting yoghurt makers in Herefordshire, cheesemakers in Bermondsey, beekeepers in Kings Cross and catching fish (and throwing up) in the Channel. All of which means that the attentive but less involved style of gardening described by Fukuoka suits me fine..

Here are few of his words:

"I grow vegetables in a "semi-wild" way, making use of a vacant lot, riverbank or open wasteland, my idea is just to toss out the seeds and let the vegetables grow up with the weeds. I grow my vegetables on the mountainside in the spaces between the citrus trees."

Here are his four principles of natural farming:

1. NO CULTIVATION

2. NO CHEMICAL FERTILISER OR PREPARED COMPOST

3.NO WEEDING BY TILLAGE OR HERBICIDES

4.NO DEPENDANCE ON CHEMICALS

If you haven't read the book, do, its a brilliant mix of philosophy and commonsense with a little low key Buddhism thrown in too. Its ostensibly about rice farming but it also makes the case for a more natural, organic approach to food, better than I've ever heard it done before. If you need converting or just have never got the point of why organic is so important, buy it now. For me it took organic food out of the luxury goods aisle and right into the heart of our relationship with the earth. Despite all this it is far from preachy and guaranteed to make you feel better.

Here's some semi wild companion planting of my own, the purple flowers of perennial hyssop with carrots, lettuces and garlic in the front..

Strawberry gluts

If you have been lovingly raising plants on your window sill, now is the time to plant them out. My own newly planted tomatoes, courgettes, borlotti beans and cucumber plants are right now fighting for survival in the  snail, slug and weed infested arena that is my allotment. The dry weather has been continuing to test my abilities to get down to the allotment and water. Any gardener will tell you that there is a special kind of angst attached to the thought of your luscious young hand reared plants frazzling away in the sun whilst you are miles away unable to water them. 

The silver lining to our present lack of cloud is the strawberry crop which is unashamedly a glut. The lack of rain has made them all the sweeter with no dilution of flavour and far fewer slugs around to munch them up.

If had a mind to write a detective story I would call my chief villains, Couchgrass and Bindweed. These two thuggish invaders send their thick white roots far and wide across my plot and have to be the only real downside to organic gardening. I know the quick solution is to blast the roots with a chemical like Roundup but I just can't bear to do it so I guess I'm stuck pulling snaking bind weed out arm over arm for the next few years. If anyone has a solution that doesn't involve chemicals let me know.

East End Paradise - The Freshly Picked Paperback

Freshly Picked is finally out in paperback with a new title, East End Paradise. Actually its the original title that I came up with lovingly polished and restored to the cover. So just to avoid confusion for anyone who loved the first book, this is the same book under a different name. Feel free to buy it again and give it to a friend.  I also hope it will reach lots of  new readers with this title and the beautiful cover Vintage have designed featuring photos by the wonderful Jason Lowe.

I  am doing some events in the next few weeks. On May 7th I'll be at lafromagerie.co.uk for a Saturday morning workshop and the following day I'll be at the realfoodfestival.co.uk.

I'll  be showing you to make Vietnamese rice paper rolls with freshly picked herbs and salad and talking about to sow, grow, pick, serve and dress the perfect salad.

On June 22nd I'll be doing an evening reading at broadwaybookshophackney.com.

Meanwhile I'm hard at work hunting down beekeepers, butchers, breadmakers and jam makers for my new book, The Modern Peasant - Food Stories From The Future City which should be out next year.

It's been beautiful weather for gardening. I've been obsessively tending both plots (back garden and allotment) sowing seeds, hauling bags of manure, planting pear trees and earthing up potatoes. So if you haven't already now is the time to start sowing (and buying).

Who needs a pancake when you can have a jelly roll crepe?

Like millions of other people I ate pancakes with my children on Tuesday night. As well as the usual lemon and sugar ensemble we tried something new...

A jelly roll crepe. For jelly read jam. Its nothing more than a baked crepe smeared with jam and sugar.

Thanks to Mr Richard Olney for providing us with what may well turn out to be a new family tradition.

