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.