The 10-Year Rewind – Part 16 – Chermoula

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 16 is this one — Chermoula — from May 2010. Over the years I've done occasional cookery postings, and this is one dish I still love to make from scratch, starting the time-honoured way with a mortar and pestle.

With more than a week of relentlessly wet weather drenching the garden and ruining that kind of fun, there is but one thing for this boy to do – cook! But something new, something different. For our 20th wedding anniversary last year, Pammy bought me a lovely Scanpan Tagine plus a big, beautiful Moroccan cookbook, and that's where I went to for inspiration. Hmmm, "chermoula" – a classic North African spice/herb blend – that sounds nice. I have most of the ingredients either in the pantry or growing in the garden. Let's go.

I'll give the recipe at the end, but here it is in its prettiest stage, just after I added ground cumin, paprika and cayenne pepper to the garlic. But I am already getting ahead of myself.

Here's the makings of my chermoula. Coriander, parsley and lemon (all home-grown), garlic, paprika, cumin, cayenne pepper, olive oil, and mortar and pestle.

Oops, forgot to mention the salt. In fact the salt is a magic ingredient, as it helps to turn garlic to soft mush with just a few thumps of the pestle. It's just like a little chemistry lesson on its own, the way salt disintegrates garlic.

Then you add the three spices mentioned earlier.

Then add chopped parsley and chopped coriander, plus some lemon juice, then at the end, some olive oil.

Traaa daaaa! Chermoula. It wasn't that hard to do, but the trick is to not add all the bulky parsley and coriander in one go. I added it in small batches and it quickly pounded down. Total time taken to pound it all down to a paste was about 5 minutes. Good village-style peasant work, and good rainy-day work, too. I suppose you could do it all in a blender, but it wouldn't come out like this, with the little chunky bits here and there.

The next step is to coat the "meat" with some of the chermoula. This in fact is a beautiful fish called Bass Grouper (it's similar to blue-eye cod). It comes as big, thick steaks from which I remove the bones, then cut it into chunks. It holds together beautifully in cooking and remains moist, never seems to go dry. However, this recipe would work equally well with other meats, such as chunks of chicken or pork, for example.

Next, the vegies. Here, I cut up slices of potato, red and yellow capsicum, zucchini, and tipped in a can of diced tomatoes, then stirred in the remainder of the chermoula and a few leftover scraps of parsley and coriander.

Big spoon to toss all the vegies together, plus a grind each of salt and pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil.

Any casserole dish will do, of course, but I do think my tagine looks snazzy.

Into the tagine I scooped in half the vegies to layer the bottom, then covered these with all the fish (which had been marinating in the chermoula for the half-hour it took to prepare all the vegies), then I covered the fish with the rest of the vegies. Lid on. Bake one hour at 180°C (350°F) and it's ready. Serve with couscous on the side.

Halfway through eating it, I said to Pam: "Oh oh, I forgot to take a photo of the finished dish". So you'll just have to imagine the results. It tasted yummy, though. Anyway, here's the amounts for the chermoula. As for the vegies, I just made all that bit up as I went along.

Chermoula

2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley

3 tablespoons chopped coriander (cilantro)

2 teaspoons paprika

2 teaspoons ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 tablespoons olive oil

Method: pound the garlic with the salt until mushy, then add the paprika, cumin, cayenne pepper and lemon juice to make a paste. Then add the parsley and coriander in batches, and pound until reduced in bulk. Finally, work the olive oil into the mixture in stages, until blended nicely.

(For Aussie readers, this recipe is from the excellent book, "The Food of Morocco" by Tess Malloss, published by Murdoch Books, ISBN 9781741960341).

Being Co-operative

I'll have to be careful how I choose my words here. "I got us into this" is, I think, far superior to "It's all my fault". However you want to apportion blame or causality to the photograph below, it's certainly all my own work. We've joined a vegie co-op… for the next four weeks (filling in for friends who are travelling).

And here's the first Saturday morning pick-up. Thirty bucks' worth, all bought at the Sydney Markets in Flemington. Wouldn't have a clue how organic it is or not. And there's just two of us to eat it all. And a similarly large pair of boxes will hit our kitchen benchtop next Saturday. And the Saturday after that. And… oh dear!

