In the style of Francesca, Gerard’s mother. My partner Gerard’s mother was born in New Zealand, but both of her parents had been recent immigrants from the island of Stromboli, north of Sicily, in the Aeolian Sea. She went on to have five children and became a completely devoted mother who always had a pot…
Category: Spring 2020
Artichokes Hearts – how to prepare and preserve
If you have a few artichoke plants, chances are that by late November/early December you will have a glut. If you pick them while they are still small you can prepare them and preserve them in cider vinegar, and they taste just like the ones you buy in the deli. An artichoke throws up one…
Globe Artichokes
The first wee globe artichokes began poking their little heads above the leaves in mid-September. By the start of October, we were eating them, and its pretty much the only veg we ate for three months. We did chomp our way through the last of the winter veg as everything got tougher and older and…
Pickled red cabbage
My dad used to make this. I loved it so much I would stand at the frig door and eat it straight out of the jar. Recently I got a hankering for it, and handily had one last red cabbage to use up before the great flowering. I don’t have my dad’s recipe and he…
Stuffed cabbage rolls
You can make these two ways, with a meat filling or vegetarian. The meat one below is adapted from Provence, the Beautiful Cookbook by Richard Olney (Welden Owen 1994). I simplified the original recipe which requires the cook to make sausage meat and tomato sauce from scratch. Instead I used good quality pork sausages and…
food ripe from my garden 