I love my food, there’s no doubting that. I’ll never be one of these stick-thin types, a) because I have child bearing hips and b) because food has an important part to play in my life - growing it, cooking it and savouring it.

I come from a family where every occasion is marked by some sort of meal or foodie event. We’re a bit continental, in that our extended family often gets together and feasts. In the summer and autumn, a lot of the food we eat is home-grown, and tastes all the better for it.

I really enjoy cooking from scratch. In fact, I rarely don’t cook from scratch, unless I’m whacking something like a beanburger on. It might sound extremely tragic to those that are living high-flying careers, but cooking my dinner is a highlight of my day. Rich is far more experimental than me with his dishes -I tend to stick to my favourites (I could live on home-made soups for months on end) and cook them on a rotation. He went through a phase of making proper italian pizzas, the dough, the tomatoes, the buffalo mozzerella, fresh basil, baked on the back of a hot cast iron dish. They were stunning. He inspires me to try harder.

We both like to cook, so a lot of the time we cook our separate meals, which sometimes results in jostling and cries of “can you get out of the way!” and “oi, I need that pan!” or “do you have to stand there?”.

This summer I’m aiming to find interesting uses for all the produce at the Smallest Smallholding. I can’t wait until I’m able to walk a few yards, ponder over the vegetable patches about what to pick or pull up, and what I can do with it. At the moment though, there’s not a lot of edible stuff here, it’s all growing, germinating or yet to be sowed. I still have yet to master the whole productive year-round and storage thing.

Which means that at present, I am relying on the supermarket (bleurgh) for my ’scratch’ ingredients. Veg, passata, frozen peas et al. Farmer’s markets are thin on the ground, a bit like my cash situation. No cash, no food from the market or farm shop. The supermarket isn’t so bad at the mo, there’s a nice looking security guard there that I don’t mind ogling from afar, much to Rich’s bemusement (”…but he always looks so moody! You’re weird.”).

ANYWAY - I will finally make my point. Cash flow is crap at the moment, thanks in part to humongous vet bills, quarterly sky-high gas bills (despite our best efforts to be efficient) etc etc. So we are on a very very very tight, strict food budget. I needed to go on a bit of a diet anyway. 7 chocolate brioches, a few doughnuts, cookies, cakes and crisps later and I’m not exactly looking my best. Remember I have this school reunion to go to - I really don’t want to be the “one that got chubby”.

But being on a budget means that I am actually eating three GOOD square meals a day. I can’t afford the extras. So it’s like putting a little in and getting the maximum out. I don’t understand all this “I’m poor so I can’t afford to eat healthily” stuff. If anything, money makes me fatter! I have no self discpline when it comes to cakes, biscuits, bread and crisps.

On the allotment, I managed to inherit two large patches of rhubarb with some impressive crowns. I was actually surprised at how early you can harvest rhubarb, even without forcing it. See, I still have a lot to learn about growing veggies.

So off I trundled on Sunday, having decided that rhubarb crumble was on the menu for dessert, following our Sunday (veggie) roast. Whilst being blown to pieces, I pulled up a whole armful of sticks of rhubarb of varying sizes and thicknesses. Here’s a completely au naturel action shot of me approaching aforementioned rhubarb:

The ones that were far too thick and stringy were cut up (to aid decomposition - yep, MORE compost talk) and thrown (literally, from afar) onto the compost heap. I’m rubbish with portion sizes so I kept pulling and snipping the leaves off, and deciding that I didn’t have enough for one rhubarb crumble, would pull some more. This went on for a fair few minutes. I have a fear of cooking and not producing enough food for a meal that will leave me feeling satisfied. Or full to bursting. So as a consequence, I pretty much always cook far too much.

Now, bear in mind that there are only two of us here at the Smallest Smallholding. This is how much rhubarb I ended up with for my one crumble:

Once I got home, I washed and chopped up the rhubarb, cooked it with about 3/4 of an inch of water in the saucepan, and added about 6oz sugar. Once it was soft, and wafting delicious sweet acidic smells out of the kitchen, I strained it a bit and had to divide it into two dishes. I rubbed together 8oz of plain flour, 4oz of (fair trade) demerera sugar and 4oz (organic) butter together for the topping, sprinkled it on liberally, put a little more sugar on top and put both in the oven at gas mark 5. After about 20 minutes, my rhubarb crumbleS were ready. We served them up with Green & Black’s caramel and hazlenut ice cream.

Fan-bloody-tastic. My first allotment harvest was a veritable success.

