Ham Hockusai

To say my parents are keen gardeners would be like saying that Prince Phillip is a trifle conservative. Mum writes gardening books and is a garden designer. Dad spends every second he’s not at work in his overalls doing as Mum says…

Our garden has developed over the 20 years we’ve lived there from being a bunch of fields into a gallery of different artistic rooms . Mum and Dad have created amazing garden rooms inspired by Hepworth, Monet, Rothko, Mondrian, Kandinsky and Hokusai.

It’s a very lateral approach to gardening that oozes creativity. The idea is not to copy or try to replicate the art/painting but to capture the mood and the concept behind it and express it as a three dimensional piece of living, breathing art that might otherwise be called a garden!

So I thought it would be a good idea to pick up where Mum, Dad and Hokusai left off and create a dish that’s inspired by an artist. And when I picked up a cheap as chips ham hock in Waitrose I couldn’t resist creating a dish called Ham Hockusai.

Feeling excited and bubbling over like a glass that’s full to the brim with water and then is depth charged with Berocca, I sought help on Twitter. Lizzie came to my help and suggested braising the pork hock in a mixture of soy, ginger and mirin. We used this as inspiration to create what might otherwise be called a ham hock ramen…

Trim your ham hock. Because you are going to slow cook it you don’t want too much fat floating around. Then put your hock in the slow cooker (AKA Stewie Grifin) and pour in half a bottle of light soy, a sachet of miso soup powder, and enough stock to cover the hock. Then throw in some spring onions, a generous amount of root ginger, 2 star anise, a few chillies and a glug of sake and mirin. Turn on the slow cooker and allow it to bubble away for 5 hours, or until the meat yields.

Then separate the meat from the liquid. Set the meat aside and strain the liquid to remove the floating vegetation. This liquid is like gold dust, so don’t spill any like I did!

Pour the liquid into a pan and place on the heat. Meanwhile, pull the pork apart and keep nearby. Heat a wok and make a stir fry of enoki and shitake mushrooms, pak-choi, beansprouts, garlic, ginger and more chilli. Then add the meat to heat through.

Add some ramen noodles to the broth and once they are soft assemble your Ham Hockusai in a large soup bowl and garnish with sesame seeds and spring onions. I did my best to recreate the Great Wave off Kanagawa but gravity got the better of my noodles!

This has no pretention of being the most authentic Japanese dish. But it was not only huge fun to cook, but incredibly tasty and healthy to eat. The depth of flavour from the stock just kept on going. The pork itself was a delight. It transformed from being tough, flabby and generally being a bit like a tight-head prop into a graceful winger.

Next time, we’re going to cook Ham Hockney – I’m just less sure how to cook it. If you’ve got any suggestions about how to make a piggy David Hockney dish or any other artist inspired recipe I’d love to know.

Have a look at Mum’s website and blog to find out more about the garden. It’s open to the public a handful of times a year and you can also book for private groups.

Idyllic River Cottage Veggie Patch

The finale of our trip was lunch at River Cottage HQ. We’ve been to River Cottage for a fantastic day of mushroom foraging in the past as well as to their Autumn festival. So we were keen to introduce Rad of squirrel and hare fame to the delights of Hugh’s rural utopia.

We were given a fascinating tour of the kitchen garden by a charming Chris Evans lookalike who had lots of ingenious suggestions such as:

Grown your seedlings, cress and other micro herbs in guttering. It seems to work brilliantly and is a piece of cake to do.

Try braising the stems of thistles which apparently are delicious.

Use tyres to create unusual containers that are ideal for growing things like potatoes in. The black rubber absorbs the sunshine and therefore keeps the soil warm. Also when it come to harvesting you can just remove a layer of tyres to get to the next level.

Try growing your tomatoes and potatoes in inside out plastic compost bags. It’s a great way of recycling, otherwise wasteful plastic bags.

Rainbow chard looked stunning.

As did the deep red, and slightly seductive, stems of this plant.

The best advice was about how to plan your kitchen garden / allotment. All too often we get a bit overexcited and dive in withouth thinking. We plant rows and rows of potatoes and acres of tomatoes both of which you can buy in the shops. It’s much better to find some interesting varieties of vegetables you love and can’t find in the shops or are expensive, or need to be eaten as soon as they are harvested and concentrate on them. Things like asparagus, raspberries, sweet-corn, squashes and artichokes spring to mind. It’s also well worth developing a strong herb garden and think about planting flowers such as nasturtium which not only taste great in salads but also attract the bugs and therefore save your prize vegetables from getting nailed.

