(Pleasant music playing) - Crown Prince squash,
and spinach stew.
Oh my God but this is not a Crown Prince squash. (chuckles)
It's one that grew here.
It's a variety called Ute or U-T-E,
from the Native Americans, who apparently valued it.
I haven't eaten one yet, so I'm curious to see.
So I'm going to use this for the recipe, for the soup.
And this one weighs 4.6 kilos, and the recipe
asks for 800 grammes. (chuckles)
So, it'll be a part of this.
And they do store well actually, after you cut them
you can just keep them in the kitchen.
And I'll put it here just to mention, we're in the
small garden at Homeacres.
This is cauliflower, and that's grown.
So the squash I harvested late September,
planted these cauliflower, as small seedlings,
and they're staying under mesh for the whole winter,
to crop, or bring up, in the spring.
Another ingredient of this soup, is carrots.
So let's have a look here.
These carrots have been under mesh,
pretty much, since I sowed them actually,
which was in June.
So this is going towards late November now,
it's five months, it's quite a long time
for carrots to be in the ground.
And they're not a long variety, as you can see,
they're called Flakkee, which is a sort of half long.
Here's some big ones here, I mean look at this.
Let's have a quick look, for a bit of fun.
More fat, than long.
But that means there's a lot of carrot there,
but what might spoil it,
is something you can't really see at this stage.
And that's why I brought a bucket of water to show you,
because, we're suffering a lot at the moment
from carrot root fly, (carrot plopping in water)
which is a horrible pest, if you don't know,
it's flies which lay eggs, near the soil surface.
They hatch out into larvae, which I call maggots,
which tunnel down, and then burrow into carrots to eat them.
And, it can be,
that you can lose pretty much all your harvest
to these horrible insects.
And we've been having a lot of problems
with some carrots up there, which are Nante,
and I think possibly the Nante carrot
are a little bit more susceptible, softer.
So I'll know very quickly here,
just by rubbing off this soil. (water sloshing)
Yeah, there we are.
Or is it?
Do you know these are not, nothing like as bad...
That's it, for sure.
That's what carrot root fly does, tunnels around,
and in there is that little maggot,
and it just keeps on going round and round.
If you didn't wash it off, and left it on and put this
in a sack to store for winter, which you could do,
it will carry on eating. (chuckles)
So that's why I'm a bit worried about them.
(water sloshing) 'Cause some of these
are for winter. (water sloshing)
We'll take these into the kitchen in a minUte,
and I'll prepare them for the soup.
I'll do quite a lot of this off camera,
to speed it up for you.
The spinach we need is here, so I'm harvesting
larger outer leaves, and for soup,
it absolutely doesn't matter.
This is slug or snail damage probably.
Totally fine.
And some of the stalk as well can go in the soup.
So this spinach, actually I planted it, I transplanted it,
as small seedlings, 20th of August, underneath tomatoes.
And you can see them in a video that will be coming out soon
about the outdoor tomatoes that I grew here.
And the spinach is the intercrop, the relay planting.
And it's a variety called Medania,
They're homesteaded seeds actually.
I think that might be partly why it's so vigorous.
And you know for, this is the 24th of November,
and you, I'm picking spinach like this,
obviously our climate helps,
and it has been warmer than usual, but it's also been
a lot wetter than usual.
We just had this morning, since four o'clock this morning,
14 millimetres of rain, that's over half an inch.
And yet, look at this.
You know I can walk on these beds, and I'm not sinking in,
or damaging the soil, so that's where no dig...
No dig, is brilliant in all weathers.
You know this summer, it's been fantastic
for conserving moisture, and now it's fantastic,
for draining moisture.
I'll come back later, and cover those up,
in case you're wondering, and I'll bring those carrots in.
So we got that, that and that.
One more thing we need is bay.
I've not grown a bay until, this spring.
So this is a new bay tree,
and I'm going to take some of the newer leaves actually.
We might, in fact, I'll take three off there
because I think we'll cut this bit off.
I don't want the tree to get too long.
We might plant it out as well.