Here's the checklist
• One large brown paper bag of button mushrooms. Some will go into tonight's baked chicken and rice dish, the rest will disappear into melted butter one day this week and end up as sidekick to a steak.
• Lots of carrots, but that's OK, as my adorable Pam is 20% rabbit (I suspect). Loves her carrots. And what she doesn't eat raw, I'll chop and cook tonight and other nights this week.
• Big bunch of celery, Pam to the rescue again. Crunch crunch crunch…  and what she doesn't eat raw, I'll chop and cook tonight, and other nights. Good sauce starter pack, carrot and celery.
• One bunch of shallots (green onions). Easy peasy. Some to disappear tonight. I can feel a stir-fry coming on for Wednesday.
• 2 eggplants (in season now). Easy peasyish, but we do already have some eggplant in the fridge, so our neighbour Katerina will probably enjoy one of these.
• 3 corn cobs (one goes into the baked chicken, the others will disappear easily enough)
• a kilo (at least) of Roma tomatoes (we know what to do with them, saucery here we come)
• 8 Valencia oranges (yummm… freshly squeezed OJ on Sunday morning)
• a dozen or more Imperial mandarins (in season, juicy, sweet and a bit fragrant; they're my special treat and will disappear soon enough)
• 10 Royal Gala apples, in season, juicy and crisp, another easy assignment, as we both work from home and like to snack on fruit
• big bunch of English spinach (pan-fry on Monday with raisins and pine nuts, touch of nutmeg, as a side dish, an old French favourite)
• And last and definitely least of all, one bag of that awful white-bleached garlic from China. The only disappointment in the box. They use chlorine to bleach their export garlic in China, then fumigate it with methyl bromide to kill any bugs. Yikes! That's about as un-organic as anything that's actually grown in the ground. We're giving that bag a miss.

Apart from the worrying garlic, everything else looks great. So, bursting with enthusiasm, we're confident of knocking this box off this week. But then there's next week, and the week after that. I'm glad all this bounty of co-operative boxes actually has a "finish-by" date.

I don't think we could keep this up for two months, let alone a year. But it's a delightful change for a couple of weeks. It'll probably change what we cook and what we eat in the next month, which isn't such a bad thing, even if our diet is already a varied and healthy one (well, most of the time).

Have you ever been in a vegie co-op, and how long did you last? Amazingly enough, this lovely bunch of people has been doing it for years, so I am told.

Spring started weeks ago!

One of the fortunate things about my new life as an erratically employed freelancer is that I get more time off to do gardening, whether I want the time off or not! The pay is lousy but the lifestyle is terrific. As a result, my garden looks rather tidy at the moment. As the heading for this post says, spring started weeks ago, so this posting is nothing more than a wander around my happy and unusually tidy spring garden. 

For me, this light, fresh green is the true colour
of spring. In this case it's the top leaves of my
potted Turkish Brown fig.

Flowers do announce the new season nicely, and our potted native
orchids are producing sprays of these tiny, fragrant little blooms.

Small but perfectly formed orchids less than an inch across
from side to side, the other nice thing about them, speaking
as a gardener, is that they are very easy to grow.

Our two lavender bushes have been blooming
their heads off for a month, the bees love them
and they aren't looking like slowing down any
time soon. I've added its fellow Mediterranean
classic, the rosemary, to keep them company.

Wet weather can truncate the show of the superb
scadoxus, but with hardly a drop for the last few
weeks they're putting on their best show ever.

Our self-sown strawberry patch (which came
up out of some compost spread in this spot) is
still rudely healthy. Its spot is a bit too shady
in winter so it's content to snooze then, but now
the amount of sunshine it's getting is growing
daily it is flowering (with liquid feeds from me
to help the cause) and the first fruits are forming.

The end of winter is one of the two times of the
year when my in-ground citrus are fed, and a
week ago our garden was resplendent with the
heady aroma of chicken poo. Now the Eureka
lemon is flowering its head off quite fragrantly. 

Our potted Thai lime is clapping on a lot of
deep maroon new growth, but as it's in a pot I
feed it lightly once a month, unlike the other
citrus trees growing here.

