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Last year was the first time that we have grown Jerusalem artichokes here. Not from a lack of desire, but a lack of space. That may sound crazy when our vegetable garden is larger than many peoples’ gardens, but Jerusalem artichokes are voracious plants and you must have enough space to give over to them if they are not to become problematic.
Growing to three metres tall and two metres across they should be placed on the north side of the garden so as not to shade out other crops. On the other hand they can be useful if you have vegetables that need shading or protecting from wind like some brassicas (broccoli, Brussels’ sprouts, kale), salad leaves and oriental greens. We fenced a new productive compound around the polytunneI last winter, so in the spring I ordered five tubers from Otter Farm. Planted 60cm apart and 15cm deep in April by August they had overreached their 4 metre by 1 metre bed and, on our rich soil, have produced a crop of almost 20 kilos in one season.
Not from Jerusalem at all, but a native of North America, Helianthus tuberosus is, as its Latin name indicates, a type of sunflower, a perennial variety which means it should be planted where you intend to keep it, as it will return year after year. Prone to spreading they should be planted where you can get at them easily to curb their invasive tendencies. For the same reason, when harvesting it is important to try to dig up all of the tubers, as a single one left in the ground will cause your colony to proliferate the following year. I have kept five tubers back this year to replant in the same position. Like potatoes Jerusalem artichokes can be a good first crop to plant in previously uncultivated or heavy ground as the growth of the tubers and their subsequent harvesting break up the soil. However, you must remove all trace of them if you plan to grow other crops in their place afterwards.
Ready to harvest from late October onwards Jerusalem artichokes do not store well once lifted and so are best left in the ground and harvested as required. Incredibly hardy they will tolerate winter temperatures down to -30°C. If you have to dig them all up they are best stored in a cool, dark place such as an outhouse, cellar or shed, although they will keep, well-washed and well-dried, in the salad drawer of the fridge for a week or so.
The fleshy, edible tubers are quite unlike any other vegetable in texture or taste. Although starchy like potatoes, they have a sweet, nutty flavour when cooked which is just about comparable to artichoke hearts, but also distinctly its own thing. Unlike potatoes they can be eaten raw, when their texture is reminiscent of water chestnuts. Thinly sliced with a sharp citrus dressing they make an unusual, crisp winter salad.
Their reputation for causing flatulence precedes them and is what often prevents people from growing or eating them. Caused by the inulin they contain, a starch which is difficult to digest, it is not a problem for everyone and it would seem, from personal experience, that the more often you eat them the less of a problem this is.
Their somewhat delicate, earthy flavour is also distinctive and although typically combined with woodsy flavours like bay, sage, thyme and nutmeg, it can hold its own with much stronger flavours and works unexpectedly well with punchy Mediterranean ingredients; tomatoes, red onions, black olives, capers and anchovies.
This recipe is for a rich, velvety and warming soup for a frosty day. Add more liquid if you prefer a thinner soup. Cooked with half the amount of water the resulting purée is a good accompaniment to game birds, chicken and firm white fish. Substitute the artichokes with celeriac or good floury potatoes if the prospect of a windy evening puts you off.
1kg Jerusalem artichokes
40g dried porcini mushrooms
1 small onion
A spring of thyme, to yield about 1 tsp of leaves
50g butter
4 tbsp rapeseed oil
150ml full cream milk
About 1 litre of water
Serves 4
Set the oven to 200°C.
Soak the dried mushrooms in 200ml hot water.
Heat 25g of butter in a large pan over a medium heat. Finely chop the onion and cook for a few minutes until soft and translucent, stirring from time to time.
Remove the porcini from their water. Squeeze the liquid out of them back into the bowl and retain. Coarsely chop two thirds of them and add to the onions with the thyme. Cook together for a few minutes more, stirring occasionally.
Scrub the artichokes extremely well and remove the fibrous hair roots. Trim off any black patches. Reserve one tuber of approximately 100g and cut the remainder into walnut-sized pieces. Put into a roasting pan in a single layer. Drizzle with olive oil and roast in the oven, turning occasionally, for about 30 minutes until softened and caramelised. Add them to the pot with the onions and mushrooms.
Make the mushroom soaking water up to 1 litre with fresh water and add to the pot. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook with the lid on for about 20 minutes until the artichokes are soft.
Blend the mixture until smooth. Add the milk and season with salt and pepper. Return to a very low heat to keep hot.
Melt the remaining butter in a small pan over a medium heat. Coarsely chop the remaining porcini and stew in the butter for a few minutes until soft and glossy. Remove from the pan and reserve.
