Dandelion tempura

It's dropping quite cold but the weather itself is fine. OH has been inspired by my example (I vainly imagine) and mobilised the shed door from the old blue summerhouse we had inherited and dismantled soon after moving in. He moves one of the potting benches and uses the door to replace the rotten tabletop. Works very well. We'll put the second, slimmer door on the other.

The compost dalek needs emptying. As usual, it is a stinking, slimy mess (probably thanks to the gallons of apple mush we threw on it last September). That dalek doesn't work. Every year, it ends up as anaerobic sludge. Then again, it's also full of pink and purple compost worms and it just smells very 'nutritious'. I bag it up and load up the garden cart. I feel even more ambitious and tie up the 2 cubic metres worth of clematis and various dried shrubbery cuttings that need burning on the bonfire and load it on top of the muck. All tied down, I trudge up the street with my cart towards the plot. Some of the looks I'm getting from drivers are priceless but I feel very worthy and low-carbon lifestyle-y.

OH has volunteered to cycle round our allotment secretary's house and pay our annual fee. He arrives at the allotment soon after me. The muck gets spread round the fruit bushes, the perpetual spinach and what is to become the tomato bed.

Still very dry. Rain possibly forecast for Monday but some of the plants are showing signs of drought stress so I water them. The blue plastic butt runs out of water. First water run of the season down to the river, with the hand cart this time and two plastic canisters. The pier is even more rickety than it was last year but it's still holding me and my watering can.

All freshly planted strawbs and the self-seeded lettuces watered now. I can see more tiny lettuce seedlings popping up everywhere, which cheers me up no end! Lettuce galore! All mints got a good soaking, as did the herb bed with the self-seeded coriander and dill. OH gives his onions a shower, and the fruit bushes have their muck watered in too. 

Weighted the shed down with paving slabs. Windows still not put in, but these can wait. Three water butts now lined up by the side of the shed, not connected yet, but the big one is ready to receive water from the guttering if it does rain.

The two lethally edgy metal sheets with the flaking paint that we salvaged from the old shed and that have been leaning against the trellis have now been stuck into the plot boundary at the back, where the old strawberries still are, nicely out of the way.

OH, having turned his onion beds into islands of Zen, picks tonight's rhubarb, not quite enough for a crumble but enough for a Fool. I also pick more dandelion flowers, on top of those already picked from our back garden. Once we're home, I make a tempura batter, but with curry powder, dip the washed dandelion heads in it and fry them off in some sunflower oil. A nice little heap of that for a late lunch, and a small dipping bowl of half soy sauce, half mirin... we do live like kings, we keep saying to each other. It is absolutely lovely. The fried dandelions have the texture of mushrooms, with a hint of bitterness from the flower base. Bitter, I read somewhere, means good for the liver. I hope that's correct.

Our neighbours have taken themselves off over Easter and have kindly left us the contents of their veggie drawer in a bag hanging off our backyard fence post. The loot is impressive: 4 peppers, 2 tomatoes, 3 courgettes, half a cuke. As we also have leftover bread, I say to OH that I would bake us another quiche. I've worked out that you can soften dried-up (but obviously not mouldy) bread with hot milk, mash it, then add semolina or flour or more breadcrumbs and some butter and line a quiche tray with it. Pre-bake like pastry, and it works just as well. As the old bread is already salted, there's no need to add any further salt to it. When I tried this two or so weeks ago with our first spinach of the season, OH pronounced it “the best quiche you've ever made”. And it was all made with leftovers.

This quiche isn't quite so successful. I didn't have any more cream and used yoghurt with corn starch instead, lots of cheese as usual and roasted peppers plus grated carrot and some fresh oregano and ground mace. It was nice enough but the quality test for my quiches is whether there's any left the next day after lunch. We were still eating it on the third day and it had to spend time in the fridge. That's serious. I guess it was the bready base after all – I hadn't salted it and the finished pastry tasted weak. New rule: elderly ciabatta goes dwarf-bread once dried so you have to pound seven shades of hell out of it to get it to soften and mix with milk. Not again.

I still send a pic of the quiche to my neighbour's mobile, by way of thanks.

Hope it doesn't look too disgusting.