Allotment in Autumn

I spent the afternoon in my allotment. I'm trying winter sowing this year - the idea is that you sow seeds of certain plants before winter comes. They overwinter in the soil and come up just as soon as they can in spring. It certainly works with weeds! Hopefully I'll get a good result and an early harvest. I'm trying carrots, spinach and onions.

There was still a little bit waiting to be picked, too. Lots of calendula that could care less about the frosts we've had, some mint and borage flowers for Hoppy, and a good bunch of swiss chard. I almost didn't plant chard this year, but I really wanted to try the variety 'Bright Lights' - it looks so pretty in photographs! - so I made room. What a good decision that was! I've been picking it all summer, it keeps growing back, and it takes more than a couple of frosts to kill it. I think it can even stay in good shape all winter under insulating snow.

Hoppy loves to run off with a leaf of chard and snack on it in a corner. We like it steamed, sauteed with garlic and especially creamed.

Creamed swiss chard with mashed potatoes

Ingredients
1 bunch swiss chard
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
up to 1 cup milk (optional)
salt + pepper

Wash the chard thoroughly, steam it in the water that clings to the leaves plus about 1/2 cup. Drain and save the cooking liquid. Let chard cool.

Meanwhile, make a white sauce: melt the butter in a saucepan. Stir the flour into the butter with a whisk so that it gets the texture of wet sand. Keep whisking and let the butter and flour cook for couple of minutes - this gets the floury taste out. Whisk in the cooking liquid from the chard gradually to make a smooth sauce. If sauce is too thick, add milk until desired consistency is reached


. It will continue to thicken somewhat as it cooks. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

By now the chard should be cool enough to handle. If not, rinse with cold water. Squeeze firmly to remove residual cooking moisture and rinse water. Squeeze it down into a little bundle. Chop. Add to white sauce and heat through.

Serve with mashed potatoes. I like to make a 'nest' of mashed potatoes on the plate with creamed chard in the middle. Serve with flaked salt.

lemon balm

I wrote this last summer and never posted it! Now I don't have any lemon balm in my garden this summer, but after reading this I'm going to plant some! It's so tasty and it smells wonderful.

I brought home a lemon balm plant a few weeks ago, because I wanted to bake some cookies from a recipe that called for it.  When I bought it it was a tiny, tiny little plant, so small that I was almost afraid to pick from it.  The nursery tag said it would thrive best in shady, moist places, and apparently that was true because it grew lightning-fast into a big, healthy bush.

Lemon balm is not an herb I have used a lot before, so I've been trying to think up new uses for it. Should you find yourself with a similar glut, here are some tips!

1. The lemon balm lemonade I wrote about here.  Also good in iced tea.

2. In fruit salads or green salads.

3. Pasta with lemon, parmesan and lemon balm.

4. Vanilla ice cream with fruit, fresh or frozen, and lemon balm is heavenly! 

5. As a hot tea - pour boiled water over lightly bruised leaves and allow to steep.

Or just enjoy it in the garden. Brush your hands over the plant as you walk by for an incredible, summery lemon scent.

Lemon balm works almost anywhere you'd use lemon or mint. In my experience it can be a bit hard to find at the grocery store, but if you've got a shady spot, a pot from the garden centre will grow like a weed!

flädersaft - elderflower cordial

This morning we went out into the yard to pick flowers from the elderflower tree and make cordial! If you don't know what that is, it's a sort of juice syrup that you blend with water to make a drink. It lasts a long time on the shelf or in the fridge and is really popular here in Sweden, you can make it (or buy it made from) strawberries, raspberries, oranges, sloanberries, rhubarb ... well pretty much anything!

Anyhoo, although I think they have elderflower cordial in England too, to me it seems like the most Swedish thing ever! And people have been making it for generations! We used a recipe from recepten.nu but they are all more or less the same, if you have a swedish cookbook there will definitely be a recipe in there! Here's a look at the steps involved:

First collect your flower clusters, we used this pretty basket that's usually used for mushroom picking. Most recipes call for 30-40 flower clusters per 2 litres of water.

