2 pitta breads, torn into 2–3cm pieces
100g shelled broad beans
1 Cos or Little Gem lettuce, shredded
1 small cucumber, peeled, quartered lengthways, deseeded and cut into 1–2cm chunks
4 radishes, sliced
10 cherry tomatoes, cut in half
50g feta cheese, crumbled
For the dressing:
6 mint leaves, chopped
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
11/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, toasted in a dry frying pan and then crushed
a pinch of cayenne pepper
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Spread the pieces of pitta bread out on a baking sheet, place in an oven preheated to 180°C/Gas Mark 4 and toast for about 5 minutes, until just crisp. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.
Blanch the broad beans in boiling salted water for 2–4 minutes, depending on size, then drain.
Whisk together all the ingredients for the dressing. Toss the bread, broad beans, lettuce, cucumber, radishes and cherry tomatoes with the dressing, then sprinkle with the crumbled feta.
Easy ideas for broad beans
♦ Boil 300g shelled broad beans until tender, then blend in a food processor with 2 tablespoons of the cooking liquid, adding enough very good olive oil to make a thick purée. Season, spread on a serving plate and drizzle with olive oil, then garnish with finely chopped spring onions and mint. To spice this up, you could add 1/2 teaspoon of ground cumin and a pinch of paprika when puréeing the beans.
♦ Add cooked broad beans to Roast Artichokes and New Potatoes (see Roast Artichokes and New Potatoes).
♦ Boil a handful of shelled broad beans with a bunch of trimmed asparagus until just tender, then drain and toss with sliced spring onions, a little chopped tarragon and a light vinegar and oil dressing.
See also:
Braised Artichokes with Broad Beans and Mint
This is a part of the vegetable world where nomenclature gets confusing. To growers in the mild, coastal areas of Devon and Cornwall, ‘broccoli’ means late-winter cauliflower. Traditionally, to gardeners and cooks, broccoli is an abbreviation for our wonderfully winter-hardy purple sprouting broccoli. But over the last 30 years, for most people broccoli has come to mean calabrese, the uniform, succulent, green-headed impostor from Calabria in southern Italy, and the version most commonly found on supermarket shelves.
Calabrese
This is juicier and milder in flavour than most of the brassica family and as such is one of the few vegetables that nearly all children will eat. In the fields, it can take a little frost but lacks the hardiness of our native broccolis, and needs more sunlight. The UK season conventionally runs from late June to November but the early crops are hard to keep growing without nitrogen fertiliser (which, as organic growers, we don’t use), and the very late ones tend to have poor flavour, so for us the season lasts only from August to late October. Through the winter, calabrese for the UK market is trucked up from Spain in huge quantities. We may occasionally buy it in the depths of winter, but where possible I prefer to use cape broccoli and romanesco in early winter and purple sprouting through late winter and spring.
Purple sprouting broccoli
To my delight, PSB, as we know it, has enjoyed a renaissance over the last few years, as people tire of the bland predictability of hybrid calabrese. It has the great advantage of coming into season from January to May, when other home-grown greens are in short supply. At the height of the season, through March and April, we make no apologies for including it in virtually every veg box and every meal in the Field Kitchen. Supermarkets have tried to respond to this rise in popularity but have been frustrated by PSB’s wild appearance and its seasonality. There is a pressure to ‘tidy it up’ with uniform hybrid varieties, as has been the case with calabrese, and to banish its seasonality by developing varieties for the summer and early winter – despite the fact that these out-of-season hybrids are tough and nasty to eat. Seasonality and variation are anathema to supermarkets. They keep trying to bully farmers into trimming the individual shoots and laying them geometrically in trays so they look as if they came from a factory, regardless of the fact that the spears come in all different shapes and sizes and the discarded leaves make wonderful greens.
The harvesting of a single variety can be spread over three to six weeks, depending on the type and the time of year. Once the primary head has been harvested, the side shoots develop into secondary spears, which we pick with a rosette of leaves. If the plants are strong and the pickers sufficiently nimble, there can be a third generation to pick. The secret is to pass through the crop frequently enough to avoid the spears bursting into flower or the stems becoming tough, without spending too much time searching rather than picking.
The varieties we grow come mostly from Tozers, one of the last independent English seed producers. We start the season with Rudolf, normally in January or early February, then move on to Redhead and Red Spear. There is always a glut in late March and April, as the highest-yielding Claret comes into season. We finish the season with Cardinal, or with Tozer’s ‘late selection’, in late April or early May. Such is the popularity of PSB with our customers that over the last few years we have been trying to breed our own late-heading variety to allow us to continue picking a little later into the spring ‘hungry gap’. I would not recommend buying PSB between mid-May and December, when you will be getting the inferior modern hybrids.
We tried white sprouting broccoli but it is lower yielding, goes off quickly and normally doesn’t taste as good anyway, so it has been dropped. Because it is possible to continue harvesting over a long period, right down to the small spears that would be uneconomic for a commercial grower, I would recommend PSB as a crop for any keen cook with access to a reasonable-sized garden or allotment.
If you cannot snap the spears cleanly when you receive them in your box, we have probably got a bit behind with the picking, and you may need to trim the bottoms a little to get to the tender stalks. Other than that and picking off any diseased leaves, the whole lot is edible. The stalks themselves can be very sweet, and normally don’t take much cooking. If they are large, it is sometimes worth splitting them from the bottom with a knife to ensure they cook before the flower is overdone. My mother was a big fan of purple sprouting broccoli and would carry on picking a few plants well into May, when the spears were the size of matchsticks. She would bunch them with a band as she was picking and then boil them standing up in the pan, as you might asparagus, so that the flower buds did not get overcooked.
Romanesco
You cannot fail to be impressed by the bright lime green colour and mathematical perfection of a head of romanesco. Its florets have a repeating fractal pattern, making up a conical shape that reminds me of Madonna’s aggressively brassiered breasts in her Boadicea phase. Romanesco’s virtues extend beyond its marvellous appearance. With a crunchy texture, and a flavour somewhere between cauliflower and