Kitchen Gardens
Quince
Early Autumn saw the harvest of more than 200 kilos of quince and around the same quantity of red delicious and other eating apples which are being used in the very Autumnal dessert Apple, triple cream, chamomile, caramel. Figs were also ready by early March and replaced the fresh berries in the Fig Leaf Soup dessert to create Fig Leaf Milk, fresh fig, dried berries.
Heirloom tomatoes harvested from the
kitchen garden.Diners who visited the restaurant in the past six weeks have been treated to Dan's Heirloom tomato salad, a colourful array of organic, sometimes quite rare heirloom tomatoes that changed as different varieties ripened slowly in the garden. The dish has included Black Russian, Beef Steak, Galapagos, Purple Russian, Green Zebra, Tigerella, Golden Cherry, Brown Berry, Waspiconsan Peach (a yellow furry-skinned variety), Red Fig, Roma, Cherry and Ox Heart. We're just seeing the last of these now as May approaches.
Having access to this wide variety of fruit provides not just a pleasing aesthetic of differing colours, shapes and sizes, but also varied textures and flavours which range from the ‘regular' tomato tastes of acidic and sweet to broader umami flavours and a concentration of intense tomato flavour on the centre of the palate, something like the taste of tomato paste. Sadly, something that most of us no longer have regular access to, the heirloom tomato dish has been a welcome reminder of what real tomatoes taste like.
Gardener Gary Fisher renewing garden
beds and planting seedlings.Kitchen gardener, Gary Fisher, is now busy enriching the soil of garden beds with a compost-manure mixture and planting new beetroot seedlings which will provide eight different varieties to be ready for the dish Pigeon, beetroot, white chocolate, rose by mid-Winter.