Week 32

a small garden salad; hot air balloon town; summer walk of doom...and a crumble recipe

Hello!

My announcement of the opening of crumble season last week caused some celebration but also a little bit of pushback…which I think is fair, as far as it goes. Crumble is of course an autumn thing, you are quite right, but the trouble is you just can’t argue with blackberries. They arrive now, and they must be put into a crumble. So let’s call this the very earliest outrider of crumble season.

Anyway, in last week’s comments it became clear that several of you would welcome a little guidance on your crumble making, so this seems like a great opportunity to share not a crumble recipe, but my crumble blueprint. Once you have this mastered you will be whipping up all manner of combinations of your own choosing. I originally wrote this for my very first almanac, which came out in 2018, and this gives me the perfect excuse to mention that the 7th edition, The Almanac 2024, comes out of the 31st of August - very soon! And more importantly that you can find it at Waterstones, Blackwells, Hive and Amazon and - best of all - at your local bookshop. AND that pre-orders give your favourite authors (*winning smile*) just the boost they need to cling on in this big, tough publishing world.

If you are not interested in the recipe, skip to the usual business below.

Crumble blueprint

Almost every element of this is changeable, and swapping the type of fruit, flour, sugar or ‘rubble’ can make this into endless different desserts. Muck about. (Apologies to Americans who I think are the ones most wanting this recipe that I have run out of time to translate it into sticks and cups. There is a converter here.)

Ingredients

500-700g fruit, plus a splash of apple juice and a spoonful or two of sugar

75g butter

100g flour or finely ground nuts

75g sugar

100g rubbly stuff - rolled oats, chopped nuts.

Method

Cook harder fruits briefly in the apple juice and sugar to soften them a little. Pour into a baking dish. Rub the butter into the flour or ground almonds until it resembles rough breadcrumbs, then stir in the sugar, rubble and spice. Sprinkle it over the fruit, pat it down lightly, then bake for 30-45 minutes at 190C/375F/gas mark 5.

Some possible variations:

• Apple and sultana filling with a wholemeal flour, oats, cinnamon, light soft brown sugar and pecan topping

• Pear and quince filling with a spelt flour, muscovado sugar, ground clove and chopped walnut topping

• Rhubarb filling with a demerara sugar, ground ginger, chopped stem ginger and orange zest topping

• Plum filling with a wholemeal flour, ground almonds, slivered almonds and golden caster sugar topping

• Apricot, strawberry and vanilla filling with a white flour, oats, caster sugar and lemon zest topping

And so on…

The usual business

This is my weekly post in which I write about the things I have noticed this week that make it ‘this week’, seasonal, particular and so on, and then you join in with yours. We start with a selection of your comments from last week, all gussied up like a beautiful poem, because that’s what they are.

Here’s your Week 31:

A vase of sunflowers on the kitchen table; crumbles and caterpillars; a small loaf for Lammas with treacle and thyme; pumpkin plants taking over; taking the little ones to a ‘pick your own’ farm; bramble compote to pour over pavlova and ice cream; the Songmoon and the intense blue palette surrounding it in the night sky; courgettes in every conceivable form (especially lemon and walnut muffins); sipping mint tea in the garden and butterfly watching; swimming at the local lake under fluffy whipped-cream clouds; not-quite-so-green tomatoes; pressing flowers; so many runner beans I am feeding the street; cooler weather (US) bringing the hummingbirds to the feeders; making lughnasa focaccia with a 13 yr old (topped with garlic & fresh tomato!); the first mulberries, and still-pale hazelnuts a-plenty in the hedges; being whopsided on the head by a bumbling cicada (Florida); mama and papa swallow swooping in and out of their nest feeding their second brood; a freezer full of blackberries…and still picking more; about 30 dragonflies dancing together in the breeze; small flocks of greylag geese on the stubble of the freshly cut wheat field; the drum line and the tubas of Band Camp at the university nearby, a sure sign of approaching autumn; taking a midnight train from Tangier to Marrakesh under the full moon which we glimpsed through the open window.

Beautiful…but wait…

We have a special dispatch from North Africa that I think all of us swift lovers would like to hear:

‘Here in North Africa I think we are seeing the return of the swifts from the UK! There have been several overhead at dusk.’

Gasp.

AND a shocker from Aoteroa NZ to remind us of the way the world turns:

‘The daffodils are here now, though premature and hit by a hard frost this week, so they got a shock.’

Daffodils!

Here’s my Week 32 (super brief, because this post is turning into a monster):

A small garden salad

Everything picked in the garden, chopped up and put in a bowl and dressed. And we can do this night after night at the moment. Yes, smug.

Hot air balloon town

Bristol is known for its hot air balloons because we have a big open space to the west of the city where they all take off and then drift across the city. The very spectacular Air Balloon Fiesta occurs this weekend, and a few of them have been straggling over our garden this week, warming up. You hear them before you see them. It’s nice.

Summer walk of doom

Wales over there, looking inviting

We went for a walk to Severn Beach last weekend and the weather was positively glowering but we pushed on, having come that far…into THIS and got rightly completely soaked through.

That’s it from me. Let’s hear what you have been spotting/eating/sniffing/doing that made this week feel like this week. And perhaps you might like to add any crumble thoughts for the poor crumble-less Americans too.