Add the rapeseed oil to the a pan and raise the heat. Using a very sharp knife or mandolin slice the reserved artichoke very thinly. When the oil is smoking fry the artichoke slices in batches until brown. Drain on kitchen paper where they will crisp up.
Ladle the soup into warm bowls and place a few artichoke crisps and stewed mushrooms on top. Serve piping hot.
Recipe & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 29 January 2022
Almost without fail, every meal I cook begins with an onion. Despite the fact that I use so many and that they are both cheap and plentiful at the greengrocer, every year we grow our own. They are a straightforward crop, needing very little attention after planting, apart from weeding, and they always produce in bulk and without pests or problems. Given the frequency with which I use them, every meal time provides a sense of satisfaction and proof of a successful growing season.
We grow a number of onion and shallot varieties, and have settled on our favourites over the years; ‘Sturon’, a large white onion for everyday cooking, which has an RHS Award of Garden Merit due to its reliability and storage quality, ‘Red Baron’, a red onion, also with an RHS AGM, which is another good keeper and with a stronger flavour than most red onions and ‘Keravel Pink’, also known as ‘Rose de Roscoff’, a pretty pale pink onion with coppery skin, which is said to have the best flavour of all, sweet enough to eat raw and deliciously fruity when cooked. An old variety from Brittany this is the variety that my mother remembered beret-wearing Frenchmen – Onion Johnnies – selling from their bicycles on the streets when she was a child in Wales.
Over the years we have learned that onions do best in the sunniest beds of the kitchen garden, unshaded by other crops, do not like growing in beds that have been recently manured, benefit from heavy watering as they approach maturity and that, contrary to traditional growing advice to bend the tops over when the bulbs are fully grown and before lifting, that this is not good practice in reality, since it damages the base of the leaf shaft, which results in the bulbs being more susceptible to rot.
We grew only one variety of shallot this year, ‘Longor’, a large, yellow banana type shallot, which produces reliably high yields. We usually also grow ‘Red Sun’, but these had sold out last year before we could place our orders. All of our onions and shallots come from The Organic Gardening Catalogue as sets – small onions ready to be planted out in spring for a midsummer harvest – but I am tempted this year to try growing some from seed, as this is a lot cheaper and reportedly very easy. Unlike onions shallot sets can b e planted in autumn to produce an earlier crop, and I have recently received an order of ‘Échalote Grise’, an old variety, the gourmet French shallot also known as the ‘true shallot’, which I will plant before teh end of November. Every year we harvest around 100 mature, large onions and 10kg of shallots which, after they have been left out in the sun to ripen and dry out, are plaited together by Dan who is a dab hand, having done it for many years as a child with his mother.
Although the majority of our onions end up invisibly in soups, stews, casseroles, dhals and curries, sometimes you really want to taste the flavour of a home-grown onion, and this recipe makes them the focus of a meal. Many stuffed onion recipes have a lot of ingredients which compete with the subtle sweetness of the vegetable itself. Here onions’ well-known partner, sage, and just a little bread, nut and cheese ensure that the onion is what you really taste.
4 medium onions – around 250g each
1 stalk of celery– about 50g
40g butter
50g walnuts
40g white breadcrumbs
50g cheddar cheese, finely grated, plus extra for garnish
12 tender, young sage leaves, finely chopped
Nutmeg, freshly grated
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Serves 4
Set the oven to 180°C and bring a large pan of water to the boil.
Remove any loose papery skins from the onions, retaining one complete layer of dried skin. Remove the root with a sharp knife being careful not to cut through the skin, then cut through the top of the onion to remove about 1cm, so that you all of the layers are visible.
Simmer the onions in the pan of hot water with a lid on for about 30 minutes until soft to the point of a knife. Remove with a slotted spoon and allow to drain and cool in a colander.
When cool enough to handle carefully remove the centre of each onion with a teaspoon, leaving a shell 2 to 3 layers thick. Put the onion shells into a buttered ovenproof dish.
Toast the walnuts in the oven for about 3 minutes until lightly coloured and fragrant. Chop finely.
Finely chop the celery and garlic and the centres from the onions. Melt the butter in a small pan over a high heat until foaming and smelling toasty. Turn the heat down and sauté the celery and garlic for about 3 minutes until translucent. Then add the onion and cook over a low heat for 10 minutes until the flavours have combined.
Remove from the heat and add the chopped walnuts, sage, the grated cheddar cheese and breadcrumbs. Season generously with salt, black pepper and grated nutmeg. Stir well and then spoon the mixture into the onion shells. Press the stuffing down well so that there are no air pockets and mound it up on the top so as to use all of the mixture.