I'll put that in our bucket with some marjoram,
which I picked from the herb garden up there.
And on the way in I'm going to get some thyme,
then I want to show you...
God I must put this down to protect my onions.
In the shed, look at this.
We're having a beautiful harvest at the moment.
Well having said that, there are a few problems there
actually and like these chicory got a bit too overdeveloped,
so we're going to use them soon.
Some of the root vegetables have got some of these
other problems I've mentioned.
What I'm going to bring into the kitchen,
is tomatoes for the soup,
these are our absolutely last final tomatoes,
so they were picked pretty much green,
and they've just been in here, or in the other shed
for six weeks.
Great, so I'm going to bring in all this stuff,
and gather some thyme on the way in,
and then I'll see you in the kitchen.
(tomatoes plopping in bucket)
(pleasant music playing)
(bucket handle clanking)
(scissors snipping)
We've come in the conservatory on the way to the kitchen
because I'm storing a lot of vegetables in here.
We're going to use some of them in this recipe.
And, just to mention, my cheek as well,
in case you're wondering, I fell off my chair, (laughs)
about five days ago.
It's nothing too serious, but just so you know.
The garlic is here in the corner,
and you can see, it's very accessible anytime.
Garlic, onions, and squash store best in dry air,
which means in your house basically.
Anywhere you've got a space to hang them up,
or put them out.
These onions are beautiful, Rose de Roscoff,
is quite an early variety, we harvested it in...
I'm going to just show you actually to the camera.
You can just see the pink skin at the top of that one.
And it's been hanging here since early August.
And everything that that's in here is good to eat,
for a very long time.
It just keeps for a long time like the squash,
so which squash to use, that's a Crown Prince,
weighs one and half kilos, about the quantity
I want for the recipe, which I'm doubling up on.
This one weighs 4.6 kilos,
so I would only need one third of it.
And this is the Ute, so that's what...
'Cause I want to try it, I'm curious to see
what it tastes like.
And the carrots, I did not,
I'm not going to use every single one that we harvested.
That's the carrot root fly damage you can see there.
It's actually not as bad as I feared, but obviously,
you just cut that out before using your carrot.
When you home grow, if you're only used to
buying from a supermarket, this is one of the differences
you'll notice, you have a bit more preparation time.
Tonnes more flavour, that's for sure.
And the spinach, I doubled up.
So what I picked in the garden,
was not enough for what the recipe would want,
if I double up the recipe, so I picked some more,
and that's roughly 600 grammes of spinach leaf.
And here is the recipe.
So, it's in the book.
Crown Prince and Spinach Stew.
And all the recipes, we put a little bit in the green
at the bottom, you know just use equivalent
of whatever you got in the garden.
Any, any other kind of squash,
spinach you could replace with chard.
And it's got carrot in it as well.
And you can then flip to the page
which has carrot growing advice, for example.
There's some gardening in here, as well as cooking.
And I do like to think this book is very much
for a gardener's cookbook.
It's not going to throw fancy ingredients at you
that are difficult to get a hold of,
or in the wrong season.
So, let's have a go in the kitchen and see what happens.
(pleasant music playing)
(knife chopping)
(pleasant music continues)
(pan sizzling)
I'm setting the carrot, onion, and garlic in the oil,
and I'm just adding a little bit of stock
to stop it catching on the bottom of the pan.
And this is some vegetable stock I made earlier,
by putting some old vegetables,
and even some slightly damaged ones, and celeriac leaves,
in a big pan of water, and that's boiled up
for about an hour.
And these onions, homegrown onions,
they are so strong, (chuckles)
my eyes are streaming still,
and it's evidence,
of how good value they are, and full of goodness.
(pleasant music playing)
(knife chopping)
(vegetables sizzling)
(vegetable stock glugging)
And then, how would these squash that are so hard,
how do you get in there?
A good point of entry can be the middle like that,
(pounding on knife)
and do it like this, where you can lever downwards,
across the bottom, and back up again.
So, that's just under half,
that's the smaller half that's come off.
And, I'm probably going to use most of this because,
these fellows, they're very difficult to peel, in fact...
