The Seasonal Supplement: Issue 15, Early Winter
holly berries | fireside butterflies | festive cocktails
Hello everyone and a warm welcome to the next (free) issue of The Seasonal Supplement. We’re so happy you’re here! This is the place where we pull together snippets from our journal that don’t make it into our longer articles: a mix of short stories; simple, joyful (occasionally fleeting) moments; cooking notes; rustic recipes; and, of course, photographs. Together they will give you a seasonal glimpse into life here on our smallholding in the hills of rural England. We hope you enjoy reading.
Saturday 2 December
Sloe gin from the secret cupboard
Nestled just to the right of the fireplace is the secret cupboard. An old bread oven, with a wooden door made from the repurposed slats of a rotten garden bench, and a handle shaped from a piece of fallen beechwood. Inside the cupboard are circles of brickwork, cobwebs, a tiny light bulb that comes on when the door opens, and our stash of sloe gin. There are several bottles here. All were made from the dusky blackthorn berries that appear in our paddock hedgerows every autumn. Each bottle is at a different point of maturity. The older, the better. We pour ourselves a thimbleful each. Something warming and fruity to toast the arrival of the festive season.
Wednesday 6 December
Fire lighting and butterflies
The fire is lit most days now. We coax it back to life each morning from the glowing embers of the night before. The flames are usually crackling again in the time it takes for the kitchen kettle to boil and the tea to brew. Every few days we fill a barrow with wood and wheel it through the front door, straight to the hearth of the main fireplace. The larger pieces of wood are stacked to the left of each woodstove, and the smaller ones are thrown into willow baskets on the opposite side. The perfect spot for a final dry before they make it onto the flames. We tend to store and season our wood in mixed piles, so that we have a jumble of varieties to burn at any one time. We’ve come to know each type of wood and how it performs on the fire well:
Silver birch burns fast and hot, so it’s perfect for getting the fire going and the temperature of the stove up.
Ash burns reliably well with a nice flame pattern. There’s a lot of it around at the moment because ash dieback disease is so prevalent and tree felling for safety is considered essential in many places.
Beech has beautiful flames and long burn time.
Fruit woods from the orchard apple, pear, mulberry, plum, and cherry trees all burn well with a sweet scent.
Willow almost burns as fast as it grows, so lots is needed for any meaningful heat output.
Oak burns hot, long and slow, with softly smouldering flames. It leaves a radiant bed of embers that is easy to relight the next day. It’s the ideal wood to see us through the night.
Today when we bring in the latest batch of wood, a peacock butterfly flutters out from amongst the logs and lands dozily on the sofa. It must have chosen the log store as a cosy spot to hibernate until spring. We carefully scoop it up and relocate it to the cats’ sleeping nook in the shed outside, where we’ve noticed some other butterflies overwintering. Hopefully it will be happy there.
Friday 8 December
The Holly Tree
The streamside holly tree is laden with shiny red berries this year. Folklore tells us this means we are in for a harsh winter. So far though, December has delivered the usual mix of rainfall, mud, and the occasional Christmas card worthy frost. Nevertheless, there is still plenty of time for further temperature drops, and perhaps a flurry of snow.
We cut a few small sprigs of holly for the wreath on the front door. And, while we have secateurs in hand, some branches for the sheep too. Holly is an excellent and nutritious winter fodder. The sheep like the berryless stems with soft leaves that can be found midway up the tree. The holly doesn’t bother to add prickles to its higher leaves because it believes them to be safe from nibbling animals, so no spiky deterrent is needed. The poor holly didn’t foresee a visit from two snip-happy humans though. Sorry holly. Luckily there is plenty left behind, including all the berries, which the garden birds fly down to visit as soon as we walk away.
Sunday 10 December
Sheep Shelter
The sheep have been banned from the copse. We’re trying to restore and expand the hazel trees into a renewable firewood source, but it’s tricky to do with four bark and leaf loving foragers using the spot as a hang-out. So, the small area has been blocked with a strand of electric fencing. The sheep are pretty miffed about the new arrangement. To make it up to the flock, today we are building them a budget shelter.