I sometimes channel a bit of Basil Fawlty when
I am yet again caring for my potted mint, as
what mint needs "is a damned good thrashing".
What I mean by that is mint needs constant
taming and cutting back, sometimes all the way
down to pot-rim level. I did that for the
umpteenth time about three weeks ago, and
since then with regular watering and liquid
feeds, it has bounced back nicely yet again.
It's a high-maintenance herb, mint, but it
does look and smell lovely in these peak times.

I'm not going to say too much about the passionfruit vine
trained on my neighbour's garage wall, other than to report
that it's ludicrously lush and green, and has no flowers and
is doing sod-all in the way of producing fruit yet.

The small gaggle of garlic plants raised from
sprouted supermarket cloves is growing on well.

I told you the garden looks neat and well mulched at the moment.
I pulled out the winter crop, dug it all over as usual, then planted
seedlings of lettuce, basil and chillies, along with pretty little French
 marigolds for some colour. The round bare patch on the right
rear is where I am raising Collard greens direct-sown from seeds.
The Collard greens came with the Soulicious eBook cookbook 
Pam and I bought from our friend Awia Markey.

New plants have been added recently, too.
This row of four Gardenia magnifica should
grow to about 2m tall and cover up that
white Colorbond fence. I am hoping for dense
glossy green growth, white fragrant flowers
in summer and no problems, please!

And finally, if it all grows too big and everything
gets out of hand – start again! That's what we
are doing with a potted bay tree. Our last one
was here for ages but grew too big, then became
pot-bound then got sick and ugly. All my fault.
So here is "Son of Bay", my attempt to make
amends for all my bay-tree growing mistakes
perpetrated over the last 20 years. Whether I find
redemption or not remains to be seen, but I do
like adding just a touch of epic theme to
gardening here. It puts things in perspective.

Playing chicken

We're into the 700th consecutive day of rain (or so it feels, it might just be the second week) but it's wet in Sydney, folks, and this little gardener ain't doing any gardening right now. The seeds I've sown of the next crops of parsley, coriander and radish are all frolicking in the rain, the lavender inexplicably has decided to start flowering, and none of that is coaxing me outdoors. 

Instead, on this soggy Saturday afternoon I'm playing chicken with one of my favourite recipes, and it's one that I have now cooked several times and each time it has worked out perfectly. The method itself sounds a bit dodgy to Western cooks, but the Chinese have been cooking chicken this way since Confucius was a schoolboy.

Here's some of the ingredients: ginger, garlic,
spring onions and salt. The bottle is of Chinese
cooking wine (Shaoxing), and in our local
Asian grocery it's $1.20 for the whole bottle,
and you use the whole bottle in the stock.
It's like a dry sherry, so I've been told.
Hope that's true (not a sherry person), but the
first time I taste a dry sherry I plan to say
"It reminds me of Shaoxing wine".

The first part of the recipe is dead easy, and normal. Make
a cooking stock (recipe below) but it's the whole bottle of wine,
5 litres of water plus lots of garlic, ginger, spring onions and salt. 

And the chicken itself needs no special prep.
Just one size 16 (1.6kg) free-range chook.

So far so good. Once you've cooked the stock for a while, add
the chicken and cook for... wait for it... 15 minutes! No, it's not
ready yet. What you then do is turn off the heat, put on the lid
tightly, and let the chicken cook very slowly and gently in the
cooling hot stock for 3 whole hours. And it works. The chicken
comes out fully cooked (ie, no 'pink' bits), super juicy and
tender. When I tell people about this recipe most of them
look a bit suspicious and you can tell from their eyes they
ain't never ever going to try this recipe. I don't care, here
it is, and this is what we're enjoying tonight!

White cooked chicken with ginger and spring onion sauce
This is based on a Kylie Kwong recipe found in the newspaper a long while ago. She didn't invent it, of course, an ancestor in 1500BC did, but I have had the temerity to change some amounts, too.

1.6kg whole free-range chicken

Cooking stock
1 x 700ml bottle Shaoxing Chinese cooking wine
5 litres water
12 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup roughly chopped ginger
1/3 cup salt flakes (eg, Maldon)
8 green spring onions, trimmed and roughly chopped

Dipping sauce
2 tablespoons grated ginger
2 tablespoons finely chopped spring onions
1 teaspoon salt flakes
1/2 cup peanut oil

You’ll need a big stock pot to cook this, preferably one with a heavy base that can hold its heat, plus a tight-fitting lid that does the same.

