We have moved!

We've said goodbye to Seasonal Matters here on blogger and we've upped sticks and moved over to our brand new shiny blog thing at Very Berry Handmade.

Do join us there if you like, for the usual mix of craft, food, gardening and drinking. If you get your skates on, you can enter our thrilling Housewarming Giveaway!

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!

Local Food and Drink

This weekend began with some real treats. Local delicacies bought from an excellent shop on Bridge Street in Newcastle-under Lyme. There's nothing particularly fancy about these delicacies - and they're almost unknown outside the Potteries. The picture at the top of this blog entry is of some Staffordshire pikelets - a bit like a cross between a pancake and a crumpet, filled with currants or sultanas. They're quite wonderful eaten raw from the packet (when fresh!), or toasted under the grill and spread with butter. Their savoury partner is the almost-world-famous Staffordshire oatcake - a kind of pancake made from oatmeal. They're everywhere round here. Just up the road from us, in Wolstanton, is the William Ambrose oatcake shop at 4 Morris Square. Unprepossessing and a little unpromising from the outside, their oatcakes and pikelets are very good indeed. Not too thick (which is the drawback with the more commercial producers, including the ones that turn up in Sainsbury's & foodie emporiums like the Neals Yard Dairy in London) and beautifully fresh (again, a lack of freshness is a drawback of oatcakes found outside the Potteries).

The Bacon Shop looks like a very good find. A really good selection of bacon and sausages, from local producers like Maynard's and Buttercross - the Buttercross 'prime pork' sausages are very good indeed and make us miss our old Cambridge butchers The Art Of Meat a little bit less! Piles of packets of oatcakes and pikelets on their counter too. The oatcakes were from High Lane Oatcakes in Burslem - which appears to do mail order via their website here. AliB was quite excited when she saw the packet, as they were the oatcakes her dad used to buy on his way back home from work. They were delicious. Again, far thinner than the varieties more widely available with just the right texture. The thicker oatcakes can be a little rubbery, a trace of which survives when they've been toasted, but these were spot on.

How do you eat oatcakes? We got through this latest batch so quickly that there weren't any left to photograph! But our boys like them sweet, spread with honey or chocolate spread. We like them savoury, heated under the grill with strips of cheese. The oatcake can then be rolled around the melted cheese. Even better, fry some rashers of bacon and place a rasher in each oatcake on top of the melted cheese. Roll up and eat with ketchup or brown sauce. As always, the quality of ingredients is the key with a simple dish like this. We used the last of Mrs Bourne's mature cheshire (bought from Eccleshall farmers' market) and some quite wonderful bacon from The Bacon Shop - Maynard's Staffordshire Black (photographed below), dry cured with molasses. When it comes to bacon there's no comparison between the rubbish you get in the supermarket and the firm-textured, tasty rashers like the Maynard's bacon. We're looking forward to trying more of the varieties on offer in weeks to come.


Finally the 'Drink' bit of the title. After our gardening exertions today, we opened a bottle each of the brilliant re-born Worthington's White Shield. Last night we were more local, opting for bottles of Leek Brewery's Rudyard Ruby, a wonderful reddish-brown ale (bottle conditioned) that had a great balance of dark fruit and slightly sour bitterness. We've been impressed by all their beers we've had so far and this brewery, along with Titanic in Burslem and Peakstones near Alton, seems to indicate that local brewing is in reasonably good shape.

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb...

We have inherited a rhubarb patch at our new home & very pleased we are about it. This morning we breakfasted on Rhubarb Muffins from Nigella Lawson's Feast, which are excellent but a maybe a touch sugary to qualify as a particularly healthy start to the day. I think I would probably make them with wholemeal flour next time - I struggle with using plain white flour for something as rustic as a rhubarb muffin. I notice from Nigella's website that she has a interesting collection of rhubarb recipes (I really like the sound of rhubarb & muscat jelly from How to Eat). & am now wondering about investing in the ones I don't have. Time to have quick search round Greenmetropolis to see if I can get hold of any bargain copies. We've talked before about making Rhubarb Schnapps according to a Nigella recipe given to us by a friend. Just to ring the changes we invested in a 1.5 litre bottle of vodka from Waitrose & have done some experimenting - creating 2 batches, 1 with 3cm piece of chopped fresh ginger added & the other with the pared rind of 1 organic orange. We'll report back on the results.

Ginger & orange are, of course, classic partners for rhubarb. We have an ancient rhubarb jam recipe from Living magazine (inherited via a godmother) which makes the most of this marriage of flavours between citrus & rhubarb - giving a marmalady twist to rhubarb jam.

Citrussy Rhubarb Jam
600g prepared rhubarb chopped into 2cm lengths
1 lemon
1 orange
250ml water
100g raisins
1/4 tsp allspice
500g sugar

Squeeze the citrus fruits & then cover the skins in cold water in a pan & boil for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat & cool, then slice very thinly. Put all the ingredients apart from the raisins & spices into a large, heavy-based saucepan. Heat very gently to dissolve the sugar & then bring the mixture to a fast boil, stirring frequently to prevent the jam sticking to the pan. Boil until the jam is thick - this takes about 20 minutes. Then add the raisins & spices & boil for a further 5 minutes. Allow the jam to cool slightly & then pot in warm, sterilized jars.

We've also made rhubarb chutney for the first time using a recipe from Fork to Fork by Monty & Sarah Don. This is one of our favourite books for inspiration - it's the kind of book that cheers you up rather than making you feel inadequate - there are some fantastic recipes & a very interesting veg garden diary. We shall see how the chutney turns out - preserving is a waiting game after all - but we haven't been let down by one of Sarah Don's recipe's yet.

Seasonal Produce & Drinks - updated

Partly this has been prompted by having to move it, but today we strained the rhubarb schnapps from the wide-mouthed jar in which it has been steeping to a bottle for storage. I blogged about making it in this post and it's now taken on a lovely vivid pink colour and already tastes really nice. A happy consequence of making these kind of drinks is that you can never quite fit all of it into your storage bottle and so you have to keep a wee bit in a jar for sampling. A great hardship. It should, though, continue to improve for a few months yet. It's a great way to use the forced rhubarb that is just going out of season now - you should still just about be able to find it somewhere. If not, it'd be just as nice during the main rhubarb season later in the year. It'll be a lot less pink though!

There's something very satisfying about steeping fruit in vodka and waiting for it to be ready. We'll have to put our minds to some cocktail recipes involving the rhubarb stuff. It's very nice on its own and can take being lightly chilled; and it's very good mixed with ginger ale, but maybe we should try to be more imaginative later on in the year.



Back in October last year we did something similar with a load of quinces someone very kindly brought round. Even though it's never ready for Christmas, we included a recipe on our Christmas website, as it's a nice thing to do while you're making other preserves and drinks that *will* be ready - and if you include a note to let it mature it does make a great Xmas present. This note is required because it's really not very nice for the first 3 or 4 months or so of its life. We made the mistake of trying our first batch in January - it was so foul we poured it away. Fortunately we missed a second bottle which hid in the back of the cupboard until we rediscovered it in the autumn. By which time it had been transformed by some beneficial alchemy into a mellow, delicious golden elixir.

The two pictures above show the 'before' and 'after'. Out of interest I dug out one of the bottles which we produced this year (pictured right) - and it's nice to see it on its way and precipitating out a load of grots at the bottom, which might have something to do with the acrid taste you get from a young batch. It's a while 'till autumn - and a good job we've got the rhubarb drink to sip before then!