welsh hills again

Months ago Ian came in from his office, as we grandly call the overcrowded and chilly porch where the desktop computer lives, and said "Listen to this.  You would like this."  It was an email invitation to Perch Hill, home of Sarah Raven and Adam Nicolson , to a summer event, a feast, with names from the world of food such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall .  Visitors were to stay in tents.  It was to be a weekend for wandering around the garden and eating glorious food. I would like it.  I would like it a lot.  Within an hour I had established that Ian was not bothered about going himself but happy for me to go, approached a friend who is always up for doing something new and interesting, even though she is not a gardener and much more interested in eating food than cooking it, and by ten past nine the next morning we were booked in.  The speed and decisiveness aren't too uncharacteristic but they don't usually get used on somethi...

I didn't appreciate before I started to grow food on a reasonably large scale - domestic scale still, but lots of it - that there is no stage between the one where you get excited about the three real pears on your little pear tree, bring them inside to a bowl on the kitchen table, feel them gently every day as they ripen (pears ripen much better inside than on the tree), finally eat one in ecstacy, the juice running deliriously down your chin, and the stage where you are bringing them inside in buckets. How can this be?  It was the same with the damsons and the plums so I suspect our gloriously warm and dry spring (do you remember?) was just what the fruit crop wanted.  The same holds true for vegetable crops of course.  One day you are cutting your first beans and eating them simply dressed with butter and drooling at their deliciousness.  The next you are wilting slightly in the face of trugs full of the things marching into the kitchen, each bean as long and...

I have been looking forward to reading and reviewing this book for ages.  Mark Diacono is the head gardener at River Cottage and runs his own garden at Otter Farm where he grows all sorts of exotic and unusual things: apricots, Japanese wineberries, Szechuan pepper and kai-lan are just a handful.  He also writes for The English Garden (pause for small "what about my Welsh garden" rant) and his are always amongst the articles I really read rather than skip over.  This is a book both about growing unusual things to eat and also about cooking them.  I love growing food, I love cooking it, I love eating it.  When the book came in the post it felt like Christmas. I am a speed reader, a skipper and skitterer over things that bore me and an express train reader with things I like.  But I have taken my time with this.  It is a book so densely packed with ideas and information and written with so much knowledge and even love that it seemed wrong to take it at...

This week a book arrived in the post.  Always a good thing.  I didn't pay for the book as it is a review copy which has also to be a good thing, although to be honest I would have happily paid and if you read my earlier review of Toby Buckland's book you will see that getting a review copy does not equate to unqualified adulation in the review.  I did  like Toby's book, mind, just not enough to buy it. This book is Mark Diacono 's Taste of the Unexpected.  Mark is the head gardener at River Cottage and in his own garden at Otter Farm he grows unexpected and delightful things to eat.  This book is an encouragement to us all to break out of the ruts full of potatoes and carrots in which we all plod and have a go at new and unusual fruit and vegetables. I can't review it yet because I am still reading it and probably will be for a bit because it bears close attention and I am still thinking about it.  This is unusual for me.  Normally I'm a bit...