The tortoise and the hare

I sowed a row of "Guernsey" parsnips in the potager on 30th April this year. After a prolonged sulk they germinated. On 4th September I had six little parsnip seedlings in a row. That was four months while they decided whether to die or to live after all.

A little row of parsnips - 6th September 2015

Parsnip seedlings, 17th September 2015

By contrast, on 7th August, Alvaro (workawayer) and I sowed two rows of Avola peas. The first of these came into flower on 4th September, and there are now fat pods forming with plenty of flowers to come. Avola went from dry seed to a healthy set of plants with flowers on in four weeks precisely. We picked enough peas for a meal on 30th September and the plants are going strong at two months old.

Avola peas, 6th September 2015

Avola peas, 26th September 2015

My original seeds came from the Kew collection and the current lot  from Plants of Distinction. Both, like many other UK seeds merchants, send seeds to France with no problems. But Avola will now be Alvaro peas to us.

Interesting that the slowest and the fastest germination should both turn up on the same day.

Also coming up: self-seeded parsley and coriander. Parsley is reputed to go to the devil and back before it germinates, but if you sow fresh seed in August, it comes up ready for action immediately

On the other hand, we have discovered the existence of N-space, where the nuts come from. No matter how thoroughly we check the filbert bushes, there is still another nut to be found. Somebody in N-space is moving nuts into space-time continuum version 1.0, hanging them up on the branches and giggling.

 

This filbert was not here a few minutes ago.

The occupants of N-space have not gifted our walnut tree with much by the way  of fruit this year. Tim and Betsy cleared the bank under the tree and we concluded that it was not worth the effort to fit the tree with a nappy* as we did last year. The discovery of a second - wild - walnut on the riverbank just below the weir put the tin hat on it. The second tree is invisible among the ash trees and produces smaller nuts than the old tree, which was a selected variety rather than a chance seedling. They are neck and neck in weight of nuts, at a couple of kilos apiece - that will be plenty!

Tim and Betsy under the walnut tree heading straight for the millstream

*walnut nappy - catches the nuts that would otherwise fall into the millstream.

Peas in our time

And all because the lady wanted to make Risi e Bisi...

For years now our favourite variety of pea has been Pea Wee 65, a petit pois (geddit?  Pea Wee, it's a little guy, it's a wee pea!) from Marshalls. The peas are so tightly packed in the pod that it's not straightforward to get them  out, but it's worth it for the sweet flavour. They may be small, but you get a heck of a lot. They are flattened by being crammed together in the pod, but round out in cooking. We blogged about Pea Wee before, here.

Pea Wee 65 in 2011 - 'scuse fingers

The 2011 Pea Wee crop...

... prepared

This year I made an early sowing of Pea Wee, along with some rather elderly seed of Meteor, an early variety. Disaster. Only one of the Meteor germinated, plus a few of the Pea Wee, and none of the seedlings looked well. This was probably down to the wet spring, plus the age of the seed.

To rescue the situation I looked for an early pea variety and found "Avola" in the Kew Urban Gardens Collection brand of Thompson and Morgan, to re-sow the disaster area. This choice was purely on a whim - I wanted an early variety and I'd never heard of them before, though I have since found them in other catalogues. They grew as well as could be expected between two rows of broad beans, and tasted pretty good.

Avola was claimed to reach maturity - harvestable peas - in 70 days after sowing, but only in the US, for some reason. The Organic Gardening Catalogue, which sells the same variety, claims 60 days. I can confirm that both are totally inaccurate. It's actually 45 days. I made a second sowing of both Avola and Pea Wee 65 on 5th August. I picked the first Avola from the second sowing on 20th September and the first Pea Wee on 9th October.

Avola (left, held up with Y stakes and string) and Pea Wee, taken 10.10.2014

Both varieties need some support, or otherwise flop on the ground for the slugs. We use a length of chickenwire held up by canes or Y-stakes. We were a little late with the Avola and needed string to push the plants off the ground and against the chickenwire,  but once there, they behaved nicely. By 10th October, Avola are finished - though still growing - while Pea Wee are still flowering. Pea Wee is taller, overtopping the chicken wire. and floppier, and much later to harvest.

Pea Wee just about ready to pick, 10.10.2014

Avola are round, fat and sweet-tasting.

Avola - a sample

The air gap at the tip of the pod makes it a piece of cake to extract the peas.

Here we could probably get three crops of Avola in a year. In "mild areas" they can be planted in November for an early spring harvest. We could get away with an overwintered planting, with fleece to hand if a stiff frost is forecast. Most of the Avola went straight into the freezer, and the Pea Wee will probably join them.

But some Avola came out, to  be used to make Risi e Bisi, a classic pea risotto. The recipe comes from The Best of Supercook "Rice and Pasta" going back to the days when I was a member of the Cookery Book Club, the early eighties, I think. This series was amazingly multi-cultural and authentic for its time, with an Italian recipe like this one rubbing shoulders with Biryani and a west indian Hoppin' John, and no curries featuring grated apple or sultanas.