Our tour finished with a casual lunch for 50 in their converted barn. Canapes of rabbit in a light jelly and smoked mackerel pate on a slice of cucumber were deliciously simple and comforting.

And don’t tell Hugh, but we may have nibbled on some of his prize peas as well…

Our main course of uber-local lamb cooked two ways was pretty special too. The shoulder was slow cooked for about a year and half with enough Middle-Eastern spices to deplete a well stocked souk.

Whilst the leg was flash roasted and served beautifully pink. Some slow cooked tomatoes helped to marry the two styles of lamb together, like a squirt of ketchup does with BBQ’d meat…

A slice of cake with fresh English fruit and stiff nutty cream brought our magical meal and adventure around the South West to a memorable close and sent us home wishing we could stay forever at River Cottage.

This is part of our trip around the South West.

Our New Apple Press

Dad gave Mum an amazing apple press for Christmas from a company called Vigo. It can cope with 12 litres of apples at a time and is a great way of making the most of our orchard. Every autumn it’s such a shame for us to waste so many lovely apples. They just land up being eaten by birds or getting squished into the grass and acting as a fruity mulch!

Dad has recently become moderately obsessed by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and is always super keen to show me how hot his compost is. We’ve now got plans for an asparagus bed and have just planted a handful of truffle trees. I am really keen for our orchard to evolve and am delighted that we have now got a quince, medlar, nectarine and apricot tree. So in a few years time we’ll be able to make some amazing jellies, pastes and jams. I got the bug for jellies when I made crab apple and chili jelly last year.

So on Boxing Day, Dad and I decided to make the most of Mum’s present! Having gathered the final apples that were clinging to our twiggy trees…

… we gave them a rinse and then fed them into apple mincer…

Once we’d mashed the first batch up we then pressed them and were thrilled to see loads of frothy golden juice spontaneously erupt from the press.

From our two pressings we were rewarded with around 4 or 5 litres of delicious, golden apple juice. It was sweet and cold with a slight edge of tartness.

Dad carted the pulp off to his precious compost heap whist I nipped indoors to warm up and quench my thirst.

Later in the day we made some Courvoisier and apple juice cocktails which were quite a hit…. even with my grandfather who claims that apple juice gives him a bad stomach!

We’ve got great plans for our apple pressing enterprise… at our garden’s autumn open days we’re going to be selling our own apple juice and hosting a “press your own” juice stand which should be really fun. If anyone has got any advice on how to preserve the juice naturally we’d love to hear from you!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Mum’s Gardening Blog

Regular readers will know a bit about my Mum because every now and again she gets a mention… She’s great at making ice bowls.

And is a star in the world of garden design and edible flowers. Last month she was on Gardeners’ World demonstrating how to cook with flowers for instance.

Also her adventure with Hannah was a huge success too. Who can resist floral cupcakes?

And for Mum’s birthday this year we had the most amazing edible flower experience at Roussillon.

But what I am most proud of is Mum’s blogging. She’s taken to it like a duck to water and is now writing brilliant articles about the garden, edible flowers and most excitingly the fascinating world of garden art.

So jump over to Mum’s blog and have a gander. Please welcome her to the blogosphere and offer her some encouragement! I’m worried that she’s going to put my humble blogging to shame!

Petersham Nurseries, Richmond

The pain is finally over…. my exams are done. This has given us not only an excuse to celebrate and dine at fantastic restaurants, but I also now have some time on my hands to dedicate to the Paunch.

Since my birthday weekend I have been spoilt rotten by Mr B. And this weekend was no exception, when I was taken on a secret lunch at a secret location.

I have a love / hate relationship with surprises.. they excite me but equally infuriate me! Despite failing to guess where we were going, I was over the moon that the exclusive Petersham Nurseries was the target, where chef Skye Gyngell works the stove.

We didn’t know quite what to expect on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Due to the grind of revision, I have spent most of my recent weekends in a woolly jumper and Jack Wills trackie Bs. So I was delighted to have the excuse to glam up somewhat for lunch… but someone should have warned me not to wear my fav snake skin heals… as we had to wade through slusshy wet, muddy gravel to get to the ‘restaurant’, which did in fact resemble a glorified green house!

