Potatoes, Broad Beans and Happy Birthday Alicia.

Saturday, 23 January 2010

Despite a rather late night celebrating Alicia’s birthday at Luxe in Spitalfields we actually did do some gardening today, albeit slowly and with less precision than normal.

Today it was all about Potatoes and Broad Beans. We ordered two types of seed potato from Suttons, the first being the Charlotte, which is an early delicious spud, very versatile and one of my favourites and secondly the Foremost, which is a fantastic early potato.

We are chitting the spuds in old egg boxes and have placed them on a wee table in the dining room ensuring it gets constant even light through the day via a basement window. They will be grown in old tyres which we have “rescued” from a garage round the corner filled with a mixture of manure and top soil. Stephen has described the mathematical precision of how they need to be placed in the tyres and their proximity to each other which involved a diagram, I slightly zoned out at this stage, I’m more of a visionary I think.

We have far more than we need, of course! Is it a really naff and cheap to give people the chitted potatoes we don’t use as presents? Mmmm, probably. However, if you do want some please let us know.

Next on the agenda were the Broad Beans - Bunyard's Exhibit from Thompson and Morgans. As a child I hated Broad Beans, I just found them tasteless and a bit powdery. But growing them last year for the first time and eating them asap after podding proved a very different experience. The little morsels were sweet, tender and yummy. My favourite way of preparing them is to get everyone in the house shelling them round the kitchen table and then having Stephen make a delicious risotto. A simple but beautiful dish, just make sure you use good quality chicken stock, the best risotto rice you can lay your hands on (try Carnaroli), plenty of white wine, parmesan, pancetta (it's even worth throwing in any spare bean/pea shoots for extra zing).

Our Broad Beans have been sown in half a dozen plant pots and some left over plastic cups from the party last night – recycling at it’s best.

We’ll harden them up a bit outside once the weather heats up before planting them into the bed – Stephen thinks we’ll be eating them by June, I think May.