The Veg Box Diaries

My mum has always sworn by Northern Rock, saying you couldn’t get a safer investment. It’s a family truism that they’re the best folks to take care of your dosh - I inherited a handful of shares (now almost worthless) from my Grandad and have always had my saving account with them. I wonder how far our collective faith in this company has been due to its name - ‘Northern’ implying no-nonsense, sensible, honest - ‘Rock’ denoting safe, reliable - rather than any objective judgement of their financial acumen.

So now a pillar of my inherited wisdom has been removed, it’s a good time to celebrate those certainties which are left - of which one is surely the Riverford veg box. If you order it, it will come; and it will be good. A Southern Rock. This week’s small box was particularly pleasing aesthetically - a still-life cornucopia of vegetable matter, including…

• a bunch of young turnips, with tops
• a bunch of small, stubby carrots
• a butternut squash
• a bag of Maris Peer tatties
• a bag of onions
• sweet peppers - two green, one yellow
• a pointy cabbage

So I could spend all day down my local NR branch, queueing for my savings, or I could stay at home, pull out my most trusted cook books and plan a fitting end for these fine specimens of vegetablehood.

There’s a compelling ‘farmer’s eye’ view of the latest outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease on mopsa’s blog.

Last night Maths Chick was out galivanting and I was left in peace to watch England’s Euro qualifier against Russia on the box. I had a half bottle of decent Burgundy and fancied a dish of something crunchy and salty to chase it down while I gawped at the footie. These shallow-fried breadcrumbed mushrooms fitted the bill nicely.

1. Cut your button mushrooms in half, or leave whole if they’re very small.

2. Whisk an egg in one bowl, season it. Lay out some fine breadcrumbs on a plate next to it.

3. First, dip the mushrooms in the egg, shake off the excess and roll them in the crumbs until they’re well coated.

4. In a frying or saute pan heat about half an inch depth of sunflower oil. It’s hot enough if it sizzles when you dip in one of the ’shrooms.

5. Fry until golden and crisp on one side, then turn over. When they’re done, fish ‘em out on to some kitchen paper.

6. Put in a bowl, scatter over some more salt and pepper, and serve immediately with lemon wedges.

You could vary this by including some cubes of camembert prepared in the same way, maybe accompanied with a dollop of redcurrant jelly, in 80’s bistro fashion. This would transform it into a retro-classic, a bit like the current England line-up (4-4-2, Owen and Heskey up front, Terry Venable’s hair-do).

This dish is an adaption of a recipe from the first River Cafe cookbook. Basically, peel and slice the carrot and spuds into large chunks. Pour a quarter of an inch or so of oil into a saute pan and gently fry some whole spices - I put in a teaspoon each of fennel, poppy and coriander seeds and a whole dried chilli. Cumin would also be good. There was no garlic in the house (shock-horror) otherwise I’d have thrown in a few whole cloves in their skin. Add the veg and gently saute, turning the carrots and spuds occasionally, until nicely browned and cooked through. Season and serve immediately.

I had these with Black halibut, cut in to gougons, dipped in flour and fried quickly at a high heat. I’d never heard of this fish before (also known as Greenland halibut), and it was a tad mushy and mildly flavoured, but nonetheless a decent, and cheaper, alternative to haddock.

At the risk of blowing our own trompettes, The MC and myself were honoured and delighted to be featured in last month’s edition of Delicious magazine. I’d like to think the mugshot combines a little bit of the floppy lovableness of Hugh F-W, the steely no-nonsense of Sir Gordon Ramsey and the saintly purity of Delia-le-Smith. We’d like to thank our agents, without whom… against all the odds… boo-hoo blubber blubber…

There’s an interesting article about the most humane way to kill a lobster in today’s Gruniad Online.

I’ve tried the ‘boiling from cold water’ method with a very large live crab, thinking the gradually warming water might lull the mighty beast into a painless death-sleep. Alas no, it thrashed around so violently it actually lifted the heavy cast-iron lid off my le creuset pan. I had to pile a number of kitchen appliances on top in order to stop the crabby crustacean escaping and wreaking bloody revenge on my ankles.

A restaurant I used to work in held an annual lobster fest, during which scores of the critters were ritually slaughtered by a knife through the neck, which seemed like a pretty instant, if grizzly, death. While awaiting their fate they were kept in the fridge to make them docile; a pair would occasionally be thawed-out for lobster duels during quiet spells in service. Modest amounts of hard-earned tips were wagered on the outcome of these fights, although generally they showed little interest in either fighting or escaping, appearing more depressed than aggressive. In my experience chefs are pretty hardened/realistic/callous (delete according to point of view) about the welfare of the crustaceans in their care.

