Credit Crunch Recipes (4) - Bubble & Squeak

This is ideal for making using leftover mashed potato and cooked cabbage – or you can make it from scratch. I don't think it really matters. You can also make it with other cooked greens, like kale or cavolo nero or even the Christmassy brussels sprouts.

The recipe below assumes you're making it from scratch – just ignore the bits about cooking the greens and spuds if you're using leftovers.

It's a lovely filling accompaniment or can make the basis of a meal in itself served up with a fried egg or a few rashers of bacon – or both!

I've not given any precise quantities as I really don't think it matters. You can make enough for a meal for 2 or an accompaniment for 4 with half a cabbage and three or four good-sized potatoes.

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Ingredients

Potatoes (preferably a floury variety)
Cabbage
A medium onion, chopped
Butter & oil for frying (I use a mix of butter and groundnut oil usually) – or using beef dripping would be a nice touch
Salt and pepper

Method

If you're making it with fresh ingredients, start by peeling and boiling your potatoes – chop them into a few bits so they cook a bit quicker. Then shred the cabbage and cook that in a large saucepan or frying pan with a lid. Cook it until it's done how you like it.

Meanwhile, fry the chopped onion in a tablespoon of oil and a knob of butter, in a large frying pan over a low heat. You don't want to brown it, just cook it gently until it goes nice and sweet. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes to get this done.

Once the potatoes and cabbage are ready, mash the potatoes with another knob of butter and a splash of milk. Season with salt and pepper and then add the cooked, shredded cabbage. Chop it down smaller before you add it if you like. Give it a good old stir with a fork until it's all mixed together well.

Add a touch more oil to the frying pan and then add the bubble and squeak mix, giving it a good stir to get the onions in the mixture a bit.

Fry it over a low to medium heat and every 5 or 10 minutes flip the bubble and squeak mix over.

It's done when you think it is – I like it well browned on the outside and usually I fry a couple of eggs beside it in the frying pan.

Enjoy! It's great with HP Sauce or Worcestershire Sauce.

Christmas Giveaway!

Another plug (to go with the one on the Christmas blog) for Ali B's super soaraway Christmas giveaway. Just leave a comment on this blog post here, with a couple of thoughts on what's nice about Christmas (even Scrooges must be able to find something... ;-) ) and be in with a chance of winning some goodies.... More details over at Craft Matters blog.

Competition closes on Sunday!

Apples

Those nice people at Northern Harvest have some lovely apples available at the moment, grown just up the road from us in Cheshire. This week we opted for Ashmead's Kernel (on the left) as the eaters and Belle de Boskoop as cookers.

You can tell how successful the cookers have been by the fact there's only one left! We've been using last year's home made mincemeat - just core the apples, score them all around the middle with the point of a knife, spread a bit of butter on the outside and then fill the empty middle with mincemeat. Splash a bit of water in the bottom and it'll turn into a nice sauce. Cook in a low oven (gas 5, 190c) for 45 mins or so.

The Belle de Boskoops did the trick - beautifully fluffy and nice and sweet, with that cooking appley edge to stop them being icky.

The Ashmead's Kernel apples are totally delicious - slightly russeted on the outside, they're firm, crispy with a beautiful flavour - clean-tasting, slightly spicy. Wonderful. I hope there are some left for us to get this week!

Also, as we're thinking about fruit trees we could add to the garden over the next couple of years, we might try to get hold of one of both varieties - after researching whether or not they're likely to grow and fruit for us here.

Credit Crunch Recipes (3): A Store Cupboard Treat!

It's such a grim time of year - still a little while to go until the festive treats of Christmas, bonfire night & Halloween are long gone, the weather is cold and everyone's worried about their finances. So we all need a few treats to cheer us up and bring a bit of warmth & sweetness to our mealtimes & this recipe really fits the bill. It's a rich chocolate pudding which doesn't involve buying expensive extra ingredients but tastes as if you've used the best chocolate available. It's one of those puddings which seems incredibly unlikely before you cook it, but separates out into a sponge & yummy sauce layer. This has the additional benefit of meaning you don't have to serve anything with it, although a bit of pouring cream or vanilla ice cream make it even more delicious if you want an even bigger treat.

Store Cupboard Chocolate Pud

Sponge Layer:
100g (4oz) self-raising flour
100g (4oz) softened butter or margarine
100g (4oz) dark brown (muscavado) sugar
2 level tablespoons cocoa powder
2 eggs

Sauce Layer:
3 heaped tablespoons dark brown sugar
3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder
400ml/14 fluid oz water

Preheat your oven to Gas 4/180C & butter shallow baking dish with a 1 litre/2 pint capacity (it's important the dish is shallow or your pudding wont cook properly). Put a baking sheet on the top shelf of your oven to preheat.

Put all the sponge ingredients in a bowl and beat together until thoroughly mixed (a food mixer or electric hand whisk are the best tools to use here). Put the mixture in your baking dish and level it with a spoon.

Out the dry ingredients for the sauce layer in a bowl and mix together with your fingertips until thoroughly combined. Sprinkle this over the sponge mixture in the baking dish. Then boil the water and pour it very very gently all over the top of the mixture (don't pour it all in one place - you will create a big hole!).

Put the baking dish onto the preheated baking sheet & bake in the oven or about 35-40 mins.

Enjoy the yumminess.. If there is any left (ha!) this is quite yummy cold the next day - you get a delicious fudgy texture where the sauce has soaked into the sponge.

Lively!

As one beer runs out, so another one comes in. This Castle Eden Ale copy is certainly lively stuff! And delicious. Now I have to make sure I finish the keg of dark, beguiling Black Bat so that the current beer that's fermenting (our Xmas brew) has somewhere to live!

Cavolo Nero - Soup Recipe

Cavolo Nero is great stuff. One of those fantastic dark green winter vegetables that tastes really good and must be extremely good for you too.

It makes a fantastic soup full of strong, gutsy flavours. Here's the one that we tend to use - as you can see it's pretty flexible, depending on what you've got available.

Note on ingredients
You can adapt this recipe in all sorts of ways. We use cubes of salt pork for the bacon - but you can easily use pancetta, lardons, cooking chorizo or even some nice unsmoked streaky bacon. 200g is just a guideline - if you don't have so much that's fine - or if you want to add more, go for it! If you can't get hold of cavolo nero, you could use kale - or some dark green savoy cabbage. Chicken or vegetable stock is fine - you could even use water, although I'd be tempted to up the paprika and add a bay leaf in this case.

It's also well worth looking for some good quality Spanish smoked paprika. It is quite expensive but it lasts for absolutely ages as you use it so sparingly. If you've only got standard paprika, up the amount to a teaspoon.