Grate a little more cheese over the top of each onion and then put into the oven for 30-40 minutes until brown and bubbling.
Serve as a main course with a green salad and boiled potatoes or as a side vegetable with other dishes.
These can be made in advance and then, before roasting, kept covered in the fridge for up to three days until needed or wrapped in foil and frozen. Once defrosted you should add 10 to 15 minutes to the cooking time from cold.
Recipe & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 16 October 2021
August is the month when every meal comes straight out of the kitchen garden. Our local village greengrocer, who is also a market gardener, is now used to my prolonged summer absences, and when I do eventually visit we compare notes on what has done well for us this year and what hasn’t. He knows that I will only buy those things that I can’t or don’t grow myself; plump Italian aubergines, lemons, limes and oranges, root ginger, flat peaches and British strawberries. We used to grow our own, but strawberry virus is rife in our valley and we had a mass crop failure two years ago and so it is the only soft fruit that we now buy. My eyes pass over everything else like so much convenience food, knowing that I am returning to a well-stocked garden of courgettes, summer squash, French beans, peppers, runner beans, cucumbers, salad greens, beetroot, carrots, turnips and sweetcorn.
Such choice and variety can make menu-planning a challenge, as the demands of those things that need to be harvested fight the desires of our mouths and bellies. We don’t fancy runner beans this evening, but they threaten to break the tripods if left unpicked. A tiny courgette left on the plant this evening is sure to be a marrow requiring coring and stuffing two days’ hence. And do I have time to dig, wash, roast and peel beetroot, when a tomato salad will take just moments to prepare?
And have we eaten tomato salads in the past few weeks. Almost every day for days and days. Nothing fancy, just thickly sliced tomatoes – beefy ‘Feo de Rio Gordo’ and ‘Black Russian’, striped ‘Red Zebra’ and ‘Green Zebra’ and pale yellow ‘Lotos’ – simply dressed with olive oil, homemade vinegar and sea salt, a scattering of fresh basil or oregano and perhaps some finely sliced shallots. The most productive of all are the cherry tomatoes which, when they’re not just popped whole into your mouth like sweeties, have gone into pans of braised vegetables – courgettes and beans – sauces and soups, or I have slow cooked them in the oven before bottling them in jars for the pantry. This is a change from bottling them whole and uncooked as I did last year. As they are cooked you can pack them in and get far more tomatoes to a jar, so saving space in the pantry for other preserves. I will use their concentrated flavour to bring a taste of summer to winter dishes or delicious, unseasonal luxury to a slice of toast.
Last week I was left with half a tray of these mi-cuit (half-cooked) tomatoes, which wouldn’t fit into the jar. Pondering what to do with them, my eye caught sight of the Genovese basil in the herb bed, and so I made this quick and easy recipe for an impromptu summer lunch. If you don’t have the time or inclination to make your own pastry, this is even quicker and easier with a pack of shop bought puff pastry or some sheets of oiled filo. Replace the basil with any fresh herb that complements tomatoes like tarragon, chervil, oregano or thyme. The sharper flavour of authentic sheep milk feta and sheep curd works very well with the sweetness of the tomatoes but, if these aren’t easy to get hold of, substitute cow’s milk feta and ricotta.
270g plain flour
10g fine polenta
140g, chilled butter, cubed
1 egg, beaten
Ice cold water
Salt
250g sheep feta
125g sheep curd or ricotta
125ml double cream or mascarpone
A large handful of fresh basil leaves
2 large eggs, beaten
About 500g cherry tomatoes, halved, sprinkled with salt and slow-cooked for 2 hours at 125°C, then allowed to cool
You will need a 20 x 30 cm rectangular or 28 cm round metal tart tin.
Set the oven to 180°C.
Make the pastry by putting the flour, polenta, salt and butter into the bowl of a food processor. Process until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. With the motor running slowly add the beaten egg. Then add chilled water a couple of teaspoons at a time until the dough comes together. When it does, immediately switch off the machine, remove the dough and form into a ball.
On a floured surface quickly roll out the dough and line the tart tin. Trim off the overhanging pastry, prick the base all over with a fork, line with baking parchment and baking beans and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the baking beans and parchment and return to the oven for 5-8 minutes, until golden brown and looking dry. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
Put the feta, sheep curd and cream into the food processor and process until well combined. Add the basil and process again until the mixture is completely flecked with green. With the motor running add the beaten eggs. Pour the filling into the pastry case. Arrange the cherry tomatoes on top of the basil cream, fitting in as many as you can. Return to the oven for a further 25-30 minutes, until the tomatoes are lightly browned and the basil cream is golden in places and puffy.
