Weeders' Weekly - what is there to harvest in March?

Early March is traditionally the "hungry time of year" if you're trying to live off what you grow (which I'm not, but it's a way of seeing whether your veg plot is doing all it can at this time of year).  If you haven't read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" about trying to live off home grown and local produce for a year in the southern Appalachians, you should - it's really interesting, and funny and inspirational.  Much of her chapter about "Hungry Month" is a hilariously detailed account of turkey courtships, but she also talks about lack of veg and how grateful she is for frozen and bottled garden produce from the year before.

So I thought I'd see what I could eat from my garden in early March - it's better than I thought

Red chicory- bitter, but fine to eat raw when it's young, like this.  When it's older it makes a fantastic risotto.  I bet you didn't know it could cook.

Jerusalem artichokes- but maybe this is cheating because I should have dug them up last autumn

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Mixed overwintered salad greens

More salads- you can't have too many

Landcress- the easiest of all.  Very hardy and seeds itself.  Related to watercress.  Delicious!

Last few leeks

Purple sprouting broccoli just getting going

Kale- a miracle- it's started to grow really tender side shoots which are much quicker to cook than the big leathery leaves

 Now these plants - nettles and ground elder- shouldn't really be growing in the garden anyway - although if you have enough space you could allow some nettles because you can eat them, make plant food from them, add them to compost and they support quite a lot of different insects and caterpillars but they're liable to spread to where you don't want them.

New nettle growth

Watch Alys Fowler, a Guardian's gardening writer, eating nettles here.  Nettle risotto really is worth making - especially if you have an old bag of risotto rice lingering in the cupboard.  Don't worry if you don't have stock - you can use a stock cube or some vegetable cooking water or if you put about half a glass of white wine in with the softened onions just before you start adding the liquid and let it bubble vigorously that gives a really good flavour.  I've just discovered at the library "Wild garlic, gooseberries... and me" by Denis Cotter, chef of Cafe Paradiso in Cork, (has anyone been there? what's it like?) with lots of recipes for home grown veg and  foraged ingredients.  He has a very engaging style, and recomends using nettles in "any way that suits simple greens such as spinach", such as in egg dishes (omelette, quiche, frittata), risotto or pasta.  I've just seen a recipe for nettle beer - I'm  trying that as soon as possible- it sounds a bit like elderflower champagne in that no real brewing techniques are required

You need rubber gloves for picking nettles

Ground elder - an infuriating weed- but edible!

Ground elder is hard to get rid of.  Like bindweed and couch grass (the unholy trinity of perennial weeds), it can re-grow from tiny bits of root and in our heavy clay soil bits of root are almost bound to break off as you try to dig it up.  A better (but untidy) method is to smother it for at least a year under cardboard with plastic sacks on top weighed down with bricks or stones.  Alys Fowler (the nettle eater) tried a method of making a "lasagne" of card with layers of organic material to get rid of difficult weeds - watch her here, but I thought that the top layer of card would get too dry and blow around, hence the unattractive addition of the old sacks!

If you can't get rid of it, try eating it!  The classic "Wild Food" by Roger Phillips (with the romantic outdoor cooking photos) tells us that ground elder was introduced into Britain by the Romans as a culinary plant (well, gratias, not, for that) and cultivated throughout the Middle Ages to be used as a spinach-like vegetable.  He's says it's delicious cooked in a tablespoon of butter and very little water, gently for about 10 minutes, stirring continuously, then tossed in butter before serving.  Maybe only the butter makes it edible, but here it is being prepared outdoors:

photo from "Wild Food" by Roger Phillips

Libraries- Scandinavian Crime Season

A strange succession of deaths at Helsinki tube stations....a corpse found rolled in a rotting carpet (or rotting in a rolled carpet?).....in a hospital basement in Stockholm two bullet-riddled bodies lie sprawled on the floor... a church in the glittering frozen wastes of northern Sweden.  Inside, a sacrifice.....winter should be a quiet time on the holiday island of Gotland..... his eyes gouged out and a strange symbol carved on his body.....one cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage by Lake Thingvellir..... his head stoved in by a tin of unwanted reindeer meat, cloudberry jam in his pockets.....

It's Scandinavian Crime Month at Kilburn library- hurry there before it ends- on 3rd March.

