Carrot and apple jam

I made this jam a while ago after foraging a load of apples from a tree growing in a farmer's field in Norfolk. The tree was alone and stood the the edge of the field as if it had grown there by chance, or been seeded by a careless walker's discarded snack. The apples were rotting beneath it. This is the first jam I've ever made.

I've thought carrots would go quite well with the apple in a jam due to their high sugar content - they do after all crop up in Indian sweets and carrot cake. Not being the jamming expert I needed a recipe to follow and found this one online. Its small amount of ingredients and straightforward sounding processes were appealing – I immediately decided to ramp up the ginger to get good harmonies going with the carrot. It does include a silly suggestion of adding a few drops of food colouring to  get a really orange colour which needless to say is not the SDON way at all. So you're going to need -

• 500g apples
• 300g carrots
• a medium - large piece of stem ginger chopped
• 625g sugar
• pinches of cinnamon and chilli
• juice of two lemons

Grate your vegetables - remember the magimix is your friend. Far too arduous to attempt by hand.

Combine all the ingredients and cook down until, well, jammy. Being a novice I went too far here and by the time the jam had later cooled it had gone a bit too solid. It still tastes delicious mind, but it's in semi-solid chunks and not great for spreading. The taste though, is wonderful - extremely sweet, with the toffee-ish texture giving way to caramel, then the warmth of the ginger and finally the sweet shreds of carrot. I think it is slightly too sweet actually, so have lowered the amount of sugar above accordingly.

As well as your standard toast and butter combo this jam went very well with a bit of gruyere - just a smidgeon of jam was enough to set of the nutty cheese very nicely. It's not really so far from the chilli jams that we use in savoury food so I wouldn't be too slavish in only using it for sweet dishes. The other thing it would be sensational in I think is some sort of jammed up treacle tart or sponge pudding....

Pasta with roast cauliflower and pumpkin

Cheap cauliflower is a boon. It's one of those vegetables (like aubergines) that isn't often had for bargains on markets. When you see some cheap snap it up, take it home and roast it. I was prompted to roast mine by this post. I did it slightly differently, but the great thing is if you cook loads you can then have it in the fridge and ready to use in different things - a little side dish, the basis of a salad (would be great with chickpeas, turnips and preserved lemons) or, as here, with pasta.

• cauliflower
• pumpkin
• garlic, chilli flakes, cinnamon, olive oil
• pasta

Roast your cauli: in florets, with butter and salt. It will need half an hour - forty-five minutes on a medium heat.

Make the sauce: fry lots of garlic in olive oil and add the pumpkin chopped small with a little twig of cinnamon. Chuck in some chilli flakes. Put a little water in there and add a lid. Allow this all to cook down for ten or fifteen minutes, using your spoon to mash the pumpkin into a sauce. You don't need loads here - it's designed to lubricate the pasta and augment the cauliflower. If your pumpkin is anaemic and lacking taste, as mine was - from our communal garden, sprinkle a little veg stock on.

When the pumpkin is well cooked and the sauce has come together de-engage the cinnamon and discard. It has done an important job here - a slight sweetness that boosts the pumpkin and bonds with the chilli. Stir into your pasta and toss in the cauliflower. Anoint with oil or bless with parmesan as you see fit.

Yes. Sheer niceness. Where the cauliflower browns against the metal of the tray you are rewarded with a wonderful sweetness, whilst the roasting in general gives the vegetable a savour not attained through boiling or steaming. It gains an almost truffle like richness which combines with the pumpkin to make a wonderful sauce.

Chickpea and pumpkin with creamed feta

You know those brown chickpeas with their skins still on that you get in curries sometimes? Get involved. They're well nice. They need to be soaked overnight in boiling water and will then cook in about half an hour. No need to mess around with bicarb of soda or anything. Just a minute's prep the night before and then thirty minutes on the hob while you get everything else ready. I still have canned chickpeas in the cupboard for impromptu salads etc. but the texture of these dark chickpeas makes them well worth a go if you have time to plan. They seem hard and under-cooked in their jackets but when bitten into are delightfully earthy - initially resistant but ultimately giving.

This is one of those simple assemblages that makes a lot of sense on an inclement mid-week evening.

• lots of chick peas
• a third - a half that amount in pumpkin/squash
• a third that amount of onions
• a few nice ripe tomatoes
• a block of feta
• preserved lemons
• olive oil, cumin, chilli flakes, garlic

Soak your chickpeas over night. Put them on to boil on a moderate heat. After twenty minutes check their progress and add chunks of pumpkin/squash.

Chop lots of garlic and fry in plenty of olive oil with cumin and chilli. This is my Turkish holy trinity of flavours which you can use all over the shop to flavour soups, salads and stews. Add the onions in slices and cook these down on a medium heat. They are a key ingredient here, not just background mulch, so make sure they are good and soft.

Meantime mash and thin the feta with a little olive oil and a drop of cream (or water if you have none to hand) in a bowl. Add plenty of black pepper and some rinsed preserved lemon sliced thinly. Mash until you have a thick paste - this is the taste bomb necessary to perk the mash beneath it - salt, sheep, adult/child lemon sherbet. Herbs such as thyme and rosemary would also work well.

When the chickpeas are done put them in with the onions and a a few ripe chopped tomatoes. Cook this all for five minutes to relax it and so the tomatoes break down to make a sauce. No need for salt as the feta will supply this. Serve with a dollop of creamed feta on top and some red wine or Turkish beer.

Spicy green tomato chutney

As well as cucumbers my communal garden has lots of tomatoes. Unfortunately they too have been a bit neglected and I fear that it's a bit late in the year for them to ripen. So I picked a load of them and made a spiced green tomato chutney. I like Nigel Slater's suggestion of putting a few ripe tomatoes in the mix as well, so I chucked in a few shop bought ones.

In the spirit of educating myself about chutney-making I did everything by eye.

• the amount of tomatoes above (two kg?)
• 400g sugar
• 350 ml vinegar (try malt/white wine mix)
• chopped fresh chillies to taste
• two onions chopped small
• a handful of raisins
• a few cloves, peppercorns, star anise, cumin, coriander seed - take your pick
  
  

Fry your onion in oil for five minutes then add everything else (easy huh?). Cook on a low heat for fifty - sixty minutes.

After finding the plum chutney (which I recently broke out - very nice. It had softened and rounded over time.) I made a while ago a little bit liquid I was careful to leave this one for an extra twenty minutes or so. It probably had about an hour in total. The tomatoes break down very thoroughly and make a wonderfully jammy matrix for the other bits.

Push a bit to one side and if it doesn't rush back immediately it's nearly ready.
 

Have your empty jam jars immersed in another pot with boiling water and decant your hot chutney into them.

My chutney draw is getting pretty healthily populated!

Cucumber with malt vinegar

When I was a kid we used to sometimes have cucumber sliced very thin with malt vinegar. It was something that my mum had got from some elderly family friends who fled Poland as refugees in the 1940s.

My estate has a a community garden and vegetable patch. It has had some vegetables (tomatoes, pumpkins) planted in which is great, and though it needs a bit (quite a lot in fact) of TLC there were some cucumbers successfully getting fat and old that I managed to pick. These aren't your long smooth Dutch class of cucumber, but a specially spiked fatman variety, more like the little Middle Eastern ones. These four have been left a bit too long on the vine so the seeds had got hard and slightly unpleasant. Not a problem, I just scooped out the middle.

Slice your cucumber as thin as possible and add lots of malt vinegar. Sprinkle over a little sea salt . That's all. That's your lot.

For bonus points serve on a plate with an pre-eminent British general.

General Lord Kitchener of Khartoum