ELDERFLOWER SHRUB

There is magic in Elderflower and its ritualistic harvest. Baked in heat, covered in sticky Spring humidity and residual elderflower pollen, striking out in pursuit of the next groaning bush. The citrus laced floral perfume of elderflower and its cordial is held as loftily as I can reach in my heart, part nostalgia for childhood, part outright love for a drop over chilli vodka, ice and soda (this years greatest revelation).

When we observe the land as the weeks and months unfold, paying heed to what’s in bloom and blossom, what has gone to seed or calls to be pickled or preserved, I believe we are presented with not only the tools to flourish and prosper nutritionally but also to find flavour at its finest, ripest and most forthright.

Inspired by my sister’s perilous and very successful experiments with Elderflower champagne production, I thought Id make something other than cordial this year. I wanted something more savoury than champagne, effervescent and quenching, something to gulp down when you remember you need to drink water that might lead you to actively seek out water next time instead of waiting till your head starts a dehydrated turn towards a tap.

Anyway I settled on an elderflower shrub, dreaming of great pitchers of hydration, ice reaching down to the base of the jug, glugging effervescent water laced with the scent of elderflower and the nutritional pin up that is cider vinegar.

A shrub is really just fruit that has been macerated in sugar and vinegar, the fruit yields its flavour and juices, mixes with the vinegar and sugar and once strained and left for between a week to 6 months, creates a sort of juicy, tangy cordial. Enjoyed neat (especially added to cocktails) or topped up with lots of fizzy water it makes one of the most thirst quenching drinks out there.  There are many many different variants on this process, some involving heat and others not but for the elderflower shrub I treated it much like making a basic cordial tho without the citric acid and less sugar.

ELDI SHRUB

300g sugar

200g dry weight elderflower heads

240 cider vinegar

700ml boiling water

2 lemons

1. Bring the water to boil, add the lemon zest and sugar and stir till dissolved

2.  Remove from the heat and add the rinsed gently dried elderflower heads so they are submerged

3. Leave to sit for 12-24 hours then sieve the mixture into a glass jar

4.  Add the vinegar and leave for up to 6 months for the flavours to all settle together

To make a glass of eldi shrub mix - ¼ cup of shrub and ¾ fizzy water, slice of lemon, loads of ice and Ohhhhhh boy. Worth mentioning that it makes a damn fine martin if you treat the shrub in the same way as you would the brine in a dirty martini.

GREAT STEAMY GREEN

Before the broccoli is fully formed, great handsome leaves grow up in a protective circle all about the head. By the time it’s fully grown the leaves are vast and drooping, their raison d'être is finally met and its time to collapse with exhausted relief.

Standing fast to the grass along their bed, that most delicious steamy green air rising from the freshly watered soil, I was left gawping at the leaves feeling there was a touch of injustice here that needed some reassessment. The sole purpose of these leaves cannot have been just to protect the head they guardedly wrapped around. The leaves are strong and handsome, surely full of the very same goodness as the broccoli itself. Prompting me to again question any part of an edible plant that we deem to be, waste, gone to seed, in edible or only there to nurture the part we have decided is worthy of our plate.

I crave the grounding iron rich embrace of a great plate of steaming greens with the same vital intensity I used to crave chocolate as a teen. Olive oil spilling from every cranny, freckled with chilli flakes, black pepper and enough sea salt you can hear it crunch is just about perfection for me. In Florence where I lived for a year or so, my friend and I would go to the same restaurant every Sunday night to eat exclusively a huge plate of sautéed spinach leaves. Served with a bowl of freshly grated Parmesan, a demi carafe of every mans red wine and another carafe of olive oil to spill over - all and everything we could have desired. The yellow pond surrounding the spinach would gradually and worryingly ‘evaporate’ as we ate and needed regular top ups from the generously provided jug o oil.

This ritual was not played out exclusively to counter vast lunch time indulgence but also because its one of the most delicious plates of food out there. Extra specially delicious eaten with a darling friend in the evening light of a Florentine piazza, watching the world go by and readying for the new week to break.

Anyway, these leaves get a similar treatment day after day after day in our house. Steamed, sautéed in garlic laced olive oil, piled high on a plate to sit in the middle of our table, pulled by forks from every angle. As a dish of greens to share or the foundation for a whole meal, topped with a poached egg and herby alioli - eaten with melty roast chicken - piled on top of your soup with shovel of toasted seeds, these sweet creamy leaves should be celebrated in their own right.

