On purple sprouting broccoli

A promise is a promise, and I'll come to that in due course. 

First though, I wanted to evangelise about this week's bag. This week's (ahem!) standard-no-potatoes bag. Yeah, you heard me. I've upgraded! No more standard bag envy for me! No more little bag blues. I've disdainfully waved farewell to the proletariat and am now rubbing ermine-draped shoulders with the elitist bourgeoisie. Feel free to throw rotten vegetables at me if you wish, but you won't find any of those in your bags this week because everything is fresh, fresh, fresh! 

To start with I've got more parsnips than I can shake a carrot at, and they're lovely-looking things, slender and pale like David Bowie in 1972. Or like David Bowie now, to be honest. They might become a zingy soup with apples or pears, or else they'll be grated and dressed  with rapeseed oil, chopped capers and grainy mustard as a sort of multi-purpose raw side dish. The carrots and onions are reliably there, as always, ready to lend their sweet notes to a stock or casserole. I might do a curry, for which the onions will of course be invaluable. Haven't done a curry for a while. And it is curry weather.  

There are lots of green leaves this week, which makes me very happy. The stir-fry bags from Calabaza have been a constant source of joy over the winter. Fried in oil of your choice with a bit of garlic and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end (and a good grind of black pepper), you can swizzle those mixed leaves around a bowl of pasta or gnocchi and you have a delicious, healthy midweek supper in no time at all. Add a few cubes of feta if you feel the need (but then your supper won't be that healthy anymore. Problem?). By replacing the pasta with noodles, the lemon juice with lime juice and adding a glug of fish sauce you could do the same with the pak choi. 

And there's chard! Get in! Strip the green stuff from the stems, chop the stems and fry them up in butter with some garlic until soft, then chuck in the green stuff and move it around for a minute. Add salt and pepper. Done. Or do as Slater does, and make a gratin out of cream mixed with grain mustard and parmesan. 

I don't know what I'm going to do with the leeks yet, but they're what I consider a 'utility vegetable' as they're so versatile. And I've got a turnip the size of Mansfield - I've never knowingly cooked or eaten a turnip before so that's going to be a voyage of discovery. 

But you haven't come here for all that. You're here because in my last post I promised a sonnet on purple sprouting broccoli if it should appear in our bags again. And of course it did, just last week. So here, too late to be of any actual use to anyone, because you've already cooked and eaten your purple sprouting, is my poem. I don't consider myself to be any sort of poet, by the way. Neither will you in a minute. 

The similarity to the Elizabeth Browning classic only lasts a couple of lines, but I've tried to retain the rhyme scheme. Obviously. So alright then: a sonnet. 14 lines, 10 syllables per line. Them's the rules. Go! 

(Clears throat. Nonchalantly adjusts cravat.)

How do I eat thee? Let me count the ways.

I eat thee to the stem and leaf and tip.

Raw dipped in hummus, to prepare is brief,

But on palate thy flavour lasts for days.

I eat thee as thy sesame oil plays

with garlic and fish sauce on my lip,

And chili and ginger dance on tongue's tip.

Alas, your season ends in saddest Mays.

But what keeps me glad throughout the year?

It's not the thought of baking under cream.

However, clearly that would be a dream.

It's dipping you in box-baked Camembert! 

Yes, I am sorry about rhyming 'year' with 'Camembert'. But Browning seems to have got away with rhyming 'faith' with 'breath'. Slapdash, if you ask me, but that's poets for you.

I leave you with a simple picture of some wonderfully leafy purple sprouting broccoli frying in my pan, just after the black pepper went in by the look of it. I can't tell you when my next post will arrive but I can guarantee one thing: There won't be another blummin' poem. 

Don't know what to call this one...

I've got to wondering recently why clafoutis is always sweet, and in a similar vein, why toad-in-the-hole always involves sausages. These parallel thoughts converged in my mind yesterday when I decided to treat those amazing-looking purple sprouts to the batter-baking treatment. What I ended up with, I now realise, was less a savoury clafoutis or a something-else-in-the-hole, than a quiche without the pastry. More on that later.

First, excuse-time. I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to do a new post. I've been away for a bit. I also had a few evening meetings meaning late returns home and no cooking. There has also been a new Mogwai album (which I'm now familiar enough with to be able to listen to as I write these words). So many distractions! But I'm here now and determined to be a better blogger from now on. (By the way, completely off-topic: Google's blogger system's spellchecker doesn't like the word 'blogger'. How silly is that? Similar to my mobile phone's spellchecker, which questions the word 'snooze' despite the fact that it appears in its own alarm function. Is it just me, or is that really funny?).

I had particularly intended to write about the purple sprouting broccoli a couple of weeks ago; had in fact, written much of the post in my head, it was just a question of typing it up, but I just didn't get around to it. I love that stuff. So much in fact that I was even going to have a go at writing a sonnet, based on Elizabeth Barrett's 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'. If purple sprouting appears in our bags again before the end of the season, I'll do it! 

But this post is about purple sprouts. Here they are:

There can be few more beautiful vegetables to look at. And the fact that I got such a whopping bagful (hope it wasn't just me, Blanche!) meant that I could be a bit experimental as there was enough for two or three dinners. So the idea for the batter-baking presented itself. It may well be that this sort of thing is a common dish in Lithuania or Staffordshire, and I've just not heard of it, but for the purpose of this blog I'll just have to call my savoury clafoutis or quiche without the pastry something dull and descriptive. If anyone can think of a better name for it, feel free to let me know!

Batter-baked purple sprouts

Serves an army

About 25 sprouts (I wasn't counting, as usual)

Knob of butter (plus a bit extra for greasing)

A clove or two of garlic

A fillet or two of anchovy (optional I suppose)

100g grated mature cheddar

3 heaped tablespoons of flour

Three free-range eggs

150ml single cream

250ml milk

Enough grated parmesan to give a thin cover

Cut the bottoms off the sprouts, remove the outer leaves, then slice thinly. Chop the garlic; Put the butter on to melt. Cook the garlic gently in the butter for a couple minutes - don't let it colour. 

Sift the flour into a bowl and add the eggs. Stir them in. It'll look lumpy and disastrous. Do not fear. Whisk in the cream and milk slowly, then speed up a bit until all the lumps are miraculously gone. Finely chop the anchovy and add it to the batter mix along with the melted butter and garlic. Mix in the cheddar. Season with salt and plenty of freshly-ground black pepper.

Scatter the sprouts liberally around a greased tart dish or other suitable container, then pour over the batter. Scatter the parmesan evenly over the top. Put the dish in a pre-heated gas mark 6 oven for 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to about gas 4 until the top is lightly browned; a slight wobble in the centre would be ok, perhaps even desirable. 

It will hopefully look not too dissimilar to this:

Serve it in wedges like a quiche. You might even be able to convert stubborn sprout-haters with this! Hot, I think it would make a nifty starter, perhaps served with a rasher of crispy bacon or a poached egg. Cold it is perhaps even better, and would be great for a picnic if only sprout season coincided with picnic season. Happily, I think this treatment would work even better with asparagus, whose season makes it more conducive to being eaten off gingham table cloths stretched over the verdant and gently-rolling contours of Brockwell Park. 

There is swede in this week's bag, something which I'm sure has brought much joy to all of you. I'm quite happy about it, as it means I can do my swede pie again and actually get to eat more of it than 5/6 of a slice, which was all I got last time. I'm also looking forward to Thursday's Jerusalem artichokes. 

Pip pip!