Saving the best to last

Top tip: Use vegetables as soon after picking as possible to keep nutrient levels up. If you can't eat them all immediately then blanch the vegetables to reduce harmful bacteria. Cooked tomatoes have higher levels of Lypocene which make them better at fighting heart disease and protect against cancer.

There is a saying that we are all either green and growing or we are ripe and rotten. This holds as true for fresh produce as it does for us.  Wine and cheese may get better with time and exposure to the air but this is rarely true for crops. Vegetables, like our skin, start to lose water and become flaccid as soon as they are picked. Why grow your own, only to neglect your crop once picked and eat vegetables that are no fresher than in the shops?

They also start to lose their vitamin content. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation  of the UN) state that vitamin C content decreases with time after harvest, and that little may remain after two or three days. When you do cook the vegetables, bear in mind that overcooking means a significant drop of vitamin content - try steaming instead of boiling (also eat potato skins as their vitamins are just under the skin) and use the water in a stock as the dissolved minerals stay in the water.

It can be hard to eat all the vegetables fresh so it helps to have a few ways of processing them. Our new freezer arrives in three days and I can resume blanching duties (the existing two freezers are already full). In the meantime, I have got a free extra fridge (from Freecycle) to store jams and chutneys in.  I am particularly fond of Hugh Fearnley Wittingstall's recipe for 'Glutney'.

This is a great way to use up summer vegetables and you can just use whatever is taking over your plot at the time. The quantities he recommends make 10 jars so i halved everything here. I also kept out the chillis as I am a wimp. I also rarely have all the spice to make the spice bag so I just use some allspice and nutmeg.

500g courgettes, diced into 1cm
500g red or green tomatoes (I don't bother to skin them though it was recommended), roughly chopped
500g cooking or eating apples, peeled and diced
250g onions, peeled and diced
250g sultanas or raisins
250g brown sugar
375ml white wine or cider vinegar, made up to 500ml with water
1 thumb sized nugget of ginger roughly chopped
1 tsp of mixed spice
1/2 tsp of nutmeg
1 tsp mustard powder and 1/2 tsp salt

Put all the ingredients in a pan. Heat the mixture gently, stirring to dissolve the sugar, bring to the boil. simmer uncovered for 2-3 hours (this makes the kitchen smell great). Stir to make sure it doesn't burn. it's ready when rich, thick and reduced. Put while warn in sterilised jars. Leave to mature for 2 weeks, ideally 2 months, before serving.

This recipe is also a speedy way of using up cherry tomatoes that is surprisingly healthy - in fact I adapted it from a Weightwatchers recipe. It takes just 10 minutes to prepare and 25 minutes to cook.

150g ready rolled puff pastry (I used a pack of feuillete pastry that I picked up in France on a day trip)
60g light mozzarella, sliced
60g goats cheese
500g cherry tomatoes
2 tbsp green pesto (I forgot to add it tonight but bet it would be yummy)

Score a line around the pastry 2.5cm from the edge to make a border then prick all over with a fork. Chill for a bit. Preheat the oven to 220C, bake the pastry for 10 minutes, remove from the oven and using the back of a fork push down the centre of the tart leaving the edges puffed up.

Reduce the oven temperature to 200C. Cover the base of the tart with the cheese slices and top with the tomato halves and bake for 15 minutes. Remove and drizzle with the pesto. Leave for 5 minutes and serve with a fresh salad and balsamic dressing.

Dealing with a deluge of tomatoes

With over 6 kilos of tomatoes that have come off the plot in the last fortnight I have been investigating new ways of dealing with them.

As the majority of them are the 'Garden Pearl' variety that I have found a little watery and flavourless I was particularly keen to try out recipes that enhance the flavour.

A great one was to create 'sun-dried' tomatoes. Given there isn't an Italian level of sun around I used the oven instead.

Slice tomatoes into thirds (depending on size), scatter a little salt over them and place into an oven preheated to around 100 degrees C.  Keep an eye on them if your oven, like mine, has hotter patches than others. It's wise to use a silicone baking sheet to save on washing up as the juices caramelise and make it a pain to clean. When they look dried (but not burnt) then pop them in a jar and cover with oil. Scatter them in salads or in pasta and enjoy the taste of summer tomatoes well into the Autumn.

