The Impulsive Gardener

First strawberries!!! Oh joyous occasion, I'm just a little sunburnt and eating my first strawberry of the season. These were the forced strawberries I brought in over winter (the link tells all and describes what to do if you'd like to have a go. It's easier than the word 'forcing' might inspire you to think).

Just a quickie, because you need this in your life, like, now.

I can't claim to be surprised where I found it because this lady's blog is the cause of so much delight (and the downfall of every calorie counting schlog ever attempted) but this recipe is just everything I've ever wanted. Booze, liberal amounts of spices and a tasty way to rid myself of those impressively pungent spotty bananas funking out my kitchen.



It happens every time. We get them, I eat one or two while they're tasty and green, then they start getting spottier and spottier and smellier and smellier. But I can't just throw them away. No, they've usually dropped from whatever hook I've hung them from and splatted on the counter before I'll finally admit defeat and wave my way past the fruit flies to scrape together their remains and chuck them to the chickens.


I'd like to say I was the good sort of girlfriend. The sort who surprises my amazing, super manly, spider squishing, cabinet building other half with a beautiful, unspoiled loaf of lovingly baked bread, but this is not so. Forty-five minutes in the oven had driven out the raw, overripe banana funk and replaced it with heavy drool-inducing fumes, too tempting to be resisted without a third party providing restraint. I did at least use a knife, rather than ripping right into it like when I forget lunch and attack whole loaves of French bread, eating them from the inside out (oh, thats healthy). I didn't eat all of it, but it went faster than the dead camera battery could charge, so apologies for being piggies. I'll be sure to make the full recipe next time so theres a spare loaf for photo shoots.

So anyway, go forth. Collect your spotty bananas and make this, make it now! Bikini season can wait.

Early nectarine blossom

I'm perhaps a little unbalanced when it comes to fruit, especially when so much of the store bought stuff is basically expensive mush. This is my first year of potential harvests and, however tiny they may be, I am already twitching with anticipation. I counted five little fruitlets on my dwarf Red Haven nectarine and I'll be closely watching every one.


Yes, there is a touch of peach leaf curl, which I might be taking a little bit personally, having so carefully housed the darn thing under glass all winter and spring. I even (after much deliberation) sprayed with some Bordeaux mixture, trying to root out any little spores that might have tagged along from the nursery but all apparently to no avail. I was so good, and I still got ugly, bumpy red leaves.

Myosotidium hortensia,  Chatham Island forget-me-not.

The middle of May and by far my most prolific crop thus far are snails. Dead snails, live snails and most improbably, a slug I found under the bedside table. I am so sorry organic gardeners, but in the face of so many slimies I have been liberal with the slug pellets.

Thanks to the stellar (horrible) weather we've been enjoying (enduring), everything is well-watered but there is a marked lack of growth happening. My tomatoes are sulking in the windowsills and even the normally energetic pole beans seem to be growing much more slowly than I remember. Still, this is when I'm extra thankful for things like radishes and carrots, whose stubborn insistence to grow despite the lack of sunshine makes up for them having been something of an afterthought in my veg- related planning.


This will be my first ever year of growing radicchio, which apparently is similar to chicory, not that that means much to me. It had a beautiful photo, with fantastic deep red and white striped foliage, how could I resist? My plant buying strategy is much like my attitude to buying wine : Approached with more enthusiasm than knowledge and if the label looks good, get it. I got seed-packet madness (when you have handfuls of brightly coloured sachets and in fits of dizzyness start throwing carefully laid plans to the wind) and so my sowing is a little early, thus I run the risk of overpowering bitterness. Worst-case scenario, I sow again later in the summer and will have learnt my lesson. If the plants simply look good, a large part of me will be totally satisfied.


How great is it to find an orchid? Well, I found two. A Common Twayblade Neottia ovata (top) and a Early Purple Orchid Orchis mascula (bottom). 


Keep and eye out for the various wet-loving things you can find unexpectadly. Thus far my list includes, newts, frogs, mushrooms and these two lovely flowers.

In my defence, I didn't mean to spend all day in the kitchen. I was going to just make one quick little pudding. Something easy using the rhubarb growing rampantly in the garden. I meant well.