1. Make sure the chicken is out of the fridge for a couple of hours before starting, so it isn’t ultra-chilled.

2. Put all the cooking stock ingredients into the stock pot and bring it to the boil (that can take up to 25 minutes). Turn down the heat, cover the pot and let it all simmer gently for 40 minutes, to make a fragrant cooking stock.

3. At around that 40-minute mark, wash and trim the chicken of excessive fat if you like. While you prepare the chicken, turn up the heat on the stock so it’s near a boiling again. Add the chicken gently to the pot, breast-side down, then turn down the heat under the pot to medium, so it’s barely simmering, not boiling. Let the chicken poach in the simmering stock for 15 minutes (and no longer).

4. Turn off the heat, fit the lid securely to the pot and let the chicken steep and cook slowly in the poaching liquid for 3 hours. Never take the lid off the pot. Don’t go near it!

5. Well before that 3 hours is up, make the dipping sauce. Combine the salt, ginger and spring onions in a wide, shallow heat-proof dish or pan, then in another small pan, heat the peanut oil until quite hot (but not smoking) then carefully and slowly pour the hot oil over the ginger/spring onions. They’ll fizz a bit in the oil but it all cools down within half an hour.

6. Once the 3 hours is up, carefully remove the chicken from the pot, using tongs, and place it on a plate for 15 minutes to cool down, before cutting it up. I use a Chinese cleaver to chop the chicken into pieces, chopping across the bone. The breast meat is very juicy and tender, so you could just cut off large pieces and slice them, to serve.

7. I serve ours with steamed Chinese broccoli, chopped into chunks, with rice on the side, plus a little bowl of the dipping sauce, which is essential. 

8. The remainder of the chicken makes a sensational cold chicken for salads or sandwiches the next day. The flavour of that ginger-infused cooking stock comes into its own more on the day after than it does on the night you cook the dish, in fact.

9. Don’t skip the dipping sauce; it’s a huge part of the flavour of this dish. It’s a classic Chinese dipping sauce, so you probably will recognise its flavour if you’re a regular at Chinese restaurants and yum cha.

Nine days later

I had thought it was only a week since I planted the sprouted supermarket garlic, but I tell a little lie – that was nine days ago, not a mere week of seven. And haven't they belted along!

The thing that caught my eye as I stepped out into the garden
this morning was the uniform rate of growth, according to
the amount of sunshine received. Closest to the camera is the
relative runt of the litter, which goes into afternoon shade
earlier than the others. And furthest away is the tallest, the
last to lose the afternoon sun.

Some years ago, as we were doing some kind of gardening
project for the magazine, photographer Brent Wilson, himself
a dab hand in the garden, said "A dead stick would grow in this
soil." And I think he's right. It is good, fertile, loamy stuff,
clay which has been improved upon by successive gardeners
living here. No doubt the warm sunshine, regular watering and
a side dressing of Dynamic Lifter (chicken poo) have helped,
but these garlic cloves seem to have a real zest for living.

Garlic Day

I wasn't even planning to grow garlic this year, but I've just planted some garlic this morning. And it felt good. It felt like I was breaking the law, in fact. Well, sort of.

I had just completed my usual morning rounds of the garden, watering this and that pot, picking a few weeds, checking how things are going. I wandered back into the kitchen to wash a freshly harvested radish or two and I spotted in our wire garlic and onion basket a head of garlic which was sprouting its head off. Why not plant them out and see what happens?

That's the 'law-breaking' bit. Law 1: might be a bit early for garlic, still too warm. Law 2: only plant varieties suited to your climate. Law 3: don't tell me, please don't tell me it's common, vulgar Woolies supermarket garlic? Yep, it's from Woolies, and that means it's probably from Mexico, Chile, Argentina and various other places they get garlic from. Well, at least it isn't the bleached-white, bland, awful Chinese garlic which all the horrified garlic aficionados bang on about (and which is disappearing fairly rapidly from our supermarket shelves, anyway).

Here they are: healthy fat little people just bursting with life.

It was easy enough to find a spot for them, as the curly parsley
was on the way out. So after clearing that space and several
good minutes of digging with my nifty Niwashi digger, I planted
each bulb into a shallow trench, just shallow enough that when
I backfilled with soil, the top tip of the shoot was at soil level.

A side dressing of chicken poo and mulch of sugar cane.

