Tag: in season

In Season: September

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Man, I’m late with this one. Hedgerows have been thick with blackberries for weeks, thanks to a meterological anomaly of a year that’s brought a heatwave and with it early sightings of autumnal fruits. Same as every year, I’ve been opening drawers to stare longingly at wooly tights, so this turn of events is all too welcome. In mid-August I rolled up my jeans, went off for a walk in search of these gems – with the Myths & Legends podcast in my ears– and was rewarded with a lot of nettle stings but, more importantly, a big bag of blackberries.

During my outings, I’ve also picked a berry with a fat spider on it and stood on a bird corpse. Swings and roundabouts.

To be pernickety, blackberries aren’t really berries at all – they’re made up of drupelets, the individual bobbles you get on raspberries and blackberries – and have also been known as brambleberries, brumblekites and lawers. No matter what you call them, they’re also great in terms of fibre and vitamin C. For me, blackberries = crumble time, but I guess it’s time to branch out… Continue reading →

In Season: September

Anyone who’s been through a school system that kicks off in September knows this: it’s the real new year. As we dodge kids in too-big jumpers on the pavements, it’s hard not to get nostalgic about new bags and catching up with all your mates after some time apart and trying some “new year, new me” magic via the medium of shoes*. And for those of us who throughout the summer crave wool tights and cosy corners, crunchy leaves and steaming mugs of hot chocolate, the type that fit perfectly into the curves of your hand, it’s 30 days of hope and promise.

September, in food too, is the great month of overlaps, its bounty made obvious by a glance at the seasonal calendar**. It’s our last chance for several months to grab short-season gems like plums and blueberries, but our first chance to get in on some sweet butternut squash lovin’. It’s very nearly soup season. Today, we’re focusing on plum, courgette, and the sweet and jammy fig.  Continue reading →

In season: October

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‘ve been putting this post off in hopes that I’d have a recipe to put up, but the broken oven in our flat has thwarted me. I managed to make a birthday cake in a kitchen fairly foreign to me – a towering chocolate affair, with whisky buttercream and caramel ganache – but the recipe needs tweaks before it can appear here. Instead, a yawning content chasm has opened.

The fan and element have both blown, and by the time the new parts are fitted, it will have been three weeks since the bad news was delivered via WhatsApp. Three weeks of mentally planning meals and then remembering they’re an impossibility. Three weeks of being desperate to bake something to use up the 40 eggs I bought last weekend. A slight surplus, but worth it – they taste different in a way that’s hard to pinpoint. Richer, perhaps? Either way, they’re part of the dearth of creative cooking, lately. It’s all eggs on this, eggs on that. (Really, it’s a pretty good problem to have.)
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