Gunpowder, Poison and Soup

Sorry about the title. It's the best I could come up with based on "gunpowder, treason and plot" ;-}
There's the gunpowder. A fabulous fireworks display at Newbury Racecourse last night. I know lots of animals hate fireworks - our cat, Jaffa, used to go into hiding if there was even a distant bang - but I have to admit we love to see and hear them.

And, here's the poison. Spindle berries. They're growing in the hedgerow around the allotment and are so pretty, but extremely toxic. The pink shell explodes to reveal the orange berry and those colours together are fabulous!

And, of course, here's the soup. Yes pumpkin again, but this time with carrot, onion and garlic and plenty of pepper. I left the skin on again.

The Jack-Be-Little pumpkins are quite hard to cut up but once cooked the skin is thin enough to get a spoon through, so fine for the blender to deal with and there weren't any scratchy-throat bits when I ate the last lot I made.

We visited the plot to pull the carrots and collect the other ingredients from their storage in the greenhouse. The loofahs are in there too but have a lot more drying out to do. I might bring them indoors.
The part of the plot with the sprouts, chard, kohl rabi and carrots doesn't look too awful.

But the rest of the plots look very sad and we should be clearing and tidying, but the inclination isn't here at the moment. All that dead growth collapsed after a couple of frosts we had last week followed by a lot of rain.

So It Begins...

Someone needs to eat all the remaining pumpkins (Jack-Be-Little and Jack-of-All-Trades) and it's mostly going to me, so here goes with the first pumpkin soup of this year's season...

They look like peach slices, don't they. I removed the seeds and stringy pulp. The seeds were too small to bother saving; there'll be plenty more for toasting/roasting from the large pumpkins.

I thought I'd get through four of the Jack-Be-Little pumpkins but there was only room on the tray for two. I didn't add any flavouring, just olive oil - the flavouring was a teaspoonful of the Sicilian spices added to the onions while I fried them up.

I turned the slices once while roasting and tasted one of the chunks - quite a subtle sweet flavour.

Once nicely browned I added them to the fried onion (one of our big onions from the plot, spices (not too many this time) and vegetable stock. I left the skins on as I saw on someone else's blog.

A 10-minute blending session later and voila! The skin broke down almost completely so I'm glad I didn't put effort into attempting to skin those little chunks.

That's about 2 pints of soup, it should keep me going for at least 3 days of workday lunches. Now I need to do a bit of searching for other recipes...

A Feast for Halloween

I copied Shaheen's spiders idea from Allotment 2 Kitchen for our starter. You wouldn't believe how fiddly they were though! The cheese toasty stars were just a bit too small for the olive spiders, but you get the gist.

The main was a cheesy vegetable bake - all from the allotment: parsnip, potato, carrot,
beetroot and onion. With a bit of black garlic in the sauce.

It looks a bit burnt, but that's just the cheese sauce, which had gone nice and red from the beetroot to make it suitably Halloween-y.

I sliced all the veg thinly and thought they'd all cooked pretty well in about 1½ hours but Jamie  thought they were still a bit undercooked. He's used to eating veg slightly more crunchy than he'd choose to cook them :-)

Earlier we'd visited the allotments to put a Jack-o-lantern in the gateway - another nice bit of carving by Jamie. And we put a light-up ghost balloon on our plot on a long string, but not sure how many people would have spotted that - unless they were going along the canal and saw it over the hedge!

An Allotment Foray

It was the last day before the clocks went back and it was dark and damp on the allotment. We had to go up there; I was showing someone a new plot and we really needed to do some Autumn tidying. Sooo many weeds as the weather is still reasonably warm and they just won't stop growing! And we noticed several different fungi have made an appearance...
We spotted this lovely Shaggy Ink Cap (Coprinus comatus) in the grass by our plot. The spore probably arrived on site in some of the manure. They're edible when in this condition, but it will very soon be a black slimy mess!

This Jelly Ear fungus (Auricularia auricula) was poking through the door of the compost bin. It generally grows on wood, so not sure what it's doing in there! Another edible one, but I wouldn't fancy eating it, especially not from the compost bin!

I haven't been able to identify this mushroom, but there are a few of them growing in one of the bulb flower pots. The spore probably came in the compost I used to plant them up.

This is growing on the raised bed and The pinkness on the gills may be a clue to what it is.

I hoped to get a better photo on Sunday, but it looked a mess, so I haven't been able to identify it.

I think this is a type of blewit. I like the spore print which was left by its neighbour!

