By Rebecca Frank
As thoughts inevitably turn to Christmas, why not swap the shops for the kitchen and have a go at making your own festive foodie gifts. Rebecca Frank visited River Cottage to do just that
While Christmas shopping tends to make you tired and stressed, spending a day in the kitchen creating brightly coloured bottles and boxes bursting with delicious festive flavours whilst ticking names off your present list has the exact opposite effect. This I discovered on a cold and wet November day when I joined the Christmas Hampers workshop at the River Cottage in Devon. While the rain came down outside my fellow cooks and I boiled beetroot, apple and tomatoes with wintry spices to create a bottle of deep red St Nicholas Ketchup and combined Bramley apples and lemons with eggs and cloves to make two jars of Hugh’s delicious winter lemon curd. A chocolate salami followed, which course leader Lucy Brazier described as the ideal no-cook recipe for when you’re ‘sick of pudding and sick of cooking’. Packed with nuts and sour cherries and a couple of teaspoons of alcohol (we used locally made cider brandy) all of our sausage shaped creations looked different but equally impressive.
As we all know, cooking can build up quite an appetite but there’s no fear of going hungry here with regular breaks for tea and homemade spelt digestives and a hearty lunch served in the farmhouse in front of the log fire. While feasting enthusiastically on winter salads and tender meats we shared stories of our Christmases and cooking successes and disasters. It was soon back to the kitchen as we had a long list of goodies to get through including piccalilli, roasted nuts and seeds with Twelfth Night seasoning, quince vinegar and a batch of those yummy spelt digestives. Lucy made it all feel very achievable for a bunch of amateur cooks with her lively demonstrations and useful tips and hints. While we cooked at our individual stations, she wandered around answering questions and rescuing the odd mishap with a smile.
At the end of the day we were given wooden boxes and Christmassy accessories with which to decorate our hampers while Lucy poured us all a glass of quince, bay and ginger ratafia and laid out a fabulous cheese board for us to feast on as we worked. I came away with heaps more confidence and ideas for making edible gifts but also general cooking tips I will definitely be putting to use in the kitchen over Christmas. I wasn’t surprised to find most people on the course had been on a River Cottage workshop before as I definitely hope to return soon. If you can’t make it down this year, perhaps you could slip a cooking course onto your Christmas wish-list..?
The next Christmas Hamper course is on 21 November and costs £195 for the day including lunch (9.30-5pm). Visit rivercottage.net to find out more.