A Tale of Two Rhubarbs

As you can see from the picture at the top of this post, the inhabitants of our rhubarb patch are just starting to poke their heads through the surface. To coddle them through the cold days of this winter, we mulched them generously with some of the spent compost from last year's tomato grow bags and hanging baskets. Can't wait for them to be ready for picking.

Mind you, the good thing about this time of year is that you get a delicious sneak preview of what's to come - a delicacy which brightens up this rather grey month. It looks like the forced rhubarb is now well in season, courtesy of our veg box (and more) people at Northern Harvest. I blogged a bit about this wonderful treat last year, when we had a ready supply of forced rhubarb courtesy of the much-missed apple stall on Cambridge's Sunday market. It was not too long ago when we finally finished up the shocking bright pink rhubarb vodka that I mentioned a year ago. Now we're working our way gradually through the two large bottles of vodka flavoured with non-forced rhubarb from our patch - one of which had some ginger added, both of which are fabulous with a nice ginger ale or beer. Back to forced rhubarb, it really is a welcome splash of colour in dull old February and it's probably the first real fruit treat of the year (if you don't count all those great English apples that continue through the winter).

It's even easier to get through the cold, dank days and the long evenings when you can enjoy a delicious crumble made with fresh forced rhubarb. We've got a good recipe that we'll add to this blog post when Ali at Craft Matters can get onto it. Crumble is one of our favourite puddings, when you can get that crucial balance of crunch and chew in the topping: in our recipe the texture is helped along with oats and sunflower seeds. It's great with custard, or even some double or clotted cream, if you're feeling in need of a real treat.

Snow stops play

Well it stops any constructive play in the garden if you don't want to sprain your wrist digging rock hard ground. We've still got plants to move (mostly shrubs in the wrong place) and now we've got a morello cherry tree to plant on our north facing wall where the old compost heaps were. Apparently a morello's a good thing to put there - and I'm already wondering about steeping some cherries in vodka. We did that about, gosh, 6 or 7 years ago in our first garden and it was delicious. And the steeped cherries made very nice ice cream afterwards too.

With little chance to actually do anything outside at the moment (other than hurl snow at each other and lose control of large snowballs, sending them hurtling perilously down the drive), it's time to have a plan about what we're going to plant. We're turning the greenhouse over almost exclusively to tomatoes this year - the Bloody Butcher & Rudolph varieties that were such a success last year. It's nice having a go at growing more unusual things, but it's also a good idea to look at the things you really eat, and which cost more than a pittance to buy, and focus on those. And it's not so fun to have a go at unusual things if we're going to have as dull and rotten a summer as 2008 again!

It's also important during this cold time to keep nipping out with a kettle of hot water to keep the bird bath in water. And to check there's enough food out for the birds. We're hoping that we're getting nesting blue tits in the garden again this year. They seem v. interested in our nestboxes. And we hope that the new visitors that we've spotted over the autumn and winter - great tits, coal tits, long tailed tits, blackcaps, goldfinches and nuthatches - will stick with us. Fortunately the magpie numbers still seem low.

I'm a bit late with this tip - but one to remember for January next year (!) is to look out for post-Christmas food special offers. I remember that the much-missed Green Poultry on Cambridge Market used to discount their unsold Christmas turkeys in January. Lots of bargain meals there. And this year, Northern Harvest were offering half-price frozen free range turkeys which we've been enjoying this week (when it finally thawed!). You've got to like the leftovers of course, but you get so many meals out of it, it makes a nice cheap-ish treat.

The news is particularly annoying at the moment

Today all sorts of hand-wringing about snow. Lots of sniggering about 'working' from home, implying anyone doing so is skiving. Boris Johnson quoted all over the BBC & Radio 4 yesterday as some kind of lovable phrase-coining duffer and leading the giddy Martha Kearney a merry dance at lunchtime. Similarly annoying yesterday, we had Maths Genius (tm) and ex-TV Personality Carol Vorderman recruited by the Tories and hitching herself to their Decade Of Woe narrative. She's well into this broken Britain theme it seems:

"In the last decade, 3.5 million children have left school without a basic qualification in maths, a shocking statistic.

"If they are to get the best jobs in the future and Britain is to emerge stronger from the recession we have little choice but to sort maths out now."

Shocking indeed. We should definitely sort maths out now. Why oh why couldn't anyone have thought of this 10 years ago? Why? Couldn't anyone have seen back then that the issue was so simple and the solution so elegant? Eh? Oh:

[Sunday 14 March 1999] CAROL VORDERMAN, Britain's highest paid female television presenter, has been personally recruited by the Prime Minister to spearhead a campaign to raise standards in maths.

Independent. Guardian.

Never mind, Carol. I'm sure it'll work this time round! If not there's always 2019.

Getting back to blogging...

...has been a bit of a job this year, what with illnesses and trying to catch up with doing a bit of work (see www.63336.com), rescuing beers and trying to get everything at home back to some kind of normality after all the Christmas excitements. Not to mention the garden! Great plans afoot there. Compost heaps, leaf mould, shifting plants and redesigning one area to include 6 raised beds, not to mention chipping all the ex-shrubs so they can go on the compost heap.. The composting is all going really well. After we shifted over to the new containers back in October, we've now pretty much got a new batch usable compost. Thanks to the bokashi system, pretty much all our kitchen waste is now composting away.

I'll get things going again with a few brewing updates. The saga of the 'Christmas Beer' has been rumbling on. After shifting it outside (big mistake with it so cold) and then back in to revive it, the revival not taking hold and a bit of head scratching, I dumped in a yeast starter that I'd cultivated from (an otherwise pretty disappointing) Leek Brewery's winter beer and hoped for the best.

It seems to have worked - although I did find another problem which might have been more significant than the effect of the cold upon the beer. Anyway, some pics first. The first is of some cloudy beer after it first revived, having been warmed up after the initial problem:

It came out ok and I had high hopes at this point. However it then went decidedly flat, so having dumped in my yeasty starter to get it going again I took off some beer, cloudy but a bit more lively and let it settle to clear up (the first pic). This is a good indication that the beer in the keg will also clear down. The second pic is of it in a re-clouded state!

And then yesterday I drew off a pint for drinking, pictured below. And what a relief, it tastes really nice. Hoppy, but not as astringent as it was before, I don't know whether the Leek yeast has softened it a bit and taken some of the edges off, but it was good and even had some reasonable sparkle to it:

The *other* problem (sigh) was that I noticed that the blooming tap on the keg appeared to have developed a leak. Now that tap not being airtight could be a more significant factor in the keg losing pressure, the beer going flat and all that than the cold. So I did something ludicrously drastic: unscrewing the screw-plug bit of the tap (cue beer fountain) and replacing it with a new one. It's nice and tight now, but could well have boogered up the whole thing again! We'll see.

On a happier note, the new beer, one of Graham Wheeler's mild recipes (Bateman's Dark Mild) seems to be doing very nicely. A week-old sample came out of the tap at the expected lick and tastes delicious already - chewy, roasty with a coffee-ish tinge. Can't wait for that one to be ready: