Stone soup
On 28th October ODGC welcomed back Kevin Alviti. No stranger to the club Kevin lives on a five acre smallholding with his wife and three children.
He has fifty two vegetable beds, an orchard and coppice and keeps chickens and bees. He is a carpenter and craftsman, a scoutmaster and contributes articles to woodworking magazines as well as giving gardening talks.
Following time honoured tradition Kevin began with ‘Once upon a time…’ recounting the story of an old man who, arriving in a village at nightfall, told the locals that he was going to make stone soup for supper. Drawing a silk purse from his pocket he slipped a stone from it into a pan of boiling water. Intrigued the villagers gathered round and each was gently persuaded to contribute an ingredient to add to the pot thus creating a delicious soup. The moral being that the magic ingredient was not the stone but the communal effort and variety of ingredients.
Modern diet is largely derived from thirty or so ingredients available in supermarkets. Kevin showed us that we can make tasty and nutritious meals from plants from our own gardens which otherwise would be composted. He makes a delicious soup from young nettle leaves in Spring and stock from the pods of broad beans and peas. Broad bean tops are steamed and served with butter.
Butter makes ingredients go a long way and is good with wild garlic. Kevin makes a tasty supper from tomato leaf pesto, crushed garlic, olive oil, cider vinegar, toasted salted peanuts and crispy bacon served with pasta. Pea tendrils and leaves are good in salads. Soup can be made from the leaves, growing tips and blossoms of squash cooked with garlic, basil, mushrooms and crispy pork fat.
Elderflower blossoms coated in a light tempura batter and cooked in butter make a delicious pudding dredged with icing sugar. The early leaves of blackcurrants are used to make cordial and herbal teas can be made from the leaves of Sweet Cicely, nettle and mint. Haws are stewed then sieved and mixed with fifty percent of apples to make a fruit leather. Windfall apples are cooked to provide pectin and unripe plums are combined with sugar to make cheong.
Adding the proviso that correct plant identification is crucial Kevin demonstrated that with a little ingenuity, instead of a stone, tasty and unusual meals can be made to enliven the modern diet.
Ghislaine Arundale
