Sunshine and showers

But mostly showers. In a brief sunny gap I nipped out to take some pics of what's going on in the garden at the moment. The herb bed is looking lovely now that the oregano is flowering



The bit of hedge you can see on the left is now (as of yesterday) gone - I've tried to transplant it elsewhere. The bees absolutely love the flowers. We've had so many bumblebees in the garden this year, it's been really nice to see them. If you want to encourage them in your garden you could do a lot worse than plant some oregano and let it flower:



Only do this if you've got plenty of space (or if you really like oregano), because it will rather take over!

Sadly it's not just welcome visitors that we're seeing at the moment. The blackfly are a bit of a problem - they pretty much did for our second crop of broad beans and now they're eyeing up our runners. Squishing them seems to be pretty effective, but the long term solution will be to encourage predators into the garden. We've had more ladybirds than last year but not many hoverflies. Here's one, having a rest on the lovely white scabious:



We're growing some fennel, which is apparently good for helping ladybirds to overwinter (they have a nap in the hollow stems, I think). And over the next few weeks we'll have a think about planning for next year.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are producing plenty of fruit:



This is that nice time of year when you can just go and pick what you need as and when. The ones outside are nearly ready now as well, despite the rubbish weather.

One really good thing to do with ripe fresh tomatoes is to make an arrabiata sauce for pasta. Put the kettle on to boil. Put three reasonably sized tomatoes in a bowl and then cover them with the boiling water. Meanwhile chop 2 cloves of garlic and 2 dried red chillies. Once the tomatoes have been in the water for a while you should be able to peel them easily - score them with a sharp knife and peel off the skin. Chop them roughly. Then heat up some olive oil in a pan add a pinch of salt, the garlic and the chilli. When the garlic gives off a nice aroma (if you overcook the garlic you need to start again) add the tomatoes. Cook until reduced.

Finally a little pic of our most advanced marrow:

A brief beery post

All kinds of beery, really. The picture to accompany this post is of a bottle we'll soon be enjoying tonight - some De Cam lambic, bottled in 2005. It's one of the last two (eek!) bottles left from our trawl of the delights of Cambridge's brilliant beer shop, Bacchanalia on Mill Road. After tonight, there'll just be one bottle of Drie Fonteinen Hommage.

But there's some other beery stuff - first, it looks like we'll be having to wait longer for the new brew to be ready. While putting up some shelving in the garage, the tap got knocked rather firmly. Cue much spraying of beer at a right angle to the keg. A quick tighten later (and fingers crossed no infections of anything nasty), followed by a sample next day shows everything apparently ok - all re-pressurised and tasting nice. But a bit cloudy, so the poor thing needs some time to settle down again.

I've also got two new brews planned over the next few weeks. As usual, I'll be ploughing through my copy of Wheeler & Protz's Brew your own Real Ale at Home, and the next two planned are Wheeler's recipes for Wiltshire Old Devil (an 8% number I'll attempt to bottle) and Marston's Burton Bitter. Well, I say as usual, it's this collection of recipes I've used for all my brews so far except one - the brown ale I have on the go at the minute, which I cobbled together a recipe for myself. And very nice it is too. And here it is, from a couple of weeks back. It's still this lively, even down near the end of the barrel:

The other beery treat we've got to look forward to is a jaunt down to London for the Great British Beer Festival at Earl's Court on Thursday week. The beer list is now online, which is great, presented in a tear-your-hair-out frustrating search facility, which is emphatically not great. Not that something trivial like that will detract from our enjoyment. We missed last year's festival, because we'd recently moved house and we didn't know if the boys would be up to the train journey, so it'll be great to get back to our usual August treat.

Now for tonight's treat. Time to open that bottle...

Proper Gardening

That's what runner beans say to me at any rate. Along with spuds, they're what I really remember my dad growing when we were little. Their jaunty red flowers are a mainstay of allotments and vegetable patches - and they need to be eaten up when they start cropping before the dreaded stringiness sets in. It's the first year that we've tried to grow them and they're doing pretty well, snaking their way up the cane supports and producing plenty of flowers.

I'm convinced that the best argument for growing your own vegetables is having a crop of fresh tomatoes. It's always a great time of the year when the first tomato goes red:



It allows us to look forward to a big crop throughout the later days of summer and into autumn, if we get enough decent weather. And there's something really luxurious about a fresh tomato you've grown yourself, still warm from the greenhouse.

Elsewhere in the garden, the squash plants are amazingly vigorous and are showing their first fruits:



And we're well into the loganberry season now. They make a great smoothie, whizzed up with some yoghurt and a banana and they're probably even more delicious with a sprinkle of sugar and some double cream. It might even be time to start thinking about starting off a Rumtopf / officer's jam / Hodgkin, preserving the fruit we can't eat in brandy or rum. Fished out of the liqueur, the fruit makes the best Christmas trifle.



Another treat we've been enjoying is a wonderful gooseberry and elderflower jelly - I must chase up Ali at Craft Matters to post her recipe here.

Len Deighton on Seasonal Food

I was very pleased the other day to unearth 'my' two Len Deighton cookbooks. Not just because they were pretty much my introduction to cooking (my dad gave them to me when I left home for University), but also because the Action Cook Book has the best cover of any cookery book. I used to call it Cooking For Spies. Front:



and back:



The books were published in 1965 and, recipes aside, they are great examples of past attitudes to food and witness to the fact that we haven't really moved on in our national food debate since the 1960s. As well as this (hopefully outdated) warning about some people's attitude towards garlic -

Controversial as a flavouring element, although I can hardly imagine life without it. [...] Don't put pieces of garlic into a dish unless you either crush them thoroughly or fry the garlic in oil and then remove it. People who don't like garlic will go out of their minds if they get pieces in their mouths

- we have a foreshadowing of our current anxieties around chickens:

Each onslaught of mechanized farming and agriculture brings us a step nearer to being battery hens ourselves. Where is the restaurant that serves a fine free-range chicken full of its own flavour, with just a background of freshly picked herbs?

But most relevant to the blog here is a short passage on seasonality (just before a really helpful list of what's in season when - the list of game birds is super!), which again shows that there's nothing new in the current generation of celebrity cooks calling for us to eat more seasonally:

Every month the seasons disappear, for more and more foods are available permanently. I have therefore listed the seasons for the cook with a certain amount of trepidation. City-dwellers - never over-conscious of the natural cycle of the seasons - will soon lose their last point of reference: the food shop.

I'll be having a proper re-read of Où est le garlic and Action Cook Book soon. And I'll always be thankful to the books which explained to a complete novice how to chop onions and garlic, how to make a roux and loads of other basics.