The Veg Box Diaries

Sit down by the fire while I tell you a tale, of a sweet country chuck who came down to London, in search of romance and adventure. She arrived in a box all perky and fresh with her free-range friends - bacon, burger and boned leg of pork.

But far from leading a glamorous life, she soon found herself basted with butter and herbs (sage, rosemary and thyme), with half a lemon and a few chunks of white bread stuffed up her bum. Just as she was thinking the worst must be through, she was popped in the oven on a bed of her sliced country cousins - carrot, onion and leek.

She came out a while later all wrinkled and brown, and was left to sit naked while a bath of hot gravy was prepared for her debut appearance. In the gravy went red wine, stock and a bay leaf, some sugar and seasoning, tommy ketchup and soy, and a dribble of Worcestershire sauce.

And after the meal, without further ado, her carcass was picked clean of the last scraps of meat, for a mustard-drenched sarnie to go in a London boy’s lunch-box. And even then her ordeal wasn’t through, for her bones were boiled up with more of the same - carrot and onion, leek and bay leaf, peppercorns and a bucket of garni.

Into this rich stock went garlic, ginger and chilli, with brocolli and chard and a handful of rice. And so the last traces of a poor country chicken were drunk as a Monday night soup. Let this be a warning to all Devon poultry - stay in your coops all cosy and safe, and don’t dream of a life in the city.

We received our first Riverford meat box delivery on Saturday. I’d spent the morning hovering in the frontroom, gazing down the garden path like a little kid waiting for the birthday post to arrive. We were both totally stoked (Ozspeak for jolly glad) when it arrived, and danced a little caper around the kitchen.

And this is what we got for our hard-earned moolah (46 squid, give or take a bob or two):

750g pork roast
400g sausages
300g bacon
300g beef burgers
400g beef mince
400g braising steak
400g rump steak
A whole organic chicken
200g ham

Which, like the legendary England all-rounder, is very Beefy and none the worse for it.

The rump steaks have been scoffed already, providing two hearty meals. We partnered them up on both occasions with the pickings from our latest forraging expedition to Hampstead Heath. On one occasion the MC served them under a pile of unidentified ’shrooms, which we thought at the time were Clouded Agarics, but which we later realised bore more than a passing resemblance to the deadly poisonous Death Cap (result: complete organ collapse in about 72 hours). The next evening we played safe and served them with a splodge of harmless sweet chestnut puree. All very Hugh Firmly Whatsisface.

Here’s a tip the next time you’re doing a roast. Slice a few peeled spuds and onions thinly, season well and add some fresh herbs (e.g. sage with pork, rosemary with lamb or chicken). Toss them in a little oil and spread them out in the roasting tray or pan, pour over a small glass of white wine. Cook the joint on a rack above the veggies.

By the time the meat has finished roasting, the spuds and onions have soaked up the fat and juices from the joint and gone gooey and soft on the bottom, crisp and brown on top. A rib-sticking alternative to the traditional roasties.

Some dishes are just so surprisingly good they make you burst into spontaneous laughter. One mouthful of these Marcella Hazan meatballs had the MC and me giggling like naughty school kids. The wonder of the event sprang from its unexpectedness. How could the mundane old meatball scale such heights? I guess you should never underestimate the ability of the Italians to turn plain old mince into gastro-gold.

This recipe reminds me of a film I saw when I was a member of an arty-farty film club at uni. I can’t remember the name, but I think it was a Belgian flick. The ‘action’ happened in real time, and largely consisted of a middle aged woman doing mundane household chores around a flat in Brussels - having a bath, polishing shoes, sweeping the floor. In real time. Over about 4 hours. Yes, the pain of watching this movie was almost unbearable.

Unsurprisingly, the audience started to dwindle as the movie shuffled along. Being a history student, and having nothing better to do, I persevered, and after a couple of hours I passed through a pain barrier and became hypnotised by these banal events. It was at this point that the nameless housewife started making meatballs, and the camera focussed in on a ball of bloody meat being slowly, slowly kneaded. The suspense was unbearable. This blandly surreal scene has haunted me since.

The film continued, and half an hour or so later the woman’s son comes home from school and the two of them eat a meal of meatballs together in excruciating silence. After dinner an unnamed man knocks on the door, is invited in, and without ceremony stabbed to death, with a pair of scissors as I remember it.

Since that day, I’ve never been able to eat a meatball without being grateful that the state paid for me to waste three years of my life watching utterly pointless subtitled movies. I hope one day, if I ever have kids, that the state will pay for them to waste three years of their lives in a similar fashion. Scrap tuition fees, I say.

