A modest first crop from the window box “garden” I have been cultivating. Chinese cabbage, spinach beet, and a very small amount of young parsley (I don’t do well with parsley). After some early bad experiences with digging squirrels, I am amazed each day to see the green leaves still waving happily at my window, but I wanted to get some of them in and on our plates before my luck turns again.

After some internet research and consultations with other home gardeners, I found out that squirrels hate cayenne pepper, and cats hate citrus peel. Between this and discovering the handiness of cloches made from economy soda water bottles, my planters look like Woolworths WorthIt! Zen sculpture gardens. But nothing digs in them.

Today I said a sad goodbye to the Growing Communities volunteer team, as work starts on Monday. There’ll be Sundays once a month, and holidays, and I won’t miss shovelling gravel and compost much, but it’s been nice being in a ‘proper’ garden and bouncing thoughts off more knowledgeable folk once or twice a week. And I have learned how to not kill plants, as evidenced above. It’s tempting to bore on about how we should all live a healthy, outdoor lifestyle, growing our own, etc etc – but then I wonder: whilst growing, cooking and eating are some of my greatest pleasures, are they my greatest skills? The parsley says no. We developed division of labour for a reason, and part of it was that pasty bookworms would not starve to death. In fact, that was probably a major factor in the stoppage of natural selection in the human race, along with glasses, antibiotics and the various other wonders that have stopped us squinty indoor types from deservedly carking it so far.

Later on I am going to attempt some polenta and whiskey salmon. I’m only brave enough to do this to mine beloved on a work night because (a) my karma is in the black thanks to a large batch of chocolate cupcakes, and (b) if a person doesn’t object when you cook fish in amaretto, then frankly they can handle anything. Oh, and (c) this week’s the last time I will view food as fun, rather than fuel, until the half term holidays. Whether this blog will be updated with tales of canteen pizza, who knows.

First DIY attempt is a typical Tuscan cannellini bean salad. We had this for lunch in the Mercato Centrale in Florence, as a side dish in a restaurant, and saw it again in Borough Market yesterday. Not for ‘customer facing’ days as it gives you appropriately Dante-esque hellish breath. For authenticity it should really be drowned in gallons of olive oil, though I learned to say “senza olio” pretty quickly.

Tonne cipolla e fagioli

4 portions: 300g canned tuna
1 1/2 sliced raw red onions
2 cans cannellini beans
Handful of fresh coriander, 1tsp dried mixed herbs

 <– the original

 <– the imitation

Note that to make this salad look appetising, you need 33C heat and the sun to be shining directly onto your plate. London rain and low energy lightbulbs don’t quite cut it.

I’ve been learning (the hard way) where my food comes from this week – first of all helping to grow and harvest lettuces on the veg box scheme plot, finding out what a cloche is and murdering a lot of root aphids in the process – then working a shift packing up fruit bags for collection. I got a very wet arse the first day, very dirty hands the second, and spent a lot of time weighing greengages. I don’t remember seeing greengages since the late 80s. We didn’t take to them, so I made them into a makeshift jam (250g greengages, 1/5 cup water, 75g sugar, boil to as near 220C as you can get and then shove it in a jar and hope you eat it before it goes off because you have no sterilising equipment).

Second cabbage incident in the veg box. This time we followed the recipe that came with it – very very simple; you cook the chopped-up cabbage in a tablespoon of oil with some fresh chilli, add half a can of coconut milk, simmer down to a manageable volume, and top with caramelised onion slices and mustard seeds. It’s tasty although, as OH remarked, “probably first discovered by someone who was pregnant”. Goes well with new potatoes and raita.

If this happens to you, do not look up cabbage recipes on the internet. If you are prejudiced already against cabbages then they all sound foul, especially the soups. One site proudly claims to have collected 200+ such recipes from around the world, and I could not find a single one I wanted to taste. In desparation, resorted to the usual fallback strategy – taking something from Delia’s website and rendering it down to the available time, ingredients, and will to live. Hence I decided to make “cabbage rolls”.

