Pontack sauce
Autumn foraging season is upon us, and there are some good-sized elders along the old green lane where I often walk my dog of an evening. I’ve always had a…
A compendium of campfire cookstrips
Some years ago I used to draw campfire cookstrips for Scouting magazine. Presented in the style of Len Deighton’s famous 1960s illustrations from the Observer and the Action Cookbook, my…
The inaugural Oak Royd Beer Festival
One of life’s great pleasures is actually doing a thing that you’ve been talking about for years. In the case of last weekend, it was holding a charity beer festival…
Mead fit for a king
‘Turbulent old time, the 17th century. It was the age of characters like Cardinal Richelieu and the Duke of Buckingham; of Oliver Cromwell, Galileo and Guy Fawkes; of civil war,…
Upcoming articles in Ernest journal
It’s been a quiet time on the blog recently. Partly it’s because work has picked up a bit, so some of the stuff I might have blogged about has found…
A brace of birds
Pheasant shooting finished at the beginning of February, and with the closing weeks of the season came a frenzy of activity across North Yorkshire, as fieldsports enthusiasts took every opportunity…
Brewing wild hop beer
I’ve written before about the annual Glebe Cottage hop harvest, and I thought it might be fun to post my latest method for dealing with such a glut of pungent…
Five comfort drinks
It’s a shame that a lot of people only ever tip back cocktails in specialist bars, because some mixed drinks are at their best in your own home, sipped sunk…
A birthday brew
The other week, my brother turned thirty, and he celebrated with a street party outside his end-of-terrace house in Hebden Bridge. It was a grand old occasion, with family and…
Four things to do with wild garlic
Wild garlic season is knocking on, but there’s still plenty of it about, and it must rank among the most easy to distinguish of all wild plants. The swathes of…
