My beloved chard plants, still going strong.

A few potato plants’ harvest. I should have stuck a foot in this photo for scale, some of them were enormous!

Rhubarb leaves over a foot long and wide!

And plenty of weed growth to go with it all.

This is that unused ‘eighth’ that I wish I hadn’t rotavated this year. The covering of manure didn’t manage to keep down the weeds. In a couple weeks time I will go on a rampage and tear all those waist-high, shallow-rooted weeds out of the ground, which will be very therapeutic.

And finally, an overview for you. I thought you might be wondering how it all fits together. My plot is everything you can see up to the plastic ground covered area. It’s hard to tell the weeds from the plants at this point, which bothers me. Those weeds are so persistent. I turned my nose up at all my neighbours’ ground coverings but by the end of my first summer, I’m seriously considering it.

Foreground, L-R: manure pile leftover from spring; weed patch, small enclosure with brassicas and chard; row of potatoes; weed patch.

Background, L-R: squashes; cherry tree (the birds ate all the cherries before we got a look in. next year we’re netting it up); strawberry/beet patch; grassy area; potato row; kale row; potato row; beans row; large enclosure with brassicas and killer rhubarb.

Click on the image to see it full size.

You can see how big those rhubarb leaves are getting here.

In the smaller enclosure where my chard is growing strong (and peas didn’t) I planted my kale and brussel sprout seedlings. I also planted a butternut squash and some tomatoes.

I put some courgettes and butternut squash into a little patch of not-very-well-dug-earth left by the last (attempted*) occupiers. *My plot is ‘half’ a full length plot, which was given up when the previous occupiers realised it was too much work to do the whole thing. There’s 3 of them splitting their plot, so I guess I’m doing well to have almost half my allocation in operation.

I managed to find a spot at the end of a potato row to plant out a couple of the kale plants earlier, and they’ve come on really well already. Proves that keeping the seedlings in the modules too long stifles their development. Since the potatoes aren’t fenced off I just made individual enclosures for these plants. Don’t laugh, you should see the state of the brassica’s my neighbours didn’t net up!

The beans have climbed right up their stalks in the 4/5 weeks since I pointed them out next to the new clearing. In the foreground here are Romano beans grown from my dad’s seed. I’ve grown up on these beans but it is hard to find them in the shops so I’m so glad to have my own source now. At the other end of the row are some runners which Gill gave me and some spinach plants in between them.

In case you don’t think all the wonderful things I’ve harvested are motivation enough, I also get to enjoy this beautiful view from the entrance of the allotment.

This is looking south-west over the countryside between us and Milton Keynes. The allotments run down the right-hand side of this path up to the electricity pilon. The little tank about half way down the path is where the water tap is.

Here’s my first potato!

Not that it is hard to grow potatoes: I found one plant growing in a bag of stones I’d cleared away when digging.

We were already eating our potatoes but the most exciting moment came when we pulled up and cooked the beetroot. They’re an interesting tubular shape instead of the typical round ones.

One of our favourite dinners, which Han originally drew my attention to in The Cranks Bible, is grilled beetroot and halloumi with steamed green beans. This every day dinner became quite the celebration the day we made it with our own beets. The dressing is balsamic vinegar, olive oil, roasted cumin seeds and a drop of tabasco, in case you want to try it yourself.

Our own green beans weren’t ready yet (a long way off) so these were shop bought, along with the halloumi (goat rearing and cheese making are even further away!).

The next thing we harvested, and which kept on coming until December, was Swiss and Rainbow chard. I first discovered this vegetable thanks to the Hackney Growing Community’s veg box we used to get. Here are my first pickings of leaves lying on the netting which is suspended over the plants to protect them from birds.

One of the dishes I love to make with chard is this tart, from a recipe on Helen Graves’ food blog. That delicious looking crust is made from carrots and oats (see my comment for the amendment I make to use olive oil instead of butter).

The problem isn’t actually so much the clearing of the ground, but the fencing it off to protect it from the little animals who want to dig under the veg, and so that you have something to attach netting to, to prevent birds pecking at the plants from above. I learnt this was necessary from my allotment neighbours, and from my own observations, evidence shown later in this post.

I recruited North to help with the job of clearing an area which had become overgrown with weeds since we rotavated. I guess we didn’t spread the manure thick enough.

Here’s just some of the weeds we cleared: some piled up in the unused quarter of the allotment (left) and others dumped on top of the manured but unused corner eighth (right) .

Between us, in a few hours, we had this 3m² area weeded, cleared of manure and fenced in. In the middle of that little pitch is a rhubarb plant which survived us rotavating over and ignoring it for a while since it was hidden amongst weeds.