Step 1: Try and remove whole leaves from your socking great leering organic cabbage. The outside layer is probably too gnarled and full of soil/slugs. Curse, make holes in leaves, remove invertebrate passengers from cabbage.

Step 2: “Blanch” leaves. I thought blanching was what genteel ladies did in Victorian novels when presented with something shocking, like an unpolished fork. In fact it involves dunking them in boiling water for 5 mins, so they become suppliant and pliable and beautifully delicate-looking, almost transparent.

Step 3: Wrap and tuck leaves around 2 big spoonfuls of whatever you please (brown rice, kidney beans, carrots, onions, garlic, Tabasco and herbs, with a beaten egg mixed in for consistency). Pour a lazy carton of tomatoes over ‘em and bake (180C, 30 minutes did it for us).

And thus we discovered that cabbage is actually really nice.

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Today: tapas cooking. Apart from the eggs, oil, seasonings and tahini, everything here comes from our box:

Salad: Oakleaf lettuce, cabbage again, cherry tomato, cucumber.

Tortilla: 4 small Accent potatoes, 3 small onions, 1 carrot, 1/5 courgette, basil, oregano, salt & pepper, 6 eggs and a dash of milk.

Courgette: Sliced into 4 lengthways, brushed with olive oil, grilled for 6-7 minutes each side, tahini dressing adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: 50ml tahini, 50ml water (he says 55 but I was using a spirit measure), juice of 2 small lemons (he says 1/2 but OH complained the dressing “tasted like peanut butter”), 1 grated clove of garlic. Lovely stuff.

To reward ourselves for saving the leftovers, we had “lazy black forest” for the second day in a row – early blackberries picked by the Lea, combined with Carte D’Or triple chocolate ice cream. It sort of works, though might never have been invented if we’d had anything else to eat them with…

I noticed that although there were quite a few blackberries already out, nobody apart from us was going near them. Whenever a local happened by, I got embarrassed and pretended not to be hunting and gathering at all. Is it poor etiquette to pick public wild fruit? Do the people of EN3 know something about it that we don’t? Maybe blackberries don’t cost £3 for a teaspoonful in Enfield supermarkets. Though pub grub is £10 per plate (£6 if you have a child’s portion, but it comes in a kiddie bowl!) so I am sceptical.

My Google search history bears many traces from previous such failings - “cake without eggs”, “bread without fat”, “lasagne without tomatoes”, the very optimistic “white sauce without milk” and so on. This time it was “salad dressing without vinegar”, which eventually yielded a few raw-food things for those who are allergic to life. A little adapting and de-sanctifying later and this was my result:

NO VINEGAR SALAD DRESSING (femme)

Juice of 2 medium-sized lemons
2cm piece of ginger, grated
2 tsp garlic puree
1 small apple, grated
1 tsp clear honey
black pepper to taste
2 tsp water (if needed to thin out)

1) Squeeze the lemons.
2) Grate the ginger and apple.
3) Put it all in a blender and blend it.

I intend to present the unsuspecting OH with this tonight. OH, having far fewer calorific neuroses than me, has a salad dressing recipe that goes like this:

NO VINEGAR SALAD DRESSING (butch)

1 huge can olive oil, upended for at least 10 seconds.

Incidentally this is also the recipe Spanish barmen use for a whisky measure, only with whisky bottle substituted for olive oil can (if you’re lucky).

We shall see what the response to the Raw Dressing is later when it is poured over this (100g pearl barley, 2 grated carrots, and 1/2 cucumber diced):

Frankly you would have to go a very long way to ruin the amazing carrots with which we are provided weekly by Growing Communities. I tried bloody hard with the “no pastry quiche”, but even that was palatable, once you’d poured off the geysers of carrot and courgette juice that joyfully sprang forth from it in the oven. If I can find the recipe I will by all means post it. Wear a mac though.