Everything’s coming up roses, but not quite yet

Some plants and a helper.

Like lots of cooks, I love to garden. It’s the nurturing thing. It has frustrated me, these past months, to look out at the space in front of our house and not to be able to properly wrestle it into a state of beauty.

When we first moved in, in September 2021, the front garden was a dense thicket of bamboo we had to pick our way through, being careful not to trip over the roots. I consulted a few local gardeners about removing it. No one wanted to touch it. Too much work. Nope. No thanks. Eventually, I found a man with a small digger who, one very hot afternoon and at vast cost, came and dug it out.

I am the anti-Miss-Wilmott. I seek the destruction of bamboo wherever I go. Beware the curse of Ms Robertson’s PostIt.

You have to remove every scrap of bamboo root or it will re-establish itself in half a minute and you’ll have a full Sleeping Beauty’s impenetrable forest situation on your hands. I loathe it so much that when I see tubs of it in garden centres it’s all I can do not to slap PostIt notes on them saying ‘Do not plant this cursèd specimen unless you want to spend half of your life and all of your money getting rid when you know better. Save yourselves.’ In the Nineteenth Century, there was a gardener called Ellen Willmott who loved Eryngium giganteum, a tall, silvery sea holly, so much that she used to scatter its seeds secretly in people’s gardens with such enthusiasm that the plant’s common name is Miss Willmott’s Ghost. I am like some sort of anti-Miss-Wilmott. I seek the destruction of bamboo wherever I go. Beware the curse of Ms Robertson’s PostIt.

When I finally vanquished The Wretched Bamboo, to give it its formal name, I still had months and months of a garden full of builders’ generators, cement mixers, and unnamed pieces of equipment of indefinable use but which were apparently essential to the renovation of the house. It is only really now that I can begin to plant.

My favourite kind of shopping trolley.

In London, I had a long, narrow garden in the middle of a terrace. It was north facing. Here, I have a square, south-facing walled garden. Sometimes we get strong winds, the Mistral and the Tramontane. We have only 60cm rain a year, and three hundred days of sunshine. In summer, it can hit 40C. These are very different growing conditions to the ones I’m used to. I’ve been rereading Beth Chatto’s The Dry Garden, and studying Olivier Filippi’s The Dry Gardening Handbook. Filippi is one of the great experts in Mediterranean gardening and his nursery, Pépinière Filippi – fortunately for me – is only a few kilometres from here. I have also been haunting the Pépinières de Montimas too, another nursery just outside of Béziers, which specialises in Mediterranean plants.

All of this is to say that I have now planted one flower bed, a circular one in the middle of the garden, between the steps to the front door and the garden gate. I’ve planted lavenders, rosemary, thyme and sages for scent, cistus (rock roses), irises, agapanthus, verbena bonariensis and orange California poppies for gloriousness, tall grasses for wafting, and nepeta Six Hills Giant for Dixie, the cat. To me this stage of gardening - as the plants sit, singly, surrounded by bark mulch in their tight little mounds - feels like a rough sketch. As the summer arrives and they grow to fill their spaces, begin to throw out their stems and leaves, start to flower, you hope they become the full painting. Like all creative endeavours – cooking, painting, writing – gardening is a lesson in optimism, in creating small futures, moments of happiness, and your own ability to both simultaneously control and let go.

Some fresh planting.

CONTACTS

Pépinière Filippi
RD 613, Rond-pont de Loupian, 34140 Mèze

Pépinières de Montimas
Route de Bessan, Montimas, 34500 Béziers

Spinach and Comté tart

I use large-leafed spinach for this – it’s one of my favourite things in life and I can’t stop myself from scooping up handfuls of its squeaky-fresh dark green leaves pretty much whenever I see them. But of course, you can use frozen spinach too if you’d rather.

I added some buckwheat flour to the cheese pastry, which adds a good, savoury note. Years ago, when I used to work at Food Illustrated, one of my jobs every month was to give suggestions for what to do with some of the more recherché ingredients we used. Readers got frustrated at buying, say, a jar of tamarind paste or mustard seeds or fish sauce when the recipe required only a tablespoon or two. So in I stepped with my ideas for using up the rest of the jar or pot or tin. It was one of my favourite tasks each month. I had buckwheat flour left over from making the galettes the other day, so here it is in the tart pastry.

