Sunny Spring Sunday

It's been some time since I've done a post as I rather underestimated how long it takes to post on a regular basis so you'll need to bear with me, my brain is naturally lazy in many ways and the blog seems to have fallen foul of my lethargic ways.

Anyway.  It's a beautiful Sunday and so I've been taking advantage of it.  The tomato, aubergine, chilli and cucumber seeds that were sown almost exactly a month ago in my post Back in the garden are growing well, as you may see in the photograph.  Despite my fears for the aubergines, three of the four seeds germinated nicely and so my back-up second tray means I have quite a few extra to go to friends.  The celeriac came through a week or so after my last post, with only one seed not germinating, and they are growing slowly but surely.  The chillies have been slow with the, normally reliable, Cayenne not germinating at all.  With a second sowing they came through quickly, so I think the seed was just too old in the first batch.

Additions to the windowsill now include ten of each of the following:

Pimentos de Padron - fairly big green chillies that are very mild but deliciously fresh-tasting.  I believe they are a common tapas dish in Spain, being fried whole and sprinkled with salt flakes.  They appealled enormously when I discovered this, mainly because about one in every ten peppers is firery hot and so provides a sort of culinary Russian Roulette.  These were brand new seeds and all but one of them germinated quickly.
Tomatillo de Milpa - I first grew tomatillos last year.  They are like a cross between a tomato and a cape gooseberry.  Little green (or purple, depending on the type) tomatoes in a papery lantern.  I didn't really know how to deal with them so ended up with two enormous plants with lots of little parchment parcels dangling in great profusion.  Once picked, de-husked and washed (they have a bitter sticky liquid on them) they made a brilliant salsa that I jarred up and added to mashed avocado as and when I wanted.  Sadly it didn't store well in jars and mould developed after a month, so I'll be looking at a different way of preserving them this year.  Only three seeds germinated but that's enough if they all grow up well.
Cornichon de Paris - pickled cornichon are extremely popular in the Jones household and so I'm going to try my hand at growing and pickling my own this year after the success of the pickled onions last year.  All ten seeds have germinated and are growing vigorously.

Now we're nearing the end of March I'm starting to sow direct with the hardier veg types.  This means sowing the seeds directly into the soil where they'll grow to harvest.  I'm always a bit wary about starting this too early but now the sun is warming the beds nicely I'm butching up and getting on with it.  I start with the troughs and containers as they warm quickly and I can fleece them easily and speedily if a frost threatens.  So today I've started with carrots and pickling onions with the peas going out next weekend or the one after if it's cold.

Pickling onions

I grew these last year they were very successful.  The variety I grow are Pompei which are a type of salad onion but with a very round, white end that pickles beautifully.  These ones I got on eBay but last year I don't remember where I found them.  I grow them in a big, long trough perched up by the garage, where they get sun all day long.  It's a great way of making use of a tiny ledge of concrete.  I've just sown these today, in the troughs I used for salad last year with the top 5 inches of compost removed and replaced with nice fresh multipurpose.  Mark two shallow rows down the length of the trough not too close together, using the side of your palm, sparcely scatter the seed in the rows and cover with a thin layer of compost.  Sprinkle plenty of water over the top and leave to grow. 

Just a small aside at this point, remember to put the troughs in their final position before you water them.  Water-logged compost is really quite heavy and you'll save yourself a lot of huffing and puffing if you water once they're in place.  I wish someone had told me this.  It would have saved endless physio sessions.

Carrots

The carrots are bog-standard longish orange ones as I can't seem to find my favoured rainbow ones.  I'll order some shortly for the next sowing but I can't seem to remember where I got them from, they are a vibrant mix of orange, yellow, white and purple carrots which taste as good as they look.  I'm afraid I don't know the type of the ones used in this sowing as they came free with an order from Plants of Distinction last year but my general favourite, as I said, are Rainbow with the little, round Parmex making an odd appearance.  I prefer my carrots to be long and tapering, rather than round and bulbous.  I grow all my carrots in two deep plastic troughs so I can place them on a wall out of reach of the dreaded Carrot Root Fly.  This fly lays it's eggs on the carrots, which hatch into little larve that carve a maze of little tunnels around the carrots.  They can smell carrot tops from miles away, so makes sure when you thin your seedlings later on to take the pulled ones well away from your bed or trough.  They can only fly about 6 inches above the surface of the ground though so growing in troughs on a wall seems to thwart them but so will putting a fence of fleece around your bed.  I hate the look of fleece and netting so troughs it is.

Remember to keep watering both inside and outside seeds. With tepid water please. If someone chucked a bucket full of cold water over you it would be a nasty shock and it's the same for seeds and seedlings. Also avoid getting water on the leaves as much as possible.

Our rhubarb has started to poke it's leaves tentitively out through the thick layer of mulch and compost I covered it with last Autumn.  We don't force ours (cover it with a pot to exclude the light) so it comes up later than the attractive pink stalks hitting the shops at the moment.  I love everything about forced rhubarb and, as the vast majority of it is grown nearby in the suitably named Rhubarb Triangle in West Yorkshire, I try to buy it as much as possible when it's in season.