If you are lucky enough to have a broccoli plant growing in your garden, I really can’t recommend this treatment enough:

• Wash the leaves and put them into a saucepan with a cm of fiercely boiling water and the lid on top

• After a couple of minutes remove the lid and turn the leaves over so they cook evenly and pop the lid back on

• When the leaves are a little wilted and nearly cooked through, pull them out and into a colander to steam dry and cool enough to gently squeeze off any residual water

• Pour away the water left in the pot and use it to slowly cook off a few finely grated garlic cloves in plenty of olive oil, a couple of anchovy fillets, salt, pepper and chilli flakes until all has disintegrated and integrated

•   Over the heat, toss the leaves in the olive oil for a couple of mins and you are all done.

• We covered ours in a garlic/ginger spiked tahini dressing, we missed some toasted sesame seeds but you can always have it all.

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HERBY ALIOLI

Never without, always within, alioli with any herbs we can forage is a constant somewhere in our fridge. It’s a simple mayonnaise with a little garlic and the combined flavour of one or many soft leafed herbs – dill, parsley, coriander, chive, tarragon, basil, chervil or mint. I like it best with every single one, then pimped with a big spoon of Dijon or English mustard stirred through. Second wave pimping takes it to a whole new planet and Id really recommend any of these, tho not all together:

• A spoonful of tiny capers in brine or thin slithers of cornichon stirred in at the end

• A small spoon of pickled green peppercorns and some of their pickle liquor  or a few anchovy fillets added to the egg yolk at the beginning.

• A few of my favourite accompaniments – boiled eggs, hot smoked salmon, roast chicken, doused on steamed greens, in a ham sandwich, with a bowl of crudité and just on its own with a hunk of bread and olive oil

Here’s to a first go tho with any herbs you can find. Slather it all over anything and look foreword to the next time you make it with a few other additions.

It’s really difficult to go wrong unless your kitchen is a fiery furnace or your egg is icy cold. If everything is at room temp when you start you’ll glide through

1 egg

sea salt

1 unwaxed lemon

1 garlic clove

little room temp water

1 cup of oil (I mix 50:50 extra virgin olive oil and rapeseed oil)

2 big handfuls of herbs or as many as you can find

1 tsp English mustard

• Into the Magimix goes:

1 egg yolk

big pinch of sea salt

zest of an un-waxed lemon

1 finely grated garlic clove

1.5 tbs room temp water

1tsp English mustard

• Blend all this together, take the lid off and scrape down the bowl so everything is settled on the bottom again.

• Turn the blade back on and slowly slowly drizzle in the oil, you will have to stop a couple of times to scrape down the Magimix bowl and continue.

• The mixture will become glossy and waxy

• Add the juice of your lemon, all the herbs and blitz again – I prefer to have little flecks of green so I don’t blend it for long, you may like to combine it more so it takes on a greeny hue.

• Check if it needs salt or maybe a little more lemon.

• Pot up and keep in your fridge for 4-5 days

VIETNAMESE SPRING ROLLS

These are parcels of texture and flavour, all the herby heights met in one mouthful with the milky fuzzy burst of sprouts, (mung, alfalfa, sunflower), creamy avocado, crunchy peanut, shreds of sweet pickled carrot and  the burst of citrus from a chunk of grapefruit or fruity lemon.

Miniature sprouted escapees of the fork cannot be so nifty when tightly sealed into a rice paper roll. The rice paper acts like an invisibility cloak swaddled around a bundle of filling, a vehicle for anything you might want to parcel up and take on the road.

It’s possible the real pin up might not be the roll but the dipper. You’ve got to have a slam dunker to soak into all the filling, crunching down on the garden you’ve squished into the roll - something juicy and slightly sweet to pay the green some compliments.

…. Spicy peanut - creamy tahini - hot ginger and sesame or - fresh minty salsa with a little palm sugar and lime. Mines peanut every time, I like the richness of texture and substance, it feels like an indulgence.

Here are the guide lines for my peanut dunker, you can play with them as much as you like depending on how tangy, runny, crunchy or salty/sweet you like it. Everything gets piled into a Nutribullet and blended till silky smooth.