Ingredients:
200g bacon, cubed
1 head of cavolo nero
1 large onion, chopped
1 good sized garlic clove
2 medium potatoes cut into small cubes
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 litre chicken, vegetable stock or water
salt and pepper

1. Chop the onion and fry it gently in a large casserole, stirring it now and then. You want it well softened but not burnt.
2. Meanwhile, chop the bacon and fry until browned in olive oil in a large frying pan
3. While this is browning, cut the cavolo nero into strips across-ways
4. Remove the bacon from the frying pan and put it to one side
5. Now add the cavolo nero (in 3 or 4 batches) to the frying pan, add a dash of water and stir fry until it's slightly wilted
6. Meanwhile, cube the potato and add it to the softened onion in the casserole. Stir, cover and cook very gently with the lid on for 5-10 mins. Stir occasionally to prevent it sticking.
7. Put the wilted cavolo nero aside with the bacon
8. Chop the garlic clove and add to the onion and potato. Stir fry for 2 mins on a low-medium heat. Add the paprika and cayenne and stir fry for a further minute
9. Add bacon and greens to the casserole, give it all a good stir together
10. Add the stock - top it up with water or more stock to make sure it covers the vegetables - and bring to the boil
11. Cook on a low simmer for 30 minutes or so - check that the potato is cooked before serving
12. Serve and enjoy!

Is There a Point to Passionato?

I'm in danger of getting a little sidetracked by trying to answer the question above. But having the Passionato publicity machine turn up on my doorstep was a trifle disconcerting.

So, going back to the whole 'major label' hoopla, this is a little correction to the post below. I mentioned the Deutsche Grammophon webshop as a comparison when it comes to who's the best value. Sadly the DG online store isn't brilliant value in the UK at the moment given that prices are in Euros and the pound is so weak at present.

The site I failed to mention (it's my age, you know) was the Universal download shop: http://www.classicsandjazz.co.uk. They've been around for a couple of years now and offer most DG releases as well as other labels within the Universal group (Philips, Decca and so on). Their downloads are encoded at 320kbps and from what I can tell their prices are identical to, or even slightly cheaper than those on Passionato. For instance, Peter Schreier's excellent 1986 recording of Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium is £14.99 for MP3s (WMA also available). On Passionato it can be found for £15.99 (MP3 - no FLAC available here). I'd still opt for MDT's 3CD price of £14.50, mind you.

Oh, and UC&J have Thomas Quasthoff & Dorothea Röschmann's great recent cantata disk for a very reasonable £7.90. This is a pretty good bargain I have to say and a nice treat for a discerning listener this Christmas, given that two of the pieces featured were written for the Christmas season.

For the record, here are the labels featured by Passionato:

* Arts
* Avie
* BBC
* Chandos
* Classic FM
* Decca
* DG
* EMI
* LSO Live
* Marco Polo
* Mercury Living Presence
* Naxos
* Philips
* Universal
* Universal Classics & Jazz
* Verve
* Virgin

There is by no means a comprehensive selection from these labels: poor old Arts only have 8 albums!

No Warners (back on the major label theme)? Their digital selection could really do with a boost, as their own site isn't that good - although there are some bargains to be found there.

Maybe it's offering EMI that's their USP - although a brief glance seems to suggest not much improvement over CD. Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll find something more positive to say soon! ;-)

Classicsonline - a Review

After the comment left on my little review of Passionato, I thought it might be a good idea to do a similar review of ClassicsOnline. It's the online download store for Naxos records. This means that as well as Naxos' huge catalogue of music, it stocks labels which Naxos distributes - a significant proportion of independent classical labels.

So there's plenty to choose from. Let's get down to the basics of how the site works - and how well it works. In summary, it's a good service that in my opinion could do with a few tweaks here and there. I'll get all the more negative comments out of the way first - keep reading for the good bits - and the nitty gritty on pricing!

The sign-up process was straightforward, although the warning that downloads were available only for 30 days after purchase made me think twice. Making somebody pay again after their computer went belly up seems harsh to say the least. Comparing it to a competitor EClassical (a site I like a lot, although the selection is much more limited) who keep a record of your purchases for re-downloading, it's a bit disappointing.

As was the offer of '3 free tracks' for download if you sign up before the end of the year. I found out that these tracks had been chosen by Classicsonline rather than being a free choice. As I already had one of them, it turned out to be just 2 free tracks for me! It might be nice to offer a choice from a longer list, at least.

But it was straightforward to download them - not terribly quick, but not too bad.

Here we come to my main beef with the website - it is, in fact, why I've not used them up to now and why they slipped my mind during that Passionato review. It's the navigation and search facilities. With such a vast catalogue available they are essential - I wonder if the size of this catalogue (coming from diverse lables) is what makes it pretty clunky. However, I think it should be able to work better than it does at present.

I thought I'd have a browse through the pages of products from the BIS label, mostly because I wanted to have a wee look at their Bach recordings and that's always quite near the beginning! I got to page 8, going page-by-page before my browser (Firefox) decided to freeze. Being curious as to how they'd price the Masaaki Suzuki St Matthew Passion (given that it's due a re-release as part of a breathtakingly bargaintastic 10 CD set), I tried to open that page, but again it wouldn't load up. My connection's pretty fast and seemed to be working well - so I tried Internet Explorer, where I got the same problem, freezing up as I got to page 8.

Bach to Firefox I tried a different tack, opening up the Atma Classique label page. It worked for a bit before getting stuck. So I waited. Eventually it did start working and, while I couldn't find what I was looking for Volume 4 of Montreal Baroque's cantata series, they had Volume 2 at a pretty reasonable £7.99.

Meanwhile the BIS page had loaded up! The Matthew Passion was £16 which is excellent value compared to the £30-ish of the standard triple CD, but sadly it just doesn't stack up against the new boxset (Matthew Passion, John Passion, Christmas Oratorio, B Minor Mass, Easter Oratorio & Ascension Oratorio) which MDT are currently offering for £29.25.

So I think prices are generally a plus point and seem fair, given the proviso that I think classical downloads (and downloads in general really) are pitched a touch too high when compared to CDs, especially boxsets.

Navigation again proved difficult when I used the search facility. The keyword search is pretty good but can be really slow. I remember on my earlier visit to Classicsonline earlier this year being really frustrated at having to resend searches and then being unable to follow links to results.

