Reasons to Be Cheerful - Saving Seeds From a Borlotti Bean Harvest and a Recipe for Pochas
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When we were living in the Basque Country, we discovered the bean dish, pochas. It was a kind of bean soup, made with semi-dried beans, from that year’s harvest. I have looked up the recipe for this and it varies widely. Most recipes use a sofrito of finely chopped vegetables, often onion, carrots, peppers and garlic. A quartered tomato is added to this fried reduction and sometimes all of these vegetables are then either strained all pureed . I couldn't be bothered with that and I also wanted to use my borlotti bean and courgette harvest and some home-made chicken stock I had, so this is my interpretation of pochas.
Ingredients For Pochas (for 2 people)
A cup or two of beans harvested from dried pods
1 carrot
1 onion
One small courgette for the sofrito (or use a green pepper) and one to add at the end (or a chopped red pepper)
2 garlic cloves
1 tomato
250 ml chicken stock (or use vegetable, or water)
paprika, salt and pepper
Method
Dice the carrot, onion, courgette and garlic cloves and fry in olive oil on a low heat until soft. Quarter the tomato, add to the sofrito and cook until it begins to break apart. Stir well, or puree if you can be bothered. Add the beans and stock and top up with water until the beans are just covered. Simmer for 45 minutes, or stick in the oven at 180°C degrees centigrade for the same amount of time. Add the other finely-chopped courgette and a teaspoon of paprika (picante or dulce, hot or not) and cook for a further 15 minutes. Add salt and pepper to season before serving with bread and guindillas (mild spicy green peppers). If you have a meat tooth (like the boyf), you can add a few slices of chorizo that have been warmed in a pan.
It wasn’t exactly as I remembered it in the restaurants in Spain, but it was good!
New Zealand Garden Diary: Planting Winter Vegetables
Yesterday was 25 degrees but it plummeted about ten today. And the sun is getting lower and will soon be disappearing behind the crater rim mid-afternoon. Time to get the winter veggies in.
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I’m hoping the purple-sprouting broccoli I also planted does as well as it did last year.
New Zealand Garden Diary: Tomato Harvest
Most of my tomatoes did ripen in the end and I have harvested the last of them and put the green ones in brown paper bags with bananas to ripen them). They haven't tasted as good as last year and I'm not sure why. We haven't had a lot of rain, but they taste a little watery. perhaps because I have had to use a hose and they have had too much at any one time. So to intensify the flavour I have roasted them in the oven with my home-grown garlic and thyme and a bit of olive oil and salt.
I then put the roasted tomato mixture in sterilised jars. I'll be testing some of it tonight with pasta.
New Zealand Garden Diary: Mulching With a Truckload of Shredded Trees
The topsoil in our garden isn't very good (that which remains after we lost a lot of it in the landslip in 2017). It is heavy clay on top of loess, which is a glacial wind-blown silt that forms dense pans that plants find hard to get their roots into. So it's needs a lot of improving. As well as compost and bokashi, I am using thick layers of wood chip mulch, which will break down eventually to feed the soil (I was inspired by the woodchip-covered garden, if not the proselytising, in this YouTube video). In the meantime it works to regulate the moisture content of the soil and to keep weeds at bay.
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As I write this, I have packed about 65 bags and moved about two dozen horse buckets of mulch up to the back section. And I haven't finished.
