Snow and hangover cures

The snow has arrived - again. Just a light dusting in West London, which has cheered things up immensely. Everything looked pinched and cold in the frosty greyness of the morning. Now the garden looks snug and cosy under the snow and the skies have gone blue and bright. It really is alpine fresh. And I'm enjoying the incongruity of the test match coverage burbling away in the background on the radio.

There have been a few days this week when the ground softened enough to get a few more broad beans in, dig up some leeks and prepare the ground for some promised garlic - exceedingly late, I know. The clayey builders-rubble soil at the allotment was even quite good to dig, the big clods broken up by the frost and easier to turn over.

I was particularly glad about this as I was nursing a hangover of the variety that can only be induced by a fatal combination of a work Christmas party, involving chinese food and karaoke (the less said the better). I don't think it's been very well documented, but aside from coffee, chocolate and a fry up, digging has to be the finest remedy for a hangover.

Me and the beanstalk

It's not hard to imagine how the story started. Beans are really quite magical. Fast to germinate, natural climbers and prolific too. It just takes a small leap of a childlike imagination to think that your climbing french beans could go on upwards forever if you didn't pinch out the tops.

And when the flowers actually turn into beans, it is nothing short of miraculous, never mind finding a giant. I swear that the slithers of pods I checked and left behind yesterday because they were too small to pick have swollen overnight into fully fledged green beans that could quite proudly hold their own in an EU-regulated supermarket veg line-up. Some people think homegrown equals misshapen but tasty - but my French beans are quite gorgeous.

Last night I cooked the ones that were just the right size according to a newly acquired (although I probably knew it all along) principle: anything grown above the ground should be cooked in cold water brought to the boil; and anything grown below the ground should be dropped into boiling water. This apparently preserves the flavour. Well, it wasn't a controlled, scientific test, but my beans really did taste a whole lot better than those packets of slimline, ready topped and tailed green tubes that get flown in from Kenya.