Peanut Butter

Lime juice

Miso paste

Ginger

Garlic

Salt

Cayenne pepper

Dash of coconut water or even water

Dash of Vodka

PICKLING EVERYTHING

SWEET PICKLED RED ONIONS

Taste bud puckering pickles, almost forcing your senses to pay attention to the surround sound of whatever else you are eating along side. The pleasure of eating ones own pickle (eh eh) has to hark back to a primal instinct innate in all of us to store and preserve what we find in the juicy sweet months of sunshine to enjoy when the sky outside is white and we are need. Nostalgic floodgates open for even what came the day before, the memory of a swift peaceful moment in the kitchen making sweet pickled onions for supper, watching the water turn fuscia and the sweet vinegary aroma lift up to your nostrils whilst you listen to everyone chatter. All this breathing an ounce of its peaceful calm into the following days head long dive into the fridge to orchestrate some kind of emergency lunch bowl.

PICKLED PEARS, LABNEH, CANDIED WALNUTS

The power of a pickle made on a hot August day and eaten in March is nevvvver to be underestimated. A pickled memory of a hot morning met with an even hotter bubbling pot of quince slices hurriedly peeled and simmering in pickle liquor whilst my coffee brews and before the day begins/ quinces become over ripe and the pickling window is lost. Cut to that day in March, desperate for a lightening fast lunch - stack of steamy pitta, bowl of hummus and the ceremonial crowning wedge of pickled quince pulled, long and lovely from its hibernation liquor.

I always use cider vinegar to make my simple pickle liquor. This is mostly because its what I really go to for salad dressings and once you’ve added a few spices, sugar, and cooked or sunk your pickle victims into it, its imparted with all that fragrance and only makes it a better dressing compatriot.

I usually use equal parts sugar to vinegar and half a part water. The levels can all be played with depending on how sweet you like your pickles, how naturally sweet what you are pickling already is and how much water content it contains. If a fruit, a quince for example is to be cooked enough to make a relatively bite able pickled slice, it may need to simmer for a while, thus the water content of your liquor will be quite evaporated so you may want to add a little more at the start in comparison to when you might just be pouring the liquor over bright shards of raw carrot that need no cooking at all.

Have a play, pickle anything, cut it beautifully - shards of carrots, full halves of pear, thick wedges of peeled plump pink quince. My go to spices are star anise, mustard seeds, pink peppercorns, black peppercorns, bay leaves. Below is a recipe for my pickled pears to give you a standing start….

PICKLED PEARS

1 cup golden caster sugar

1 cup cider vinegar

½ cup water

1 star anise

pinch pink peppercorns

pinch chilli flakes

8 juniper berries

3 bay leaves

3 Conference pears

pinch of salt

In a saucepan on a gentle heat mix the sugar, vinegar, water, 1 star anise, and spices until the sugar has dissolved

Peel and halve you pears lengthways 

Once the sugar has dissolved add the pears and slowly simmer for about 10 mins - I like my pears a little firm but you can cook them for longer if you prefer a softer pickle

Lay your pears in a jar and pour over the liquid, leave them to cool, they will keep in your fridge forever

CREAMY TAHINI SAUCE

Thick as cream it meets your mouth with all the largess of a full fat dairy mouth swaddle. Across the Middle East and parts of the Mediterranean its found as commonly on every table as knives and forks here, but we seem to have been slow getting to know one another. Much like cashew cream cheese, it’s a one stop meal maker and takes your half hearted fridge forage to somewhere you could gladly spend some time.

It’s the kind of richess you find beautifully potted in an LA deli, for little more than your weeks wages you can enjoy the pleasure of this poured all over your ‘rainbow bowl’’; you might, in the heat of your all consuming enjoyment, even forget that you now have little money to spare for less immediately gratifying but no less significant indulgences like loo roll.

It’s so very simple to make and really does sit in your fridge like a reliable hound dog, guarding against any potentially deflating mid week lunch fridge forages. Almost all it touches turns to gustatory gold and if you felt like a perfectly plant based alternative to a Caesar dressing to pour all over your salad and greens then you’ve arrived at the right spot.

You can play with the quantities of lemon juice and water depending on your taste buds but here’s a bottom line for you to work off -

1 cup tahini

1.5 cups water

juice of one lemon

big pinch of salt

• Stir or shake it together in a jar - if you want it more runny - add more water but just a tbs at a time, it’s easy to go overboard and make slurry.

• It will look like its curdled and all gone horrible wrong at start of the stir but keep on keeping on and it will come together and emulsify

A million ways in which I love you…..