Serve warm with a green salad.
Recipe & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 28 August 2021
We’ve never had much luck with cauliflowers. With a reputation for being tricky customers, sensitive as they are to inconsistency during the growing cycle, they also generally require a very long growing season, thus making inconsistencies in cultivation far more likely. As the queen of vegetable growing, Joy Larkcom, succinctly states in our kitchen garden bible, Grow Your Own Vegetables, ‘The secret of success is steady growth, with plenty of moisture both at young plant stage and when maturing. Growth checks are caused by delayed transplanting, or spells of drought, resulting in deformed and small curds.’ Having had some unexpected success with the purple-headed ‘Sicilia Violetta’ two years ago, last year I was determined to break our dissatisfactory run once and for all and grow a harvest we could be proud of.
I had picked out two varieties, both from Real Seeds, ‘All The Year Round’ and ‘Autumn Giant’. The first because it promised the ease of successional sowings, and the second since it was reportedly ‘very reliable’. Both were sown in plugs on April 12th and were ready to plant out five weeks later in the middle of May. I looked after the young plants assiduously, watering them regularly and giving them a fortnightly liquid manure feed from mid-June as the plants started to grow away in earnest. Whether the feeding initiated it or not I can not be sure, but by early July it was apparent that all eight plants of ‘All The Year Round’ were on target to produce huge and beautiful, snow-white curds that would all be ready to harvest simultaneously in a matter of days. It was equally apparent that there was no way Dan and I were going to be able to eat all of them ourselves in the time available.
I chose my day carefully, reorganised the freezer, cleared the decks in the outside kitchen and assembled the equipment required for a mammoth batch of blanching. Cauliflower plants are huge, and it took some sawing and wrestling to take them all down, but eventually my catch was landed and Dan took my picture standing over them, inordinately proud. A large pasta pan with a colander insert makes blanching an easy affair, and as each batch went in I would set the timer for 3 minutes and return to preparing the next in line, removing the leaves and slicing each floret in two. Despite my apprehension of a neverending mountain of caulis the whole process of harvesting, preparing, blanching and bagging up seven of them for the freezer took around three hours. This really doesn’t seem a bad investment for the number of prep free meals they have provided this winter.
Dan posted his pictures of me on Instagram and that evening I got a message from Errol Fernandes. Errol is a Senior Gardener at Kenwood House in Hampstead and through his connection to Great Dixter we have come to know each other a little on social media, but have never met. Errol directed me to a post of his which gave his own recipe for blackened cauliflower inspired by his Goan mum’s home cooking, in the hope it might help us get through our cauliflower glut.
Knowing that we live in deepest, darkest Somerset Errol offered to send me some of the harder to come by ingredients – namely the back salt, powdered lime and mango powder. I have used dried lime and mango powder before, but never the black salt. Errol warned me, ‘It smells like bad eggs, but don’t be put off! It’s essential for the dish.’ When the little cellophane packets with hand-written labels arrived a few days later the distinctive sulphurous smell instantly transported me back to the Diwana Bhel Poori House on Drummond Street behind Euston station. When I was living in Camden in my mid 20’s I used to eat there on a weekly basis with my friends Simon and John Paul. The crisp-shelled poori, served with potatoes and chick peas and an appetising chutney that I now understood was flavoured with black salt.
Black salt (also known as kala namak) comes from volcanic salt mines in the Himalaya, and has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for centuries for its cleansing, detoxifying and digestive properties. Its pungent smell acts in a similar way to asafoetida, adding a deep, hard-to-pin-down umami richness which makes it incredibly more-ish. The powdered dried lime, mango powder, lime juice and turmeric combine to produce a deliciously astringent flavour which makes this a perfect dish to greet the changing season and wake up our slumbering taste buds and livers.
Each time I have made this dish I have taken the little cellophane packets of black salt and lime powder that Errol sent out of the spice cupboard and each time I have been reminded of his kindness at that time. We had just come out of the first lockdown and everyone was feeling raw, apprehensive and yet keen to connect. As Errol wrote to me when I asked him if I could share this recipe today, ‘I love sharing my food/culture, and I love learning about other people’s. Food is a wonderful way of connecting…’ So, as we look forward, hopefully, to a summer of renewed connections, it makes me happy to be able to share that connection with you.