Whilst flicking through the most recent Waitrose magazine (yes, it seems I really am that middle class) I found the perfect recipe to utilise these coral lovelies, a baked cheesecake with a scrummy rhubarb and ginger compote.  The recipe for this is below, along with a rather poor photograph of my creation. 

We've had some friends staying this weekend so this formed the grand finale of the night's supper, following on from Lamb, Chickpea and Pear tagine from Lorraine Pascale's book Home Cooking Made Easy.  A great book actually, I had my doubts after watching an episode of the accompanying TV series in which she bizarrely seemed to mostly cook and/or present on the fire escape of her building.  Not really the time of year for lamb as everything available has hauled itself half way around the world from New Zealand but I'm making an exception as I want to make use of the last of the British pears still in the shops.  Besides, I think the spices in the tagine would overpower the delicate Welsh lamb available later on in the year.

Cheescake with Rhubarb and Ginger

Rather misleadingly called Rhubarb and Ginger Cheesecake in the magazine, it's actually a vanilla cheesecake with a rhubarb and ginger compote.  I've altered it slightly with the addition of lemon to the cheesecake mix but other than that it's pretty much the same, so thank you to Waitrose magazine, although your cooking times were a bit off.  I hasten to point out that the recipe is conveyed here in my own words, Waitrose would never use the English language in such a cavalier manner.

150g gingernut biscuits
75g unsalted butter, melted
500g curd cheese (you can only get this at the deli counter in supermarkets, although surprisingly Waitrose didn't have any so I used mascarpone instead)
200g cream cheese (full fat please, don't use light as I find it invariably never works)
150g caster sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1/2tsp vanilla extract (never essence)
1 lemon, zest and juice
170g soured cream (I used a whole 300ml pot actually)
75g granulated sugar
400g rhubarb, cut into 3cm lengths
1 ball of stem ginger in syrup, finely chopped, plus 2tbsps of the syrup

Preheat the oven to 150◦c and baseline a 20cm springform tin.  Put the gingernuts in a bag and bash them to crumbs with a rolling pin or other appropriately weighty object.  Pour into a bowl, mix in the melted butter then push into the base of the tin.  Pop in the fridge to harden.

Mix the curd cheese (or mascarpone), cream cheese, caster sugar, vanilla and the zest and juice of half the lemon.  Beat until smooth then beat in the eggs.  I use a wooden spoon as you need to start off with a spoon anyway but you can use a whisk, starting with a whisk is tricky as great lumps of cheese get stuck in the, ummm, prongs?

Pour the cheese mixture on top of the gingernut base and bake in the oven for an hour and half.  The cheesecake should have a slight wobble in the centre.  The recipe says bake for one hour but after an hour mine had a massive wobble all over so in fact it took and hour and half to reach minor wobble status.  Turn off the oven and leave the cheesecake in there for half and hour with the door ajar. 

Remove from the oven, pour over the soured cream and leave to cool overnight or for at least 4 hours, then put in the fridge for 4-6 hours.

For the rhubarb, I tripled the recipe as I love rhubarb and will use the leftovers for eating with Greek yoghurt or some such, if you do the same make sure you triple the amounts of granulated sugar, ginger, ginger syrup and lemon.  The method below is using the amounts stated above, so using 400g of rhubarb.

Put the granulated sugar in a pan with 2tbsps of water over a low heat.  Simmer until all the sugar granules have dissolved, then add the rhubard, chopped ginger, ginger syrup and the juice and zest of the other half of the lemon.  Turn up the heat and bring to the boil, then lower the heat once more and simmer for 5 minutes or until the rhubarb is soft but still mostly holding it's shape.  Put a sieve over another pan and pour the rhubarb into the sieve.  Leave to go completely cold and for the syrup to drain into the pan below.  Put the rhubarb to one side then boil the syrup in the pan until reduced in volume by half.  Reunite the syrup with the rhubarb and leave to go cold.  Then put in the fridge.

I prefer to serve this room temperature so you can taste the flavours better so remove both the cheesecake and the rhubarb from the fridge about an hour before serving.  Serve slices of the cheesecake with a great dollop of the rhubarb and ginger compote.

Always keep one eye on where you're going...

Rather a good day in the Sheffield Hospitals Charity office today.  However the leaving of the said office didn't go quite as successfully, with me confidently walking face first into the entrance doors proving a rather spectacular conclusion to the day.  Sadly it seemed to have escaped my tiny and distracted mind that the first set of doors when leaving the office are, in fact, not automatic. 

Though in the face of such adversity I think I recovered admirably, as fortunately my nose took the brunt of it and it was only witnessed by two alarmed vistors and a random woman dropping off flyers for reception.  On finally reaching my car, having triumphantly negiotiated all remaining portals,  I was required to spend several minutes checking the nasal situation but I am pleased to say there doesn't appear to be any permanent damage.

So now, sustained by a healing cup of coffee, I'm able to update on the seeds, or rather seedlings, that are flourishing on my windowsill.

