Nibbles #24
Visiting a 200 year old watercress festival, an introduction to chrysanthemum greens, and the mystery of the missing tomato cane.
Welcome to Nibbles where once a month I share everything brilliant I’ve been reading on the web as well as some general updates from my kitchen, my vegetable garden during the growing season, and other miscellaneous ‘you really need to know about’ updates. I know I owe you one more pistachio recipe before we move onto next month’s ingredient, but don’t worry - I’ve not forgotten you!
If you’ve somehow arrived here from elsewhere and you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here so not to miss out on monthly ingredient essays (featuring a different ingredient every month), exclusive recipes, sneak peaks into some of my favourite food people’s kitchen cupboards and the occasional long read!
Meryl’s Basil and Burrata Ravioli is simple, clever and beautiful. Simply perfect for the end of spring / start of summer:
Am I the only one who is absolutely terrible at cleaning my cast iron skillet? Do you think I should invest in one of these Lodge skillet scrapers? If any of you own one, are they any good?
Jack uses the field to table journey of Weetabix to highlight what exactly has gone wrong in our agriculture food systems. A very important read:
To mark a big birthday, Ruth’s moving essay about her immigrant Jewish family’s journey first to Britain and then to America told through the medium of food is incredibly moving:
Kristina teaches us all about Tong Ho, or chrysanthemum greens, and how to use them in the kitchen (including in a delicious pesto!)
After a few weeks (happily) drowning in rosé I’m trying to cut back a little, but I’m bookmarking Richard’s Caper Margarita for later as it looks and sounds like a bit of pure brilliance:
Jacob takes us to a 200 year old watercress festival and schools us in the history of watercress cultivation. Let’s eat more watercress!
Over on my blog I’ve published plenty of new recipes this month, straddling the cool rainy days we’ve been getting, and those days where we’ve been eating outside in the brilliant sunshine! If it’s a rainy day like today can I point you in the direction of my Indonesian and Malaysian-inspired Duck Rendang? Or how about my happily sustainable Slow Cooked Venison Ragù? And if the weather is a little better where you are, my Spanakopita Tart I think is just the thing for entertaining at the moment, and my Prawns with Thai Red Curry Mayonnaise make a lovely starter (appetizer), light lunch or even snack to go with a couple of nicely chilled glasses of white wine.
And, if sandwiches are more your thing I’m super pleased with the one I’ve put together for my Macknade residency this month: my Roasted Garlic, Burrata, Porketta & Rocket Pesto Focaccia Sandwich tastes just as good as it sounds!
In spite of all the rain and the grass getting completely out of control, there has been a little progress in the vegetable garden this month (sorry there are no photos to go with this update… you’ve guessed it, it’s raining again!)
My rainbow radishes look like they’re almost ready, and the pea crop is doing exceptionally well, now planted out and gradually growing up their strings on the bamboo structure I’ve built them. Some of the sweet peas have survived (but others have failed) but they all seem to be the orange ones, so that is probably going to be my colour of the summer.
None of the lettuce seeds I put in have succeeded, the garlic does not seem to be doing anything at all, and the last year’s carrots have now flowered so I’m going to experiment with collecting the seeds. My purple chilli was eaten by slugs.
As usual because I don’t have a greenhouse my father has kindly raised some tomato plants for me so a good mix are now out in giant pots against the garage wall (which absorbs a lot of heat) and are already flowering, though none of us can figure out what happened to the one that appeared snapped in half one morning. In a completely locked garden you’d just think an animal had done it… but the bamboo cane it was tied to, the string, and the top of the tomato plant are nowhere to be found. The bamboo was taller than me and pushed very firmly down into the soil… I can’t think of anything that could have got into the garden which would be able to take it away??
Also, I’ve planted one of my Dad’s cucumber plants in the old sink I usually put courgettes in, I’ll plant one of those elsewhere once he’s given me one instead.
I wrote about Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime when season 2 had just aired, but I for all my newer subscribers I wanted to highlight once again this brilliant show that shines a light on our broken food system and the real plight of British farmers: to put it simply, if we don’t have any farmers, we won’t have any food.
For those of you who think all Jeremy Clarkson is good for is making amusing car shows, yes Clarkson’s Farm is hysterically funny at times but in following his journey learning how to farm his 300 acre farm in Oxfordshire he highlights how impossible life has become for the farming community in recent years, and how hard they work to keep us all fed. It’s important to note that whilst Clarkson is worth around £43 million so he can afford to experiment with different approaches (he plants up a regenerative field this year due to the rising costs of pesticides and fertilisers, and experiments with both pig farming and ‘farming the unfarmed’ with unconventional crops such as mushrooms) but he’s very honest about the money involved: profits and losses, and it is very hard hitting to imagine this is what our ordinary farmers have to face without his massive safety net.