For two people I used:

½lb /250g fresh or frozen peas, weighed without the pods
½lb/250g  round grain (Arborio/arvorio) rice
1 small onion, thinly sliced
2oz /60g dry cure streaky bacon, cut in lardons (I used smoked poitrine)
1 tablespoon olive oil (optional – include if the bacon is not nice and fat)
1oz butter
½ glass (2 fluid ounces / a good splash) dry white wine (I had some rosé left, so used that)
1 pint / 500ml chicken stock, boiling
2oz/60g parmesan, grated (we used the coffee grinder attachment)
Salt and pepper to taste

The bacon must be decent quality, i.e. not pumped up with water. You want crispy, not boiled.

Put the olive oil into a heavy based pan over a medium heat. If not using oil, dry-heat the pan. Put in the bacon, and stir it around until it is crisp and has given up most of its fat. Scoop the bacon out of the fat with a slotted spoon, and lay it on some kitchen paper to dry.

Add half the butter to the fat in the pan. When it has stopped sizzling, add the onion. Stir and cook the onion until it is soft and translucent, but stop before it starts going brown. Reduce the heat a little and add the rice and peas, and stir them about for about five minutes.

Add the wine and a ladleful of stock (about a third of it). Adjust the heat so the mixture is just bubbling. Stir frequently and cook until the liquid is almost all absorbed. Add another ladleful of stock and continue cooking as before. Keep adding ladlefuls of stock until it is all gone. When all the stock has been added, and is all absorbed, check the rice is cooked (it should still have a “bite” but crunchy is definitely Not Done). If it still needs a little more cooking, turn the heat right down, put on a lid and leave the pan for five minutes, then check again. Repeat if necessary.

Stir in the rest of the butter, the parmesan and cooked bacon, add salt and pepper to taste, and heat through for a minute. Serve immediately.

Serving suggestion: a fresh green salad and a dry white wine – Frascati is the classic Italian accompaniment, but a nice Muscadet sur lie would go very well (wow that phrase would have annoyed my English teachers. Fights down urge to edit it immediately). We toasted pisum sativum var. “Avola” in vinho verde.

The missing superfood

One of my favourite recipes is Black eye Beans and Mushrooms, from Madhur Jaffrey's "Indian Cookery". But I'm having trouble finding the first ingredient. Black-eye beans are a subspecies of vigna unguiculata, a member of the pea and bean family. Kew Gardens gives a bunch of names: Cowpea, black-eye bean, black-eye pea, China pea, marble pea (English); niébé, haricot à oœil noir, cornille, voème, haricot dolique, dolique à œil noir, pois à vache  (French); caupi, feijão frade (Portuguese),  lobhia (India), lubiya (Arabic). Other subspecies include yardlong bean, asparagus bean, and catjang. The cowpea originated in central Africa - Ethiopia has the largest genetic variability, indicating that they have been cultivated there for a long time. They spread to central and southern Asia in prehistoric times, then to Southern Europe where the Romans introduced them, then to the Americas in the 17th century. These are semi-tropical plants that I assumed would need the growing conditions of central Africa or the southwestern states of the USA - hot and humid.

It is difficult to find them anywhere in our area, in any form. One supermarket yielded jars of black eye beans in brine, and we bought the last packet of dried beans from A Casa Portugaise on the D910 in Veigné. The last of these are sitting forlornly in a jar, too few to cook with. I found one european supplier of seed - Jungleseeds - although there are plenty in the USA.They recommend growing them in a polytunnel in the UK. But in France? As usual, I acted first and researched afterwards. As a desperate measure, at the beginning of June I planted a dozen beans out of the jar, more in hope than in expectation. I started them off in the spare room in Rootrainers, two seeds to a 'rainer. They germinated in two days (sown 4th, up by 6th... in a bed 19th June.)

They all germinated. I found that they could be dwarf or climbing beans, depending on the variety. I guessed wrong, they turned out to be climbers and sprawled all over a bed of dwarf beans. Their position, on a warm hillside but in the light shade of a bed of sunflowers, was, by complete chance, the best I could have chosen, as they prefer shade from the full heat of the midday sun. In Africa they are inter-cropped between rows of sorghum. Like many pulses, they fix atmospheric nitrogen in nodules in their roots, providing nutrients for themselves, for the sorghum and for the next crop. As for humidity, they are actually drought-tolerant.

The flowers are beautiful and delicate, lasting just a few hours.

Black eye Bean flower, 18th August 2014ion

Flower from the back, plus luscious leaves, 2/09/2014

Seed pods appearing behind the flower, 02/09/2014

The seed pods began to swell...

Black eye Bean pods, with "Snake" bean in the background, 2/09/2014

The same pod, only riper, 20/09/2014

More and more pods

Until finally they began to feel papery, then I picked them. Or some of them, there are more to come.

The first harvest

Small, but lots of them. They are related to the Yard Long Bean, which grows up to 90cm long.

There are 28 beans so far, so I'm 16 beans up on my starting position!

They produce a lot of nectar and will provide a valuable honey crop. Various medicines are made from the roots. The foliage is high in protein and is also eaten. The haulms (stems) are used instead of straw as bedding for cattle. The dried fibre is used to make fishing lines. The uses go on and on. This is a super-food and I've proved that it will grow outdoors - so why is so little made of it here?

