It's rather a late blog post, because supper was late. I'd volunteered to make vegetable curry, and do enough to last a couple of meals, so there was mushroom and potato curry, and dhal, and eggs in curry sauce, and cucumber raita, and chapatis. Making perfectly circular chapatis is a skill mastered by Bengali girls at a tender age, but the first of mine was positively triangular. They were more or less round by the time I got to the last one, but mainly less.
The cucumber was home grown. A real, live, outdoor cucumber. I've never tried to grow them before, and was startled when suddenly, almost overnight, this thing appeared, about six inches long and faintly spiny like a cross between an outsize gherkin and a sea urchin. The slice I tried while I was cooking was tasty and very crunchy, an example of a freshly picked vegetable being better than the bought one. The raita was pretty good too, and the remaining two thirds of the cucumber is wrapped in cling film in the fridge, but alas, by tomorrow it will probably taste no different to a supermarket one.
Apart from the cucumber I have harvested two courgettes, and eaten one. The other is sitting in the fridge, getting less freshly picked with every passing hour, but I couldn't leave it on the plant any longer or it would have turned into a marrow. It is obviously the courgette season, because somebody who grows their own vegetables gave me three yesterday. It would have been churlish to reject them on the grounds that I already had one waiting to be eaten, but at this rate I'm going to have to volunteer to cook again so that I can make some ratatouille. The Systems Administrator is not madly keen on courgettes whose underlying miniature marrow nature is still apparent, and looked at the one I fried in olive oil a couple of days ago with rather guarded enthusiasm, so I suspect that unless I intervene all that will happen is that in about a week's time I'll end up disinterring four mouldy courgettes from the fridge and putting them on the compost heap.
We had a helping of broad beans along with the courgette. I was worried I'd left it too late to pick them, but although the pods were bulging alarmingly the individual beans were still tender. And yes, fresh ones do taste better than frozen. Which said, I am quite partial to frozen broad beans since being introduced to them at music society suppers, mixed with frozen peas. The SA is not such a broad bean fan either, and if I want us to eat the rest of them I might need to get creative. We had an extremely good salad in a Middle Eastern restaurant involving broad beans and garlic yogurt, so I'd better start rifling through Claudia Roden.
The sweetcorn might yet come to something, but my other sowings succumbed to weeds and drought, and whatever it was that ate the tops off them as soon as I'd weeded them. But the mini-glut of courgettes and the SA's muted response to broad beans do illustrate the difficulty of grow your own when the gardener and the cook are not one and the same person. The SA does a lot of our cooking, for which I am very grateful, but is used to planning the menu and shopping accordingly. Being expected to go on doing the cooking while planning meals around whatever vegetable is cropping at the moment, and keeping it up day after day (oh good, more courgettes) risks turning it into a chore.
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