The advanced search seemed a little difficult too. I tried this first:

Composer: Bach
Artist: Masaaki Suzuki
Label: BIS

and got no results. When I changed it to:

Composer: Bach
Artist: Suzuki
Label: BIS

it turned up 61 results! Little things like this can really put people off, especially when it takes a long time to browse through multiple pages. Trying to narrow down one CD is also a bit inflexible. A search on:

Disc Title: cantatas 12

turned up nothing. Whereas a general keyword search on 'cantatas 12' did bring up Suzuki's 12th volume of cantatas as the 6th result. I think given the title of the CD is 'BACH, JS: Cantatas, Vol. 12 (BWV 147, 21)', 'cantatas 12' ought to find it via the title search.

The other most important thing, after finding what you want, is how easy it is to buy it and download it. Here, Classicsonline did a really good job, I thought, that pretty much made up for the frustrations of navigating the site.

The disc I mentioned in the previous post (Volume 3 of the Purcell Quartets 'early cantatas' series) is a very reasonable £7.99. It compares very favourably with Chandos MP3s which are £16.80, and the double CD, which you can get for around £10-12. I hope there's not been a mistake pricing it! I paid via Paypal (despite the recent scaremongering of Which magazine), which was nice and efficient and then it downloaded pretty quickly, in about half an hour. Given the file size (it's 320 kbps) I thought this was pretty good. Along with the tracks there's a pdf of the CD inlay and a (quite small!) jpeg of the front cover.

This is turning into a long, long post now. So I'll do another post on some more price comparisons! All in all I was pretty satisfied with Classicsonline. It was very frustrating at times trying to find things there (as I'm editing this to put in links, it's taking me ages to open product pages again), the free gifts were annoyingly limited, but the prices are fair and good value given the kind of market average and the downloading worked much better than I was expecting. So, more on pricing to follow...

Brewing once more

Just a note to say I'll be blogging today in an exciting blow-by-blow account of the brewing process for the beer we'll (hopefully!) be enjoying come Christmas time - over at the Christmas blog.

Testing testing

As another brew day looms (Burton Bridge Bitter recipe to try next Tuesday - should be ready for Christmas!), it was time to try the Castle Eden Ale clone to see how it's doing. It's about a week or 10 days before it's officially ready, but already it tastes really nice. Clean and hoppy with a nice long finish. The first pint or so always seems to be a little bit cloudy and then crystal clear after that, so I'd expect it to clear up after I've drawn off a bit more.

It gets harder to wait for it to be ready once you know that the stuff tastes good...

Busy time brew-wise. The Black Bat clone is just coming to an end now. The Castle Eden is nearly ready - and the Gales Horndean recipe will be another 10 days in the keg before I'm ready to have a go at bottling it.

An autumn walk

It's been a beautiful autumn day today in this part of the world. A bit cold, but clear blue skies (mostly!) and lovely autumn colours. This morning we had a bit of a 1970s retro moment (or several), when we got up to discover there was a power cut. I suppose we should be grateful it happened in the morning, when we didn't need any lights or much heat! I remember vaguely from my own 1970s childhood evening power cuts, candles, our posh oil lamp and a gas lantern. For me, as a kid, it was deeply exciting - all the lights off and that flickering light from various sources. I remember being a bit obsessed by the oil lamp that lived on the windowsill in the front room, now obsolete, through the 1980s. Ali B never really enjoyed power cuts when she was little, as her childhood home shared the power source of the local hospital - which, of course, had an emergency generator to avoid disaster during power cuts.

But being a grown-up and a parent now I find power cuts slightly less romantic! We were rather wishing we didn't have our nice new dual fuel cooker, unable to grill anything for breakfast - until Ali B had the particularly great idea of doing banana pancakes. Yum yum.


View Larger Map

Anyway, the upshot of all this was that we thought it'd be best to spend the morning away from the house - and we decided to go for a little walk in Hanchurch Woods, which is a short drive from Newcastle-under-Lyme, over the motorway and into the countryside. I've tried to paste in the Google Maps code for this - I hope it works!

It was a lovely day for a walk, as you should be able to see from the pictures at the beginning and the end of this post. It was properly autumn, the wind coaxing the leaves out of the trees to spin down to the ground. A thick layer of leaves to kick up. Puddles to splash in - and even an array of ex-fireworks from Bonfire Night.

We didn't see much wildlife, apart from some blackbirds, a great tit and some dogs out for a walk. But we did see an intriguing-looking mushroom. We thought, rather excitedly, that it might be some kind of puffball. But we weren't brave enough to take it home with us. Just as well, as it turned out to be a 'Common Earthball', which according to this excellent mushroom site is 'mildly poisonous'. Oh. It's always a little disheartening to us poor townies when something we've never seen (or noticed) before turns out to have the 'common' prefix. Never mind!

To finish, a couple of photos - first of the earthball mushroom and then another couple of the beautiful autumn trees. A view across the road first, and then looking upwards to see the autumn colours of the larches.

Oh by the way...

...do have a look at my modest first attempt at a Squidoo page (http://www.squidoo.com/bach-sacred-cantatas). It'd appreciate some visitors I'm sure. ;-)

Is Passionato a bit of a rip-off?

There's certainly lots of press surrounding the new 'high quality' classical music download site, Passionato. They even appeared on BBC Radio 4's consumer affairs programme 'You and Yours' yesterday, getting some nice free publicity courtesy of the licence fee payer! Ignoring (for the moment) all the marketing speak and exaggerations when it comes to how unique and new this service is, on the surface it sounded ok. Maybe they were just being enthusiastic when they went on about how they were trailblazing high quality downloads, neglecting to mention excellent sites like Gimell, Linn and Chandos. (to be fair to the BBC, Gramophone's James Jolly did put them right here) And perhaps they genuinely didn't know how electronic music has for a number of years been sold online in higher quality formats than the fledgling classical sites. (on this point, sadly, they weren't put right)

**Edit** As Jason pointed out in a comment, I failed to mention EClassical (and, by the way, the subscription site I use, Emusic). I'll post on their site soon!
**/Edit**

But I thought 'give them a go'. The real interest was that they offered major label recordings (in contrast to the nice site eclassical, for instance). Could this turn out to be online classical music selling which, unlike iTunes and the like, didn't look like a rip-off compared to buying CDs?

Hmmm.

I thought I'd start with a CD I purchased just recently from MDT - Thomas Quasthoff and Dorothea Röschmann's fantastic recording of Bach's 'dialogue' cantatas for bass and soprano. It set me back a very reasonable £10.50 (on special offer). If you go direct to the source, Deutsche Grammophon have been offering 320 kbps MP3 downloads for a while. They've got it priced at E11.99, which works out at the moment at about £9.70. Not too bad, although for an extra 80p I would rather have the CD. But pretty good compared to the full price, which is around £13 (Europadisc).