I welcome any identifications!

Back to the Real World

We've just had two lovely weeks in Puerto de la Cruz, in the North of Tenerife. I think this is our tenth visit. It's so beautiful and we discover new areas and re-visit favourites each year.

This year we found two other vegetarian restaurants in the town! We didn't get the opportunity to go in because we found them late in the holiday, but it's great to know they are there for next time. We went to our favourite vegetarian restaurant, El Limon, twice.

We arrived at a quiet time that day!

It's funny, though a bit sad, that Puerto de la Cruz caters far better for vegetarians than Hungerford and Newbury do between them! It shouldn't be difficult to put this kind of tasty snack on any menu, surely.

The Risco Bello bar restaurant isn't vegetarian, but it has such a beautiful garden to just sit in. The freshly made mango juice provided refreshment while looking at the plants they were selling and watching the turtles and birds around us.

The barraquito (con liquor) was so fabulous we stayed for two.

We prefer to go self-catering and enjoy the interesting fruits that are available fresh from the island.

Dragon Fruit - looks great, tastes great

Horny Melon - looks great, but lacks flavour

A passion fruit. It never did ripen enough to eat. I should have bought a wrinkly one,
but didn't realise what it was till I studied the receipt!

The cactus jam is amazing! So sweet and delicious on toast. A nice 3-course breakfast is a good start before going out into the ~25° temperatures. We always end up walking long distances up-and-down hills.

And cakes for breakfast too - what a great country :-) No wonder all the walking doesn't stop us gaining weight on holiday!

Lunches were generally cheese or salad rolls. And it's good to share with the locals...

Evening meals weren't always at the apartment, but we had tasty ingredients when we did cook. The little local potatoes are full of flavour and the green mild mojo sauce is coriander-y and creamy.

I've brought a pot of the black garlic home. It's almost licorice-like it's so sweet. I need to work out how to best use it. Spanish peppers grow huge, that one was bigger than my hand and delicious roasted.

Other nights we resorted to more off-the-shelf options, but still interesting Spanish (and German) vegetarian options.

Aah, it's kind of good to be home. We look forward to our next visit to lovely Tenerife x

More photos here, if you're interested.

Spicy Veg - thanks to Daniel

I received a thank you gift from someone I'd helped at work - isn't it nice to be appreciated! Daniel had been to Sicily and brought back these lovely spices.

They are meant to be used on pasta but they look so lovely we couldn't wait till we were having pasta, so sprinkled some over our roast vegetables last night instead. (With hindsight, we added a bit too much of the spice - it was VERY hot hot hot!)

Carrots, parsnip (the first this year), beetroot, kohl rabi, pumpkin (small, lumpy kind - thanks Forbes), tomatoes and onion.

That must surely be the last of our courgettes for this year! There's a sweetcorn there for me. We have found that just keeping them for a day after picking stops them tasting so sweet and delicious - the kernels go rather hard, so they've got to be cooked and eaten as soon as possible after picking. 

That will be our penultimate visit to the plot before we go to Tenerife - I wonder how much will still be green in a couple of weeks time...

Food Festival Success

We got to the Town Hall with about an hour to set up the HAHA stand. It's always rather daunting when faced with 2 empty tables and surrounded by baskets, bags and boxes of vegetables. There were a few of us working to get it all done on time, and we were pleased with the result - so many interesting vegetables grown on our lovely site!

A full table-top

The tromboncino squash (thanks Jonathan!), kohl rabi and patty pans provided talking points and lots of people wanted to know the variety of the black tomatoes - Indigo Rose. I had to be honest and say they weren't as tasty as they look though!

Too much for the top of the table

The media table - food pics, site photobooks, 2008-2016 slideshow
and National Allotment Society literature

Jamie's carved pumpkin is always eye-catching. It took a long time to carve, but definitely worth the effort.

And Kerry's tasting section of the HAHA stand is always a welcome site at the top of the stairs! Those savoury scones didn't last long and none of the elderflower cordial went home!

 Our 'giant' pumpkin paled into insignificance compared to the 'guess the weight' one - 76kg!

And I got to listen to Roger Phillips' talk on mushrooms and truffles, so interesting and funny. And a few tasty recipes thrown in for good measure - I think maybe we need to go mushroom hunting again!

Aah, what a fun, long, busy day we had! We were at the allotment before 8am to pick vegetables for the display. It looked like there had been a bit of frost but it was a beautiful morning and the sun shone all day for Hungerford visitors - perfect.