Maybe I'll take out
first the seeds. (utensils clanging in drawer)
So, this squash grew near to other squash.
It's very unlikely, that I'm going to
keep these seeds to grow again because,
the crosspollination would've happened,
with different varieties,
and it would be therefore,
an unpredictable mixture. (chuckles)
I prefer to know roughly what what I'm getting.
But also before that, we want to see what it tastes like.
So far so good, it's smelling squashy,
it's looking
in good condition. (spoon scraping)
For this recipe it's going to be, the difficult bit,
and for this squash in particular, is going to be,
getting off the skin. (spoon clanking)
Let's see what happens.
These peelings, are good to keep,
and you can roast them,
and put them in other dishes.
I'm having a little taste, just to check and see,
the squash is pretty soft, easily going into a mush almost.
But being as it's squash, not stew,
that's in good firm condition.
And actually the carrots, more than anything.
they're really holding firm.
That's true, organic, no dig carrots grown in healthy soil,
they don't go to a mush, (chuckles) they keep their texture.
So, I'm going to put the heat back on, I turned it down a bit
just while I was doing that.
And we've been about 20 minutes,
boiling everything,
and the squash, we're going to get it on a rolling boil now,
just when I add this spinach.
I've not done this before, so it's going to be interesting
to see, how this fits in.
(boiling water gurgling)
It's a lot spinach to push in there.
That's almost too much heat.
This, is an induction,
no contactless it's called, sorry, cooker.
And they can cut out very quickly I find,
if you get some water on the top,
like from taking off the lid, and condensation falls on.
But it also means that it speeds up really fast,
which can be brilliant.
It can also get you in trouble,
if you're not paying attention, and it gets hot so rapidly.
And then, I found that I can burn things.
Having said that, this is looking promising,
because, you can see that has all gone in,
even though it looks a lot of spinach.
And we're pretty much ready to go now,
to eat it, because this is very rapidly,
that spinach is going to go soft,
and it's up to you, but I don't want it to go too soft.
I like, you know, the spinach has almost got to be raw.
And you know, I'm actually going to turn the heat off
at this point, because I don't want the spinach to overcook.
- [camera operator] You've just got the marjoram
to add as well, Charles.
- Yeah.
Nicola has reminded me to add the marjoram, (chuckles) also.
So this is the final flavouring.
And actually there is one more,
Chilis, chilli salt.
This was a present recently from Alessandro Spicy Moustache.
Of course what I don't know,
and it's always the mystery with chilli,
is you can see the little flecks of red there perhaps.
And how, how hot is it?
Well there is one way to find out.
(smacking lips)
Hmm, I think the answer can be summed up in one word,
and that is very. (chuckles)
Alessandro doesn't mess around with chilis.
I always tend to favour the slightly less hot ones.
Well anyway, that was probably about a,
well that was less than a teaspoon,
of his chilli salt. (scoffs)
Yeah, so we'll see.
And, I'll leave the bay leaf in for now.
We're not at risk of eating that one,
'cause it is very large,
and we're ready to taste.
So I'm going to put a little bit in a pan, in a bowl,
and let it cool down,
and then we'll just come back to have a taste.
(spoon sloshing)
So we have stew. (chuckles)
And this is the moment of truth,
I mean that's lovely recipe.
So many nice things from the garden.
It's been a great time of year to make it as well.
Still got spinach, squash, for a lot of the winter
you could possibly be using this.
(Charles slurping soup)
Mm, mm, do you know it's really interesting.
The Ute, is not the same taste as Crown Prince.
It's more, it's more fruity,
and not as dense actually.
So yeah, you can get different flavours,
for whatever squash you use.
The next recipe I want to try, is...
Oh there's a bowl there for Nicola. (chuckles)
Actually, we've both be looking forward to this.
It is about one o'clock now, it's ready for lunch.
I want to try carrot and parsnip dip with orange.
And do check out how to grow all these wonderful vegetables,
in my "No Dig" book,
and, how to cut them, and cook and my cookbook.
(pleasant music playing)