Dear Friends,
I am rather consumed by courgettes right now, This is my first successful year of growing and harvesting these useful and delicious fruit and my colllection includes sprawling and climbing plants.
Courgettes and cucumbers are members of the cucurbit family along with squash, marrows and pumpkin and all are heavy feeders. I am also growing marrow and a cucumber amongst our allotment veggies and Him indoors is also growing greenhouse cucumbers, which are literally, romping away.
I am baking them into cakes, sauteing in oil and butter and grating for salads and there's a host of helpful recipes and comments from others about their choice of useses. My fruits have been rather over-sized these past two weeks but I am now determined to pick them more frequently to ensure the production of small, slimmer fruit which really are much more attractive to the eye.
Now a marrow should be bigger but not enormous, despite what He says. A large marrow certainly provides a good vehicle for filling with a variety of savoury ingredients for baking; steaming and serving with a cheese or herby sauce and an oven-roasted marrow is delicious. Too enormous and they become tougher, thicker skinned and dry.
I am also trialling squash this year, another first, and todate, I have one tiny fruit emerging from beneath its canopy of greenery. My marrow hasn't put in an appearance as yet but I'm hoping for great moves on its part.
I fed my garden yesterday with comfrey feed. This feeding should have taken place last Friday but we were out to lunch with friends instead and my garden was not visited. Then on Saturday, planting out a last collection of dwarf and climbing beans and becoming drenched to the skin by a heavy outburst of rain, we retreated indoors for the remainder of the weekend. There was no GP for Him to watch on Sunday but I was fully occupied with domesticity and paperwork.
On Monday, in between persistent rain, I managed to garner a small harvest of curly endive - aka frisee and escarole, also lettuce, broad beans, courgette and runner beans. Names can be bothersome. Endive is chicory for Brits., Endive in France and then there is Belgian Endive. Chicory is a small, conical vegetable, grown underground to prevent greening-up and spreading out, has a slightly bitter taste and was a vegetable I used to eat with salads many years ago. I don't buy it now, which is a puzzle.
Chicory root is ground for a coffee substitute. Camp Coffee contained chicory essence. This is another item I've not bought for many years. My mother used to buy Camp Coffee regularly and I used to buy it only for particular recipe uses. Fashion and disinclination get in the way somehow. On the other hand, peanut butter is now a magic ingredient for my son's fav. cookies which, of course, are only very rarely baked as a great treat. Yet many years ago, its presence in our shopping trolley was a weekly "must-buy". Indeed, there used to be great conversational gatherings, just to dispute the different varieties and their representative benefits or deficiencies. The nutty variety was a "must-have". I even used it in a chocolate-peanut-butter-fudge recipe...utterly delicious which, devotee that I was, could only consume a tiny amount at any one time !!!
Food is a great consuming fact of life. Its production fascinating. Its cuisine delightful and varied and its study a life-long interest of mine.
Happy eating x Be safe stay well and don't forget to eat up your greens - they're good for you !
Margaret xxx
