Green tomato chutney

If, like me, you have a glut of homegrown tomatoes that aren’t ripening, this is a great way to use them up. My crop this year was really high yield and there was no way the ones on the lower trellises were going to ripen with all the seasons we are having at the moment, so I removed them.

I am new to gardening, but I have read that at the end of the summer in the UK, you can encourage the remaining trellises to ripen by being quite ruthless with the plants. As well as removing lower hanging fruit, you should also remove any new flowers, small fruit that haven’t developed yet and any diseased leaves or leaves that are blocking the sun. This encourages the plant to put all its energy into the remaining tomatoes. You can also reduce the watering schedule – this stresses the plant and again encourages it to put its energy into producing ripe fruits for reproduction.

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Bergamot poached pears

I had never tried bergamot before I started working at Natoora. I knew it as the aromatic in Earl Grey tea. I had no idea it was a citrus fruit.

Natoora were the first company to import bergamot to the UK, though it has become more readily available since they introduced it in 2009. Their bergamot is sourced from Calabria. It is exceptionally aromatic and surprisingly versatile, given its unique and intense flavour.  It works particularly well in Asian dishes, with seafood or desserts, where you might usually use lemon or lime. It has now replaced the cucumber in my Hendrick's and Tonics - definitely my favourite use.

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Andrew's Roasted Delica pumpkin with garlic, herbs and chilli

Pumpkin is not something I often choose to cook. I generally prefer something more savoury. But the Delica pumpkin from Natoora really is exceptional. They are grown in Mantova, Lombardy following traditional methods that involve a final curing process in heated warehouses that maximises the sugar contents and reduces the amount of water in the flesh.

My colleague, Andrew, made this recipe for the Natoora autumn seasonal meeting and it was a hit. Gone in seconds. It's a simple recipe which makes the most of the Delica's sweet and tender flesh. Roasted with garlic, herbs and chilli, it caramelises beautifully in the oven.

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Moroccan-spiced carrots

Today I am updating a post from November last year to make use of these glorious heritage carrots from Natoora. Of course, you can just use normal ones or baby carrots as I did originally. The introduction that follows remains the same, but I have edited the recipe.

As a budding young food anthropologist I feel very ambivalent about the name I have just given this recipe. I just spent my summer writing a dissertation querying the very notion that any dish or cuisine can be assigned a nationality. However, the alternative is a bit of a mouthful: “Carrots with preserved lemon, cumin, caraway and coriander seeds”. I could keep things vague, e.g. “Middle-Eastern spiced carrots”, but that only extends the problem, anthropologically speaking. Anyway, the point here is these carrots are bloody delicious and I really ought to leave such musings to my anthropology pages.

This is such a simple recipe. I threw it together for the first time a few weeks back when all I had in the fridge was a bunch of carrots from the farmers’ market and some preserved lemons that I made a few months ago. (Any excuse to use the lemons – they are fabulous.)

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