Making these beefy nuggets of joy is a fairly long, involved process. It’s best to go to the original for the full details, but here’s a functional summary:

1. Cook a slice of crustless white bread in 6 tbs warm milk, leave til soft, then mash.
2. Mix 1lb well-hung minced beef with a finely chopped onion, some parsley, a grating of nutmeg, a wee drizzle of olive oil, an egg, 3tbs grated parmesan and the mushy bread-milk mixture. Season well.
3. After gently kneading the mixture for a while, shape into 1″ balls of love and roll in fine, dry breadcrumbs.
4. Fry the balls in about 1/4″ of hot veggie oil in a large saute pan, until nicely browned.
5. Remove the balls and tip out the hot oil. Give the pan a quick rinse and return to the heat, adding a glug of fresh olive oil, a tin of Italian toms, a pinch of salt and the meatballs. Leave to cook at a simmer for about 20 minutes.
6. Serve. Eat. Giggle.

I’ve come to the conclusion the phrase ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’ is an insult to mutton. It’s great stuff, and shouldn’t feel shy about flaunting it’s mature charms. We’ve been eating it regularly since we found a supply at the local organic deli down the hill. We’ve ‘ad it roasted, stewed, and braised with tatties and onions in the (sadly neglected) classic, Lancashire hot pot.

On Sunday I picked up a copy of Lizzy David’s ‘Salt and Spices in the English Kitchen’ down Camden Market. It’s a typically eccentric collection of recipes, perhaps better at stirring the culinary imagination than providing practical instructions for real life meals.

There are two particularly bizarre recipes for ‘Mutton Hams’ - boned leg or shoulder of mutton cured in brine, smoked (for 10-15 days!), and boiled like hams. After boiling, these mutton hams were pressed for a few days, then sliced and served cold - and seem to have been a staple feature of the British Raj breakfast table.

Amalee’s brave attempts at curing her own lambacon seem to have a precedent here. Are her pioneering experiments with salting lamb evidence of a culinary folk memory rising to the surface after decades of neglect, or just another sign that we’re all losing our collective gastromarbles?

Boil ye up some lovely stewing beefe. Shinn is mighty goode. Let bubble softlie for halfe of ye hour.

Add a boiling fowle whych hast roamed free all itse mortal days. Also add ye, three or four fyne fat leeks. Leave all to stewe at a temperate heate for three hours or until ye fowle is soft and wont to fall off ye bone. Season most generouslie.

Ten minutes before serving, and when all is cooked, remove ye olde leeks from the pot and cast out. Throwe in 3 fresh leeks, sliced fine, and a goodly handful of prunes, which ye have previously soaked in clear, sweete water.

Remove the fine boiled meats from ye broth, divide into goodly chunks, return to pot, and serve all with fine crusty breade. And may God preserve ye from the pox.

Exactly one week into my new life as a freelancer. It’s OK. Some days I sit in the kitchen facing towards the fridge, other days I sit facing the back door. Occasionally I walk through to the front room and look out the window, to check the weather. Haven’t yet been tempted to turn on the telly before Eastenders, haven’t yet sat down to start work much after 9am. Things are going pretty well, I’m pleased with progress.

I like not having a job. The feeling of being free to sit down and apply for any vacancy listed, however ridiculous, irrelevant or badly paid. Today I saw that Brighton Museum are looking for people to do 3 months research into any object in their collections which relates to courtship - wooing, getting it on, having it off, however you want to put it. They’re offering a bursary of £5000. Not much dosh, nothing to do with the web, but still, sounds interesting. Suddenly life is full of odd tangents, tempting diversions. Must stay focused though, I’m too easily distracted, like proverbial kid in candy store.

Mmm.. what’s this over here? Interesting… hmm let’s just take a quick look… er what was I meant to be doing… oh, yes…

The veg box, as always, continues to inspire culinary diversions. Thanks to the good folks at the River Cafe (not to be confused with HFW’s metro-peasant posse over at River Cottage) we’ve discovered that Cavolo Nero makes a magnificent pasta sauce. Just boil the leaves from 2 or 3 heads with a couple of peeled garlic cloves, drain, and blitz to a rough paste. Finish by stirring in plenty of olive oil, more raw crushed garlic, goodly amounts of salt and pepper. Stir it into a bowl of tubby pasta shapes and serve with parmesan and more oil at the table. A worthy winter pesto-substitute.

I’ve also had a kilo slab of pork belly kicking around in the freezer since our last trip to the Farmers’ Market. I’ve been meaning to have a go at making home-cured bacon for a while, and according to HFW in the Meat Book, it’s a pretty simple procedure.

So I’ve mixed up a bowl full of coarse salt, brown sugar, juniper berries, pepper and chopped bay leaf and rubbed it into the belly meat. This salty pork slab is now sitting in the fridge, and I’ll need to drain it off and add more cure mix each day for the next week or so. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

And now it’s nearly 6pm. Time to get my coat, hat and scarf on, tuck my laptop under my arm and walk round the block, returning home with my domestic head on. A little fake-commute to remind myself I am in reality a poor boy wot must work for his crust and not, alas, a lady of leisure.