To the right of the new clearing is a row of beans that are just starting to climb, and then 3 rows of potatoes.

I didn’t bother to fence or net up the potato plants because I didn’t think any thing liked to eat them. Turns out this is true, but it doesn’t stop them digging under the plants anyway.

Something dug this big hole in my potato plant ridges, found a potato, had a little nibble and discarded it. I filled the hole in but it dug it out again and once those potatoes were gone it found another row to dig under. I have no idea what it was. Rabbit? Fox?

Something else liked to dig between the stawberry plants. Well I’m guessing it was smaller, since the hole was. Later in the summer I found these little woody pellets around the hole. They were dry and broke up into sawdust like stuff.

Any ideas for what they are or what deposited them? Please add your suggestions in the comments.

Lesson 1: Discovering the therapeutic benefits of digging

The ground was so hard. Remember that rotavator we had to take back because it was broken? I think maybe we broke it trying to break into this insanely hard soil. I learnt after the rain finally came months later that the soil can be nice and easy to put a fork into, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting, as I had seedlings to get in the ground, so I would do this crazy dance balancing on top of the fork until it sunk into the ground (and then another to lever the rock-like earth out of position). Then I’d bash it a bit with the fork and leave it for a few days to get softened by, failing rain, a little bit of exposure to sun and wind.

See those ‘rocks’ of earth? They told me to plant out into “finely raked soil” on the back of the seed packet. Well that didn’t happen, I tell ya.

Lesson 2: Patience

Digging was taking such a long time, and I was impatient to get things into the ground. But work was pretty stressful at the time and I found that after couple hours on the allotment digging work felt like a distant memory. So I learnt to have patience.

First 2 rows dug. Potatoes went in there.

Lesson 3: Start those seedlings early!

Growing brassicas at home on the window sill. These were actually my 2nd round of seedlings. The first round included chard (swiss and rainbow), peas, beans, radish and spinach. Potatoes and beetroot were sown direct in the ground.

Lesson 4: Pause for the sunset (and hurry home!)

Sunset. One of the rewarding things about my evenings on the allotment is watching the sunset over the field. I just have to pop through the trees to the next field to see this view. And this was at 9:30pm. Of course I should be heading home by this time but there was always something else to do – or I simply hadn’t got down there early enough. There’s been a couple times this summer I’ve been planting out seedlings using my night vision!

Fiddlehead ferns are the unfurled fronds of ferns, but you can’t just pick any old fern, like these freshly furled ones we saw on our hike up High Creek Falls. I’m guessing we don’t have the right type of fern growing in the UK to harvest Fiddleheads since we don’t get them there (though we have plenty of bracken). Or could it be simply that no one knows which or when to harvest them?

Fiddleheads aren’t cultivated here so you only get them in season and they aren’t cheap, but they are well worth spending money on. Their taste is somewhere between asparagus and artichokes, and like those, they are delicious served with lemon and butter.

To prepare, brush off any loose brown leaves and give them a good wash. Then trim the woody or brown ends off the stalks. To cook them I would recommend steaming them until tender. Then serve tossed with a dob of butter, a good squeeze of lemon juice and seasoned with salt and freshly ground pepper.

I got a window seat which was very cool. I love aerial views. I’m always trying to remember what I learned in geography, like oxbow lakes (formed when a meandering river takes a shortcut).

I also got a good sense of how Chicago is laid out from above.

Lots of trees.

Couple super tall buildings. You can just see the top of the Hancock building, the black blob peeping out above a white building on the left, and the Sears’ Tower, the big black blob on the right. We’re looking towards the east in this photo.

Once we had taxied over the train and car highway (very bizarre) we were quickly off the plane and greeting Duncan by the baggage collection. Then we went to get on the “L“, (equivalent to the Underground), which mostly goes overground or above ground here – L standing for elevated.

The line which runs out to O’Hare airport runs up the centre of a 4 lane highway. It is a bit full-on standing in the middle all that.

And here is a detail of Duncan’s goofy wave in that last photo.

It is hot here in Chicago. Actually a bit hotter than usual for May, though June through August is always hot and humid. It’s been around 27 degrees celsius the last few days, reaching a staggering 30 this afternoon. Thankfully, our hosts, D&J, have air conditioning throughout their house. It’s like magic!

Here’s their house.

They just bought a new rocking bench for the porch there, which is lovely to sit in and watch the street or read a book. They live in the Albany Park neighbourhood. It is in the north of the City of Chicago, and is “one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States”.

