Broad Beans with smoked Gammon

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

This is the first meal I have cooked this year with home-grown Broad Beans.

Home-grown Broad Beans are not available very often. In my garden I usually only plant one batch, so their harvest season is limited to a couple of weeks, and I never have sufficient quantity to make freezing them a viable option.

My first dish using these beans was a really simple one, making full use of fresh vegetables and herbs. Here we are – Smoked Gammon with new potatoes (home-grown “Annabelle”), peas, carrots and Broad Beans with herbs, all complemented with a Parsley sauce.

I wish I could say that the carrots and peas were homegrown too. They weren’t,  but these were:

So were these herbs – Parsley, Mint, Thyme, Chives and Savory.

Cooking this meal was incredibly easy. The Smoked Gammon was wrapped loosely in foil and baked in the oven for 90 minutes and then rested for a further 15 before carving. The potatoes were boiled in water with a few sprigs of Mint added. Once these were well on the way I did the other vegetables. They were all boiled, but added to the pan at different times. I correctly judged that the carrots would take longer to cook than the other two veg, so I put them in about 10 minutes beforehand. Then the peas and beans went in just for about 5 minutes at the end. I also added the Thyme and Savory at this point (leaves only).

The cooked vegetables were drained, decanted to a serving-dish, and smothered in chopped fresh herbs (the softer ones – Mint, Chives, Parsley). The final stage was to add a generous knob of butter and let it slowly melt before gently stirring it in.

Meanwhile, as the meat was resting, I made some Parsley sauce. I used the time-honoured roux method to produce a Bechamel, with flour, butter and milk, adding the chopped Parsley at the end in order to preserve its fresh flavour.

By this time the meat was rested and the butter had melted into the vegetables, so it was just a matter of serving up.

This is it: thinly-sliced roast Smoked Gammon with “seasonal vegetables”.

The Gammon was not too smoky, so it did not overpower the rest of the dish, and we were able to enjoy the fresh flavours of the young veg to the full.

To read more articles like this, on Gardening and Gastronomy, please visit * http://marksvegplot.blogspot.com/ *