Spanish style tortilla with beetroot leaves

Our beetroots and potatoes are doing incredibly well and we've also some onions coming on a treat. Beetroot leaves are surprisingly pretty nice either in a salad, or used cooked, like spinach. Here's a tasty recipe I cooked up for breakfast today that uses all of them:

Ingredients:

• A large potato or two, diced into small pieces
• Beetroot leaves, roughly chopped (spinach or chard will also work well)
• A medium sized onion or two
• 3 eggs
• Salt and pepper
• Olive oil

Method:

• Put the diced potato(es) on to boil.
• Just before the potatoes are ready, add a little olive oil to a hot frying pan and start frying the onions.
• When the potatoes are ready and the onions are part cooked, add the potatoes to the frying pan. You might also want to add some more olive oil to stop the potatoes sticking.
• While these are cooking, crack the eggs into a large bowl and roughly mix the yolks and whites together.
• Once the onions look like they're nice and translucent and the potatoes are starting to brown slightly, put them in the bowl with the eggs. The smell should be gently teasing your taste buds by this point.
• Add the chopped beetroot leaves (or spinach, or chard) to the now empty frying pan, along with a little more olive oil.
• Cook the leaves till they've reduced and softened a bit and then add them to the bowl with the eggs and potatoes.
• Season the lot with as much or as little salt and pepper as you like and then mix it all together.
• Add a little more oil to the frying pan (look, I didn't say this was the diet version, did I?) and then pour in the contents of the bowl. Cover the frying pan with a lid to help it cook all the way through.
• Once it's getting quite solid and the bottom is nicely browned, you need to turn it over and cook the other side (here comes the clever bit...)
• Remove the lid and place a large dinner plate over the top of the tortilla. Turn the frying pan over, keeping the plate firmly in place. Then slide the half cooked tortilla back into the pan, uncooked side down.
• Once the other side is also nicely browned, it's ready to eat.
• Mmmmmm! Tasty!

The joy of organic gardening is...

The joy of organic gardening is finding a nest of caterpillars in your broccoli after you've just taken a bite.

Courgette, apple & buckwheat cake

We seem to have done plenty of the sowing and picking posts, at the expense of the cooking and eating bits (which surely is the best part of allotment gardening) and, I think, have been guilty of straying into the dark, murky waters of smugness and self congratulations on being such worthy urban allotment warriors. Well, pish to that - I'm interested in being a smug, self congratulating, fat and sated allotment gardener, to which end Sarah has been coming up with incredible ways to use the glut of marrows and courgettes we've been having recently.

Here are the before and after pictures of last night's incredible edible.

Before:

After:

Not only is it the about the tastiest cake in the world, it's also gluten-free, dairy free and relatively low GI, as Sarah used agave syrup instead of sugar. It's just about the healthiest cake you'll come across.

I'm not privy to the recipe, however, so I'll have to rely on Sarah to do the honours...

[insert recipe here]

Blighted confusion!

Someone forgot to tell our tomato plants it's the outdoor plants that are supposed to get tomato blight, not the indoor ones:

Beautiful, healthy outdoor tomatoes.

Sad, dishevelled, blight-ridden indoor tomatoes.

Sigh...

Photo diary: last seven days at the allotment

Nenya and I had a really productive day last Saturday.

I dug two new beds this week. Just have to figure out what the hell to plant in them now!

The broccoli is coming on a treat.

As are the beetroots - I've got my first baby beetroots from the thinnings and reckon they'll make a lovely salad, grated with olive oil and lemon juice.

I think I'm doing something wrong with the lettuce transplanting. Perhaps the secret is to water them before taking them out of the ground as well as after putting them back in?

This Saturday's haul. Not bad for a chaotic first season, I think. We're now self sufficient for potatoes and lettuce, and check the size of that marrow! (it looks much bigger in real life)

The allotment is a former refuse tip and we're forever finding broken bits of pottery, glass jars, clay pipes and so on. It's pretty nice to find some undamaged examples like these, which I dug up last Saturday.

Four months in...

I forgot to take my camera to the allotment today, but realised I hadn't uploaded these photos from a month ago. When they were taken, the allotment was just starting to come together. We'd made good progress, done loads of fencing, digging and planting, and everything was just starting to bloom and grow. It was very exciting.

Looking at them now, I can see how much it's changed over the past month. From looking nice and neat and fresh, the allotment is now looking a lot more... lived in. The dock and nettles have gotten out of control in parts of the garden, the strawberries are over run with weeds, the massive amount of lettuce we've planted is bolting out of control and parts of the garden we carefully prepared previously are now an impenetrable jungle. We're still digging new beds and can't spend the time we need to maintain what we've already planted. And do you know what...?

I love it!

I said to myself from the beginning that the first year would be a serious learning experience. We had a tonne of work to do and we were bound to make mistakes. None of us had managed an allotment or garden on this scale before and I for one am a real novice. As far as I was concerned, anything edible we managed to get out of the garden was going to be a bonus. According to that measure, we've done staggeringly well.

We might not be able to walk on the path up the middle of the garden because of the rampant potato plant leaves taking it over, but that's okay, because I now have all the gorgeous tasting, beautifully scrumptious potatoes I can possibly eat. Today I picked a courgette the size of my forearm (or at least the size of a six year old child's forearm, but still pretty damned big). When I thinned out the carrots the most incredibly sweet carroty smell was released (from tiny carrots less than half the size of a match stick!) and you just don't get that from super market vegetables. I picked my first baby beetroots today and I've been having home grown sugar snap peas, broad beans and broccoli for breakfast the past few days.

There are definitely things we didn't get right this season and we're nowhere near as productive as we could be, but neither are we too far from being self sufficient for vegetables this month. Next year is going to be amazing!

A gardening comedian - inspired idea

The theidiotgardener made me laugh today. The post starts with:

"I went to a local horticultural event, and realised that I've had more fun allowing my Mexican dentist to rip out my bloody teeth! Now, I accept that for some people, gardening is a competitive sport. I also accept that for a few, it's a high brow past-time to be shared with vicars and dried-up husks of old ladies. However, for the rest of us imbeciles, it's a bloody hobby, something to do between life's drunken escapades and our inevitable deaths.

Thinking about it, when gardening events occur, there's not much in the way of "kick off your shoes and have a beer" entertainment. There's a lot of judging, much pontification, and a generous serving of pomposity, and the general public (that's us lot) turn up, pay the entrance fee, and generally mingle with a mixture of ignorance and expectation. So, what's wrong with also chucking in a bit of light entertainment? What's wrong with a few laughs? Why don't we have ... a gardening comedian?"

and gets a little out of hand further down. Enjoy!