Appropriately then, we went out to a Columbian place for dinner when we arrived, just round the corner from D&J’s house.

This was the grilled steak and chicken dish (meant for one? we shared between 2!), which was deeeelicious. That’s a yummy empanada (top left) which we had as a starter, next to the green garlicy sauce, cilantro [fresh coriander will be known thus, while I am here ok!] and/or parsley, we weren’t sure. There’s a fried plantain on the plate too.

The next couple days we all had work to do, so we got on with that. This is me working in the dining room which has a mirror at the end, reflecting the lounge and its windows which look out onto the street.

We did explore the local neighbourhood, taking a walk, checking out the local shops. I also went to the lovely Bloom Yoga studio in Rockwell for a class one evening. On the way home I made a little video of the “L” level crossing.

I was intending to take a photo of the station but my phone camera was on video so I got video instead. Out here the tracks run along street level or a bit higher, so there are lots of level crossings. I was in the middle trying to take my photo, when the bell started ringing, and I didn’t fancy being in the middle of the tracks when it went by. So the video starts with me dashing to a safe position behind the barrier! Hang on in there for the bit with the train rushing past.

There was more excitement to be had on my way home, as I saw a couple rabbits hopping around the wide grassy area between the pavement and the road. Chicago turns out to be ‘green’ down on the ground and not just from the air, which makes wandering about this neighbourhood very pleasant.

Okay I’ve run out of time – the new (gas) BBQ which North assembled in the garden today needs some food putting on it now. So I will have to save my impressions of downtown, which I explored yesterday, for next time. I’ll leave you with a little taster though – the view of downtown Chicago from Millenium Park.

This recipe demonstrates why Ottolenghi is such a king of Fusion cuisine. A spicy chinese stir-fry with brussel sprouts. And it has maple syrup in it too. Brilliant. The tofu is marianted in the maple syrup along with chilli sauce (I used chilli bean sauce as that’s all I had, seemed to do the trick), soy sauce, sesame oil and rice vinegar. If you can get the firm tofu from a chinese supermarket which comes in water (like I did), you need to drain and press this first so that it will suck up the marinade.

I even treated myself to including the fresh shitake’s as suggested in the recipe. A treat because I had to go to Fresh and Wild Wholefoods to find them (and so it goes without saying: paid silly money for them). I think you can find them in Sainsbury’s sometimes but that was not an option for me this time.

I used little over half the amount of brussel sprouts recommended as that was all I got in my veg bag (once I’d peeled off the outside leaves which were looking a little worse for wear after waiting a week to be eaten!). I think these proportions were just fine.

Looks alright doesn’t it?  Tasted absolutely fabulous. We had it with plain white rice.

Yup that’s right. That woody, twiggy, leafy woods swallowed my spectacles whole. We were doing an exercise in which we were to find our way back to the campfire at night navigating by the sound of a drum. I took my glasses off in order to tie my blindfold tighter round my head. It was only when I got back to the fire and that I realised my glasses were no longer in my pocket.

The next day a bunch of us returned to our starting spot and rewalked the route, scanning the ground for my glasses. (Thankfully I had some contact lenses with me which I wore instead). It was difficult to know where to look, because I didn’t know which way I had walked/crawled when I was blindfolded and disoriented. The one potential clue to location was that I was probably doubled over at the time, since if I’d been standing up straight they couldn’t have fallen out of my deep pockets. So we looked around areas where there were low level branches and twigs. That didn’t narrow it down much.

It also didn’t help that my glasses are brown and blue and silver. Kind of like the colour of the birch tree twigs littering the woodland floor. After a couple of unsuccessful day time searches, Dan – also a glasses wearer, who made it his mission to help me find mine – joined me on a night time search.

We hoped that perhaps I could manage to retrace the path I took by recreating the disorientation I felt at the time and that the torch light might reflect off the glass/metal parts. As Dan paced behind me shining the torch about, I stumbled, half crawling, through the woods. And look what we found.

They were a couple feet away from a spot we had stood in earlier in the day, where Dan had noticed a small branch that was broken in 2 places – indicating that this path had been trodden more than once. Luckily, no one trod on my glasses.

(Thanks Dan – I couldn’t have done it without you!)

I’m afraid this blog post isn’t strictly a food pictorial like this one (the inspiration for which I explain here), because I didn’t document every single step. I only decided to make the dish at the last minute, I didn’t have all the ingredients, and I was hungry! But since Helen has asked for other things to try, and I need to respond to this while she still has the wok on the hob, this will just have to suffice!

