Have a well-preserved winter

leaves again in spring (they’re a good addition for salads). Parsnips need to be chilled to give them the sweetest flavour – the cold forces the plant to turn starch to sugars to act like a weak antifreeze. And, like parsnips, potatoes also get sweeter with cold. ‘Golden Wonder’ taste far better after a period of storage. Many potatoes can be lifted until Christmas or even after. ‘Mayan Gold’ (resistant to scab and with a high resistance to blight) has a superb nutty flavour and is our choice for chipping and roasting. Like many potatoes they will keep well for a few months in paper sacks in a frost-free shed. I have a couple of tubs of new potatoes growing in my greenhouse for Christmas, too. Some things I do freeze as they are quick and special. Raspberries and gooseberries are easy to lay out on trays and freeze. Then we vacuum pack them and put them back in the freezer. It’s worth it for the odd gooseberry or raspberry pavlova after a Sunday roast. I’ve got some apple racks in the old barn, where I lay out apples and pears. Some will keep quite well until March. The pears are short-lived, although I am planning on growing some in a bottle next year. You gently push a tiny one on a twig into the bottle in spring and use tape to keep insects out. When it’s ripe, cut off the stem and fill the bottle with vodka. Leave the bottle in the sun for a month before adding 300g of caster sugar and leaving it again for three months until the sugar has dissolved. Add a liqueur glass of eau de vie de poire and it’s done. I love quince – a bowl on the kitchen table scents the room, but in a cool place they will store through the winter. Paul Gayler makes a quince sauce with oranges, redcurrant jelly, port wine and cinnamon to serve with game or pork. This I would definitely find time to make and freeze. Like this, some fine foods will take you through the winter to enjoy with your regular fresh pickings – leeks, cabbages, spinach, watercress, lettuce, coriander, parsley, chervil – making sure that your winter menus are anything but barren.