Swedish librarian, Åsa Nylinder, has made a fantastic selection, by authors you'll have heard of- Steig Larsson, Henning Mankell, Peter Hoeg, and others you may not know - like the Icelandic Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Jo Nesbø and Sofi Oksanen.  I'm part way through Arnaldur Indridason's "Hypothermia" (that's the Lake Thingvellir hanging), and it's great stuff, well translated too.

On Thursday 3rd March 7-9pm award winning and best selling Norwegian crime author, Gunnar Staalesen, is talking about his work at Willesden Green Library.  If you want to read one his books first, ask for "Consorts of Death", "The Writing on the Wall" or "Yours until Death".  Hope to see you there!

I'm a big fan of Scandinavia - the style, the swimming (from those sensible wooden jetties so you don't have to wade through seaweed), the language, the people, the food (excepting the tinned reindeer and, even worse, tinned bear meat on sale in Helsinki's covered market)- I love the way everyone eats peas from  pods in the summer, and goes wild for berries, and then there's the trendy Danish foraging by Rene Redzepi.  Giles Coren described it all brilliantly here

But back to the libraries- it really is a case of Use it or Lose it at the moment, so get down there, join if necessary and borrow some of this gripping Scandinavian crime.

And, by the way, I made up that bit about the reindeer meat and the cloudberry jam - it sneaked in from Frugal February.

Afraid I only just found out about the Crime Short Story Competition- the closing date is on Wednesday 23rd Feb, so unless you can write 2,000 words very quickly it's a bit late.  The challenge is to complete this story begun by Swedish crime fiction author Camilla Ceder:

"In theory, Margaret had functioned well as his partner.  She was a faded beauty who had once been a celebrated singer.  It would not have hurt for her to drink less."

Frugal February - indoor foraging

Foraging is fashionable right now, so there must be lots of frustrated foragers out there waiting for the new season to begin.  Here's an idea to keep your spirits up (and save money, live sustainably and all that)- forage  indoors, in your own home, in your own cupboards and freezer.  Now is the time- during Frugal February- to pull out all those jars of strange condiments, the pickled walnuts, the date expired buckwheat grains, the tin of reindeer meat which a friend brought from Finland as a joke, the evaporated milk (how did that get there?) and use them up.

I think some celebrity chef has brought out an app where you can search for a recipe by ingredients, but I'm not sure whether it can deal with the sort of strange products lurking in most people's cupboards.  I mean, if you're looking at a red pepper, a bit of fish and some rice it's a bit like a less glossy version of "Ready Steady Cook"- you can make a meal from that.  It's the unusual stuff which is more challenging. 

Here's a few ideas

• seeds which are a bit old- pumpkin, sunflower- might still be fine for birds.  Same for nuts
• jam can be used instead of sugar (it's about 50% sugar anyway) in fruit crumbles or other puddings.  Nigella has a great recipe using marmalade in a chocolate cake
• Tinned salmon makes delicious fishcakes
• old bread you found in the back of the freezer makes breadcrumbs (ok, it's only useful if you actually use breadcrumbs- you could coat your salmon fishcakes)
•  pesto goes with lots of things- rice, cooked vegetables, stirred into soup 

Another idea is to leave jars or tins (not date expired ones, they're usable at one's own risk only) on local doorsteps for your friends and neighbours to enjoy. This is the flip side of frugality- generosity.  Pass on stuff or cook up a frugal supper and invite friends round to enjoy reindeer hash.

The orange jelly and evaporated milk have reminded me of those strange milk jellies we used to eat as children (I know, I'm coming over all Nigel Slater, in his book "Toast".  Nothing wrong with that though, it's a great book if that's your era, or even if it isn't).  Anyway, there was an obsession with getting as much milk into children as possible, and milk jelly - particularly if made in a rabbit shaped mould- was better than rice pudding, semolina and tapioca.  Of course it wasn't long before Angel Delight and Instant Whip were invented and all this cooking with milk became a thing of the past.

Back to the foraging.  For real outdoor foraging information check out one of the Transition Towns websites- we're covered by Transition Kensal to Kilburn.  More thoughts on foraging when the outdoor season begins, but to be going on with, have a look at Celtnet for wild food recipes.