When you bring your flowers inside you can lay them out on a white tea towel and let them sit for fifteen minutes or so, this gives any little bugs that have been hanging out inside the blossoms time and opportunity to climb out. Then rinse them well!

Meanwhile you can cook up 2 litres of water with 2 kg of sugar (it feels so wild to empty a whole 2kg bag of sugar into the pot! That's what you need to preserve the saft and make it tasty and syrupy, though).

Pretty!

Cut the flower clusters off the stems into a big metal bowl or bucket and add the lemons.

Pour over the hot sugar-water. Then the hard part - you have to let it sit for three days before you can sieve the liquid and enjoy your cordial!

The perfect summer drink!

 The little flowers go everywhere - afterward you'll have a lot of floral decoration in your kitchen!

dill.

Dill might be my favourite plant in the garden. I love its strange, wispy leaves and nodding, blowsy flower crowns. Most of all, I love the smell. It reminds me of summers at my grandparents' farm like nothing else can. My grandfather died eight years ago and I haven't been to that old house since then, but still the smell of dill filling my small garden takes me back there, to those warm warm warm afternoons picking red currants, looking for frogs at the pond, wandering in the pasture with the horses, running back to the house with the smell of dill heady in the yard.

 If you see some yellow flowers in this picture, they are cucumber blossoms. I'm hoping to make pickles this summer. But right now these vines boast just one, oddly shapen little vegetable, so I brought home a big field cucumber from the market and made snabbgurka ('quick pickle') instead.

This is so simple but makes the perfect, fresh, summery side dish. Kaninen's mother showed me how to make it. Use your trusty vegetable slicer to slice very thin rounds of cucumber (however much you want to eat) into a bowl. Peeling it first is up to you. Mix with 1/2-1 tsp each of salt and sugar and a lidful of white vinegar (ättika). Try to get a balance of salty, sweet and sharp. Cover your cucumber with finely chopped dill (or other herbs) and cover it with a little dish. Let it sit while you are preparing the rest of your dinner, say, boiling the potatoes to go alongside it. After twenty minutes or so: Eat!

Snabbgurka goes well with meats or with starchy vegetables like potatoes or roasted beets, anything that wants a nice sharp taste alongside it to cut through starchy or fatty foods.

PS I just noticed on my calendar that today marks the start of crayfish season. Timely, as crayfish are traditionally eaten with lots of dill crowns!

This guy likes dill, too.

♥

översättning:

ett enkelt recept för snabbgurka!

Amaranth, and garden eating

I harvested a handful of massive amaranth leaves for my dinner.

I mentioned before that I had never heard of amaranth until I began growing it this summer. Now I love it. It grows so quickly, doesn't mind the heat, has been bug-proof (knock on wood) and despite being eaten down to the quick by rabbits last month, the plants are now all about 30-50cm high and covered with big leaves. If you garden, grow amaranth! I have only a few plants, in a tiny area, but they are so vigorous that I seem to be getting a large harvest anyway. You can eat the young leaves like lettuce, which is great now, at high summer, when lettuce is a bit fussy about high temperatures, and cook the large leaves like spinach, good for when the spinach is not yet ready (at least mine isn't).

Amaranth is popular in all around the world. I found and made this Indian curry recipe (the first one on the page). Try it with spinach if you don't have amaranth. Yum yum yum.

Of course curry doesn't exactly 'go' with the insalata calabrese I served alongside it. That's just how it is with garden cookery. Sometimes you simply have a basket of rapidly ripening tomatoes, a basil plant that's longing to be eaten, a small jungle of amaranth needing to be picked, and a serious craving for buffalo mozzarella all in one day. Of course there are surely ways to work all these things into a single cohesive meal, but I don't have anything against a mismatched salad and main course. After all, it's just me I have to please!

lemonade

For hot days, how about lemon balm lemonade?

