Simple Beginnings: Beading. Aiden Byrne

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      100 g caster sugar

      TO SHELL THE ALMONDS you will need a small tack hammer, a wooden chopping board and a steady hand. It’s best to use a tack hammer because you don’t want to crush the almonds, just crack the shell. This may take a bit of getting used to, but it’s worth being patient. As soon as you have shelled the almonds, blanch them in boiling salted water for about 10 seconds and plunge them immediately into iced water. This makes it easier to peel away the brown skin, leaving you with a bright white almond. If you can’t find fresh almonds toast 150 g flaked almonds just long enough to release the oils and flavour. Drop them into the cream to infuse with a drop or two of almond extract or oil.

      PEEL THE GARLIC. This will be easier than peeling normal, aged garlic because the skin will almost fall away. Put the garlic in a saucepan and cover with one-quarter of the milk. Bring to the boil, simmer for 5 minutes and then drain the milk away. Cover with another quarter of the milk and repeat the process until all the milk has gone. Once cooked, the garlic should be so soft that you can almost squash the cloves between your fingertips.

      PUT THE GARLIC, almonds and cream in a saucepan. (If you are using almond-flavoured cream drain away the almonds and cover the garlic with the cream.) Heat and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring until smooth.

      PASS THE MIXTURE through your finest sieve and chill immediately over a bowl of iced water. If you are going to serve the soup cold, wait until it’s chilled before you season. If you are going too serve it hot, season it before chilling. Season with salt, sherry vinegar and dry sherry. The sherry vinegar and the dry sherry will cut through the richness and give the soup a really fresh taste. If you are serving it cold it will benefit from a little Greek yogurt being mixed in just before you serve.

      MAKE THE APPLE JELLY. Peel six of the apples and keep the skins separate. Juice the apples in a vegetable juicer and transfer the liquid to a saucepan. Bring the juice to the boil, remove from the heat immediately and pass through a muslin cloth or very fine sieve. You will have a clear apple juice. While the juice is still hot put it in a blender with the reserved apple peel and blend until the juice is bright green. Add a squeeze of lemon juice, the gelatine and the sugar. Strain again into a bowl set above iced water. When the jelly begins to set slightly transfer it to the refrigerator for at least 2 hours. Finely shred the remaining apple.

      TO SERVE, pour the soup into bowls (chilled if the soup is cold) and spoon some jelly in the centre. Garnish with shredded apple, sorrel leaves or, as here, oxalis leaves, which have a similar flavour to Granny Smith apples.

      GROWING BABY SALADS IN WILTSHIRE

      I firmly believe that vegetables, herbs and fruits are a cook’s greatest asset. Any cook who thinks vegetables are the least interesting part of a meal, a bore to prepare, and a mere garnish to meat or fish, is totally missing the point. As far as I’m concerned, vegetables are a staple, central to a dish, the real deal. A lot of my dishes are based around fruits or vegetables – meat, fish or dairy is quite often an afterthought, something to fill the dish out.

      Today there really are no excuses for not using organically grown fruit and vegetables. I could almost guarantee that if you were to have your vegetables delivered each week by one of the many box schemes working hard to change the way we think about organic produce, you would spend the same amount of money as you would do filling your stainless steel trolley on a Saturday afternoon. Plus, it would make you think a little more about what you cook, and you would discover new flavours and combinations.

      Food miles (how far your carrot, potato or apple flew, aided by fossil fuel, in order to sit on your plate) is a big issue for enviromentalists. I try to buy British produce when it’s in season but when I have to I choose imported produce from a source I know is benefiting the people growing it. Britain could be much more self-sufficient and not import out-of-season produce from far flung places – but only if the supermarkets were prepared to pay a fair price for them. Also, if Britain’s farmers grew a greater variety of crops, they would live less under the threat of abandonment by supermarket buyers.

      Greengrocers are fast disappearing from the British high street. They find it too much of a struggle to compete on price with the supermarkets. If you have a greengrocer near you – support it! They buy their produce straight from the traditional wholesale market, who buy straight from the grower. This simple supply chain means you can buy vegetables that were picked the previous afternoon, and you will taste the freshness. Again it’s a question of pester power; ask your greengrocer to sell the vegetables and fruit at the time of year you want them and when they are at their best.

      However, it is not all doom and gloom as smaller chains of supermarkets build long-term relationships with farmers. Some support watercress growers in the South, and rhubarb growers in Yorkshire. Others encourage farmers to grow specialist vegetables such as wild mushrooms, violet pearl aubergines and spiny artichokes. I would love to see fields of artichokes growing in Yorkshire and sweet peppers in Devon’s greenhouses.

      A true ambassador to the cause is someone who has been a great friend of mine for almost ten years, Richard Vine from R.V. Salads based in Wiltshire. He is the maestro of all things very small. Richard’s passion is now centred fully on growing micro salads after a career as a livestock producer and organic vegetable producer. He now runs a highly successful operation supplying England’s best restaurants with ingredients that simply were not available seven or eight years ago.

      Born and raised on his family farm in Berkshire, in a world where everyone foraged for nature’s seasonal harvests and grew a large proportion of their own food, he experienced massive changes in food production, and consumer expectations of it. In a world where nothing was wasted, food was both British and seasonal, with national pride in his produce being taken by producers and consumers alike.

      Richard says, ‘the myriad of convenience and fast foods, with a whole fusion of taste experiences from around the world meant that we as a nation came very close to loosing both our national and regional food heritage’.

      Richard’s business needed to diversify to meet the demands from a new breed of chef whose passion and desire to source and use every available British product was unbounded. He operates in both a greenhouse and an outdoor environment where the skills and dedication of his small team of passionate and committed gardeners and pickers reign supreme. Everything from ground preparation to seed sowing and produce picking is all done by hand.

      The philosophy is to work in partnership with nature and so his crops are subject to fluctuations in temperature, humidity and daylight. There is also the inevitable problem of pests. They try very hard not to use any form of pest control, preferring to dispose of crops (composting what they can) and starting again. If absolutely necessary he uses an organic control method.

      Greenhouse heaters are set on frost control only (this is his small attempt at conserving fossil fuels and reducing his carbon footprint). Each tiny plant and leaf is packed with phenomenal flavour as well as being aesthetically beautiful. Visual appearance and taste are of equal importance and it is exciting to see how these qualities marry with and enhance any dish. It usually takes him eighteen months to find out if a new plant or leaf is viable.

      Some of Richards’s favourite СКАЧАТЬ