-        all over my steamed greens

-        as a dunking puddle on top of my dhal

-        inside Vietnamese spring rolls, then dunking said rolls back for a final smooch

-        with hunks of apple  as a dipper

-        In a chopped salad of anything I found in my fridge

-        Drizzled over charred red peppers/ hispi cabbage/pumpkin/anything charred…

-        Drizzled over honey/ coriander seed roast carrots

Its rich and sustaining, full of protein and feels like a delicious kind of fuel for your body. There are many many things you can add along the way like herbs and garlic, or if you wanted to take it in a more Asian direction: ginger, garlic, mirin, chilli, miso. If you do go this way, it might be better to mix it all in a Nutribullet, so that everything is silky and combined.

However, whichever, way you eat it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

ODE TO BEET LEAVES

So abundant up top, all the trappings of a beautiful plumpsious beetroot bulb down under but on investigation it’s a miracle the shrunken marble sized beet has been keeping the verdant forest above afloat. For some reason they decided to channel all their energies above ground, not an ounce of beet below, we haven’t been able to bring ourselves to pull them up despite their feutile efforts to bare fruit. Im privately in awe of their defiance of what we expected of them, going their own way and my way really as the leaves are my best bit.

The beetroot leaves can be cooked in just the same way as large spinach leaves tho with a little more water. Steamed in batches with a smidge of water boiling under neath them, left to drip and steam dry in a colander before being squeezed tight in my mits and tossed through garlicy olive oil.

These leaves were a potentially necessary visual decoy for my first attempt at making mung dhal. I envisaged an off colour soggy body of mush that might need shrouding, then dousing (in tahini dressing) and finally crowning in fuscia pickled onions to fully divert attention, but; happy to report Im a convert the mung and its really not such a bad looker after all.

PEA AND PARSLEY SOUPER

Endless blue skies and bluster meant there was no escaping my hankering for the reassuring warmth of a cupped hand around a bowl of steamy soup. Id been weeding in the garden until I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t freezing anymore and sought shelter and chit chat with Ali in the seedling greenhouse. It’s the most grounding of them all, so full of life in its earliest stages, theres a chair in there and a table stacked twice its height with tools, salad bags, old radios and redundant scales. I propped myself on the bendy bin rim, again trying to pretend to myself that I was comfy, and we talked all things we had mused on since seeing each other the day before. As we chatted I inched the green house doors gradually closer to one another in the hope of shielding us from the wild wind, only to turn them into a united beating sail as the whole bottom took off, flying and beating against the floor with every gust.

The need for soup seemed to descend (as always) like a heavy sea fog, one moment Im balancing my bot on the bin, happy as can be to find myself of a Tuesday morning, sheltered in a wild green house, nowhere to be, drenched in mossy humidity and chit chat, then one resounding clang upon the last, a rogue gusts of cool air zips down my neck, all about my ears and nose, stray pots flying along the ground and suddenly Im flying too. Out the doors to the nearest patch of abundant green which lands me at the parsley bed, a happy accomplice.

My sole purpose now is to be cloaked in the warm fuzz of a bowl of hearty green soup. Soup to fill my tummy with warmth and muff the wind about my head.

Its to be pea and parsley in equal measure, great handfuls to strengthen my body and address the parsley tsunami reigning large in the garden. Parsley seems overlooked as a vegetable in its own right. When you’re lucky enough to have it in abundance, not caged in a micro packet, you are welcomed to treat it like any other leafy green.

This was a really simple soup, just a little sliced onion, chilli and fennel seeds warmed in olive oil, then some celery and garlic, cooked slowly together until they had given up their form and moved about the pan with a united limpness, then a splash of wine instantly steamed away. Then water to cover, and some, a little vegetable bullion, then to a simmer, frozen peas pilled in, back to simmer for 5 or so minutes. I really wanted a silkiness so the skins of the peas needed a little more time than usual so they gave away fully when I blended them.

Then for great hand fulls of flat and curly leaf parsley, crammed in and lid on to steam down and soak into the soup body. Really they are only in there to gently flop, to cook enough to eleaviate the very raw green flavour and impart their mellow sweetness to the broth. The peas may have dulled in colour but the parsley, only cooked momentarily will hold its grassy green and make your soup look vital

Blended to a silky cream and in my chosen vessel I piled on flax seeds, chilli, black pepper, salt and cold pressed sunflower oil. Patches of flavour ready to be caught by a decisive swipe of my spoon and dunked into by the stiff shards of seedy crackers by my side.