An hour later I am left with custard, stewed rhubarb and a large measure of frustrated anticipation for tonight's pudding. What am I going to do with this, I wondered, poking a bowl of unappetising rhubarb slop and trying to ignore the gross skin beginning to creep acrosse the surface of the custard. Nigel said it would work, but where ever it was that I'd gone wrong, I'd gone badly wrong. Mushy rhubarb topped with some mushy custard ain't pretty and after the taste test, I wasn't even going to try my trusty flaked almonds to tart it up.



Cinnamon saved the day; in desperation I added a dash to the custard I'd used to hide the stringy rhubarb goop, and suddenly my taste buds rushed to another memory of custard and cinnamon. Pasteis de nata. As I've encountered them, these are essentially little mini custard tarts with that memorable dash of cinnamon on top I so fondly remember. However.....

Pasteis de nata or Portuguese custard tarts. This lovely photo is by psd

...let me mention that I hate making pastry. I hate getting dough between my fingers and under my nails and despite always being cold my hands are perfect pastry melters and I'm generally too impatient (impulsive) to follow any recipe which calls for resting to the letter. Fifteen minutes in the freezer is surely worth a hour in the fridge, right? Pastry making is time wasted that I'll never get back, I thought, so I'll just use some of that lovely pre-made stuff and get on with my life.  However, when I searched in my trusty freezer I found no puff pastry. Shock. Horror. I am never out of anything and if it has the word 'puff' in the title, I'm likely to keep in in store just for that tiny bit of amusement it gives me.
So, in a fit of over-caffeinated bravery, I googled and made rough puff pastry, even going so far as to properly refrigerate and keeping the butter cold. Hell is a long way from freezing over but there may be a mild frost warning tonight.

I folded and counted and rested, getting braver and more confident as each step was reached. I made the custard (Bird's - I know, it's not hard to make the proper stuff but I was already in over my head with making pastry that puffs while rhubarb goo coagulated in a messy sulk on my counter tops), and carefully spooned a little bit of rhubarb into each cup, then topped off with the custard and a dash of cinnamon.

The only recipes I followed to the letter were the rough puff pastry recipe and the Birds custard recipe (on the back of the tin). Then I baked for 15-20 minutes at 240*, which in hindsight, might have been a bit too hot. As you can see much of my custard has escaped, although the rough puff worked brilliantly, much to my surprise.

So in summary:

Preheat your oven to 220* C

Make the pastry

Make the custard of your choice (heres' a nice one if you'd like to have a go from scratch) while the pastry rests. I worked from the same quantity and had more custard than I really needed but unfortunately I got a little excited and forgot to measure how much I actually used.

Mix 3 tsp water with 3 tbsp sugar (or honey) and 250g of roughly chopped rhubarb. Cook over a medium heat for 15 min or until the rhubarb is tender but not a stringy mush. If, like me, you go too far and make stringy mush, that's okay. Just whatever you do, don't let prospective dinner guests see it because while rhubarb mush is actually perfectly tasty and will be hidden under the custard anyway, it looks très gross.

Flavour with 1 tsp of vanilla extract and a dash of cinnamon, cover with clingfilm (helps to minimise a skin forming on the top, then set aside.

After the pastry has rested (this helps to keep it from shrinking back as you roll it out) use a cookie cutter and cut out rounds to fit your tart or muffin trays. The diameter of the cutter I used was 3.5" or 9cm.

Using your fingers, squish the middle of each pastry disc so that the centre is thinner than the sides and the whole thing is slightly bowl shaped. Braver souls can experiment to see if this is necessary ; I was a chicken and concerned about lack of crisping on the bottoms. My thoughts were that thinner bottoms means a reduced risk of uncooked, mushy pastry.

Pop a bowled round of pastry into each muffin pocket (technical term for 'holes in a muffin tin'?) and gently press the pastry so that the tops of the pastry are around the tops of their respective pockets. Over shooting should be okay, mine were all slightly under the lip but everything worked fine.

Spoon about a tablespoon of rhubarb into each pastry case (should be about 1/4th full) then top up with the custard till about .5 cm from the top.

Bake at 220* C for 15-20 min or until the pastry is golden brown and the custard is firm. Beware munching them right out of the oven! The outsides may be of eating temperature but inside the custard is lava hot. Serve warm (at least a ten minute wait, then bite carefully) with a dash of cinnamon. Mine kept for a week in an air tight container and were lovely popped back in the oven for five minutes or so to re-crisp their cases.