Take 3-4 tablespoons of sugar in the bottom of a glass. Tear up some lemon balm (or mint) leaves and muddle them into the sugar with a spoon or a proper muddler, if you have one. Stir in the juice of half to one lemon (depending on juciness, of course). Add ice and top up with cold still or sparkling water. Herbs make good things even more refreshing!

(add an oz of gin if it's that kind of party)

Best enjoyed through a straw on a sunny afternoon!

green (and red)

 I made this small salad for lunch from things in the garden, and it looked so pretty. It's fresh shelled peas, radish, dill, thyme, and red and green amaranth leaves. I had never had amaranth in my life before, or even heard of it, but I read an article extolling the virtues of growing red leafy vegetables, including amaranth, so I tried it. It's good! Slightly bitter and very fresh. On the side is a grilled sausage and a pool of grainy mustard. Perfection.

breakfast

Yoghurt with brown sugar and strawberries from the garden, toast with gooseberry jam, water and tea.

Those strawberries were so lovely but I kind of wish I had saved them for tomorrow, so I could have a proper strawberries-and-cream breakfast-with-Wimbledon Saturday morning! Perhaps some more will ripen by Sunday.

♥ Dawn

översättning: min frukost: yoghurt med hemodlade jordgubbar, te och rostat bröd med krusbärssylt.

seeds

 

After a marigold blossom starts to die back, I cut it off and let it dry out for a day or two. Then I can open it up and take out the seeds inside, which look like small black-and-white needles, and plant more, or save them for next spring. Some people don't like marigolds because of their smell, but I think they are beautiful, with their orange and red and gold ruffles, and they help protect the other plants from being eaten by insects. They're one of my favourite flowers!

Elegy for a healthy plant Or, another problem with condos

The yard maintenance person cut down my pepper plant with an edger today. I didn't notice until hours later, when I went out to pick some onions for dinner. I'm truly upset. I don't have a photo, but it already had a good-sized pepper on it, a smaller one, and lots of blossoms that were turning into fruit. It was such a healthy plant! I know it was just one plant, I can get another, shouldn't take it so hard, etc., but I am really upset. When I heard the mower running out back I thought of going outside and asking them to be careful around the garden plots, but then thought it probably wasn't necessary. Lesson learned. This is not a terrible place to live, but I really will be happy to have my own garden somewhere soon, where I take care of everything and there are no nosy neighbours just a few feet away.

Setback

I've had a bit of a disappointment this week. While I was at school on thursday a man from the condo management company showed up as a result of a complaint made by a resident and instructed my dad to remove our compost bin, claiming these are forbidden in multi-person dwellings by city by-law. I haven't been able to find conclusive evidence of such a by-law - in fact our city website presents nothing but praise and encouragement for back yard composting. Regardless, however, of the question of legality, what really irks me is the thought that one of our neighbours has nothing better to do than to peer into others' gardens, and upon seeing something they don't like, to take that complaint to the management like a child who's seen a classmate being naughty. Wouldn't the polite and, dare I say it, adult thing to do be to first speak with your neighbour about your concerns? We live in a long row-house with gardens out the back that are fenced on two sides, with a strip of lawn running beind the open gardens. Our living room has french doors that look onto the garden. I see people walking back and forth on this strip of grass all day long and have always assumed they were simply out getting some fresh air. It makes me awfully uncomfortable to think that they might actually be taking a quick look at everybody's garden (and perhaps inside, too), checking for the least violation of the owner's agreement that they can then gleefully report. I don't understand the appeal of condominiums, I'm not sure who thought they would be a good idea in the first place and it was never a particular desire of mine to live in one. I'm here now though, and if everyone in this building was like my dad and I, unconcerned with our neighbours and what they do in the quasi-privacy of their own yards, it wouldn't be such a bad place to live. It seems, however, that those who are most attracted to the idea of condos are those same people who find the thought of being able to police their neighbours so very appealing in the first place. My friend tells me this sentiment is not limited to condo-dwellers, that her own neighbourhood is in fact populated with busy-bodies, the difference being that here those types have, for some reason I cannot fathom, been given a lot more clout. All I was wanted to do was to take my waste, my kitchen scraps, my potato peelings and coffee grounds and lettuce stems, and turn them into something nutritious, something that can supplement the meagre layer of dry earth and gravel that lurks beneath the grass here. I understand there is a concern about compost attracting animals, but that is only the case if one puts meat and dairy scraps in the bin, which I had no intention of doing. If the concerned party would have come to my door, I might have had the opportunity to assure them of this. I could tell my neighbour that all I'm doing is bringing some diversity and nutrition to this neglected little corner. Instead, community and conversation has been rejected in favour of authorities and rule books.