I have to admit to having a sharp twinge of guilt when I fried up a plateful of tiny live shrimps in France the other week. Tiny they may have been (too small to even peel as it turned out) but they had a remarkable jump on them. Four or five of them spectacularly leaped out of the frying pan on contact with the hot oil, and I can’t really blame them.

My view on the ethics of cooking live sea-food is, firstly, if you’re going to eat a creature you should be prepared to kill it or watch it be killed and, secondly, you should try and do the ugly deed in the most painless way possible (e.g. not chucking them straight into boiling oil). With lobster, I suspect the old knife in the back of the neck technique might, after all, be the kindest way of despatching them to the Great Rock Pool in the Sky.

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.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting at the kitchen table. An operatic soprano is warbling through the window from somewhere nearby. Maths Chick is going through her old school notes, selecting some to throw away in an attempt to reclaim a few more square centimetres of space in our tiny 1-bed box. We’re always fighting a battle with an encroaching tide of stuff in this place, sometimes I feel we’re the King and Mrs Canute of Muswell Hill.

Anyway, HFW’s latest ‘wild food’ article in the Gruniad has inspired me to go off in search of green hazelnuts today. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, so I’ve ripped out a photo of the wee critters and am off to Hampstead Heath to see what the deal is. They look like tiny sweet corn in the mug shot. I’ll let you know if I find any…

[Monday morning...]

Well, that was one of our less fruitful foraging expeditions. As you can see we came back with a measly half-dozen green hazelnuts, half of which turned out to be maggoty or empty on closer inspection. We found plenty of copices of hazel trees, all of which were already stripped bare of their fruit. Which I guess goes to show that you can’t beat a cockney squirrel to his nuts.

“Too much of nothing, Makes a man feel ill at ease” grumbles Dylan on the Basement Tapes. What he doesn’t go on to say, is that too much cabbage laying around the house can lead to similar feelings of uneasiness.

When I’m suffering from EBAS (excess-brassica-anxiety-syndrome), I often resort to Cabbage and Bean soup therapy, which generally does the trick. I don’t really follow a recipe, just a basic method. It’s all about patiently waiting for a good, deep flavour to emerge.

Cabbage and Bean soup

1. Firstly, build a strong base of flavours by slowly sauteing together, in plenty of olive oil, whatever is available of the following, chopped together roughly:

onion, garlic, carrot, celery, tomatoes, mushrooms (ideally, dried porcini soaked in hot water for an hour), pancetta, bacon, salami (in chunks, not slices), herbs (rosemary, parsley, marjoram), salt and pepper

2. Stir in a tin of beans - haricot, chick peas, flageolet - whatever’s available in the cupboard. Continue to cook everything gently while the flavours continue to mingle and develop.

3. Next the liquid is added. Perhaps a small glass of wine first, then water. Not too much, the soup should be quite thick and concentrated by the end.

4. Let this cook for a good while, at least an hour or two. Continue to taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more water if necessary.

5. Finally, 15 or 20 minutes before you’re going to eat, finely slice some cabbage leaves, wash them, and add them to the soup. Continue to simmer until the cabbage is well cooked.

6. This soup is good served at the table with freshly grated Parmesan, maybe a bowl of pesto to spoon in, or some chopped red chilli and fresh herbs to sprinkle on top.

Good camping and good cooking don’t have to be mutually exclusive, even when you’ve only a got a small single-burner gas stove and a battered old pan. Here are our 5 top tips for gourmet campers:

1. Take a washing up bowl

Great for tossing salads, scaling and gutting fish, marinading roadkill and, er, washing up in.

2. Invest in a no-handled non-stick frying pan

The absence of a handle means the pan balances well, the non-stick makes whipping up a quick piperade or omlette a doddle. Check out the orange oven-glove - pretty stylish, huh?

3. Use a frisbee as a chopping board

This was our most valuable discovery of the holiday - convert a frisbee into a chopping board. It’s light, it has a rim that stops stuff being blown away by that pesky Mistral wind, and the grooves the knife makes in the plastic doesn’t seem to adversely effect the frisbee’s flight.

4. Take advantage of on-site fruit bushes

Virtually every campsite we stayed in provided us with a free dessert (except for the Red Indian-themed site we stayed at in Brittany). Figs and plums in Croatia and Italy, blackberries and elderberries in France - simply poached with some brown sugar and a glug of unidentified brandy-like spirit given to us in Croatia.

5. Take a Riverford veg box

Our trusty veg box did us proud as an all-round booze and cooking equipment container. It even survived a spillage of anchovy oil which would have destroyed a lesser box. We’re still debating whether to return it to our local veg box deliverer for re-use - if you get very fishy-smelling veggies any time soon, you’ll know the reason why.