We pencil out a plan on paper and work out the wood angles to cut with the help of trigonometry (school maths lessons finally put into practice) and set to work. We knock together a simple wooden frame with a crinkled tin roof. Then pallet wood panelling is added around the sides to keep out the worst of the weather. We run out of wood just as it starts to get dark. We’ll have to snaffle a few more free pallets from somewhere to get the shelter finished another day. But when it’s all done it will hopefully offer the sheep a cosy place to huddle when the winter storms blow in.
Tuesday 12 December
Making the Christmas Cake
The Christmas fruit cake changes every year depending on what we have managed to gather throughout the seasons. One year, after a bumper crop in the summer, it was filled with chewy, sweet, dried cherries. The following Christmas there were no cherries to be seen, but dried greengages dominated the batter. This festive period we’re using apple and pear crisps, broken into little pieces; damson and honey leather, snipped into tiny nuggets; wild hazelnuts, cracked ever so carefully to avoid any rogue shells sneaking into the finished cake; a generous slosh of mulberry vodka; the juice from some of those wonderful outdoor lemons; and eggs from the freezer (because the chickens are yet to start laying again). There will be chubby sultanas and raisins, jewel-like glacé cherries, and dried apricots too, courtesy of the village shop.
Today, with its blanket sky of grey cloud and mizzle, seems like a good time to make a start. We grab a huge bowl from the cupboard and weigh out the fruit. Measurements of each ingredient are decided by whim and level of abundance. As long as there is roughly a kilogram of fruit in total, we should be fine. The lemon juice is retrieved from the freezer and the alcohol merrily sloshed in. We stir with a huge silver spoon, pop an upturned plate on top, and leave everything to soak. A few days, with the occasional top up of alcohol is usually long enough to ensure the fruit becomes plump and flavoursome. We’ll bake the cake at the weekend and squirrel it away in a tin until Boxing Day, when it will be brought out to accompany dinnertime cheeseboards or post-walk mugs of tea right through into January.
Saturday 16 December
Cloves on the Woodstove
This afternoon we put a spoonful of cloves and some water into a tiny cast iron pot and sat it on top of the woodstove. The water gradually warmed around the spices and diffused into the room, scenting the cottage with Christmas. Of course, we forgot all about it after a while and the cloves ended up burnt to a crisp, but it was lovely while it lasted. Tomorrow, we’ll try again, this time with orange slices and cinnamon sticks (and a reminder set to top up the water!).
A Seasonal Recipe
This is one of our favourite festive drinks to make at this time of year. It’s one that spans the seasons: midsummer berries from the freezer, autumn apple juice from the store cupboard, plus a few sprigs of fresh winter rosemary. We usually use redcurrants, raspberries, or blackberries for the juice base. It’s fruity, refreshing, and not-too-sweet. It makes a great non-alcoholic option for a Christmas cocktail. That said, you could always, swap the tonic water for some prosecco if you so desired…
Redcurrant, Apple and Rosemary Fizz
Serves 4
Ingredients
400g frozen redcurrants (raspberries or blackberries also work well)
250ml unsweetened apple juice
3 sprigs of rosemary
600ml good quality tonic water
Ice and a few sprigs of rosemary to serve (optional)
Method:
Put the redcurrants, apple juice, and rosemary in a saucepan and heat gently for around 10-15mins (don’t allow it to boil), squishing the berries with a spoon occasionally to encourage them to spill their juices. Remove from the heat and leave to cool down. Then strain through a sieve or jelly bag into a jug and move to the fridge to chill thoroughly. You should end up with around 400ml juice.
When ready to serve, fill four glass tumblers with plenty of ice, pour approx. 100ml of the juice into the bottom of each glass, top with around 150ml tonic water, and serve with a sprig of rosemary tucked down the side of the ice in each glass. Serve immediately.
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Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas
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Thank you so much to all of you for reading along and supporting our newsletters here over the last year – it has been such a pleasure writing to you all. We hope you all have a wonderful and restful Christmas and festive break, and we’ll see you in 2024!
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Thanks so much for reading and have a lovely Christmas.
Kathy and Tom
Hope you had a nice Christmas.
So you have any ideas if/how can used the currant s from the recipe? I am going to make using half & half red and blackcurrant. Thank
Wishing you a wonderful, well earned break - look forward to reading your newsletters in the coming year 😊