Makes 1x29cm tart

For the pastry
180g plain flour
60g buckwheat flour
1 tsp English mustard powder
½ tsp fine salt
120g unsalted butter, very cold, cut into small cubes
60g Comté cheese, or cheddar cheese, or a favourite hard cheese, grated
1 egg
Iced water
A little oil or butter for the flan tin

For the filling
20g unsalted butter
100g lardons or unsmoked bacon, cut into 0.5cm strips
1 large onion, about 250g, finely diced
About 250g leaf spinach,whichworks out at about 370g frozen
230g crème fraîche
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp Dijon mustard
¼ tsp freshly-grated nutmeg
120g Comté cheese, or cheddar cheese, or a favourite hard cheese, grated
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper

First make the pastry. Whisk together the flours, mustard powder and salt in a bowl. Gently rub in the cubes of butter until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs with some pea-sized pieces of butter remaining in the mixture. Stir in the cheese. Make a well in the middle and pour in the egg, cutting it in with a knife until the dough starts to come together. You may need a little iced water to bring it together, but add it a little at a time and don’t overwork it or your pastry will be tough. Lay out a sheet of clingfilm, tip the pastry onto it and gently bring the pastry together into a disk with your hands. Wrap it and chill it for at least an hour. You can make this the day before if you like.

Heat the oven to 200C/180C Fan/Gas 6.

Roll out the pastry – I like to do this between two sheets of baking parchment or cling film, lightly dusted with flour. This just makes life easier. Brush a 29x3cm loose-bottomed flan tin lightly with olive oil or brush it with soft butter. Roll out the pastry and line the tin, pressing it very gently against the sides and letting any excess fall over the edges. Place on a baking sheet and chill for 15 minutes. You can make the filling now if you want, which will give it time to cool a bit.

Prick the base of the tart all over with the tines of a fork. Fill the base with crumpled baking parchment or foil and fill with ceramic baking beans or dry pulses and rice. Bake for 15 minutes, until the overhanging pastry is lightly golden. Remove the baking parchment or foil and the baking weights, return the tart to the oven for 12-15 minutes until the base of the pastry is completely cooked through – it won’t get any more cooked once you put the filling in, so this is your chance to make sure it’s properly crisp. Remove it from the oven and with a small sharp knife, trim off any excess pastry. (Don’t turn the oven off.)

To prepare the filling, melt the butter in a large frying pan (ideally one that has a lid, for later, but don’t worry too much if you don’t have a lid – you can use a large dinner plate) over a medium-high heat and sauté the lardons or bacon until lightly browned. Pour off all but 2 tbsp of fat. Reduce the heat and tip the onions into the pan and fry them gently, stirring, until softened and translucent, about 15 minutes. Transfer the lardons and onion to a bowl to cool. Rinse the spinach well in a colander and tip it into the frying pan with some water still clinging to the leaves. Cover with a lid and cook until just wilted – you may need to do this in a couple of batches. Return to the colander and press out any excess liquid. Press gently with some kitchen paper to remove further moisture. Chop roughly and mix with lardons and onions.

In a bowl, whisk together the crème fraîche, eggs, mustard and nutmeg. Season with salt and pepper.

Line the base of the tart with half of the cheese, then the spinach mixture. Carefully and evenly pour over the crème fraîche mixture and sprinkle on the remining cheese. Bake for 30-35 minutes, until the top is golden. Let it cool for 15 minutes before removing it from the tin. Serve warm or a room temperature.

Market haul: Tuesday 14 March 2023

This week’s market haul comprises a piece of tomme de Pyrénées cheese, broccoli, oranges, red peppers, an avocado, some winter tomatoes, lemons, thirteen eggs, as is traditional, a Savoy cabbage, sausages, ham, marinated pork chops, a petrisane céréales baguette (someone, not me, ate one of the ‘ears’, le quignon, on the way home) some nem, breaded crab claws and dipping sauce from the Chinese food van.