The gluts have left the building (shed)
This is where I used to write about the gluts I get from my veg patch and the ensuing gluttony in the kitchen.
Now I write a weekly mostly-veggie recipe over on Substack, plus share tales from the veg patch and exclusive videos. You can subscribe for free by clicking on the link below and every recipe will be sent straight to your inbox. If you’d like more content (such as those videos I mentioned, interviews and printer-friendly PDFs of every recipe to collect) do consider becoming a paid subscriber. More on that here.
In the meantime, here’s an archive of my old Gluts and Gluttony blog:
Ras-el-Hanout Carrot Soup
I don’t know about you, but my freezer can be a bit, how shall I put it, vague. A sort of a magical mystery tour through random leftovers, batch cooking frenzies, and veg patch gluts that I froze for ‘safe keeping’ having been unable to use the abundant harvest when it first arrived…
Roast Cauliflower Soup & Kale Pesto
It’s soup weather. And I’m quite fussy about soups. There is no room, in my mind, for a bland bowl of sameness just warmed and slopped into a dish. A good soup must have layers: a splash of sour, a crunch of salt, a swirl of cold against the hot foundation, so that every mouthful is alive with interest…
Roast Tomato Soup
When the rain starts and the temperature falls and the nights draw in, my mind turns to soup. Specifically, tomato soup. Perhaps because tomato soup is, to me, the cure for all ills. As a child, a tin of Heinz tomato soup was like penicillin in our house: it could remedy almost any ailment from a grazed knee to a chill caught after a reckless trip in a rowing boat during a rainstorm. It was what you took on caravan holidays, where succour was always necessary. It was where you turned when you wanted satisfying, flavoursome coziness but couldn’t find anything to eat in the kitchen. It was what you stuck in the microwave to eat on a Sunday afternoon in front of Star Wars videos.
Celeriac Soup with Pickled Rhubarb
There’s so much rhubarb in the patch that it is becoming a bit of a problem. Rampant and unwieldy, it is technically caged in a spot removed from the main veg beds to protect it from the rabbits, but I think the barbed wire is really to keep it from taking over the EVERYTHING. Anyway, its abundance means I find myself with the first of many main crop rhubarb gluts.
Every Flavour Noodle Broth
Honestly, there are times when I feel like throwing the towel in and flouncing off to become a podiatrist or something. It happens on the, thankfully rare, occasions when the whole foodie scene loses its head and gets all obsessed with something completely nonsensical. January is a particularly persistent offender. Half the food world can’t get through a whole sentence without saying the word ‘vegan’ or ‘detox’ or ‘cleanse’. And the other half, as if in pointed opposition, turns into some Bacchant monster revelling in the self-destructive joys of comfort food drenched in cream and butter. Oat milk on one side, cheesy meatballs on the other. The battle lines are drawn and it’s enough to make you despair.