Thinking of food and lettuce

 

I have grown a lot of lettuce over time, my favourite lettuce from the supermarkets are Little Gem and Iceberg.  But looking at the above remembering those tight little balls of red lettuce (radicchio) grown over winter.  Lambs lettuce plucked alongside a big pot of mixed leaves. The Lollo Rosso of summer with its red fringed leaves, more of an art work than taste.

A few days ago I saw that Tasker was turning his nose up at Belgian chicons/endives, or chicory, a favourite of mine.  Even grown them, like rhubarb you need to force them in the dark.  Grow a particular lettuce through the summer, then dig them up cut the foliage off, just leaving an inch or two of the green, then plant in the cool of Autumn, with a flowerpot over the heads and wait till they grow into that slightly bitter white fleshed delicacy.

Cooking. Just cook to tender, squeeze water out, then wrap in ham with a cheese sauce to cover, then bake in oven.  Alternatively a few leaves in a mixed salad will enliven it. I was looking at a recipe the other day where chicory was halved and fried to a rich deep brown, I think the word would be unctuous.

I had also mentioned trout and gooseberry sauce on Tom Stephenson's blog.  It bought back the memory of the trout we had bought from the Farleigh Hungerford trout farm, the lad would come around knocking at the door and you could buy fresh trout from him.  I notice that 'Watercress Cottage' from whence it came from has been sold for a very large sum and has entered the realms of those upmarket retirement  'cottages'.  Sadly.  Needless to say the river was a chalk stream, fed by springs.

I have also as a child fished for trout in Wales, and even tickled them. Sent off in the summer holidays to a Welsh farm, I would make my way down to the river with the pig in tow.  It was idyllic, probably as children we did not catch much.  But I remember the farmer catching an eel, which jumped about in his haversack on the walk back.  It was cut up but to this day I swear it jumped round in the frying pan.

I spent a lot of time in the summer holidays on two farms, perfectly happy, sometimes with my brother or another time with my pony, my grandfather was far too busy to have us around.  I learnt to eat the chickens I had seen killed, also helped to pluck them of course.  

Farms in those days were lessons in self survival, would you send your children to a large farm where they raised bulls for showing? Watching them be exercised in the yard was a window job.  The boar had its own enclosure yard, which you had to cross to get to the barns.  Sprint across or if he came out head for the barn with the bales of straw. There was always an adventure to be had, rounding up the cows for milking, losing our ponies because the youngest son played cruel tricks on us. Sitting on what I thought was an empty hive because it had gardening tools on it, and as I idly kicked against its side, a whole nest of angry bees came out and fastened themselves to my foot. I fled to the kitchen and the farmer's wife picked them all off and then applied that blue starch? to my leg.

Well PJ is making it back.  The tracking of cuckoos................