This recipe is from my Chinese Regional Cooking book by Deh-Ta Hsiung which I talked about more here. This dish actually comes from the Hunan province which borders Sichuan to the south-east, but their cuisine is closely affiliated, since they share a passion for hot chilli. The photo above is of the illustration for the recipe from Deh-Ta’s book.

You can see right away, it is one of those seventies cookbooks. Sexy food photography had not yet been born. But it is also one of those recipes that doesn’t match the illustration. Green pepper isn’t mentioned in the recipe (though I’m pretty sure it’s in that photo unless he had access to mega sized chillis!) but I think it looks better like that and tastes right too. In fact it is usually having got a green pepper-or a leek-in my veg bag that inspires me to make this recipe.

Ingredients

• 300g pork fillet (you don’t really get pork labelled ‘fillet’ in the shops here so I tend to use pork chops)
• 3-4 chinese dried mushrooms, soaked
• 1 tbsp chinese pickled cabbage (look for a little packet, may be labelled ‘preserved vegetables’)
• 2 tbsp bamboo shoots (you can freeze the rest of the tin for next time)
• 50g hot green chillis (no idea how many that is, I use 2 long thin green ones which-coupled with the HOT chilli paste-seems enough heat for us)
• 1 leek
• 1 green pepper (this wasn’t in the recipe, but is in the photo, and I think goes very nicely!)

• 1 tbsp cornstarch
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 egg

For the sauce:

• 2 tbsp chilli paste (see notes, below)
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp sesame seed oil

One detail of this recipe I haven’t quite got yet – though it doesn’t seem to hurt, is that Deh-Ta says you should “cut the pork into thick slices [and] score the surface with a criss-cross pattern” before cutting it into small squares and marinating in salt, egg and cornflour.  The idea here being, that when you deep fry the pork “each piece opens up like a flower”. This never happens for me. However, I still score the meat each time like a good student. I guess I feel that at least it gives more surface for the egg to cling onto, and more places for the sauce to get a grip. I suppose I should try not doing this one time to see what the difference is.  (I’ll add the results to the comments if/when I do this!)

The other tricky thing here I suppose is the chilli paste. You may find it difficult to locate. I was lucky the first time and found this squat little jar in my local Chinese supermarket that seemed perfect. Then they stopped selling that and the next best thing I’ve found is a much taller jar, whose English language label is titled with “Black beans” but the first ingredient is actually chilli (then soybeans).  This stuff I find I need to chop or grind by hand (it appears to be predominantly black beans) to make it into a paste – the other jar was more a paste to start with. See how you do, and good luck!

Oh one more thing: can I just emphasize that the leek and preserved vegetables are crucial. Okay, so you can probably get away with out the latter-incase you struggle to find them too-but I just tried this with onion instead of leek and it was definitely missing something. So please use leek if you can.

Method

You know what to do with the pork already (as decribed above: score/chop – add to egg, salt and cornflour). The vegetables: chop them all up finely; I find the green pepper should be roughly 1.5cm cubed, same with leek; the other can be chopped smaller, in proportion to their size. Grind the chilli paste if what you’ve found isn’t much of a paste. Get a colander/plate-with-paper-towels on it ready. Put some rice on.

Then heat a couple inches of oil up in your wok (a wooden skewer or chopstick left in the oil will indicate the appropriate temperature when it starts to fizz) and drop the pork cubes in, possibly in 2 batches so you don’t overcrowd it or cool down the oil too much.  You’ll need to give it all a good poke to stop it sticking together. I have an enormous holey spoon that helps with both this task and the fishing out of the pieces later. It doesn’t take long. If the pork pieces open up like flowers please tell me how you did it. If not just take them out before they start to brown. Drain them in a colander and/or on some paper towel. Tip the oil into a saucepan to cool (I then put in a jar for reuse another time).

Add 1-2 tbsp of the aforementioned oil to stir fry the vegetables. They only need a few minutes on a hot heat, stirring ALL THE TIME. Then add the chilli paste and pork, stir well. Then add the soy. Take off the heat, stir in the sesame oil, and serve with rice.

Enjoy.

P.S. Deh-Ta’s recipe suggests you add some cornflour slurry at the end to ‘thicken the sauce’. I don’t find I have much of a sauce when I make this dish – just all the flavours which are clinging to the ingredients. There is no liquid left in the pan for the cornflour to thicken. However, if you would like to try making this more saucy, I guess you want to add more water (or maybe chicken stock) and then the cornflour slurry (cornflour/cornstarch mixed with equal parts water) will have something to thicken and you will have a wet sauce.  But I am pretty convinced you don’t need this.