Water in well with a watering can, some
Seasol (seaweed, to stimulate root growth) in a
few days from now, and so my unexpected
little law-breaking Garlic Day patch is born.

I'm increasingly attracted to the idea of growing food plants from the food plants you're already eating. Sometimes it's not a good idea. Supermarket tomatoes, for instance, are mostly what they call 'F1 Hybrids' and their seeds won't produce the same tomatoes you bought. But buying heirloom tomatoes from an organic farmer's market and sowing their seeds should work perfectly well.

Some other foods sold in supermarkets would be worth harvesting seeds from. Chillies are a good example. Seeds of supermarket Habaneros and Jalapeños will produce Habaneros and Jalapenos next season. I must explore this idea further, next spring. In the meantime, today is Garlic Day, and I look forward to watching how things progress over the coming autumn, winter and spring.

Garlicky grumbles

It hasn't been a total disaster by any means, but this year's more scientific (and more expensive) approach to growing garlic has seen no worthwhile improvement after last year's very cheap and easy ad-hoc methods. Well, so far it hasn't been a roaring success, but I live in hope. Here's the story so far.

Earlier this year in autumn, May 2009, the box of Pintanor garlic bulbs, costing a princely $32, arrived by mail-order. I've blogged at length about this year's approach to growing garlic here, and then updated things here and here. All of this fuss is simply because (a) my garlic-growing experiences in previous years haven't been terrific, even if I did manage to harvest some and it tasted nice (bit like my track record with tomatoes, come to think of it), and (b) several people have told me that Sydney doesn't have that good a climate for growing garlic.

I can understand it if you don't have time to wade through all my earlier garlicky ramblings, but this is the garlic which I planted earliest in the year, in May, and it's doing best as of today.

The garlic which I planted after refrigerating the bulbs is doing worst, and the bulbs which spent 8 weeks in the fridge prior to planting are doing worse than the bulbs which spent 4 weeks in the fridge prior to planting. These are the '8 week' plants, and they were blown over recently in a day of strong winds and torrential rain – and they've had it. I tried to prop them up with that little stake and wire ties arrangement, but it was useless. They've had it.

And so I pulled them up to discover all the bulbs were about half-size. I'm going to dry them and then use them in cooking to see how they taste, so all is not lost. But they're a puny little bunch of mini garlics, definitely not a success. Oh well, the earliest planted garlic plants are still forging on quite well, the stems seem stout and I expect the crop to be full-size, so maybe next year I'll forget all that 'refrigerate first' business and just whack the bulbs in the ground the day they arrive in the mail.

However, elsewhere in the allium-growing department things seem to be going much better, so I thought I'd finish up with an update on my French eschallots, and my ever-reliable shallots (ie, scallions or spring onions).

This is what I mean by French eschallots. They're much milder flavoured than garlic, closer to an onion (but quite different) and often purpley coloured inside. They have a zillion uses in cooking, but my favourite thing is to bake them. Add several of these to a mixture of root vegetables baked in the oven, and they sweeten up everything wonderfully well. At the time I planted the last of my garlic in late June I saw these in a garden centre and thought "what the hell, let's try them". They are planted in the soil with the neck of the bulb just above the soil surface, and the new bulbs form in a circle around the base of the parent bulb. When you see the next few photos you'll know what I mean.

This unruly tangle is my eschallot patch this morning. There's not a straight line to be seen anywhere. I hope that's normal! I've never grown them before, and they do look quite odd.

Several stems erupt from the one point in the soil where the parent bulb was planted.

They have just started to send up flower buds now and every one of them is a weird, twisting, curling shape that just makes me like them even more. Harvest time is when they start to die down, so as they are only starting to flower, getting bigger and more chaotic looking every day, I guess I won't be harvesting these guys until Christmas, maybe later.

Meanwhile, the endless succession of trouble-free crops of shallots (ie, scallions/spring onions) continues. These are seedlings planted two weeks ago. I've added shallots to my list of essential kitchen garden plants that I plan to have growing virtually all the time (along with salad greens and all my herbs). They are just so reliable, long-lasting, versatile and convenient.

I sowed seeds of the next mini batch last Saturday and they were up by Thursday. The spring temperatures must suit them perfectly.