OK, so much for the status quo. What about the all-new revolutionary Passionato? Would I find it in 'lossless' format? Would I find it cheaper? Erm, would I find it at all? No. Either it's really hidden, or they just don't have it listed. So much for the 'availability of major labels' business.

But it's early days for them - maybe they just haven't got round to listing one of the best albums from last year.

Let's try some other things. As luck would have it, I've been messing about with Squidoo over the last day or so, experimenting with a page on JS Bach's cantatas. Part of this was intended to be a 'buyer's guide' to this music - so I thought I'd put Passionato to the test as part of this. I tried them out on two areas - multi-CD boxsets (surely much cheaper to distribute electronically than all that bulky cardboard and plastic) and budget CD recordings.

The boxset: Karl Richter's 4CD collection of cantatas for Advent and Christmas.
CD: Europadisc - £21.95; MDT - £18.25 (special offer)
Established download site: Deutsche Grammophon - E43.99 (£35.50 - ouch!)
The all new download site: Passionato - £31.99 - better, but still ouch!

The verdict - get it on CD and save almost £14 on Passionato's downloads...


The budget CD: John Eliot Gardiner's CD of cantatas BWV 140 and BWV 147
CD: Europadisc - £8.45; MDT - 6.95 (special offer)
Download 1: Deutsche Grammophon - E11.99 (£9.70)
Download 2: Universal - £7.90
Download 3: Passionato - £7.99

The verdict - it's CD again, £1 cheaper than Passionato at the offer price (these major label CDs are often on offer) - or just 50p more at its normal price. Universal Classics and Jazz (which presumably provide Passionato with their tracks) are 9p cheaper.

I decided on a different tack next. I'd really like to hear the latest CD of early Bach cantatas by the Purcell Quartet on Chandos. I could dip into my Emusic monthly downloads, but it's a lot of tracks. I could go direct to the Chandos website - but they've priced each CD of the double CD, which makes it pretty pricey. Here's the CD versus downloads comparison then:

CD: Europadisc - £9.95 (on offer - pretty good!); MDT - £11.75 (not bad...)
Download: Chandos. Lossless - £16 (eek!); MP3 - £16.80 (random!)

Would Passionato come riding to the rescue? No. They didn't have it.

OK, let's try Volume 2 (previously mentioned here!)
CD: Europadisc - £9.95 (on offer); MDT - £ 11.75
Download: Chandos. Lossless - £9.99; MP3 - £8.40

Download 2: Passionato. Lossless - £9.99; MP3 - 7.99

Finally - they're the best value! By 50p over Chandos, whose MP3 pricing does seem a little random at times. But it's not very impressive, in my opinion.

Which all leaves me wondering, what's the point of Passionato? Are they banking on people's naivety when it comes to shopping around for downloads? Or an assumption that downloads will automatically be better value than CDs? I do wonder if they're more style than substance, given the big marketing blitz. Their site hardly seems set up for the expert (or even the not-quite-expert in my case!) on first impressions, with half of their front page given over to 'crossover' artists...

Could do better. Much better.

About this blog.... (a plug)

We'll be keeping this blog going with some more recipes, ramblings and so on - but we'll be splitting our time between here and our Christmas Blog. While we don't want to be part of 'Christmas Creep', being organised is much less stressful - and experimenting on festive recipes means lots of results to enjoy over the next couple of months. ;-)

And while I'm plugging away here, another small word for the lovely things (not made by me, so I can be objective here!) available in our Etsy Shop. Order early to avoid disappointment. Or something.

Remember remember...

....the fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot...

and all that. It can seem a little overshadowed by Hallowe'en, not least because safety fears have reduced the number of people enjoying the back garden fireworks displays of our youth. It also used to be pretty common when I was growing up that we would get together with friends and family for firework parties. There was one friend in particular who put on an annual party with a most impressive bonfire, all through the 1980s. Including baked potatoes cooked in foil at the edge of the fire, if I'm remembering it right.

The BBC have an interesting article today on one supposed member of the plot to destroy James I's government. The poisonous atmosphere detailed there towards Roman Catholics embodied in 'Guy Fawkes Day' has all but died out now (except in deepest Suffolk and even there it's very much on the wane). This year, we have different betes noires to burn..

Hallowe'en

I've never been that keen on all the business around Hallowe'en. It's never really been that big a deal - I've a vague memory of apple bobbing and all that when I was little, and trick-or-treating just really being introduced. But that's about it. Then there's the annoying 'Celtic New Year' nonsense which is sporadically rehearsed, and which offends my staunchly non-Romantic nature.

But I think I'm coming round to it to a certain extent. The pumpkin jack o'lantern (see above for our amateurish efforts!) is really quite fun. It does look good on these dark evenings - and I dare say, like last year, it'll keep going until it shrivels up some time in November.

Trick-or-treating is the thing that tends to exercise people the most, on three counts. First, it's an American import. Second, it's an import we've seen happening in the very recent past and it's come through the mass media. And third, it's just about dressing up and then demanding some sweets (with the vague threat of menaces). Against these slightly grumpy objections, I'd point out that it is just about the only visiting custom we have left (excepting carol singing, door-to-door selling and pushy evangelism), when the briefest study of our customs turns up loads of them that have fallen away over time. If we give up our kneejerk reactions just a little bit, I suspect in time it will grow away from its American model and we'll put a stamp on it. Perhaps schools, who may have in part been responsible for the great growth of Hallowe'en in England, could teach the kids some songs to sing for their sweets when out visiting their neighbours?

Anyway, once we'd made our Jack this afternoon, there was plenty scraped out of his innards (see below) to make a load of pumpkin chutney as well as some pumpkin and bacon soup for tomorrow. Looking forward to that!

Two Seasons

Another cold day here today, with yesterday's snow still lingering at lunchtime. My mum told me that apparently it's the first snowfall in this part of the country at this time of year since 1934. Our boys are now convinced that it's winter rather than autumn, no matter how much we try to convince them otherwise.

Today started with some lovely blue skies and sunshine, so I tried to take a snap with winter in the foreground and autumn in the background! So the photo above I took just after making sure that our bird feeders were filled up and there was some non-frozen water for them. Brrrr.

Credit Crunch Recipes (2): Root Vegetable Soup

It was definitely a day for soup today - there's something about a blast of cold weather that makes a bowl of soup at lunch time seem absolutely essential. I guess the majority of soups make reasonably cheap meals, especially if you make use of seasonal ingredients. And, of course, using good fresh seasonal veg also makes your soup incredibly tasty and nutritious.

A root vegetable soup is pretty flexible - you can use what you have available (it's great for using random bits left over in your winter veg box for example), but this recipe makes a good starting point. It's up to you whether you blend/process it - sometimes we do, sometimes we just mash it a bit in the pan (that's much more common since our hand blender died). I think a good stock is important - I like to use homemade chicken stock if I have any in the freezer, if not, I use Marigold Bullion powder (as recommended by Delia & Nigella...), but you can use water if you really are stuck.