1 cauliflower (around 1kg)
1 tablespoon coriander seed
1 teaspoon mango powder
1 teaspoon lime powder
1 teaspoon black mustard seed
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon salt flakes
½ teaspoon cumin seed
¼ teaspoon garam masala
¼ teaspoon Kashmiri chilli powder
¼ teaspoon asafoetida
¼ teaspoon Himalayan black salt
½ large green chilli, coarsely chopped
1 large clove garlic, coarsely chopped
8 curry leaves
Juice of half a lime
2 teaspoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons rapeseed or other unflavoured oil
Separate the cauliflower into florets and cut these in half or in quarters depending on size. Cut the core and stalk a little more thinly. Include the young tender leaves too. You want bite size pieces that all will cook evenly. Put it all into a glass or ceramic bowl.
Put all of the other ingredients into a mortar and crush slowly and gently to make a coarse sauce. You want the garlic and chilli to be bruised and broken, but for the whole spices to mostly retain their form.
Spoon all but one tablespoon of the marinade over the cauliflower and mix thoroughly. I find it is quickest and most thorough to do this with your hands, but wear gloves if you don’t want the turmeric to turn your hands yellow! Cover and leave to marinade for at least an hour.
Pre-heat an overhead grill to hot. Arrange the cauliflower pieces in a single layer on a baking sheet and put under the grill for 20 to 25 minutes. Turn the pieces every now and then until all are cooked and charred in places.
Spoon the remaining marinade over the cauliflower with a squeeze more lime juice. Garnish with fresh coriander and more finely sliced green chilli and eat piping hot.
Serves 4 as a main side dish or 6 as part of a mixed plate meal.
Recipe: Errol Fernandes | Words & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 27 February 2021
Once upon a time I had a very sweet tooth. Each Christmas Eve, close to midnight, as my overexcited brother and I lay feigning sleep in our bunk beds, dad would come and lay something heavy at our feet. We knew exactly what it was, and it called on all our reserves of self-control and superstition to prevent ourselves from peeking until it started to get light. When we did – and my younger brother was always the first to crack – we would haul the stockings (actually dad’s nylon football socks) up the bed and start to unpack them. Always alongside this stocking was another made of net. A Cadbury’s Christmas selection pack containing the usual suspects – Mars Bars, Twix, Milky Way, Marathon. We would slowly eat our way through these on Christmas morning and still somehow have room for lunch.
As a child I was always more interested in what was for ‘afters’ than the main event and my favourites usually involved chocolate, whether it was Bird’s Angel Delight, mini rolls, steamed chocolate pudding, Viennetta ice cream or choc ices. At around the age of 9 I started baking my way through the Marguerite Patten recipe cards mum had collected and which sat in a specially made plastic box on top of the fridge freezer. Once I had become proficient with scones, jam tarts and sponges, I quickly moved on to Devil’s Food Cake, chocolate Swiss Roll, Black Forest Gateau and, eventually, eclairs and profiteroles. My pièce de résistance, however, was Marguerite’s Pots au Chocolat, which to me looked impossibly chic in the photo on the front of the card. The dark, velvet mousse in simple, white porcelain pots, decorated with elegant quills of dark chocolate. It made me feel very grown up the first time I served them. Looking back for that recipe now I find that they contained melted marshmallows. Certainly not the purist’s idea of this classic French dessert, but one that, as a child, I was more than happy to accommodate.
As the years passed my palate became more refined. I graduated from Cadbury’s Dairy Milk to Bournville, from milk to dark chocolate Bounty bars and got a taste for Fry’s Chocolate Creams from my dad. (Mint, since you ask.) At university, I discovered Swiss and Belgian chocolate before, in my mid ‘20’s, experiencing a revelation. I had moved into a house on Bonnington Square in Vauxhall and, unbeknownst to me, my new landlady was about to change my view of chocolate forever. She was Chantal Coady who, in 1983, had opened Rococo Chocolates on the King’s Road. There were four of us renting rooms there and every month Chantal would bring home a box of ‘bin ends’, broken bars and trial new products from the shop and invite us for a chocolate tasting.
This may conjure images of a craven orgy of chocolate bingeing, but quite the contrary. The room was candle lit, a fine cloth on the dining table and a small selection of wines and spirits were available to be sipped in recommended partnerships with some of the ‘sweets’. Chantal would break small pieces of chocolate onto plates and pass them round. We were instructed to place the chocolate on our tongues and to allow it to melt slowly – no chewing! – and to describe the flavours we were tasting. Chantal explained how fake vanilla, hydrogenated oils and sugar destroyed the true nature of chocolate and would get us to compare my childhood Dairy Milk to a high cocoa content milk chocolate to understand what she meant. She taught us to appreciate it like fine wine and I have never looked back.
