Broad bean Pate

It still rains and everything is growing like topsy. Picked the last of the broad beans today, there were only a few pods so decided to make pate with them .

Ingredients

• Half a bag of broad beans (handful of pods)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• Drizzle of olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• Sprig of thyme, chopped

Method

Remove the broad beans from their pods and boil them with the garlic cloves for about 15 minutes. Drain and cool.

When the beans are cool enough to handle, remove the outer skin of each bean to reveal the brighter green 'inner bean'!

Blend the beans and garlic with a hand blender and add the salt, pepper and thyme.

Spread on crackers or bread.

Absolutely delicious, a real surprise ! Best of all all home grown, well other than the olive oil !

Zoom - Rocket soup

After the recent rains and wind, the vegetable garden was looking rather shabby. Every year self seeded rocket appears and takes over the garden unless I’m super vigilant. I decided to clear an area of one of the raised beds and was faced with the prospect of composting a large volume of rocket. I needed a recipe that appealed to my sense of using any garden produce. I thought I would given Rocket Soup a try.

Take a few small potatoes and slice two small onions and put them in a pan with some boiling water. Not too much water, but enough to cover it and simmer until soft, I added a vegetable stock cube.

I then rinsed a colander full of rocket leaves, and chopped them fairly coarsely and added them to the soup. The rocket leaves don’t need as much cooking as the potato and onion. Rocket leaves cook down. Liquidise and serve. It’s deep, bright green, having cooked it a bit the rocket isn’t too powerfully strong, as you might expect. Hubby liked this soup, I thought more of an acquired taste.

Roping Garlic

How do you make a garlic rope ?, after harvesting for the first time ever a decent crop of garlic from the garden and drying it for a couple of weeks in the greenhouse. I needed to find out how best to store our bumper harvest. I tried you tube but to no avail, the nearest we got was onions an even then the video wasn’t very good on detail mainly due to the guy demonstrating being stoned ! So hubby and I decided to have a go ourselves with what appears to be great success. Secret seems to be having a cane to work off and loads of string.

Garden Vegetable Soup

As the weather has decided to turn unseasonably unpleasant, thunder, wind and rain. Thoughts have turned to soup , my other half loves soup and would happily eat nothing but if I let him, I am rather more fussy and only really enjoy homemade soup and even then only periodically.

Yesterday whilst surveying the damage in the garden caused by the wind and rain, I collected together the ingredients for what ended up a rather tasty lancashire version of a sort of minestrone. To make the soup just use whatever you have to hand, in my case that was a couple of tomatoes, courgettes including the flowers and a few new potatoes.

Firstly I sweated off a recently picked onion and chopped onion in a little oil, then I added 2 cloves of garlic finely chopped and cooked until the onion and garlic were soft but not coloured, I then added the tomatoes chopped into small chunks, skins, pips and all and cooked for a another 4 or 5 minutes, next the courgettes and potatoes went in . In goes about a pint of vegetable stock and the soup is simmered for about 15 mins, until all the vegetables are soft and then add a couple of fresh basil leaves. Serve with crusty bread. Delicious.