Root Vegetable Soup

1 onion, chopped small
1 large floury potato, peeled & chopped
1/2 large swede, peeled & chopped
1 large parsnip, peeled & chopped
1 large carrot, peeled & chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped (or 3-4 sprigs of lovage finely chopped)
large knob of butter or a couple tbsp oil
about a litre of stock
1 bay leaf
1 large sprig thyme
a couple of tbsp of cream (optional!)
a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg

You'll need a large pan with a lid (or a plate that will cover the pan) for this.

Heat the butter in a large pan then throw in the veg. Give it a stir so that all the veg has a covering of fat then put on the lid & leave it for about 10 minutes on a very low heat. Check it & stir a couple of times to make sure the veg at the bottom of the pan isn't catching.

Add the stock, bay leaf, thyme, add a little salt & pepper & bring the whole lot up to the boil, then allow it to simmer for at least 20 minutes (it could take longer!), until all the veg is tender. Then process it however you like, & add a little cream if you are feeling like splashing out. A scrape or 2 of nutmeg is also very good.

This should serve 4 with no problems. It's delicious with some bread & cheese.

BRRRRR!

Winter came early today with a bit of a blizzard. Here are some pics:





We particularly like the forlorn sunflower in the 2nd one. It has now rather given up the ghost!

Finally a pic of the pruned loganberry with all the new growth trained reasonably neatly off to the right. We're lucky to have that big wall to train it along. There's also a picture of the prunings from the loganberry - in the snow!

Pumpkins for Hallowe'en

News this morning from the BBC about the problems facing pumpkin growers in the UK. Not that it seems to have affected our friends at Northern Harvest, mind you. As you can tell from the photo, we're going to have a rather large jack o'lantern to stick a candle in at the end of October through into November!

There's all sorts of guff about Hallowe'en (there'll perhaps be more on that later!), but the American innovation of using a pumpkin for a jack o'lantern is a good one. The glowing orange is more dramatic than the swede that may well have been used for the English equivalent home-made lantern.

Hallowe'en has made a dramatic impact on this time of year within our lifetimes - encouraged by the plethora of depictions of American customs in TV shows and films like E.T. There was someone moaning in the Guardian yesterday about how it was overshadowing Bonfire Night. There's no need to be quite so grumpy. And there's certainly no need to spout a load of guff about 'Samhain' (whatever that was) being some astonishingly pagan Celtic (whatever 'Celtic' means) festival that underwent some mythical forced evolution into a 'sanitised' Christian festival. Honestly, the sooner this kind of cliche dies a death, the better.

We found out the other day that there is some evidence (according to Steve Roud in The English Year) that mimsyish teachers, worried about the dangers of Bonfire Night, encouraged Hallowe'en as a safer alternative during the 1970s and 80s. So it seems that teachers are to blame. ;-)

But as ever it seems odd to berate people for doing the 'wrong' thing, or celebrating the wrong day in the wrong way. Whatever its source, it looks like Hallowe'en, however naff and consumerist many of its trappings are, is here to stay.

The insides of our pumpkin are going to be turned into chutney, by the way.

Credit crunch recipes - a new series

The credit crunch (or maybe we need to call it a recession now) means that everyone has to cut back on their spending a bit. We think it's really sad that for most people this seems to mean starting to shop at Lidl, Aldi & the other cheaper supermarkets rather than having a closer look at their shopping, cooking & eating habits. Quite apart from some of these shops' worrying employment practices (Lidl, for example, does not recognise Unions), we would prefer to support local producers, especially in these tough times. So over the winter we'll be experimenting with lots of new recipes that use cheaper cuts of meat, delicious winter veg & lots of filling grains & pulses. We're going to share the best on here.

Beef Pot Roast - Brisket
Since I stopped being vegetarian a few years back I have really enjoyed learning how to cook meat. We very very rarely eat expensive cuts of meat here - we just can't justify that amount of expenditure on one meal, especially as we insist on the best quality meat we can get hold of. We usually buy 1 large cut of meat (maybe a free range chicken or a piece of brisket) a week as well as some proper butcher's sausages for another meal.

The large cut has to earn its keep - I expect it to form the main or substantial part of at least 3 meals. The brisket we had this week fed 6 of us on Sunday, did red flannel hash (we use Hugh F-W's recipe from his Meat book) for us the next night & the gravy and left over veg will form the basis of some soup for our lunch today. I don't think that's to bad for an initial outlay of £12.

This is my recipe for a pot roast using rolled brisket. The fantastic thing about this method of cooking a roast is that you do just a little bit of prep then you can put it in the oven and forget about it for 3 hours. Also, the veg is cooked along with the joint so when it comes to eating all you need to do is serve it up with whatever extras you fancy - a few greens maybe, mustard or a Yorkshire pudding anyone?

Pot Roast

• 1.25-1.5kg piece of rolled brisket
  
• 2 tbsp olive oil
  
• 2 large onions, peeled & cut into quarters or 6 small onions peeled & left whole
  
• 500g of a mix of carrot, swede & turnip peeled & cut into 2-3cm chunks
  
• 100g field/chestnut mushrooms (cut up any larger mushrooms into large pieces)
  
• 4 sticks of celery chopped into 4 (or a couple of sprigs of lovage roughly chopped works well as an alternative)
  
• 1/2 pint of hot stock or hot water at a pinch
  
• dash of Worcestershire sauce
  
• large sprig thyme
  
• 1 bay leaf
  
• 1 tbsp plain flour
  
• 25g butter
  
• salt & pepper
  

You will need a large, thick ovenproof dish (with lid) that will fit the joint comfortably with room for the veg around it & a large frying pan for the initial preparation of the meat & veg.

Preheat your oven to gas 1/140C.

Heat up the olive oil in a large frying pan & when hot, put in the brisket (still rolled!) & brown it on all sides. It's important that you brown it thoroughly because this is one of the things that will give the roast & gravy a lovely flavour.

Transfer the meat to your chosen ovenproof dish.

Now put all the veg in the frying pan & brown them too. When they have slightly caramelised edges switch off the heat & arrange the veg around the meat.

Pour over the hot stock, add the Worcester Sauce, herbs & a little salt & pepper. Bring the whole lot to the boil on top on your hob then put on the lid & put it in the oven for about 3 hours.

Just before you are ready to serve cream together the flour & butter to make a paste.

Take the dish out of the oven & remove the meat & veg to keep warm elsewhere. Discard the bay leaf & sprig of thyme.

