The Food Issue: Eat what you Grow. Simple as A plus B equal C, Cooking Galore :)

The theme today is about food and turning out dishes out of your harvest.



I must say that already the labour of tending to your vegetables and fruits make them already more precious to you. You get a earthy sense of where they come from and how hard it is for them to develop: right amount of rain, right amount of sun, right soil, pest control and so on. The list is long and I am still discovering it as an amateur gardener. So when you get your harvest, whatever it is, you tend to do it justice and honour. From all the sweating and hard work, the fruit of your labour makes it from 'fork to fork', to mention the book of the inspirational Monty Don.




Gardening makes you so much more conscious about your food. Your 'Blasé' consumer attitude changes irreversibly. The mere thought of chucking away your harvest because you let it rot away, having forgotten about it somewhere, doesn't happen. When you come loaded with shopping bags and stuff the fridge, and throw away a bag of rocket salad that went all 'liquidy' a week later because it didn't make it to your plate, let's be honest, you will not feel a tinge of guilt, nor throw yourself upon your knees and promise yourself that you will not do it again. The care is hardly there, start growing your own food and this is an entirely different matter.

I tell you what, you just start giving a shit from a single seed to a single veg or fruit that will appear from it. First you have the sheer excitement of seeing it happen before your eyes. Let's call it the beauty of nature. But then nature can be very cruel, the lion ate the antelope and your lettuces do look as appetising to you as the local slugs who will make a bee line for them. The wind can blow your tall plants to annihilation in a gusty gust, where mouth to mouth reanimation of the tender destroyed green stalks is just not possible. So the big second is the sheer tender, love and care involved in growing something, anything from start to finish. Third: it's a fairly emotional journey filled with sadness and joy, disasters and successes.


The result if you have one is never overlooked. From day one, I tend to dream for the result and the outcome on my plate, let it be jams, chutneys, pickles, infused oils, which keeps for ages or the straight onto the plate for a Sunday Roast. I have that childish excitement from seed to result based upon plans and dreams. It might be just seeing and growing a black tomato to know what it taste like to doing chilli jam or oil passing by the now traditional in my household 'Christmasy' redcurrant and port jelly. The result has the honour to make it onto a plate with usually great pride.

I am not going into the whole issue about food, consuming behaviours, wastage and the third world, for I am not called Bob Geldof, however I did learn during my life to count my pennies, and yes there was a time when I would pick the odd one from the pavement which would bring the amount in my pocket to the right level where I could afford a bag of potatoes. When my cheap potatoes had growing eyes and buds within a few days, I did not despair. I planted them.


I would never forget my first harvest of potatoes, I have been growing them ever since, once or twice a year, trying different varieties.  A desperate idea born out of necessity soon became a passionate hobby: growing the food I love with the space I had. It only took an humble spud to reignite the gardening bug I took from my father's allotment and from the trendy lady who gave me a papyrus to grow and tend. I also remembered vividly how my dad got by his hard days of unemployment which only lasted from six to nine month by feeding us with his allotment. I thought I could grow out of mines by growing stuff to feed myself. Gardening fed my fighting spirit to keep looking forward.



For me respect is due to a harvest and it does not go to waste. Maybe it grew from my personal food issues falling on hard times once or twice or thrice. Yet growing my own is just a pure passionate hobby now, pulling me out of my writing desk to the sunshine for a few blessed hours.  Rain or shine, collecting that blessed harvest put a smile on my face, from the humble potatoes, to the fiery chillies, passing by a glut of raspberries.

Doing justice to the food I get has almost been ingrained upon me. Which brings me to C, the Cooking Galore.