We made our crepes in an ancient iron skillet from Pennsylvania that I picked up in an antique cookware shop in San Francisco. "Cookin" is an Aladdin's cave of treasures. It has every kind of tin, saucepan, cake tray, earthenware casserole, jelly mould, plate and glass. It is the kind of shop you dream about finding and we stumbled across it by accident whilst looking for a post office. I made myself buy only one thing or I would have had to hire a shipping container to get all I really wanted home. The crepes made in this pan come out a little smaller than average but are all the better for gobbling up fast before they get cold. Its also the perfect tortilla pan too and deep enough for a little bit of deep frying every now and then.

Contrary to every other pancake recipe I read last week Richard Olney takes a mere 50g of flour and is all the better for it. His delightfully eggy crepe is crisp at the edges and tastes of butter and eggs not flour, once you've made one you'll never make them any other way.

Under Richard Olney's instruction (the recipe is the French Menu Cookbook) we spread our crepes with jam. We used strawberry as a concession to childish tastes rather than the sour plum, Olney suggests and I would have liked. Then we rolled them up and put them in a buttered oven proof dish, they were sprinkled with sugar and dotted with butter and baked until the sugar melted and formed a glaze.
You can probably imagine how good they tasted. We ate the rest of the pancakes straight out of the pan rolled up round a blood orange and roasted rhubarb compote. So good and definitely to be eaten every week not once a year.

Food Frenzy in San Francisco

San Francisco is a paradise for food loving modern peasants. The tastiness level is off the scale (fancy Catalan tapas California style? or a takeaway kimchi and flank steak sandwich from a word of mouth take-out counter staffed by off-duty chefs or a punk take on a coffee shop complete with dj and Four Barrels coffee served with Dynamo Donuts or braised pork and fresh relish on a tiny taco from a truck? I  ate everything from a lemon and cinnamon morning bun for breakfast to a soothing bowl of curdled to order tofu from a minute Japanese restaurant for dinner and plenty in between.

As well as a food culture easily, if not more diverse, than London the local produce is amazing (I went at the peak of the citrus season). I ate Paige's mandarins with dense orange flesh that was dripping with  juice. Intense almost concentrated like a Jaffa Orange lolly on a hot day in childhood. I gorgoed on a Pomelo/grapefruit cross that was possibly the most grapefruity grapefruit I've ever tasted and ate Andante goats cheese off Acme sourdough bread in a dripping fern filled gully near Bolinas. On top of all these riches there's an inspiring  back to the land, do it yourself, grow your own philosophy with all the emphasis on taste. I visited Alice Water's Edible Schoolyard project, Novella Carpenter's urban farm in Oakland (see her backyard poultry below) and picked broccoli with volunteers at the Hayes Valley farm (an urban vegetable garden on an old freeway ramp in central SF).

I've never eaten better and I got some great ideas for my book. Who knew Brussell sprouts were actually tasty? All to be revealed later on......

Freckled bounty

Is there anything so dreary as a stale blog? Anyone paying attention will have noticed that the summer has not been very fruitful for my blog, luckily my garden has fared a little better. Late autumn is a satisfying time on the allotment the weeds don't grow quite as fast and the crisp edge to the air seems to make the colours stand out all the brighter, cosmos, zinnias, sunflowers and pot marigolds are all still blooming making the plot a cheering sight. Today I picked a big bouquet sized bunch of rocket planted in August and a colander full of borlotti beans to be made into an aromatic soup of garlic, chilli and waxy potatoes diced fine.

Last week I picked a handful of extremely shiny, slim green chilli peppers. Anxious to make the most of them I cooked chana dahl and added the garlic and peppers fried in ghee, then made dough and filled some  little round pancakes with a spicy mixture of potatoes, peppers and spices. I served the parathas with dahl and a fresh tomato and coriander relish.

Today I thinned and replanted my rosso treviso chicory seedlings and planted shallots (echalot grise) and garlic (early wight purple).  Next year's garden is already taking shape. I have sown green manures of rye grass and clover to cover the ground in winter and feed the soil. Late plantings of courgettes planted in late July are still cropping and this got me thinking that a garden planted for harvesting in late August would make a lot more sense for people like me who have to be away from their plots in August. This year was a good year for globe artichokes, blackcurrants, raspberries and salad (especially the speckled kind). The chard self seeded lushly beneath my greengage (still reluctant to produce any fruit) and my pink fir apples were a welcome surprise on my return from holiday. I've realised that its time to take the allotment in hand, its ten years old now and desperately needs some renovation. This winter I will be doing my best to make it a bit more respectable looking with new paths and a bit more structure (that's the theory anyway). I also hope to start work on a new book that celebrates city food producers and a more direct way of cooking with what is to hand.