But this was the charm and style of the place. The staff we equally as welcoming, trotting about in black skinny jeans and wellies. It had a lovely relaxed Boho atmosphere and the food certainly did not disappoint.

The menu was brief, with only 4 options for each course. Scottish girole mushrooms on toast and 3 epic, massive grilled sardines were both superb starters. Its not every day you pay £12 for a starter of sardines, but the portion was vast and they were truly scrum.

For mains, as predicted, Brown was true to form and had the slow roasted shoulder of pork, accompanied with endless veggies, beans, and a very herby salsa verde. Simple, tender and beautifully cooked. However I was pretty smug as the Monk fish stew was actually astonishingly good! Big, plump, meaty chunks of fish, sweet roast peppers, fennel and tomatoes, almonds, all infused with lashings of garlic, saffron, plus a naughty blob of aioli.. YUM!

As you can imagine our bellies were feeling pretty stretched at this stage, so we shared a delightful and refreshing clementine sorbet to finish.

A fantastic way to spend a wet Sunday afternoon. Delicious, honest feel-good food… if slightly on the pricey side. Great place to treat someone with earthy, stylish qualities, who doesn’t wince at a speck of mud!

Poisonous and Tasty Mushrooms at Stevington

It’s Autumn and I’ve got a semi about all the fun fungus growing in the hedgerows. Little outcrops of joy. Wondering around our garden I only found a few mushrooms… Dad was far more successful. As he was mowing the grass he kept on unearthing more mushrooms. Here’s a selection of the tastiest and most deadly…

This first set smelt nicely of aniseed. I am relatively confident that they are field mushrooms… or possibly horse mushrooms.. either way I am pretty sure they would have been edible and tasty too. I never plucked up confidence to eat them… and found that they were riddled with little insects which had eaten a fine matrix of little holes.

The second set of shrooms were even more exciting. Dad yelled and I ran out. He’d found a green mushroom growing beneath a cherry tree. The more we looked the more we found. Within 10 minutes we’d found bucket loads. They were all thriving in the mulch all over the garden. Excited at the prospect of an adventurous free lunch.

As you can see they were a weird green colour and covered in white specks… enough to make me refer to a proper text book.

I am glad I did because it turned out these green bad boys were poisonous, called Vedigris Agaric. Thank God I didn’t fry them up and serve them on toast!

Kathy Brown’s Edible Flowers

When I was doing my GCSEs about a decade ago Mum was busy adding flowers to all our food! I thought it completely normal and nothing really to cause a fuss. Little did I know she was about 10 years ahead of a major culinary trend!

This excitement peaked a few months ago when the contestants in the Master Chef final visited Michel Bras’s restaurant in Southern France that specialises in using flowers in his cuisine. The setting, philosophy, style and no doubt taste were stunning. Mum was enthused and we can’t wait to find an excuse to go there for lunch!

Then, this week, Charles Campion, who as it happens is a judge in the semi final of Master Chef who comes out with gems such as “TEK nically accomplised… dinner party ordinary” wrote an article in the Evening Standard which is shown below. Inspired by Chelsea Flower Show he talks about:

“The highlight of the horticultural calendar, the Chelsea Flower Show, will be upon us again next week — so dust off the daisies and bring on the begonias, we’re all going flower power crazy. However, if smelling the roses just isn’t enough for you, you can now eat them as well. London’s restaurants have taken a leaf — or should we say a petal — out of the Royal Horticultural Society’s book.

And we’re not just talking lovely, fragrant bouquets on the tables or culinary staples that have been cleverly reinvented with a floral twist — the capital’s top chefs have devised a whole new crop of florally inspired dishes, from entire menus to afternoon teas and cocktails. These run the whole gamut, from gently incorporated floral essences (an initiation for the nervous) to serving up the real thing — petals, stamens and all.

But if you’re planning to attend the show at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, don’t make the mistake of eating the displays — you may find yourself unceremoniously ousted.”

Whislt in this online article it concentrates on the RHS, Chelsea and some restaurants the printed article says,

“For the home cook, the seminal reference book, Kathy Brown’s Edible Flowers, is republished by Anness in June.”

How exciting! Charles, if you would like to come for dinner with my parents in Stevington we will show you around the garden and then feed you with flowers just let me know.