The Vegetable Garden of Oddities...

   After a couple of years of trying to raise veg in shady conditions, it came to me in a flash of brilliance that the sunniest spot in the garden is right in the middle of the lawn.
   I truly hate lawns, the horticultural equivalent of tasteful beige, so it was with some gusto that I set to with a spade a couple of months ago. What's there right now are two beds, one each side of the bowling alley path (that has to go too, at some point). The soil here is beyond fertile and completely free of stones so digging is a real, and easy, pleasure.
      These beds aren't huge but they're jammed with vegetables that you don't normally see at the market. At the back are yard-long green beans grown from seeds I brought back from Chiang Mai. In front are white aubergine plants (from the same source), and bronze and green fennel. Mixed in with these, in no particular order:

 Can someone please tell me what this is? I bought it from an organic grower at Mirepoix market, but forgot to ask its name. It's quite pungent, and a little works well in salads and stir fries.

The Espelette pepper that is one of the basics of Basque cuisine. I picked up a little plant at a market in St. Jean de Luz when we were there in June.

 Gorgeous crimson-stemmed chard, one of four plants that just keeps producing and producing. Again, bought at a local market.

   The best euro I've ever spent was for this tomatillo plant. I've never even seen tomatillos for sale in France so this was a real find. I'm thinking salsa (and margaritas) some steamy night soon. Tiny when I first brought it home, the plant now stands at least a metre high, measures the same wide and is absolutely dripping with fruit.
     Also growing lustily are Asian greens from seeds I bought while we were in the UK, (which reminds me it's time to write some posts about travels earlier this year).
    Time to cook up some of those greens, grill some slices of pork belly that have been marinading all afternoon with chilis, soy sauce, garlic and sesame oil, and crack open the jar of homemade kimchee.

Asia in a French kitchen.

    Years ago, I bought Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking on the strength of its recipe for kimchee, that incendiary Korean pickle that you either love or hate. Personally, I'm crazy about it but hadn't made it here in France because daikon (white radish) is rarely seen at local markets. PS: I've since heard that you can use the black radish that you find everywhere here.
      I reckoned ordinary radishes would do just as well so, last week, I set to with a Chinese cabbage--these occasionally show up around here--and a fat bunch of neon-pink radishes.

 Here they are soaking in heavily salted water.

 The other ingredients: sliced scallions, cayenne pepper, and indecent amounts of chopped ginger and garlic.

 Drained, the radishes and cabbage are mixed with the hot stuff.

   And then packed in a two-litre jar, topped up with the salt water, covered with a cloth and left for three or four days to turn into kimchee. The jar has now moved into the fridge and I'm imagining the pickle as a side dish, and thinking about some sort of sticky, spicy treatment for that two kilo slab of pork belly that's in the freezer with some plain rice to sop all the delicious juices up.