I still won't have enough to make my favourite dish, or to try Hoppin' John, a signature dish of the southern USA (for future reference, the recipe is here). Maybe next year...
P.S.
(Ignore the posted by Tim... 
I started it on the laptop downstairs...
Pauline)
P.P.S. I have just concluded that I have two varieties here: one is a climber, with the fat frog-green  pods, and one is dwarf, with the pinkish pointed pods. You can see a green pod on the left of the picture dated 20th September. This is on a different plant from all the others in the picture. There is another green pod at the back in the picture following it. The dwarf variety clearly matures earlier than the climber, but has much smaller beans. I haven't harvested any of the green sausages yet, but the pink pointy ones are nearly all ready to harvest.

The half green pea

Last week we bought a ham hock (jarret de porc demi-salé) which I cooked in the usual way - lob it into a saucepan, cover it with cold water, bring it to the boil, throw the water away, cover it with water again but this time add a bayleaf and five white peppercorns, back to the boil and cook for 20 minutes per pound plus 20 minutes. The following day the cooking water was a wibbly jelly. A pan of ham stock is just begging to be made into pea and ham soup. No, no, such piteous cries! What no green split peas? We didn't need to go as far as the Bio co-op (the All-Green Pea) to buy some - the Intermarché at Descartes provided pois cassés verts - half green peas. The organic ones looked much the same and cost twice as much.

Note the lack of an accent on the capital E in "Cassés" - a new-fangled idea I can't get used to!

No need for a recipe, says Tim, just lob the lot in. So here's our recipe (for six servings).

1 litre jellied ham stock (or what you have) in which a ham hock has been cooked with 1 bayleaf and 5 white peppercorns

500 g green split peas
½ teaspoon to 1 dessert spoon ground black pepper (depending on how much you like pepper)
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon English mustard powder
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Water/milk/single cream or liquid crême fraiche to dilute as necessary (some of each in this case)
1 handful fresh sage, chopped

Bring the stock to the boil. Add the split peas and a little more water. Stir and cook for 30-40 minutes (according to the packet), stirring occasionally and adding water if shipwrecks are sighted. When the peas are cooked, add the spices and some milk, and blend using a whizzy stick. You can add the sage at this point, or use it as a garnish if you prefer. Dilute further to the texture you like. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Bring back to a simmer and cook for a further 10 minutes. Serve garnished with a swirl of crème fraîche and a sprinkling of chopped sage.

Half green pea soup, with bread, digestives* and cheese

Wash up immediately as this dries like wallpaper paste!

[* A family thing... sables anglais go extremely well with blue cheese... here served with some "chevre bleu"... or equally well with Albert's Bench [Forme d'Ambert] or a brebis bleu... in my Dad's case, he'd have had Blue Stilton... and some bottled stem ginger on the side ... syrup rinsed off! Tim.]

Muffins - with peas!

Muffins are always an enjoyable snack, whether they are sweet or savoury. When we opened our latest pack of St Hubert 41, a low fat spread we mainly use for tartines, there was a recipe on the inner lid, number two of a series. Muffins with peas, onions and curry looked easy enough, given that there were home-grown "Pea Wee" petits pois in the freezer and all the other ingredients, or a ready substitute, are always in the store cupboard.

Pea Wee, the July harvest

When I translated the recipe, I realised that the weight given for the peas was for peas in the pod. That would restrict the recipe to the summer months, if using fresh peas, unless you have a gourmet vegetable shop to hand and don't give a hang for the food miles! We blogged about picking them here. I just used what I had left, which was a little less. Tim loved the effect, but I reckon 150g or so would be better. The recipe says it serves 4, and nothing about how many muffins it makes! It actually made 12 medium muffins.

The original French recipe.

200g petits pois
3 small white onions
100g St Hubert 41 spread
200g plain flour
1 sachet (2 tsp) baking powder
1 tsp curry powder
40g grated parmesan
3 eggs
70g fromage frais
a pinch of salt (omit if using St Hubert demi-sel)

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Prepare 12 muffin cases or moulds (if you use tins, grease them thoroughly).
Shell the peas. Peel the onions and chop finely. Melt the St Hubert over a gentle heat (30 seconds in the microwave on high and stir).
Sift together the flour, baking powder, curry and salt into a mixing bowl. Stir in the parmesan and fromage frais. Beat in the eggs one at a time.
Add the melted St Hubert and whisk thoroughly. Finally stir in the vegetables.
Share out the mixture into the muffin moulds and bake for 30 minutes.
They are cooked when the point of a knife comes out clean.

Four gone already... foregone conclusion!

If using frozen peas, defrost the peas thoroughly before adding them. I also used ras al hanout North African spice mix instead of curry powder; shallots instead of white onions, freshly grated cantal instead of parmesan; and faiselle (goat's milk curds and whey) instead of fromage frais. I found the cooking time was more like 50 minutes. Definitely a success!

Damn... now we'll have to eat this one as well! Oh dear...