There are no good puns involving 'corn'

Now we're talking.  The clocks have gone back, it's barely getting light, I've already had soup - hello winter, you beautiful season.  Go on, chill my fingers, nip my nose, it only gives me a better excuse to warm up with stews, crumbles and all things carbohydrate.

One slight problem though.  One tiny confession.  I don't actually want stew and crumble all the time.  I know, what a shock, I'm so sorry, dear reader, I should have suggested that you sit down first.

Maybe you can forgive me if I show you one reason why?  Just one alternative to pastry, pies and potato?

All hail the mighty corn on the cob!

What a glorious vegetable.  (Is it a vegetable?  I think so.  Might be a legume or something.  We'll go with vegetable, if only from the definition that it is 'not fruit'.)  From this angle, it reminds me of those pictures you see of beaches on the Costa del Sol, all those bronzed bodies lined up to worship the sun.  

We are admittedly coming to the end of the fresh sweetcorn season, although I did check in Sainsburys before I wrote this and they are still selling them.  Their ones are already prepared though, which does deprive  you of the pleasure of stripping back all those fibres to see the corn all snuggled in there like so many tourists.  I bought mine a few weeks ago from the market, three massive ones for £2, which presented me with the opportunity of doing more with them than just boiling them and smearing them with butter and salt.

All ready to start consulting the indexes, I realised what I could do, what I needed to do.  I could use THAT recipe card.  The first one I ever picked up, from Yateley Waitrose in June 1999 and had never used - Sweetcorn Parcels with Creole Butter.

This involved making a butter with sundried tomatoes, red pepper, celery and chillies, chilling it and then spreading it over sweetcorn that had been baked in greaseproof parcels in the oven:

Um, yeah.  Not great to be honest.  It's already tricky enough eating bits of corn without trying to scoop up bits of pepper and celery in the same mouthful.  I can't say I wasn't disappointed after twelve years of waiting.  Still, onwards!

The next recipe was one from an Observer Food Monthly mag (only from 2009, what's two years?) for a quesadilla with courgette, chilli and cheese:

This was pretty nice, unbelievably quick to cook and made a soothing little supper - my brain and stomach fought to decide whether the amount of veg compensated for the melted cheese and frying the whole thing in oil, finally agreeing to disagree.

However, the nicest of the bunch involved just two ingredients:

Yep, they're classic for a reason.  Good ol' butter 'n' salt.  The only slight change here was using Heston's Smoked Salt from Waitrose, which was unutterably delicious - it tasted like I'd barbecued the corn without having to stand outside with an umbrella.

So there you have it.  Positively gleaming, twinkling in the late autumn sunlight, corn on the cobs really only need a bit of grease to make them shine - much like those holidaymakers.

A Warning - Don't Be Fooled by Sunshine

So it seems, dear reader, that not only did summer confuse the hell out of us all with its downpours and general inclemency, but now autumn seems to be doing the same thing.  "Oh, but it's been so lovely and hot and sunny," I may hear some of you exclaim.  I don't care.  I don't like it.

I want fog.  I want frosts.  I want to open my window in the morning and be able to smell that 'back to school' smell of cooling air and lowering temperatures.  I want soup.

I do not want, and I cannot stress this enough, I DO NOT WANT SALAD.

In that blasted heatwave of a couple of weeks ago, I was forced into making salad because of the weather.  It was too damn hot to make anything else.  I attempted to make it a bit autumnal though, using a Nigel Slater recipe involving roasted beetroot, pink grapefruit, mixed leaves (he said to use watercress but I couldn't find any that day) and some goats' cheese sprinkled over the top.  To look at, it's lovely, the beetroot making the grapefruit even pinker, the green of the leaves coordinating nicely with the pink, the white of the goats' cheese lightening it all - even the occasional curl of orange zest from the orange and olive oil dressing creating a little flash of neon:

Do not be deceived.  It was utterly, utterly foul.

The beetroot was undercooked (admittedly my fault), the grapefruit went all slimy from the olive oil, the goats' cheese coagulated into a vile slime from all the various liquids, I could have sworn there was grass in those leaves and the orange zest kept catching in my teeth.

This, dear reader, this is why I dislike hot weather in autumn.  I am not supposed to eat salad at this time of year.

I want soup.