Blackberries and PSB

Almost, almost. A few times over the past week people have said ‘it feels almost spring-like’. The mercury is certainly rising now, after the Arctic temperatures at the start of the month. During the cold snap we had to isolate after a few Covid cases at nursery; with the hours feeling like days, there was nothing for it but to cook. Scones with raspberry and tayberry jam (I burnt the jam but it turned out to taste toffee-like rather than carbonated); 5-hour baked lamb; all types of pancake – the larder, and my cookbook collection, is my Lockdown friend.

The potted blueberry became an ice sculpture at the start of the month
Pancakes are food for the soul as well as body: this puffy Norwegian baked pancake came with blueberries and maple syrup
Scones with raspberry and tayberry jam. Clotted cream mandatory.
5-hour baked lamb shoulder collapses into shreds with the poke of a spoon. Serve with tzaziki, baked new potatoes, green beans dressed with feta and spiced aubergine relish.

But all this domestic lounging around can’t go on for ever. As the plants start to green up and the daffodils swell, I can feel energy rising. We’re on the cusp of time to be getting busy, and within the next month or so I’ll start off the early seeds. A TO DO list is back up on the kitchen wall, full of tasks that take seconds to write but weeks to actually make happen (‘renovate bathroom’, ’tile kitchen’). And on the allotment, this little patch of anarchy has been provoking me: raspberries, wild blackberries and grass, all jumbled together into an unholy mess.

The autumn raspberries have been colonised by brambles and grass

February is the time for cutting back autumn raspberries, and I trim ours right down to the base every year at this time. We inherited these plants. If I was starting from scratch I’d plant the canes in neat rows, but as it is, they are uneven, unruly and thriving; every year we have more fruit than I can be bothered to pick. However a few years back a wild blackberry set up home here, sending out runners which have grown into lethal traffids. These in turn make it impossible to keep the grass down, a perfect storm of irritation. Incidentally, a blackberry plant is nigh-on-impossible to pull out due to their lengthy tap root, but I am told the key is to bury down into the soil a few inches, find a new little pink shoot, and cut below that to help weaken the plant. This needs to be repeated for several years. So today I made a start, heaving and puffing in the February winds, but some are so big I’ll have to bring out an actual saw (a saw!) to sort the buggers out.

This bramble requires drastic action
Raspberries trimmed and mulched – the biggest blackberry still in place waiting to be hacked out with a saw.

My reward for today’s graft was an early picking of purple sprouting broccoli. These were bonus plants that I was gifted last summer by my in-laws, which I planted and then ignored. Taking out the central flower now encourages side shoots, just like with a sweet pea or cosmos, except these are a far more tasty treat. I’ll blanch the PSB stems then toss them in olive oil, chilli flakes, garlic and parmesan, the most perfect sauce for oriechette.

An early crop of PSB

One bonus of the cold weather is that the white fly that has lived in the brassica cage since August has finally been zapped, leaving pristine cavolo nero and pentland brig kale. A quick rinse in cold water and we’re ready to go – I can feel a minestrone coming on.

Also this week:
Cooking and eating: 5 hour lamb with aubergine relish, then the leftovers turned into wraps with massive flatbreads and fresh parsley from the Halal shop; burnt tayberry, raspberry (and redcurrant) jam; scones; apple caramel upside down cake; pea and paneer curry. Still no booze (body says no) which I continue to be sad about.
Harvesting: Kale, cavolo nero, PSB
Also: Trains, cars, stories, painting, Cbeebies etc etc etc. Reading My Life On The Road by Gloria Steinem and Two Kitchens by Rachel Roddy. Watching It’s a Sin, which is possibly the best TV ever made but devastating.

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