Tag: Summer
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Rhubarb & Strawberry Collins
If there’s one taste that epitomises the British summertime then it must be that of a perfectly ripe strawberry, bursting with sun-sweetened juice. Some of my earliest memories are of going strawberry picking at our local farm and of the sheer delight of finding the fruit, red and gleaming beneath trefoil leaves. We would fill…
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Elderflower & Cucumber Margarita
There are few scents that evoke the British summertime as beautifully as fresh elder blossoms. As May ripens into June the hedgerows burst into deeper flower and sweeten the air with their perfume. We have our own rather unruly tree that Maurice keeps trying to convince me to remove, but I love it for its…
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Lemon, Elderflower & Chamomile Posset
May is probably my favourite time of year in the UK. After a usually grey early Spring, the sun finally throws out real warmth, and the world responds with an abundance of fresh green growth. Radishes, peas and broad beans spring up in the vegetable patch, the herbaceous borders seem to fill out over night, and every…
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Spring-Clean Green Juice
Iris is now sixteen weeks old, and my body is beginning to feel familiar again. I have to admit that I had not anticipated the level of sheer physicality I would experience during this time. I have become acutely aware of the needs and rhythms of this tiny body, barely separated from my own, while at…
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Smoking Bees Knees
The early May bank holiday is set to be glorious. Flowers are blooming, the sun is shining and (by Yorkshire standards at least) it’s hot! I’ve spent the last few days in the garden – potting up tomatoes, herbs and courgettes – and in the evening have been playing around with new seasonal cocktail recipes.…
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Pea & Coconut Soup with Garden Herbs
As we were walking the dogs earlier this week, we noticed that one of the fields near our house- that had seemed completely bare a couple of weeks ago – is now filled with sturdy pea seedlings, curling out of the earth. It’s a familiar sight at this time of year; the area just east…
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Spiced Rhubarb Gin Fizz
The last time Maurice and I were down in London we visited Mr Fogg’s, a cocktail bar and gin parlour in the West End, themed around Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. As I love a bit of whimsy, I was quite in my element perched on a chaise longue, sipping literary-inspired libations and nibbling quails’ eggs. (And…
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Spiced Rhubarb Soda
When we moved into our house five years ago, the only thing in the garden that seemed to have been purposefully planted by the previous owners, was a large crown of Victoria rhubarb. It was so well established that we didn’t want to risk moving it, so dug the flower bed around it, and it…