Planning a garden

I'm not an expert on vegetable gardens. As in so many areas of my life, I've read a lot of books on the topic but I've never done any real gardening myself. I do have a bit of experience from the big garden we had in our backyard when I was a child. My grandfather, who was a great gardener, put it in for us, 10x10 feet or so, surrounded by railroad ties, and filled with neat rows of warm red tomatoes and fast-multiplying zucchini. We had red currant bushes and raspberry canes, little apple and pear trees and one giant sour-cherry tree, great for pies and beloved by birds. On the other side of the yard a rhubarb patch kept us well supplied with pie fillings throughout the spring. (It was a very pie-centric childhood). Despite growing up with a bountiful garden, I never got out there much myself. This year I'm hoping that my knowledge of the delights of a vegetable garden will make up for my lack of familiarity with the mechanics of the enterprise. It's been somewhat easier than I imagined to start the whole thing. I used graph paper to plan out the space, brought home the seeds and seedlings from the nursery, and started digging up the grass where I wanted to plant. That was sweaty work, but didn't take too long. The hardest part was digging all the rocks out of the ground and dealing with the sorry state of the soil. We live in a quite new condo neighbourhood and the developers of such places have a very helpful habit of carting away all the topsoil and filling in the ground with gravel and shards of brick. The earth that is there is mostly cold, hard clay. To make up for all this I had to bring in a lot of topsoil and some well-rotted manure from the nursery. I hope my plants can manage in these circumstances, but as far as I can tell they are doing quite alright. In order to provide my garden with some nutrients in the future, I built a mulch bin out of 1x2s and chicken wire. The mulch bin (or compost pile, if you prefer) was a big part of our childhood garden. I was always amazed by how soft and green the grass was that grew in the rich, damp soil around the bin. I'm also keeping a calendar to record important garden dates, such as planting and harvest days - like today, when I ate the first strawberry! (Although the rest of them appear to be several weeks away).

Blueberry pie

I was feeling unaccomplished yesterday, so just before I went to bed I made a blueberry pie.  So easy, so good!

Make a pie crust using your favourite recipe, and let it chill in the fridge for 15 minutes. Then smoosh half the dough over the bottom of a greased pie pan to make a roughly flat, even crust.  Bake for 8 minutes at 350.  Take it out and spread about 1.5 cups frozen blueberries over the top.  Sprinkle half a cup of sugar over the berries.  You could also grate some lemon zest over, which is a very yummy, but not necessary, addition.  Take the rest of the dough and smoosh little flat pieces of it and lay these over the blueberries.  Bake for another 20-30 minutes at 350.  You'll know it's done when the top crust turns golden. Of course you could also be fancy about it and roll the dough out and everything like a proper pie, but this way is so easy and so good.  You end up with something between a pie and a cake.  Really nice with coffee and vanilla sauce, or ice cream.

Of course it is winter, not blueberry season, and these are not frozen.  They are shipped (sigh) from Peru (sigh).  My dad bought them for me because he knows I like blueberries, so what could I say.  I wanted to give in to my tendency to lecture - especially my tendency to lecture on my favourite topics of local, seasonal, organic.  But it was a thoughtful thing for him to do, so I swallowed my lecture and baked a pie.