My mother informs me that this year the price of onions is set to increase a fair amount. I think this is in part due to last year’s soggy summer, which proved a blight for onion growers. My Hercules onions that I grew last year were utterly fantastic - bursting with flavour and so sweet when cooked in soups and stews. I use onions almost every day in my cooking, and so it just made sense to grow as many as I could. However, last year I didn’t grow enough to store - only 50 sets or so that were each pulled, peeled, chopped and cooked and eaten within the hour.

Mum visited an onion growing farm last year - they had crates and crates bursting with literally tonnes of onions that had been rejected by Tesco, and were going to be binned. So the farmer threw Mum and her friend a few sacks and they filled them up. Crazy. I had a few of these onions, and they were perfectly fine.

I think I blogged (or possibly posted on my forum) last year on the fact that red onions in particular were going to be hit the hardest by the price increase. So earlier this year - safe in the knowledge that thanks to my allotment and new veg plots at the Smallest Smallholding, I now had ample space - I put some money aside for loads of onion sets. I tried growing onions from seed, but they failed miserably, probably due to the fact that I put them in far too late and didn’t nourish the soil enough beforehand. But from my reading and other people experiences, I have come to the conclusion that the general consensus is that sets mean bigger, faster-growing delicious onions.

I think if you’re going to grow from seed you could generally expect a smaller onion - or possibly have to extend your growing season considerably. If space is an issue - and last year, for me it was - then having sets means that you can pull them earlier and use the space for somethig else over the winter. Smaller onions can still obviously be used in cooking, but as with shallots and pickling onions you can preserve them, or do scrumptious things like roast them whole.

Did you know that your average British pickling onion does a few thousand miles? A typical journey might go something like this - grown here in the UK, picked and sent off to places like Poland, where they are peeled, sent back to Britain to be pickled, sent back to Poland to be bottled up and then finally brought back to be put on our supermarket shelves - and sometimes labelled as British. Food miles? Well, for me, about 40ft.

Anyhow, this year I have the following either growing, or going in the ground very soon:

• Stuttgarter Giant
• Red Baron
• Radar (super early, should be ready around May)
• Hercules (my absolute favourite)

The weather forecast looks more promising, so I will be heading down to my veg plots at the Smallest Smallholding, as well as down to the allotment to get them all in. Still got a packet of Bedfordshire Champion onion seeds from last year that remain unopened. I won’t be growing them and will happily swap them for something else if anyone is interested?

Just got back from the vets again with Pattie. £146. We’re still waiting on fecal results and probably having her in tomorrow for blood tests. Then she may have a general for x-rays. That may cost us almost £300. She only cost us 50p.

This is the thing about having animals that are primarily pets. You want to do the best for them, so you pay through the nose to give them the best chance you can. What else can we do? This country produced her, exploited her, and was going to chuck her away. So fingers crossed little Pattie will pull through whatever is making her ill.

In other news…

I was going to post on this a while ago, but with the ten million other things occupying me I didn’t get around to it. On Easter Sunday, instead of the traditional chocolate egg, my mother turned up on our doorstep with a freshly baked apple and raspberry crumble which turned out to be quite a family affair. Let me explain myself - no, Mum didn’t mill the flour by hand or churn the butter herself (although, if you vigorously shake double cream in a bag until your arm almost falls off, you can make butter yourself), or refine the sugar at home. But she did collect the raspberries from my grandmother’s raspberry canes, and she did use the cooking apples that my aunt had been storing from last autumn’s bumper crop. So with my family’s input, we were presented with a very tasty crumble. Needless to say really that it “mysteriously” completely vanished overnight, never to be seen again.

When I was madly baking cakes for people at work, when I had a ‘regular’ job, i started off by using what we referred to as ‘Ditch Jam’. It was basically jam made from the pickings of a few rambles in the countryside by my Mum’s best friend. She’d pick up a few bits and pieces each time she went for a walk (leaving enough for the mice, birdies et al) and chanced upon a hedgerow (not too close to a road either), and then would go home and make up a nice big batch of jam. There’s no set Ditch Jam recipe, it’s a case of bung in what you can find - wild blackberries, sloes, haws, elderberries, crab apples (fantastic for adding pectin into the mix), wild damsons, rosehips…

I am a jam and preserving novice, our grandmother’s preserving pan does the rounds in the family, but I’ve yet to make use of it. I asked on freecycle if anyone had one spare to no avail. I would like to try something with our crab apples, damsons and Victoria plums here on the Smallest Smallholding, but the moths get them every year. I’m too soft to put up those horrible moth traps, so I’m on the lookout for a plum moth deterrent this year.