The tomatoes when ready for potting up.

I also slow cooked some cherry tomatoes, garlic, red onions and red peppers and blended it together for a healthy chilled soup.

When I get more flavoursome tomatoes off the plot then I might create great vats of pasta sauce but it's not worth it when the tomatoes aren't already bursting with flavour.

Useful resources: books

26.07.10
It is not just food, plants and land that I am greedy for. I obsessively buy books and magazines to help me learn more and find new ways of growing and cooking produce. My current measure of if a book is a good cookery book is the variety of courgette and potato related recipes it offers.
Some books defy classification into gardening or cooking as some have cleverly combined the two but tend to skimp on detail for either.

Both
Food from your garden and allotment (Reader's Digest)
- Billed as all you need to grow, cook and preserve your own fruit and vegetables, this is a very comprehensive compendium of fruit, herbs and vegetables. It is excellent on how to grow and care for your plants and for this rigour we can forgive it's brevity on how to cook the produce – besides other books cover this more extensively and with better credentials. What it does have is an excellent section on preserving fruit and vegetables with a good variety of recipes. It goes into the difference between pickles, relishes and chutneys and even has a section on making wines – my own personal new area of focus. NB suggests a 3 bed rotation system)
Fruit and Veg Grower's Cookbook – Kathryn Hawkins
- Recipes ordered by course rather than vegetable
- One Swiss chard recipe – Swiss chard with sweet spice
- 4 courgette recipes (with eggs and chorizo, summer veg and pesto meatball pasta bake, tagine of chicken and autumnal vegetables, and muffins)

Cooking
Delia – The Frugal Cook
Delia – Kitchen Garden
- How to grow the plants (with advice by Gay Search) and some recipes by Delia
The Cook's Scrapbook (Reader's Digest)
- A return to traditional recipes organised like a cook's notebook with wisdom on seasonality, growing tips and a strong section on preserving and game
The Great Allotment Cookbook (GAIA)
- Comprehensive and laid out by season – courgettes here are classified in Autumn despite me enjoying the onset of our glut in mid July
Tender – Nigel Slater
- Very comprehensive and inspirational cook book devoted to vegetables – I can't wait until his fruit volume comes out (though it will frustrate me as I don't have all those lovely fruit yet).
- Excellent on Potatoes and Courgettes – chard recipes are limited
Using the Plot – Paul Merrett (noticed it has been renamed to 'The Allotment Chef' in paperback version)
- A humorous book written by a chef taken with the passion to be self sufficient. Pleasing to see that others have similar challenges when starting out and definitely reliable on the recipe front – very good on variations on the crushed potato theme
The Ration Book diet – Mike Brown, Carol Harris, CJ Jackson
- Going right back to basics – the original driver to get Britain growing and self sufficient. Based on newly discovered science about nutritional values and a desire to reduce dangerous importing of food from the colonies, the British government encouraged the home front to a) waste less b) grow more themselves and c) cook more healthily.
- This actually is now mirrored in our desire to not over-cook vegetables, to move to a more vegetable based diet rather than eating red meat, to grow food organically (though mechanisation, fertilisers and pesticides meant that women found the arduous job of farming easier and more productive) and to eat locally and seasonally
- Good recipe for Nettle soup and nettle champ
Perfect preserves – Hilaire Walden
- Good for using up gluts through jams and chutneys
A Greener Life - Clarissa Dickinson Wright, Johnny Scott
- Old school skills includes a section on preserves and foraging (possibly more useful than spinning and butchering)

Gardening
Allotment Gardening – Kevin Forbes
- Pocket sized and hard backed – should survive the rigours of the plot well
Your organic allotmenteer – Ian Spence, Pauline Pears
- Sensible approach and comprehensive without being preachy
- Four bed rotation system recommended (potatoes put with squashes & tomatoes)
- Good on green manure
Alan Titchmarsh How to Garden series – Vegetables and herbs
Dr Hessyan series
– Very good, reasonably-priced specialised books on vegetables and fruit. Also with compact pocket editions.