quite contrary

things are really starting to happen in the scrubby little excuse for a garden i'm carving out for myself at casa mitchell. it's still very much a work in progress, but all the arse-busting work i did in spring is starting to show rewards. i've got pods on my pea and broad bean plants, i've already eaten my first lettuce harvest, and i keep getting handful after handful of rocket to scatter over just about everything. my small scale herb garden is thriving. the latest success story is my perpetual spinach plants. perpetual spinach is not spinach proper, it's a member of the chard family that behaves in a very similar manner to spinach, in that you can't really tell the difference apart from the plants being hardier. i have two plants, and about say, once a week i nip out and harvest a couple of handfuls of leaves about this size:

i've been starting to pretty much plan what i cook around this weekly harvest, so reliable and prolific as it has become. part of me is intrigued to see how long my plants will keep giving if i keep them well cared for. they're sure enough not showing signs of slowing down.

while it would be easy to get lazy and just start wilting spinach into everything, like i did when i was a student and reluctant to waste any of one of those supermarket pillow packs of baby leaves which i seemed to buy every week; i have been trying to cook things that let the natural flavours of this spinach come through on their own. because if you're putting in the time and effort to grow something yourself, organically, it doesn't make sense to just chuck it any old where. not to mention that home grown produce seems to taste so much more of itself than its industrially raised counterparts, and it would seem a bit of a disservice to it to let it get lost in amongst too many other ingredients.

my most successful endeavour with my spinach so far has been in coupling my growing-to-eat obsession with my other obsession: yeasted baking. i decided, after making the pizza dough recipe from the river cottage bread handbook, that i wanted to try using the dough for calzones, and since in a calzone the filling is protected by folded over dough, there's no risk of wilted spinach scorching at the high temperatures necessary to bake the dough. so i kind of improvised this little number, and was mighty pleased with the results:

spinach and mushroom calzones

half a batch of river cottage pizza dough
1 ball mozzarella, roughly torn (contrary to what food snobs will tell you, using mozzarella bufula campagna is entirely unnecessary in recipes in which it will be melted and is not to be the primary flavour, but buy organic, yeah? unethical dairy production is way more grim than unethical meat farming)
four large field mushrooms, slicked thickly
about 150g spinach, very roughly chopped
two gloves of garlic, finely sliced
1-2 sprigs of thyme (i used lemon thyme from my garden)
olive oil
rye flour for dusting
salt and black pepper

so obviously, apart from the pizza dough prep, which needs to be done about an hour in advance, this recipe is super easy. before you get started, preheat your oven to as high as it will go, with a heavy baking tray or baking stone in it.

heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan, and brown your mushrooms, adding the garlic and thyme after a minute or two. and you shouldn't need me to tell you this, but the less you move your mushrooms and the more space you give them, the better they'll be. nothing pisses me off more in the kitchen than having an obsessive stirrer keeping me company and not leaving things to just be. just give the pan the odd shake to flip the mushrooms about so they brown evenly.

when pretty much done, add your spinach to the pan, stir it in, season with salt and pepper, and turn the heat off. the spinach should wilt pretty damn quickly. and it'll look a little bit like this:


leave it aside for a minute while you roll/stretch out your calzone dough. now, i just made two here, but i think if i made it again, i'd divide the dough into three, maybe four, because the ones i ended up with were absolutely massive, and while i have a mega appetite, i struggled with one. you need to roll out your calzones into rough ovalish rounds on a surface dusted with rye flour, size not mattering as much as the fact you're aiming for about a 5mm thickness.

assembling your calzones requires speed more than anything else, so they don't get soggy. dust a rimless baking sheet with rye flour, place one of your ovals on it, scatter your filling on one half, along with some of your mozzarella, fold over the other half, and crimp the edges up with you thumb and forefinger. slide straight into the oven and the heat from your baking sheet or stone will get to work on the base before it has time to get soggy. repeat with the rest of your dough.

they take ten minutes to cook, roughly, and come out looking like this:


not the prettiest (yeah yeah, i'm just gonna stop making mention of the fact i'm totally slapdash on presentation, i think we all get the point now, don't we?), but basically awesome. one of 'em leaked a little bit, but it wasn't really the end of the world in my opinion. mine ended up so big i didn't have anything with the one i ate for dinner, otherwise i might have been tempted by some of my rocket alongside it. and despite the bold flavour of the field mushrooms i'd used alongside it, the whole thing turned out pleasingly spinach-y, and will definitely be making a reappearance on the casa mitchell dinnertable again. especially if my perpetual spinach keeps flinging out leaves the way it is at the moment.