A quick update on tonight’s road kill dinner. The stew had a pleasantly pheasanty taste. Some small splinters of bone in a fractured leg contributed the occasional unnerving crunch. A small portion of posh bubble’n’ squeak, using the last of the Christmas sprout-stick, enhanced the rustic-chic feel of the meal. Thank you, Miss Pheasant, for laying down your life to satisfy my gluttony.

I noticed in the Guardian Guide this week that there’s going to be a new series called ‘Road Kill Cafe’ on the box this year. Well, VBD has got in there first, with our very own road-kill exclusive.

This poor wee she-pheasant was found dead, but still warm, on a dark country lane in the Scottish borders, near the cottage we were staying over the new year. Her pheasant-mate, who’d been keeping a lonely vigil in the trees near where she lay, flew off dejectedly when we stopped the car.

We got out to inspect the body in the light of the headlights. Maths chick was dubious, borderline horrified, by my insistence on slinging the battered corpse in the car and taking her home for the pot.

We hung her by the feet in a barn next to the cottage, high enough off the ground to prevent any passing foxes from taking a nibble. There was a brief debate about whether a bird needs plucking and gutting before or after being hung. We decided to leave her intact for a respectful period of mourning. I went to the barn each day to check if the rigor mortis had worn off, and to give her a quick snifter, to make sure she wasn’t honking too badly.

I finally got round to plucking her this afternoon, 6 days later. In his ‘Meat Book’ Hugh Furry-Wellingtonboot makes plucking and drawing a bird sound like a doddle. Well, it ain’t. It’s like having a pillow fight with a cold, bloody mess of skin, flesh and innards. I started off in the kitchen, but a mushroom cloud of tiny down-feathers soon forced me, sneezing violently, out into the back yard to finish the job.

I soon discovered a large ball of undigested grass in the creature’s gullet. Not only had it failed to learn the Green Cross code as a youngster, it’d obviously never been taught to chew it’s food properly either. It must have had the manners of a pheasant. Ha ha.

The skin was ripped in several places from its road accident, and its guts were spilling out of a tear between the breast and the leg. 15 minutes of ham-fisted plucking soon rendered the bird unrecognisable, and I gave up on the idea of roasting a nice, whole pheasant for tea.

In the end, I hacked off the breast and legs, removed the skin and have just bunged it in a pot with white wine, garlic, thyme and onion. I’m going to leave it to stew slowly until Maths chick staggers home from her first day back at school.

The whole experience has taught me I am neither a pheasant plucker, nor a pheasant plucker’s son, and I’m only plucking pheasants because I’m now ‘working from home’ and have got bugger all else to do.

Cabbage ears, cabbage head. You’re a complete cabbage. The cabbage is a much-maligned veg in the English vernacular. An insult, it suggests either stupidity or ugliness, or both.

When over-boiled, cabbage becomes translucent, water-logged, flatulatory. A short-hand for all that’s wrong with British institutional life - the damp, gloomy stench of school canteens, hospital wards and village halls.

It’s all a bit unfair. The Savoy cabbage, in particular, is a handsome beast - tightly wrapped up, crinkly and squeaky. It looks like a big, green brain. If you bring it up close to your eye and turn it over in your hands you can recreate the opening credits from Tomorrow’s World, circa 1980.

Thrown against a wall, or walloped with a stick, it produces one of the vegetable world’s most satisfying explosions.

Or you can stuff it. We did, with sausage.

Cabbage Stuffed with Sausage

1. Take a whole savoy, snap off the loose outer leaves and trim the stalk.

2. Dice a carrot, finely slice an onion, assemble a bouquet-garni. Have a bowl of sausage meat to hand. A well-seasoned, herby sausage such as Cumberland would be ideal. If the sausage is too mild in flavour, add extra seasoning and herbs, chopped sage fits the bill.

3. Bring a large pan of water to boiling point; add the cabbage and leave for 5-10 minutes to soften.

4. Remove the cabbage and drain. Carefully peel back the leaves one at a time, adding a spoonful of the sausage meat to each leaf as you go.

5. Use your hands to reshape the whole caboodle back to its original shape. Tie it up with kitchen string (or crochet string, if that’s all you’ve got). An extra pair of hands is useful for this awkward procedure.

6. Put the carrots, onion, bouquet-garni and seasoning into a deep oven dish. Place the cabbage on top and lay 2 or 3 bacon slices over, as in the photo below. Pour over 3/4 pint of either stock or half white wine, half water.

7. Seal the edges with foil. Put on the lid and place in a low oven (100-120C) to braise gently for around 3 hours.

8. At the end of this time, drain the juice from the dish. You can reduce this, or thicken it with butter and flour, or simply adjust the seasoning and serve it separately in a wee jug.

9. Bring the cabbage to the table in the dish and serve it in slices, along with the cooking juice. It worked well for us with a big dollop of dry, fluffy mash.

And so the frumpy old cabbage is transformed, Cinderella-like, into the belle-of-the-ball. A vegetable fairy tale, just in time for Crimbo.