Whisk the flour and butter paste bit by bit into the stock & stir until the gravy thickens.

Serve & enjoy!

Phew

Finally done the first proper update to the Xmas website. The children's books page is now hopefully a bit neater and more manageable. Seven more snippety reviews put up there too.

http://christmasmatters.org/kidsbooks.html

All that and making a yeast starter for a brew day on Saturday, along with siphoning the current brew into its keg and getting everything ready for listing some Christmas craft kits in our Etsy shop (should be listed by Sunday or Monday)... It's been a busy kind of evening!

Or rather the Wiggle Eye Worm...

... (see post below). I blame the tracklisting provided by emusic, but a quick double check at allmusic.com shows that 'The Prickly Bush' should in fact be 'The Prickle Eye Bush'. So our song will have to be 'The Wiggle Eye Worm', then.

Oh, The Wiggly Worm....

Danny and I have amended the lyrics of Spiers & Boden's The Prickly Bush (from their great album Bellow - Amazon link) to sing as we move some worms from their old home in the temporary compost bins to the swanky new ones.

Oh the wiggly worm
That wiggles in my compost
If I take it for a ride in me wheelbarrow
Then I promise that I won't get it lost

We've given lots of worms a lift over and goodness me, but this compost thing is going remarkably well. Not only have the old temporary things provided us with plenty of compost in doublequick time to improve our beds for next year (see below). But the new one that we transferred the stuff into just the other day is already doing great. The first picture shows what's going on just digging down a foot or so into it - the second should hopefully give some impression of the heat of it, with the steam coming off it. It was actually hot, rather than warm, to the touch dug down a foot.



Much of this has to be down to using the magical bokashi effective micro-organisms, or whatever they are - from good old Wiggly Wigglers. The latest batch of that was the thing I was burying in the new heap.

It was a beautiful autumn day today. Blue skies, a little chilly: just the sort of day for working in the garden before the forecast foul weather arrives. Below is a picture of the blue-plastic beds that should hopefully get working over the winter as well as a snap of the beech tree we can see from our garden. Finally today I cut back the loganberry, all the dead and previously fruited growth from this year - and then I tied back the new growth, all neatly off to the right, which should give us a good crop of fruit next summer.



That, along with ground-levelling work, left me well ready for a pint of the current garage beer.

Another great thing in the garden is the number of birds we've got visiting at the moment. The numbers of magpies has gone down significantly - hopefully somebody's on the case controlling their numbers, because they were a real pest. Now, thankfully, we're getting lots of smaller birds: coal tits, blue tits, great tits, dunnocks, robins, wrens, blackbirds and thrushes, rather than gangs of magpies. And on the subject of wildlife, as I clear the shrubs and cuttings and level off the bit of the garden that's going to be the boys', I'm having to re-house more frogs than I've ever seen before. I hope they can be as happy and thrive as much eating the slugs in our 'veg-zone' this year!

website again...

Or, even shorter: http://christmasmatters.org

Christmas Website

Our Xmas website is now up again after some problems with our previous host. It needs lots of work over the next few weeks, but it's all up and running at:

http://christmasmatters.org/index.html

Busy, busy

Busy time of year, this. Lots and lots to do in the garden. We're making good progress creating a large area for the boys to have as 'their' bit. It's pretty much cleared now and just (!) needs levelling and then a bit of turf transferred onto it. Our two smart new compost bins needed filling up - now one is almost full of some compost-in-progress. We really need to improve the soil in the area of the garden that's going to be our veg patch - so two beds are now covered with newspaper, which is then piled to about 4 inches deep with fresh compost and covered over with plastic to improve things there. Add to that general tidying and cutting back and our ongoing war on shrubs and it's a little daunting trying to get it done before the weather gets cold. Loads of ex-shrubs now needing shredding too for building up the compost heaps again.

We're also thinking about new things to sell in our shop on Etsy for Christmas. Ali's blog is full of updates on new things she's making. Our Christmas website also needs a major overhaul - and it's currently offline, as our old web hosting went excessively peculiar. The old site needed a bit of tweaking and we've got lots more new content on Christmassy music, films, books and more to put up. Suddenly Christmas seems very close!

The pages will be transferred across this evening, hopefully - if not, then tomorrow! I'll link from here (as well as updating other links elsewhere, groan) as soon as it's done.

We've pretty much finished all our makings - all the chutneys are resting in their jars, the Rumtopf is doing well, the various rhubarb vodkas as well as the sloe gin, wild plum gin and everything else are maturing away.

Brewing-wise, we're really enjoying the latest one - a clone of Banks & Taylor's Black Bat (pictured above). At 6.5% it packs a bit of a punch, but it drinks a lot easier than the strength might suggest! It reminded Ali of Harvey's XXXX Old Ale that we enjoyed many years ago in Lewes. High praise... The latest brew is fermenting away nicely, to be ready in the 3rd week of November. And then I'm going to do another brew to have a first go at bottling.

I think a lot of our presents for our friends and family this year will have a boozy theme!

Michaelmas again?

Today is 'Old Michaelmas Day' - there are several days in the calendar which exist on two dates, 11 days apart because of the 11 days 'lost' due to the Gregorian calendar reforms of 1752. Events like Tewkesbury's Mop Fair are timed to coincide with 'Old Michaelmas', originally being hiring fairs for workers to bring in the main harvest.

Some gleanings today: we scrounged and scratched about and climbed a couple of trees even to get together a few elderberries to make elderberry cordial (essential for our 'Yuletini' cocktail), on a walk about the green spaces by Ford Green Hall. Nothing much else doing, apart from a few rosehips.

Some makings today: very excitingly we now have two batches of sloe gin on the go, as well as a big load of damson gin made with the wild damsons, wild plums or bullaces we found (and froze) the other week. We need another bottle of gin to top that up now! Here's our sloe gin martini cocktail recipe while I think about it.

An experiment: we tasted last year's quince vodka and while it's ok, it's still quite sour and a little harsh. So we're trying to sweeten it - with a bit of honey instead of sugar. I think the problem was that the quinces we used weren't quite ripe enough.

Lots of garden stuff to do

Well, I don't know whether or not the Devil's been at our blackberries on Michaelmas - but the last few days of very wet weather have done for the last fruit on the bush, which is now either mouldy or far too squelchy to use. Fortunately at the weekend we picked up some windfalls from next door's apple tree (which helpfully grows a branch over our garden) to have a very nice crumble indeed.

Next it'll be time to cut back all the bits of the plant that have fruited this year - and to make sure that the loganberry canes that bore fruit are also cut right back. There's a nice simple tutorial on how to do this on videojug.

