Tasty ways to use summer harvests
Not sure what to do with all your homegrown harvests? Chef Gill Meller suggest fresh, easy and irresistible ways to make best use of your fruit and veg
Cooking fresh seasonal ingredients is a brilliant way of connecting with the gentle rhythms of the year. And if, like me, you’re lucky enough to grow a few of those ingredients at home or on an allotment, you’ll be able to appreciate the importance of these connections even more.
There’s simply nothing quite like harvesting your own produce. It’s so rewarding and something I always look forward to, even if it’s just picking a bunch of herbs. Everything seems to taste so much better if you’ve helped it to grow, and August is the month when a lot of that effort and patience pays off. It’s a time of plenty, but happily most of the hard work’s been done earlier in the year, so you should be able to spend more time in the kitchen with a knife and less time in the garden with a fork.
Sometimes it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the harvest, particularly if you’ve got a big garden, but there’s really no need to worry – wonderful ingredients don’t need to be cooked in complicated ways. In fact, freshly picked vegetables, fruit, salads and herbs are best treated simply, so you can taste how wonderful they are.
Of course, there are all sorts of other ways to deal with the high summer bounty. Preserving, bottling and pickling are some ways to make the most of the harvest, but sharing it with your friends and family is another equally lovely way of enjoying the fruits of your labour.