Half of my leeks are hidden in a frenzy of weeds, I've all but given up eating potatoes and yet have several hundred pounds of them sitting in the ground. I have experimented with unusual squashes and now have to look up 'interesting things you can do with a squash', most legal and some slightly dubious. My Pumpkin patch is simply becoming enormous and quite scary actually and God only knows what my Sweetcorn is doing. But yes, on the whole it is actually great fun and my only regret at all is that it does play second fiddle to the business and suffers as a result which frustrates me at times.
I have some great allotment neighbours and we have some nice chats and that and it is really special to be working, sometimes topless, on a warm sunny big blue Norfolk sky day in the silence of my own thoughts with just a Black bird singing or perhaps the call of the Oyster Catchers as a pair fly low over the allotments landing in the field beyond.
Lovely.
But my time constraints do sometimes cause issues and the Broad Bean saga is one such example. I have long hated Broad Beans until I grew a few and found out how delicious the young tender beans are. Actually I found that I liked them so much that I was eating them raw straight from the pod on the allotment.
So it came to pass that I decided to plant quite a few seeds this year and who knew, they all came up and soon I was planting dozens of small Broad Bean plants. So far so good. Having successfully stopped the birds from pecking at the seedlings with some strategically placed netting I waited for them to grow. Which they duly did, unrelenting and with some spirit I felt. Soon I was forced to remove the netting and it wasn't long before the birds clearly thought that the Broad Beans looked far too menacing a proposition and left them well alone.
Time passed, the business got bookings then more bookings and then more and I started to pick the odd pod for dinner but the race was running at too fast a pace for me. The plan to catch 'em young and freeze 'em hard passed us by as more and more B&B bookings flooded in and it was not long before my visits were barely once a week.
Then one day I squeezed a little time to go and water the Toms that I had planted in the poor excuse for a greenhouse up t' allotment and I saw that the Broad Beans were no longer my friendly buttersweet little succulent beans, but were now fully blown giant pods of a bean. These needed picking and fast. I started picking with great gusto and enthusiasm. After 20 minutes that waned a little, a further 20 minutes and some nasty insect bites later I'm getting a bit bored of this. After an hour or so I really could have just given up.
Eventually I had picked all that there was to pick, the harvest was ready to bring home and I filled two large market garden trays with them. These I loaded onto my mini Eddie Stobart truck which is called 'Claire Rebecca' and I hauled the cargo back to Alison.
I found out two things when I got home;-
Firstly that I had harvested 40lb of Broad Beans (in their pods).
And secondly that Alison's "You've got to be kidding" face is not that dissimilar to her "What the *?@*" face that she pulls when I bring home from the auction one of my more interesting finds such as a Lobster pot or indeed 5 chimney pots.
A little later I also found out that 40lbs of podded Broad Beans equates to about 20lbs of loose Broad Beans and that my wife apparently has "the patience of a saint."
It was as we were podding the beans we realised that these were just over the edge as far as using them on an actual dinner plate and that in attempting to eat them we would look a little like those tobacco chewing baseball players, chewing on the same bit for some 10 minutes before eventually having to give it up and spitting it out of the mouth in disgust.
Well I for one was not interested in composting all this hard work and so a plan was hatched.... We would make Broad Bean soup I announced. Alison did not seem to be filled with the same verve as me with this suggestion and enquired if indeed there really was such a thing as Broad Bean soup?
"Yes, of course there is," I lied....
"What's in it?"
"Broad Beans" I replied smugly. She wasn't impressed and so I added...
"And Bacon!" Where this came from I know not but it sounded doable to me.
"And Cheese." I pushed my luck a little too far at this point and 'A' went off to google it.
Well I was soon vindicated and soup it was to be then. Only one problem you had to par boil the beans first then move the tough outer skin on each and every bean a count that we estimated to be getting on for a thousand beans and it could only be done one by one... by hand.
It is fair to say she wasn't happy.
We set our selves up at the patio table with a bowl full of beans to be 'shelled', another bowl for the discarded grey skins and a third bowl for the fresh young beans within. It was slow at first as we picked a bean, cut it carefully then picked at it until we extracted the bean from the skin. It was laborious and took forever. After several minutes I 'experimented' with different techniques and it wasn't long before I had discovered that a quick slice down the spine and a pinching movement between the thumb and forefinger would cause the bean to fire out like a tiny bullet. Right, we were away now and having shown Alison we were spitting the little fellas willy nilly. There was some collateral damage as every now and then a bean would scoot off into the distance or would bounce off my nose. K-poww and one would ricochet into Alison's arm. Alison even managed to fire one straight up into the air having it about turn and dive straight back down again right into her cleavage. I insisted that it was not to be put back into the 'soup' bowl, naturally.
Another hour of our lives lost for good then. Well a good few hours later 'A' has made 26 pots of soup paste (It looked uncannily like green polyfilla) and stashed it in the freezer. That's lunch for me for nearly a month! Having enquired it would appear that no one else in the house will be partaking of this culinary delight so it looks like I'm going to be the sole consumer.
I have to admit that I was hoping to share the burden, no erm the... task of getting through this putty but apparently it is all down to me.... did I mention that broad beans give me wind?
So here we are a week or so later and I'm fighting, or working, my way through them. Broad Bean soup every lunch time, mmmmm, D E L I C I O U S! That's after I've added a ton of black pepper, watered the paste down with half a pint of milk and added some cream and a good dose of grated cheese, any cheese will do just make sure it is a strong one as it has quite a battle on it's hands!
Next week Onion & yellow Zucchini soup (300 onions to use up) and if you thought Broad beans left me windy you don't want to be around after my onion soup supper!!