The cucumbers were first to come through, with a massive five out of six germinating nicely.  Nearly all the tomatoes have also come through with five out of five, with the only exception being the Blondkopfchen (white cherry variety) which have stubbornly refused to budge.  So it will be seven varieties of tomato this year I think, the Blondkopfchen seeds were a couple of years old so perhaps they've just run out of energy or got a bit damp.  Then the aubergines, well aubergine, as only one of the four have germinated.  That means a second sowing this weekend to make up the numbers.  The chillies are still holding back but I noticed a couple coming through this morning, the jury's still out on them.  Finally the celeriac, which are showing no signs of life but having never grown these before, I'm just hoping they're late developers....

Once your seeds start to sprout make sure you remove the clear cover you have over them.  High humity is nectar to seeds but will make your little seedlings rot and make sure you keep the compost they're in nice and damp by checking them daily and watering a little when needed.  If you have got them on a radiator to germinate, then take them off now and the high heat is no longer needed and they'll dry out quicker.  Watch them grow until you can see roots starting to come out of the hole in the bottom of the cell, then it's time to pot them on...

The new addition to the windowsill is the tray of seed potatoes.  Potatoes are a fabulous crop to grow as harvesting them is like digging for buried treasure.  I never cease to be excited when, scrabbling through the dark and earthy compost, I find these little nuggets of gorgeousness resting patiently.  I'm not sure I can do their description justice, they're just so....new.  The grow so wonderfully with very little effort and they come in so many colours and shapes with a variety of different uses.  You can grow them in bags, pots, tubs or in the ground which makes them perfect for every type of garden.

You start off with seed potatoes.  These are just rather wrinkly looking potatoes, probably with a few sprouts on them.  I get mine from JBA Seed Potatoes which do a staggering variety of seed potatoes of the three potato types, these are:

First Earlies - plant around the end of March and they can be harvested around June/July.
Second Earlies - plant mid to late April to be harvested around mid August
Main Crop - plant late March to mid April for harvesting mid August all the way to October.

You will also need to choose your variety based on what you're going to be using them for i.e. floury for mashing or waxy for salads, although many are good all-rounders.

JBA Seed Potatoes are also great with planting advice and timings etc, even if you don't get you seeds from there (they will have probably sold out of the most popular varieties by now) it helps to give you an idea of how to grow them.

I only ever grow First and Second Earlies because I grow in potato bags so don't grow a massive crop and because Main Crop are more likely to get the dreaded blight around August and September.  I can't be doing with that so I just grow the ones that I can harvest mid to late August so I have a greater chance of avoiding blight all together.  This is particularly because I grow tomatoes and aubergines as well, in reasonably close proximity, and so I don't want to risk blight spores spreading around the three. 

You can easily get seed potatoes from your local garden centre though, plus the bags to grow them in if you want to take that route.  You'll need only four or five seed potatoes per 50 litre bag, plus I have a couple of 40 litre ones as well and those take three or four seeds.  I've never grown them in the ground due to space so I can't help here but there are a whole variety of good veg books that you can get or, as I do, just Google it.  Gardener's World is invaluable to me in most cases, so their Growing Potatoes Guide should help.

This year I'm sticking to two varieties, both of them Second Earlies:

Blue Kestrel - I tend to grow the Kestrel variety every year as it's a fantastic all-rounder, so it can be fried, baked, roasted, mashed and boiled.  It has a superb taste and good disease resistance, plus it doesn't seem to suffer to badly as cuisine for slugs.  The Blue Kestrel is a relation with all these admirable attributes but with a lovely purple-ish tinge, plus it's a bit more floury which appeals for roasting purposes.
Salad Blue - I grew this for the first time last year, following which I was totally in love.  It's a gorgeous deep purple colour all the way through when harvested, when cooked it turns a delicate blue.  It's a waxy, or salad, potato and looks brilliant when added to the said potato salad.

You will notice I like to go for unusual colours but many of these don't survive the cooking process, frankly they're just a lot more interesting to grow.  I do grow "regular" potatoes though, such as the Kestrel, and some previous varieties I've known and loved are:

Charlotte - the well-known waxy (salad) potato but a million times tastier than the ones in the shops.
Heather - a scrummy lilac-skinned variety, will definitely grow again but my last crop was a bit small.
Red King Edward - actually a Main Crop but I grew it as a Second Early, beautiful red-skin with creamy white flesh.

Once you've got your seeds you need to "chit" them.  This is where the windowsill comes in.  You need to lie them in a tray (old egg boxes are also good) and put them in a light but cool place.  Greenhouse, conservatory or windowsills work well.  If you do go for the greenhouse please make sure the door is closed as you don't want frost destroying the lot. 

I've popped mine in one of the clear, plastic covers I've just taken off my tomato seedlings and put it on the windowsill in my parents' study, turning the radiator off.  I've run out of room on my primary windowsill and I've afraid I've just had to spread further afield, as I do every year.  By April every available windowsill has some variety of fruit or veg growing on it, the downside of not having a decent greenhouse.  That's it.  Just leave them there to produce lots of lovely sprouts from their eyes until it's time to plant them out....