Thus far, I've made a lot of effort to fool you into thinking that I'm not actually an overly impulsive person; I was just being ironic when I made this blog and I am actually totally calm, collected and most of my ideas are thought out and well planned. Well, those of you who had their doubts when I bought a curry plant on a whim will not be surprised to hear that the other day I impulse-bought essence of rennet.

Available in Waitrose believe it or not, in and amongst the flavourings and vanilla essence.

'What on earth...?' I hear you say. No, it's fine. A perfectly normal thing to have in the cupboard, you (probably) make cheese with it, which was what I told myself as I snatched it off the shelf and hid it behind the onions and out of sight of OH, who is practical and does not buy ingredients which he does not know how to use (and quite rightly tries to rein me in when I attempt to do so).

Well, my first batch was a total flop. I made some milk mush which was nice in a watery mascarpone sort of way but was definitely nothing like the herb-crusted little beauties I'd had in mind. I won't show you the results, no amount of playing around in photoshop would make the little quivering puddle of goo look anything other than mildly  nauseating. 

The second batch is curdling away near the wood stove and will hopefully be glorious, though at this stage is no more photogenic than it's goo sibling.

The next day.....

AHHHHH! Success (dances around waving arms)! I have cheese curdles (above)! I left the curds overnight to drain and then squeezed them in a muslin cloth till they were dry dry dry. And look (down)! Okay, there are prettier cheese related images out there but I think it's still a respectable thing to appreciate my little hunklets of home-made, nameless cheese stuff.

And the taste? ....well, I'll be perfecting my technique before I go entering any contests, but the simple fact remains, I   Have    Made    Cheese.

For those who'd like a go, this is Bon Appétit, a lovely blog which has the recipe I followed. 

....words to sum up last week

While the weather is being less than helpful and clumps of mud the size of- oh, I don't know- hippos, have been tracked in and out of the house, huge progress was made in my garden:
After avoiding even looking at it for weeks, I've finally tackled the large bed of luxuriant ground elder growing along the wall, uncovering a small horde of (free!!!) allium bulbs and dill seedlings.

From this...

To this! Room for a Hinnonmaki yellow gooseberry, a tayberry teepee (the idea is to train the canes in a spiral-cone shape. Fingers and toes crossed) two cardoon seedlings and maybe my plum or pear tree.

Whoo-hoo! Free plants! I found two seedlings of dill and bronze fennel. Okay, I may have also sown about 50 of my own but still. I found these. Like food off of someone else's plate, they'll taste even better.

My scavenged brick-and-bits walkways are almost done! Good bits of brick and flattish-stones are getting harder to come by but all the trouble of hunting them out of various rubbish piles is worth it as they're saving the paths from becoming total mud mires.




I've found a wild gooseberry and saved it from certain squishing by diggers, discovered four rhubarb crowns growing in the overgrown garden next door and tackled overgrown fruit trees.

Before. Dead limb, half broken branches and about 20 little plum suckers were jostling for space.

The light has gone but already, it's so much better. I suspect that two of the smaller plum trees on the right are actually rootstock suckers which have sprung up in between the two rows of pear, apple and plum trees, so they may also be taken after they fully leaf out if they prove to be robbing too much space and light.

Most of the plum blossom has dropped, now is the turn of some of the later pears and what I think are two apple trees. Ever notice how pear blossom smells fishy?

 While orange is not really my favourite colour, these flowers have turned out to be so unfailing, always growing well and giving back seeds which work every time, that I've been totally won over. I bought a bag of the little curled seeds three years ago, wanting to grow something bright to lure the bees into my greenhouse and over to my chillies. In my little greenhouse, I resented giving mere flowers any growing space at the expense of my precious tomatoes, so I kept them in pots. A chore at watering time but hugely convenient as I came to like them so much, I moved them out to the patio where I could appreciate them more. I've never had to buy any more seeds, as they've happily self sown- treading the fine line between invasive and helpful- or been collected when the heads turn brown and crumbled away into their funny little hooked segments when rubbed.

The seeds on sale here have been very good and you'll never have to buy another pack as they're such fecund little things.