Christmas always calls for chocolate, but as I have aged my taste for sweet things has tempered and I have decreased the amount of refined sugar I eat. I rarely order pudding in restaurants these days unless I am prepared both for the initial sugar rush and the almost immediate headachy comedown. At home, dessert usually takes the form of stewed fruit or a handful of figs or dates, rather than anything sweeter. But it’s Christmas and I want chocolate, so I worked on this dessert recipe without refined sugar.
The combination of pumpkin and dates in the filling means that it needs no further sweetening, although if using chocolate with more than 82% cocoa solids you might want to and add honey or another sweetener to taste. If possible, use a drier-fleshed variety of pumpkin, otherwise you may need to drain the flesh before using as you don’t want the filling to be too wet. The Kabocha pumpkin I use has the texture and flavour of chestnuts, which makes it particularly truffle-like.
Chantal was also a pioneer in the use of unexpected flavourings and this tart is also the perfect foil for your favourites. To my knowledge, she was the first to make cardamom flavoured chocolate, to which she introduced me and which is my habitual choice. However, you can infuse the milk and cream with any winter spice or herb you like. Bay is very good (a couple of leaves), or try a sprig or two of rosemary or thyme, a spoonful of ground fennel seeds or even some crushed juniper berries. A teaspoon of finely ground espresso coffee heightens the bitterness. Half a teaspoon of chilli powder warms the mouth and accentuates the flavour of the chocolate, while a few drops of rose or rose geranium oil add a different level of perfumed refinement. The addition of a couple of tablespoons of alcohol – rum, for instance – makes it definitely adults only. Although we have been eating it plain this week, for a truly festive plate this would be particularly good with brandy-soaked prunes or figs or pears poached in red wine. Definitely a chocolate dessert for grown-ups, not children.
Serves 12
Pastry
75g hazelnuts
150g plain flour
1.5 tablespoons honey or maple syrup
75g cold butter
1 large egg, beaten
A pinch of salt
Filling
200g cooked pumpkin
100g dates
100ml milk
250ml double cream
3 large eggs
200g dark chocolate (minimum 70% cocoa solids)
Seeds from 3 cardamom pods, finely ground or other chosen flavouring
You will need a 23cm round, fluted tart tin with a removable base.
Set the oven to 180C.
Put the hazelnuts into a small baking pan and roast in the oven for 10 minutes until lightly toasted and fragrant. Remove and allow to cool, then put into a food processor and process into a medium-fine flour. Do not over process or you will end up with nut butter.
Add the flour to the hazelnuts and pulse mix. Cut the cold butter into 1cm cubes and add to the flour and nuts. Pulse again until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. With the motor running slowly add the beaten egg and honey until the dough comes together. Stop the machine immediately and quickly remove the dough. It will be very soft. Form into a ball, wrap and put into the fridge for 30 minutes.
When the pastry has chilled, roll it out carefully on a floured surface until large enough to line the tart tin. The pastry is very short, so work quickly and carefully. However, if it falls apart just fit the pieces to the tin and press together gently to join. Remove any excess pastry from the rim, line with greaseproof paper and fill with baking beans. Bake blind for 20 minutes. Remove the baking beans and greaseproof paper and return to the oven for a further 5 minutes until it looks dry. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
To make the filling heat the milk and cream in a small pan. Grind the cardamom seeds to a fine powder in a mortar and pestle and add to the milk. As soon as the milk comes to the boil remove from the heat, add the dates put a lid on the pan and leave to stand until cool.
Chop the chocolate coarsely and put into a heatproof bowl. Put into the oven for about 10 minutes until almost melted. Remove from the oven and then beat with a fork to ensure that all of the chocolate is melted.
Put the cooled dates and cream, eggs and pumpkin into the food processor and process until smooth. Add the chocolate and mix until fully combined. Pour the mixture into the prepared pastry case and bake for 35-45 minutes until the mixture just starts to crack at the edges, but still has a little wobble in the centre.
Leave to stand for 20 minutes before removing from the tin and transferring to a serving plate. Decorate with sieved icing sugar as you wish.
Serve warm.
This reheats and freezes well.
This can easily be made suitable for vegans, using coconut oil and sugar and no egg in the pastry. For the filling substitute the milk with vegetable milk, the cream with an equal weight of silken tofu (although do not heat this with the milk). Substitute the eggs with chia ‘eggs’ (1 tbsp ground chia seed mixed with 3 tbsp cold water for each egg).
