Last weekend we pulled the chard up from its bed and with that there will be no more chard in the Dempsey household until August at the earliest. But over the last two months or so, those plants have been keeping us more than supplied with greens. So how to use it up. Mostly, I just stir fry it with garlic and a bit of olive oil but there was a week when faced with nearly a kilo of chard, I had to be a bit more inventive and these happened.
This is based on a recipe from River Cottage Veg Every Day, which is one of my favourite cook books for inspiration. The original recipe is spinach and ricotta, but says that you can use goats cheese instead. I find for putting greens in things, chard is better as it doesn’t need to have the water squeezed out of it when it’s cooked. The pastry for this is inspired, it’s stretchy to work with but once baked lovely and tender.
WHAT
For the pastry
- 250g plain flour
- 125g chilled butter cut into cubes
- 75ml milk
- Pinch of salt
For the filling
- Olive oil
- 350g chopped chard
- 3 small red onions, chopped
- 1 clove of garlic, crushed
- Zest of one lemon
- nutmeg
- salt and pepper
- 125g soft goats cheese
- 1 egg, beaten
HOW
- Make the pastry. Put flour and butter in the food processor and blend until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add milk and blend again until it all comes together.
- Take it out of the processor and form into a disc. Wrap in clingfilm and let it rest in the fridge.
- Turn the oven on to ….
- In a large pan over a medium heat, heat about a tablespoon of oil and cook the chard.
- After about 10-15 minutes, it should have cooked through and reduced in size. Remove from pan and into largish bowl
- Add another tablespoon of olive oil to the pan and add the onion and garlic. Fry until the onion is cooked through and translucent but not brown. Add to the bowl with the chard.
- Add the goats cheese, lemon zest, a grating of nutmeg and salt and pepper to the bowl and set aside.
- Take the pastry and roll out to about 3mm, divide into six squares of roughly 13cm square.
- Add half of your beaten egg to the bowl of chard etc and mix it all together.
- Divide the mixture between the six pastry squares and fold over to make pasties. (I can’t do this tidily but my guess is that the pastry is stretchy for this reason!). Put on a baking tray
- Brush the pasties with the beaten egg and make a hole in the top for the steam.
- Place in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes, until pasties are browned.
First up say hello to the summer squash! This is on Joe’s plot. Three yellow courgettes, four green courgettes, 3 crookneck squash. Yes, that’s a lot of squash. The first year I had the allotment, I had six courgette plants and one week an amazing 37 courgettes. I’ve never grown as many since and we’ve only ever sown one crookneck squash which has always been sufficient for our needs. So I am aware that we’re going to be swimming in summer squash. However, the plan is that Ma and I will water, feed and weed this area but Joe can take as many as he likes and there is a list of people willing to take on excess courgette, we can give some away for the produce sale and I quite like gluts. I want to make pickle, I can freeze grated squash for cakes and sauces and 
Something we don’t feel that we’ve ever had enough of is cucumbers. This is the cucumber bed five Boothbys Blonde, three Marketmore, the gherkins didn’t make it!
We also sowed the french beans and the sweetcorn and I’ll sow dill, coriander and marigolds next week. Finally I planted out the five surviving celery plants in the bed with the sweet peas
We weeded (obvs), topped up the potatoes cleared the chard bed, picked broad beans and watered loads. Then sat with a glass of wine and admired our little plot. 
So the trick is to freeze a bottle of wine and take the frozen wine to the plot in a rapid ice. By the time you’ve stopped work, you have some really cold defrosted wine. Seriously, best thing ever…
Other good things are that another of lovely my allotment neighbours says that this year she’ll give me a boysenberry plant and some strawberry babies for next year. So my soft fruit empire plans have changed but will grow!
Happy Tuesday! If you have a office job and are in the UK (or the US), you’ve had Monday off work and today is your Monday and it’s a four day week, so it’s the week that should feel shorten but you have to fit all your work into four days AND it’s half term here so the office is a ghost town as lots of parents are on leave to look after their offspring.
So that’s where it is. I’m probably worrying about nothing and it’ll all be fine but here is a short list of what needs to get done next weekend, it’s a good thing it’s a bank holiday!
I know it’s a first world problem, and I still have a roof over my head and running water and friends who let me shower at their house (and fed me!) and that it’s May and therefore I wouldn’t have the heating on anyway, however it’s the completely rubbish project management and although I knew they were doing the works, they didn’t tell me when they would be doing the works and it was sheer co-incidence that I was working from home on Friday! I’m beginning to understand why the work planned for November 2018 is just being done in May 2019!
This week in allotment adventures the broad beans have blackfly. I can cope with having to cover all the beds because otherwise the foxes dig them up, I can more or less handle the foxes trying to treat my raised beds as toilets and the birds trying to use my chard, kale and soft fruit as an all you can eat salad and desert bar but aphids do nothing and the ants that farm the buggers really get on my wick, the little bitey buggers. Actually that’s not fair, the red ants are bitey and the black ants are the aphid farmers.
In other news, we topped up some of the potato bags (the sharpes express are really living up to their names!) all in we used 99 litres of compost and we have more topping up to do. Ma weeded because the weeds offend her. We had tea. I took up some of the chard. We were going to sow the french beans in that bed when the chard was done but given that it’s right next door to the broad beans, we aren’t going to do that now. We’ll sow them in another bed and put something else there.