One of the things I realised a while ago about shallots is that I also like the look of them, as plants. Afternoon sun streaming through their hollow stems looks lovely.

And I'll finish up with an old photo of my summer vegie and flower patch back in 2007, when I first grew shallots and realised that they could be part of something pretty, as well as something delicious. That upright forest of shallots actually adds something to the look of that patch. It's a designer vegie!

I haven't given up on the garlic yet, and I'll try again next year, too, but as several people have told me they were interested in how it all turns out, I feel duty-bound to report both my failures and successes here on my blog, and so far the garlic has not been a success. C'est la vie.

Garlic, again and again

Well, the garlic-growing experiment continues nicely. Having posted something about garlic here and here in recent months, I have some good progress to report to my half-dozen readers world-wide!

Stage three plantings are up and showing signs of doing best out of the three plantings. What I mean by 'stage three' is merely the last cloves to be planted. These had spent a full eight weeks chilling out in the crisper section of my fridge and were then planted out on our winter solstice – June 21. There's an old saying of 'plant garlic on the shortest day of the year and harvest on the longest'. And so that's the plan. As pictured above this afternoon, all the June 21 planted cloves are up and belting along nicely.

Standing back a bit further reveals the three rows of garlic. On the very left is the little row of garlic which was planted in April, without any prior chilling of cloves in the fridge. Four weeks later I planted the middle row, after the cloves had been in the fridge for four weeks. And on the right is the third row, the eight-weeks-in-the-fridge guys. It may be significant, maybe not, but with the two earlier rows I had two 'misfires' – ie, cloves which didn't come up – out of the six cloves planted each time. With the 'eight-weeks' guys not only have all six come up, but I had five leftover cloves at the end of planting, and so they've gone in another spot in the garden nearby, and all five of those cloves have come up – a 100% success rate. So, it looks like a good spell in the fridge prior to planting might help the cloves get going, at least in the relative warmth of Sydney, that is. Maybe it's not so important in colder areas, where garlic is said to be easier to grow.

Now that all the cloves are up and running, I've laid out some mulch after both doing a spot of weeding as well as feeding, by laying down some lines of Dynamic Lifter (pelletised chicken poo) in between each row of garlic plants.

While at a local garden centre today a little packet of golden shallots caught my eye and, being something of a garden-centre impulse buyer from way back, the rest is history. I had the perfect spot for them, the bare patch of soil next to my 'spillover' garlic which has just come up.

The shallot pack says I can plant these between May and September, and expect to harvest them around January. Planting depth is shallow – you're meant to plant them with the pointy tips just poking out above the soil surface. The new shallots form below ground at the base of the bulb, clustered together to form a kind of a circle of bulbs emanating from the one spot. As is the case with all root vegies, they don't like manure or fertiliser added prior to planting, so I didn't. Pictured here on the left are the new garlic shoots powering along, and on the right you can just see the brown tops of the shallots poking up (they need to be planted about 15cm apart, but I gave them a bit more room than that). As I had a bit of spare ground left over at the end of the row after planting them out, I dashed inside to the kitchen, grabbed two more golden shallots from the pantry and whacked them in the ground, to see if they do any better or worse than the fancily-packaged garden centre ones. This isn't the ideal spot for either the garlic or the shallots. Right now it only gets morning sun, but by September it should get about six or more hours of sun a day, so I'm hoping they'll catch up in growth once the weather warms and the sun gets higher in the sky.

The only other trick I have up my sleeve is chilled water. I'm going to occasionally water the garlic and the shallots with chilled water from the fridge, at least once or twice during this July, our coldest month of the year. The chilled water will provide just a touch of extra icy-wintry weather to help trick them into thinking they're somewhere much cooler.

And so that's this month's garlic report from Amateur Land. A lot of Aussie gardeners are having a go at growing garlic lately (all my gardening friends are), due to the fairly patchy quality of shop-bought garlic here. Some of the imported stuff in the shops is OK (I've found the Californian and Argentinian garlic to be OK, but the Chinese garlic has achieved legendary status it's so bland), and you never know what you're going to get, quality-wise, from one week to the next. The locally grown garlic is often both rare and overpriced, but it is quite good when you can find it. So lots of us are having a go at growing our own.

If this year's crop does well, I have no doubt that I'll be adding garlic as one of my regular crops. But there's a long way to go yet!