Recipe & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 December 2020
One of the benefits of working from home in Somerset this year is the time we have gained to harvest. Previously, there has always been a disheartening moment in late summer when it becomes apparent that there simply aren’t enough hours to get everything in the kitchen garden gathered, processed and stored away for winter. In the past, to dispel the phantom of wastage, we have managed this in a number of ways. Firstly, by inviting friends down for harvesting and preserving weekends – which has clearly not been possible this year – giving away the surplus to neighbours or leaving it out for passers-by or, finally, satisfying ourselves with the knowledge that what we can’t eat will be gladly seized upon by birds, rodents, insects and gastropods.
Though we blanched and froze enough French beans, broad beans and cauliflower to provide for us through the winter, it quickly became apparent that our harvest of soft and stone fruit would soon fill both freezers. Knowing that when everything else started to come on stream the question of what to do with it all would present itself, I prepared myself by reading Piers Warren’s How to Store Your Garden Produce and its American equivalent, Keeping the Harvest by Nancy Chioffi and Gretchen Mead. Both books give detailed instructions on how to freeze, salt, dry, bottle, ferment, pickle and preserve any fruit or vegetable you care to name.
My primary concern was for the tomatoes, of which we had a lot and of which I was determined to ensure not a single one was wasted. The idea of having our own supply of tinned tomatoes and passata – some of the few things I still buy from a grocer or supermarket – led to a frenzy of bottling in August, and the pantry shelves soon groaned with jars of whole and chopped plum tomatoes and bottles of passata. In Italy what I produced would strictly be called tomato sauce, as I learned that true passata is actually raw, with whole tomatoes being put through a passa pomodoro (tomato mill) that separates the skin and seeds from the pulp. The raw pulp is then put into sterilised bottles, the only cooking being from the time spent in the sterilising water bath required to preserve them.
I cooked the tomatoes and simmered them until there was no excess water content before passing through a mouli-légumes and then bottling with a dash of salt and citric acid to aid preservation. A late summer glut of cherry tomatoes resulted in a further 5 kilos of bottled, whole tomatoes, as well as several litres of yellow tomato ketchup, made using an adapted recipe from Kylee Newton’s The Modern Preserver.
In anticipation of this year’s bumper harvests, in May I had decided to invest in a dehydrator. When I could see that space in the pantry was soon going to run short it came into its own. For several weeks in late August and September it saw an almost permanent relay of pears, plums, blackcurrants and raspberries, but mostly many kilos of tomatoes. The benefit of drying, of course, is that the resulting produce takes up less space. It is also much lighter to store and concentrates the flavour, so a little goes much further when you come to cook with them. Most of the dried tomatoes are stored in an airtight bucket with a lid, but I have also preserved some under oil with bay, thyme and garlic cloves, to eat as savoury snacks or used to enrich other dishes.
The last of the tomato preserves came about more from necessity than design. I was completely out of shelf space in the pantry and yet there were still kilos coming up from the polytunnel. So, having gone through the same initial process as for the ‘passata’, the resulting sauce was reduced over a low heat until thick enough to spread out on greaseproof paper and put into the dehydrator. By the end of the next day I had enough small jars of tomato concentrate to see me through a winter of casseroles, soups and sauces.
It was just last weekend that we harvested the very last of the tomatoes from which we made about 5 litres of tomato soup. Given heat by the addition of some chilis also grown under cover this year, it warmed us through a whole week of sunny but chilly outdoor lunches. The thing that really makes me glow, though, is the prospect of opening a jar of my own plum tomatoes in January or February and bringing a memory of summer’s richness to the depth of winter.
Words & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 14 November 2020
This year our pride and joy (as well as provider of steep learning curve) has been the polytunnel. As soon as we decamped to Somerset before lockdown in mid-March, we started to discuss the pros and cons of finally biting the bullet and getting one, which we have discussed at length and then shelved on several occasions. The reason to defer was always the same. We weren’t here enough and, once a polytunnel is up and running, it simply can’t be left for days untended. Suddenly we were compelled to be at Hillside for the foreseeable future and, with the thought of more complete vegetable self-sufficiency firmly in the forefront of our minds, we decided to take the plunge.