The big task facing us this autumn (and winter, no doubt) is to get the garden set up for what we want to do with it. The area we'd like for the boys to play in is currently covered with a lot of mature shrubs that just want taking out. Once we've got it cleared, we're going to try to move the turf from the area for the vegetable garden and see if it takes. The ground is terrible - poor quality clay soil with barrowloads of rubble just beneath the surface - so we think we're going to go for raised beds for veg.

We're going to need plenty of compost - and our big compost heap is happily doing very well. More worms than we've ever seen before, and it's producing a nice amount of heat. This, in tandem with a fabby bokashi system from Wiggly Wigglers, is eating up all our compostable waste at the moment. Regular additions of spent grains and hop flowers from the brewing seem to help too!

So phase one - clearance - is well underway. Once we've got the shrubby patch cleared, then we'll have a better idea what we have to do to create the areas for veg & herbs and for a few fruit trees to go with the plum & loganberry already in place.

The garden's full of birds at the moment - it's hard to keep up with having seed in the feeders. Crowds of coal tits, a handful of blue tits and great tits, dunnocks, robins, blackbirds - and even a nuthatch and a chiffchaff - are making a very nice change from the gangs of magpies that usually swagger about the gardens round here.

Offers for pinched wallets?

Crumbs, MDT are pushing the boat out with their special offers this week, boasting an astonishing 37 new deals to tempt even the emptiest of purses. Immediately standing out are the CDs & SACDs of Masaaki Suzuki's outstanding Bach cantata series for under a tenner as part of a BIS label promotion - and a wonderful bargain 10 CD set of his recording of the big Bach choral works for a snip, due for release at the end of the month. If I didn't have them all separately already I'd be very tempted! Nice to see the big box of Harnoncourt & Leonhardt Bach cantatas back for a seriously good value £96, as I blogged about earlier in the summer.

Michaelmas

One of these years I will find a goose to roast for Michaelmas...

It's also meant to be extremely unlucky to pick blackberries after Michaelmas, once the devil has interfered with them. As we've still got some very nice looking berries in the garden, we'll take our lives into our hands with a crumble, keeping our fingers well crossed.

Gleanings

It's been a while since I posted on here, mostly because we've just come back from a lovely 10 day holiday in Eskdale in the Lake District.

It's the time of year now for scouring hedgerows for all the berries and other things that are available for the next couple of weeks. There should still be plenty of blackberries (the smaller 'brambles' rather than the earlier cultivated ones) - we're struggling to keep up with the crop from our garden! I wonder if we might have missed the elderberries, which would be a real shame and it would mean no elderberry cordial for the winter. But we'll have a look around the places we found elderflowers early in the summer to see if we can get a couple of bags full.

Today we were making a concerted effort to find some sloes, small sour fruits of the blackthorn, which work a delicious magic when steeped in gin. We've already had repeat requests from people who had bottles of sloe gin from us for Christmas 07. So we were feeling the pressure. Most of the blackthorn we found on walks in the Lake District was all but bare of berries - we ended up bringing back just a handful or two. But a quick trawl on the internet turned up an area of former peat bog just north of Crewe that was drained and enclosed with hawthorn and blackthorn hedges (in the eighteenth century I guess). A short stroll turned up loads of lovely sloes - enough to start with anyway. We also got a bag of rose-hips to have a go at doing something with.

But the real surprise was finding lots of wild damsons - we were pretty sparing in what we picked but still ended up with over three pounds of the things (the bottom picture). This, according to a recipe we turned up (I'll post it when we get round to trying it) is easily enough to make a bottle's worth of damson gin. What's left over from this we'll probably try to pickle whole. We tried pickled damsons when visiting friends recently and liked them very much.

Now to find some elderberries somewhere..

Plum recipes

We were pushed to the limits with our plum harvest this year - we have jam, 3 different types of plum chutney & a freezer full of halved plums for future use (we like to have them for breakfast with thick Greek yogurt). And this is just from one quite small tree. It's probably one of the reasons why I am so late with this post!

It is now far too late for anything but the very last of the plums, but I have wanted to write up a couple of very successful jam recipes & our favourite plum cake recipe for a while, so while I have a moment, here they are, all ready for next year. Please excuse the imperial measurements - these 2 jam recipes are from an ancient cookery book (1954) called 'Cheerful Cookery' by Noel Chanter. My mum won it as a school prize in 1961 - not surprisingly for a cookery book of this vintage, the jam and chutney recipes are excellent.

Plum Jam I (for slightly under-ripe plums)
3lb slightly under-ripe plums
3lb sugar
1/2 pint water

Stone the plums by cutting them in half and pulling out the stone. Put them in a large pan, add the water and bring slowly to the boil. Crack a few of the stones and add the kernels to the fruit (this part is optional but adds a tasty hint of almond to the jam). Simmer for an hour until the fruit is well mashed, then add the sugar and boil for about 30 mins until the jam reaches its setting point. Pour into warm sterilized jars and you're done.


Plum Jam II (for ripe plums)
3lb ripe plums
3lb sugar
Stone the plums and then layer them in a large bowl with the sugar overnight. Crack some of the stones for the kernels & reserve until you are ready to make the jam. The next day put the plums, sugar and kernels into a large pan. Bring slowly to the boil, stirring and cook gently until it will sent when tested. Pour into warm sterilized jars.

This recipe for plum cake is taken from another old cook book belonging to my godmother this time - 'The Living Book of Cakes, Breads and Gateaux' (1979). I remember 'Living' being a very housewifey mag that my mum used to bring home from trips to the supermarket in the 1970s along with the equally cake-packed 'Family Circle'. Looking at the intro now, I gather that this is a 2nd collection & I confess I would love to get my hands on the 1st volume - 'Cakes, Biscuits and Bakes'. As usual the recipes are annotated by my godmother which is an added bonus for me. I use this book a lot - at least once a week - it's a great collection of recipes.

German Plum Cake
This cake reminds me very much of cakes we have eaten many times in Germany with its thick top layer of fruit, but the bottom layer is not quite like the dense sponge layer that I remember - it has a more sandy texture which contrasts well with the juicy plums. It's definitely a dessert cake & is good with coffee.

175g plain flour
1/2 level tsp baking powder
1/2 level tsp salt
grated rind of 1/2 a lemon
50g castor sugar
85g butter
1 egg, beaten
a little milk
2 level tsp ground almonds
1kg of plums halved & stoned
2-3 level tbsp castor sugar for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 200C/gas 6. Grease and base line a tin 20x25cm and at least 5cm deep. Sift the flour, baking poder and salt into a bowl. Add the lemon rind and sugar and then rub in the butter until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Mix to a fairly stiff dough with the egg. Gather the dough together and press evenly into the tin. Brush the dough with the milk and then sprinkle on the ground almonds. Cover the almonds closely with rows of halved plums, cut side up. Bake for about 30 mins, then sprinkle with sugar, cool slighly and serve. Cream (what else?) is an excellent accompaniment.

