I feel very privileged. Nick has given me his biggest onion. It wasn’t any good for the horticultural show after all as he didn’t have three onions of the same size. One enormous one just doesn’t cut it unfortunately. It’s a special show onion called Kelsae. I weighed it and it is a massive 1.3kg (2 lb 14oz). That compares to our largest onion (pictured) which weighed 426g (15oz). That got chopped up and fried last night and served with our sausages at an impromptu barbeque on the allotment. The first of our pink fir apples made a lovely potato salad (much better than the Anya potatoes which went all floury) and I had roasted some beetroot that I used for a salad – the flavour was so sweet and intense it didn’t need a dressing. The sausages were good too – thank you Thomas for doing the barbeque! Lindsey, Stuart and I could hardly see our hands in front of our faces by the time we packed up and headed home. So much for that early (sober) night I’d planned.
The night before, Thomas and I had shared a couple of bottles of nice wine – oh, and we ate some food too: rare fillet steak with a Portobello mushroom, parsnip puree and honey-glazed shallots (ours, of course). Apparently parsnips like a touch of frost to make them sweeter but I’m not sure our parsnips can wait that long (see photo). Maggie gave me the idea that I should stick it in the freezer instead, which I did. Obviously I hadn’t tried it before it went in the freezer, uncooked as it was, so I have no idea if the half an hour in the freezer did anything. Nevertheless the parsnip puree was lovely (chop and boil until tender, then process in a blender with hot milk and cream and horseradish sauce).
Today I sorted the wheelbarrow-load of pink fir apple potatoes that we’d dug up yesterday. The ones that have fork damage (blame the husband) and there were quite a few, I’ve put in the cupboard to use first and the rest I’ve put in a hessian sack and put that inside one of those large paper sacks you can buy to line your brown recycling wheelie bin. Last year I put our Desiree potatoes just in the hessian sack but I don’t think it was dark enough and the potatoes all went green. We still ate them, of course, it just took ages to peel off the layer of green, and as far as I know, I didn’t poison anybody. The problem we have now is where to store the sacks of potatoes. We have a small house and no garage. I’m going to ask the neighbours if we can store them in their garage for the price of as many potatoes as they can eat. I think that’s a pretty good deal.
Our largest spring onion looks very small compared to our largest onion, let alone Nick's show onion.
Our first parsnip compares in size to the courgettes that have turned into marrows.