Our dreams of a cornucopia of tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, chillis, cucumbers and melons haven’t been fully realised due to a shortage of seed and plug plants immediately after lockdown, and the fact that the polytunnel couldn’t be delivered until the end of May. So our initial plan for a tomato trial with three plants of ten varieties quickly increased to twelve plants of each and so this year, although we have three chilli varieties and two of cucumber, the polytunnel has been pretty much dominated by them. I will write at more length about the polytunnel at a later date, once I have some more experience under my belt, but suffice to say that growing tomatoes in grow bags has this year taught me the importance of a regular watering regimen, the effects of lack of ventilation and the dangers of not starting to apply tomato feed early or regularly enough. We lost almost all the second trusses and, due to the cool August, the third and fourth trusses are only now just starting to ripen. Everyone will be getting Green Tomato Chutney for Christmas this year.
Apart from firm favourites ‘Sungold’ and ‘Gardener’s Delight’ I was keen to trial some plum tomatoes and chose the best known and most reliable varieties, ‘San Marzano’ and ‘Roma’. These are the varieties that are almost invariably in any tin of tomatoes you might buy at the shops. They were surprisingly productive at first and the mini-glut in early August produced ten large jars of bottled whole and chopped tomatoes, as well as several litres of passata and ketchup. Although ripening is definitely slowing down now, somewhat surprisingly it is still the plum tomatoes that are providing the largest usable harvests. This I don’t mind, since I cook with tomatoes pretty often in winter and the idea of being able to use my own preserved ones and not shop-bought is very appealing.
Despite their productivity only the best plum tomatoes are good enough for bottling, so there are always plenty left over. These end up as passata or a simple tomato sauce (which I either bottle or freeze depending on available storage space) and in ketchups, salsas and chutneys. Quite often, however, they end up in our dinner and one of my daily challenges of recent weeks has been ‘What can you make with any combination of courgettes, tomatoes and runner beans ?’. After many nights of making things up as I went along I have started to run out of inspiration and so this week there has been much rifling of recipe books.
I very seldom present another cook’s recipes here, although my own are often tweaked and altered versions of dishes I have eaten or cooked from recipes in the past. However, when I came across this yesterday, it jumped out at me for the intriguing use of two of my main available ingredients in a previously completely unimagined form. What is in effect a tomato and bean pie is elevated in this recipe into a memorable dish of unctuous and exotic richness. Given the apparent humility of the primary ingredients I was unprepared for quite how delicious it is and feel that it is only right to share the original, untweaked, recipe with full credit to Maria Elia from whose excellent book of modern Greek cuisine, Smashing Plates, it is taken. As she says (and as I did myself) it is best to make the filling the day before you plan to assemble it so that the flavours can come together overnight. Of course, not everyone has access to vine-ripened plum tomatoes, so I weighed mine and they came to around 600 grams, equivalent to around two cans drained of their juice.
To balance the richness this would be good served with something fresh and bright such as a citrussy Greek cabbage and carrot coleslaw or a raw fennel, chicory, orange and watercress salad.
Serves 6-8 as a main, 8-12 as a small plate
100 ml olive oil
2 Spanish onions, halved and finely sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tsp ground cinnamon
5 tbsp tomato purée
10 vine-ripened plum tomatoes, skinned and roughly chopped
500 g runner beans, stringed and cut into 4cm lengths
A pinch of sugar
1 bunch of dill (approx. 30 g), finely chopped, or 2 tbsp dried
1 packet of filo pastry (9 sheets)
100 g melted butter
100 g Medjool dates, stoned and finely sliced
250 g feta, crumbled
6 tbsp clear honey
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan over a low heat and sauté the onion until softened and sticky; this can take up to 20 minutes. Add the garlic, cinnamon and tomato purée and cook for a further 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes and their juices and cook over a medium heat for about 8 minutes, before adding the runner beans, sugar, dill, a pinch of sea salt and 150ml water.
Reduce the heat to a simmer, cover and cook the beans for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the beans are soft and the sauce is nice and thick. Check the seasoning and cool before assembling.
Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4. Unfold the pastry and cover with a damp cloth to prevent it from drying out. Brush a baking tray (approximately 30 x 20cm) with melted butter. Line the tin with a sheet of filo (cut to fit if too big), brush with butter and repeat until you have a three-layer thickness.
Spread half the tomato and bean mixture over the pastry, top with half each of the dates and feta. Sandwich another three layers of filo together with melted butter and place on top. Top with the remaining tomato mixture, dates and feta. Sandwich the remaining three filo sheets together as before and place on top.
Lightly score the top, cutting into diamonds. Brush with the remaining butter and splash with a little water. Cook for 35 – 45 minutes or until golden. Leave to cool slightly before serving, drizzling each portion with a little honey.
Words & photographs: Huw Morgan | Recipe: Maria Elia
Published 12 September 2020
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