Now on to the blackberries!!

It's that time of year....

...when there starts to be a real glut of produce from the garden - even in such a terrible summer as the one we've had this year!





The tomatoes just keep going. We've already had the delicious roast tomato & basil soup from Nigel Slater's 'Kitchen Diaries' (thanks, sis!) a few times this summer, but hot rather than chilled as he suggests. It's a great, simple way of doing tomato soup - just roast chunks of tomato in olive oil & garlic for about three quarters of an hour in a casserole. Add a pint of vegetable stock, a handful of torn basil leaves, bring to the boil & then whizz up in the food processor or with a hand blender. Lovely.

We're going to roast up the latest crop of tomatoes from the garden and then freeze them to bring a bit of colour to late autumn and winter. We've done this before with our glut of tomatoes - blended and then frozen, they can be pulled out of the freezer to make a great base for a pasta sauce or a pizza topping.

The plums are almost over now - there will be one more crop that's just ripening up now. Despite our problems with mouldy plums (caused by a maggotty thing, we think, not helped by the damp) and the terrible year that England has been having for plums, we've not done too badly. They're lovely stewed in the oven and then served up for breakfast with some yoghurt. We've made a very nice 'instant' plum chutney from one of our cook books. And there have been two batches of plum jam so far - not to mention Delia Smith's great recipe for plum chutney, which went down so well last year.

We're barely keeping up with the blackberries - which is good for the birds, I guess! The latest lot will probably go into some kind of chutney...

Busy, busy...

Current special offers of note - Das Alte Werk

Having previously blogged about Europadisc's 'Das Alte Werk' special offer, the label has now also turned up on offer at MDT until the 28th of October. They're selling single CDs for £5.50 & doubles for £6.50 - within the UK free postage applies to orders over £50.

There really are some great recordings turning up in this series. MDT aren't offering the entire selection. From what they have, I already mentioned two CDs by Il Giardino Armonico, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos & a selection of excellent Christmas Concertos. Nikolaus Harnoncourt's brilliant recordings of Bach's B Minor Mass & Haydn's Missa in Angustiis ('Nelson' Mass) are also a snip.

I've also been really enjoying Herbert Tachezi's Kunst der Fuge performed on the organ and the intriguing 1963 recording by Jurgen Jurgens & Andre Rieu of the two secular cantatas BWV 206 & 208 has turned out to be well worth listening to. It's 'old school' Bach to a certain extent, on modern instruments with pretty large-sounding choral forces (the Monteverdi Chor, Hamburg), but it's performed with a bit of dash and style and the soloists all sound pretty good. It doesn't have the leaden-footed quality I sometimes hear in earlier 'traditional' interpretations - instrumentalists and choir do a particularly good job with 'Lebe, Sonne dieser Erden' from the Hunting Cantata (BWV 208) - the need to have a good driving rhythm along with force and clarity in the vocal lines makes this short section a pretty good litmus test for the work as a whole - it's carried off with a fresh sound and a bit of brio. Sadly this CD isn't (yet?) included in the samples available from the Das Alte Werk site.

In fact, that website is a little frustrating, as it seems to be rather slow to catch up with their own release schedule, as well as a little lacking in more general information. Having a glance at MDT's list of new releases for October, there seems to be a new batch due then - including two more fantastic Bach double CDs from Harnoncourt, his Orchestral Suites & first recording of the Christmas Oratorio (included on our Xmas website; & I blogged about his recent return to the piece last year) - where the official site falls silent. They're not on MDT's offer, unfortunately, but they are brilliant value nonetheless. If you search on 'Teldec' in the label field, you'll get a list of 10 releases, which also include more cantatas (sacred this time) from the Monteverdi Chor Hamburg & Jurgen Jurgens, featuring amongst others Kurt Equiluz & Max van Egmond.

Beer, beer, beer

Haven't found much time to blog lately. And when it comes to seasonal customs, this time of year was always too full of hard work for too much fun. I've already posted about our Rumtopf and now is the time for planning for and making all kinds of treats for the winter months. So it's jams, jellies, chutneys and booze that needs time to get tasty in bottle or jar. We really hope we can find a supply of quinces this year - Cambridge was full of them, we got loads via a post on the local Freecycle scheme - but we've not found a supplier so far in Newcastle...

The beer is still going surprisingly well (I always expect these kind of things to go wrong!). The latest beer (a 'clone' of Banks & Taylor Black Bat from Protz & Wheeler's book of recipes - a nice strong beer for October) is currently fermenting away quite nicely in its bucket. Fermentation is going quite well - the gravity needs to drop from 1064 to 1015. So far, after 3 and a bit days of work it's down to 1040. The yeast I'm using this time is Wyeast's London III (1318).

As that one starts off, we're tackling Brew 3, another Protz & Wheeler recipe, for Exmoor Gold. It's turned into a very clean-tasting (if a slightly *too* hoppy) golden ale, quite summery and light. The pictures below show samples at 1, 2, 3 & 4 (well, *almost* 4 - we couldn't wait any longer!) weeks. Somewhere in the 3rd week, the cloudy stuff turned into delicious golden beer...

Loganberries finished - loads of plums now

All that's left of the loganberries now are the jars of loganberry jelly in the fridge and the job of cutting back the fruiting branches - leaving the new growth to produce fruit for next year. Despite problems with mould, no doubt caused by the miserable wet summer we've had, we're starting to get so many Czar plums from the tree that we hardly know what to do with them. So far, some have been added to our Rumtopf, another batch have been turned into an 'instant' (ie. no maturing) chutney to have with a curry & yet more have been made into delicious plum jam, which we enjoyed on pancakes this morning.

Plenty of tomatoes are ripening - the pick of the bunch are the Bloody Butchers - and, having survived the slug onslaught, our leaves are now ready to make some great salads. A particularly nice salad we've been enjoying involves dressed leaves, broad beans, feta cheese and chopped dill. It's another good thing to add thinly sliced kohlrabi to as well. Also doing pretty well are the little purple and white striped Calliope aubergines. We've had a couple so far and there are 5 or 6 more at the moment getting towards ripeness. But we're a little nervous about our chillies. The plants are all doing really well, but we've been having such scarce sunshine that it's touch and go whether they'll ripen properly or fall victim to mouldiness.

Our problems of course pale into insignificance compared to the situation facing farmers in England this year. Will the weather ever turn sunny?