Vegan food prep including from the allotment

What a lovely day we have had with the children at the allotment. They've been up and down to the pump helping fetch water for the plot, harvested potatoes, spinach, beetroot and radish which have added to the runner beans and raspberries from the garden at home It is always a pleasure going down to the allotment, even for just a bit of weeding or watering.

I'd put pulses in to soak overnight too and so we ended up having a bit of a feast of home grown produce and putting by other foods for later in the week.

For lunch we had spinach, runner beans and beetroot to go with previously frozen kidney bean burgers and potato wedges (old ones, not from the allotment). We'd also put the beetroot in foil and roasted it for an hour before peeling the skin off and slicing up for lunch and for later.

The chickpeas and butter beans which had been soaking overnight and had then been cooked for an hour or more, while I got on the bike and popped down to the shop for an 8 mile ride to get some bananas and flat breads, were popped into the blender along with garlic, cumin, lemon juice, olive oil, tahini and salt and pepper, to make hummus. They taste good and will be fine in the fridge for the best part of a week.

The kidney beans were also blitzed along with carrot and onion, cumin, salt and pepper, sage and rosemary before being shaped into burgers and put into the freezer where we can use them at our leisure.

The final bit of the action was with the radishes which I washed and cleaned up before chopping finely, sprinkling with salt and leaving for an hour or so. The juice which is extracted in doing this was poured into a kilner jar and the radish itself was rinsed before being put into the jar, along with some peppercorns and ginger. The trick is apparently to then cover with the water, if the juice from earlier proves insuffient, and to leave in the jar, not quite completely tight to allow for some air circulation. Afetr a couple of days fermentation will be underway and the lid can be closed properly. After about 10 days the radish, finely sliced, can be added to salads, sandwiches and so on. I understand that they will be good for 6 months, tasting best before 3 months has passed.