What's In My Basket? - new potatoes, sunflowers, baby chard, sorrel, marjoram, chioggia beets, courgette flowers, salad and spring onions

It's crazy weather for growing vegetables this year, all extremes with nothing in between. My chard is still quite tiny but I was given an enormous bag of lush  super-sized chard by my parent's neighbours. I used it to make a big ricotta and chard pie for a picnic to celebrate 200 years of Shaw Farm in Wiltsire.

Ricotta, dill and chard filo pie recipe

You can make this pie with just chard or a mixture of leafy greens. I picked a luscious and juicy bunch of sorrel, beet tops and chard.

1 small red onion or shallot finely chopped (approx. 100g)

1 big bunch (500g) of chard (stalks and leaves)

1 small dried red chilli pepper

2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed with the flat of a heavy kitchen knife

2 eggs

400g ricotta

1 tbsp of finely grated Parmesan

zest of one lemon

a few good scrapings of nutmeg

1 small bunch of dill, leaves only, finely chopped

1 packet of filo pastry

olive oil for brushing the pastry (its more traditional to use melted butter but easier and I think just as tasty with olive oil)

butter for greasing

sea salt black pepper

Lightly butter a deep gratin dish (approx 15cm x ain2cm)

Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Wash the chard well and drain in a colander. Strip the leaves from the stalks and put to one side. Dice the stalks finely. Roll the leaves up into a fat cigar and cut into very thin ribbons (chiffonade).

In a separate bowl mix the ricotta with the eggs, the Parmesan, the lemon zest, the dill, the nutmeg a few turns of the pepper mill and a tsp of salt. Mix well and set aside.

Heat a tbsp of olive oil in a heavy, wide frying pan, when the oil is hot add the onion and sweat over a medium heat until transparent, add the chard, the garlic and the chilli pepper. Cook until the chard is tender (about 7-8 minutes). Add the greens and continue cooking, stirring constantly until the greens are wilted. Remove from the heat and allow the mixture to cool. When cool, add to the bowl with the cheese and egg mixture. Mix well to combine all the ingredients.

Remove the filo from its packet and gently unwrap it - don’t worry if it rips a little bit, this pie is very forgiving. Place a sheet of filo on the work top and brush lightly with olive oil. If you don’t have a pastry brush you can always zig zag the oil over the pastry and spread it out with your hand, no ones watching. Place another sheet of filo on top of this piece and brush a little more oil on. Gently lift the pastry up and place in the bottom of the dish, a low a little (10cm) to hang over the edge but trim it if it’s too long. Repeat until you have six sheets of filo pastry in the bottom of the dish. Spoon the chard and cheese mixture into the pie dish. Level it off and top the pie with six more layers of pastry brushed with oil. You can trim this to fit the top of the pie exactly or let it hang over, as you wish. When the pie is assembled take a sharp knife and score the pie diagonally across the to make diamonds, taking care not to pierce the bottom layers of pastry. Cook for about 20-25 minutes or until the top of the pie is golden and the sides a deep crunchy brown. Allow to cool and serve with a salad of mixed leaves preferably freshly picked.

Oh baby what's in my basket - baby chard, baby chioggia beets, baby courgettes and a cucumber

Today I picked some tender leaves of self seeding chard for a dish of chickpeas and chard or chicken broth with chorizo, new potatoes and chard I can't decide. The last of the rhubarb for a compote with some redcurrants and the first tiny courgettes with flowers (to be truthful I got those from a neighbour). A big bag of salad (rocket, purslane, little gem, marvel of four seasons, sweet butter crunch) but no potatoes, they aren't quite ready. I think its been too dry so I am leaving them to swell up a bit in the hope of some rain. My carefully planted pumpkins are looking rather snail or slug munched and my dahlias (Bishop's Children) grown from seed are growing very slowly. As ever its a mixed bag. The hollyhocks by the shed are looking lovely as is the vine with some tender leaves just right for making dolma.