Steven Lamb is a linchpin of the whole River Cottage operation and has been for a decade. He teaches on several courses at the Cookery School but specialises in curing and smoking meat. Steven appears in the TV series, regularly…

Steven Lamb is a linchpin of the whole River Cottage operation and has been for a decade. He teaches on several courses at the Cookery School but specialises in curing and smoking meat. Steven appears in the TV series, regularly…
Spring, undoubtedly, is my favourite time of year. After a long, cold, wet winter of hunkering down by the fire, these first days of warm feel like emerging from a cave. Early flowers are popping open, an embrace for the…
We should all be eating more goat. It’s sustainable, ethical, highly nutritious and very delicious. Why, then, does it remain so underused and misunderstood? GOAT tells the story of how food and farming culture developed in the west without the…
Spring is stubbornly refusing to show her hand, playing poker-face rain games and hiding the sun up her sleeve. It has rained for weeks, with one false dawn day when the sun shone warm and I was able to get…
Foraging and seasonal eating go hand-in-hand. In fact, foraging is the very definition of seasonal eating. You will not find wild blackberries in January (though the supermarkets will still sell you punnets of cultivated fruits). Birch sap has a season…
Although the wild garlic is only just starting to peek above the chilly soil, I cannot help myself but start planning all the things I will be making from this pungent plant over the next couple of months. Later in…
Lucy Antal is a maker of preserves, a lover of food, and a writer. She runs the food blog Grab Your Spoon, and can be found selling her preserves at Lark Lane Farmers’ Market in Liverpool on the 4th Saturday…
There are several key moments in the foraging year. The point in the spring when the birch sap is rising, to be tapped from the tree and made into wine or syrup. That warm day, towards the tail end of…
Winter drags its frosted heels. Spring will never come, so it seems. The wild birds (those that have not vacated these shores for warmer places) line the branches, seemingly waiting for something. There are signs of change if I look…
Birch trees are explorers. A pioneer species, they will colonise bare ground where little else grows, sparking an increase in biodiversity. Jim Mann of North Pennine Birch taps birch trees for their sap in his woodland, a forest regenerated in…