Homemade Christmas Gifts

Homemade Christmas Gifts

by Genevra Fletcher

Homemade Christmas gifts…a wonderful idea in theory. But how do you pull it off in poised and elegant Kirsty’s Homemade Home style as opposed to DIY bodge disaster?

Bedruthan Steps Hotel has come up with a great way to help you with creating your Christmas crafts this year so you can make some wonderful homemade presents for your family and friends.

Our Cornish Christmas Craft Fair Weekend (25th - 27th November) at beautiful Bedruthan Steps in Cornwall is a chance to stay in luxury and enjoy all sorts of inspiring craft sessions and food demonstrations.

We’re guarantee to get you and your family making a whole range of beautiful handmade presents; we’re talking the sort of bespoke, handcrafted gift your friends and family will treasure and feel blessed to receive.

Our head chef is going to show you how to create the most delicious Christmas dinner - with all the trimmings, but at a fraction of the price and with everything ready prepared so you can have a relaxing Christmas Day. Come to our Christmas Preserving class and we’ll teach you how to create your own festive flavours to add another homemade and personal touch to your Christmas table.

And what’s more, to make your life really simple, we’re hosting a Cornish Christmas Fair at the hotel. Our aim is to make it easy to get your Christmas shopping done and find just the right presents for family and friends. There really will be something for everyone, with plenty of inspiration for gifts that will leave all those ubiquitous and expensive shop bought ‘must have’ presents out in the cold.

We are offering a very special rate from £74 per person per night including dinner, bed and breakfast for two night stays during our Homemade Christmas Weekend of November 25th, 26th and 27th.

The weekends are suitable for every generation.

To find out more, please call us on 01637 860 555 or email stay@bedruthan.com. To book now, please click here.

Homemade jams, sloe gin and vodka anyone?

Culinary adventurer Adam Clark

Adam's gooseberry jam.

Nature's bounty.

The family that forages together stays together!

by Culinary Adventurer Adam Clark

You may not know this yet, but I decided a little while ago to stand down as head chef of Bedruthan Steps Hotel. Why? An exciting new culinary adventure was calling me.

I've taken up a new role as food development chef for Red Hotels (the company that runs Bedruthan and its sister hotel the Scarlet) and my ambition is to create a range of Red Hotels own branded products.

Wooden spoon in hand, I've got off to a good start by creating preserves for both hotels to serve with breakfast, afternoon tea etc.

And I've been lucky enough to have spent quite a bit of my working day food foraging some of Cornwall’s most beautiful spots, gathering edible hedgerow treasures from which to create some wonderful Red Hotels fare.

On days off, I've taken my family on food foraging expeditions, gathering the most wonderful sloes, so abundant this year and so early. I've never seen them so big. I've also discovered the merits of the wild plum, and squirrelled away a bumper crop.

Back in the busy Bedruthan kitchen, I set to work with my finds. Now, if you stop for a drink at Bedruthan's bar, and you will see on the spirits shelf our very own sloe gin - a wonderful liquor with a lovely flavour and wonderfully warm feel to it. Just what you need on your return from a windy beach walk.

Excited by my success with the sloe gin, I used some of the wild plums to make a flavoured vodka, which after just a few days is already looking enticing. I can only imagine how quickly that is going to go once I put it in the bar. Be sure to look out for it when you next visit us.

Hopefully, with all the sloes I picked with the help of my family, there will be enough to go round. My children Archie and Daisy, my wife Tania, my brother Nick, sister Penny, niece Anna and I all really got stuck into the picking and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves on a beautiful sunny day in St. Agnes. We had walked over the beacon with views as far as St Ives one way and Newquay the other, and the colours of the heather and gorse over one of the highest points for miles was incredible. The different shades of purple and golden yellows were really lovely.

It hasn’t all been a blue skies ideal life though, I've been in my full on wet weather and bramble protection gear as I took on some seriously spiky bushes.

Firstly, the blackberries. Well, I had to get stuck in didn’t i? So in I went and came out laden but truly scratched and bloodied. It was worth it though, and our apple and bramble jam is a real seasonal treat.

Then there was the rosehips and the sea buckthorn, discovered on our own sand dunes below the hotel, so in i went again. If the prickles from the roses weren’t bad enough, have you seen the thorns on a sea buckthorn? There is no easy way of gathering these as the thorns are massive and not easily seen in amongst the berries and leaves but i managed to get myself a little routine going on and got a little savvy in how to handle this plant. And again it was well worth it after using a River Cottage recipe to make sea Buckthorn and apple jam, a real special jam that I will be making for our speciality range.

As for apples, I have never seen so many wild apples as I did this year. I have taken up most of the conference fridge with crates of crab apples and am slowly working my way through them.

I'm enjoying my new role; it's very satisfying to be providing both hotels with their preserves and I have been receiving good feedback too.

We have been spending time getting our labels and jars organised so that we are able to let our guests have some memories of their stay to take back home with them, so please ask when you visit if you love tasting our preserved Cornish countryside.

Seaweed Crisps Recipe

Seaweed Crisps Recipe
By Adam Clark



I thought it might be nice to share some knowledge with you about our beautiful Cornish countryside. As some of you know, I have a passion for wild food and enjoy getting out and spotting ingredients that can be bought back to the kitchen.

There's great joy to be had in making the most of our local larder.

I’m sure as kids you all used to love looking, feeling and playing with the different seaweeds on the beach. Well, who knew that some of them can be turned into something delicious?

Here I am going to talk about sugar kelp, so called because of it’s lovely sweet flavour. It is also known as sweet oarweed.

It is a very common member of the kelp family and is distinctive for its long, dark brown curly edged belts. It's usual a good six inches wide and sometimes over six feet long.

You can normally find it very near or below the low tide mark, as it does not like too much exposure by the tide. You can normally see them hanging vertically in the water, swaying in the current.

So, to make delicious crispy sugar kelp crisps

1. Rinse the seaweed well in fresh water
2. Hang the fronds up to dry; they don't need to be completely brittle when you cook it, but they should at least be shrivelled and leathery (yes, really).
3. Cut across into two cm strips and fry in batches in at least one cm of hot sunflower oil.
4. In a matter of seconds the strips will puff up and change colour.
5. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.

So, there you have it…delicious sugar kelp crisps.

Bedruthan salutes The Loose Salute

We are very proud of our local musical talent. The Loose Salute, a band from just up the road in Newquay, were on Dermot O'Leary's Radio 2 show this weekend.

Listen here from about 13:40.

Spare 2 minutes and Keep Cornwall Beautiful

Bedruthan Steps

Have you visited Cornwall? Do you care about keeping our natural environment beautiful?

Can you spare 2 minutes, then, to do your bit to protect Cornwall's areas of outstanding natural beauty?

All we want you to do is fill in a short online survey about your trip to Cornwall.

Red Hotels Ltd, owners of Bedruthan Steps and the Scarlet hotels, is supporting sustainable tourism enterprise CoaST with its project comparing sustainable practices in national parks and protected areas in Europe. CoaST's aim is to discover how we can improve our practices here in Cornwall.

CoaST is an independent body and social enterprise based in a refurbished barn in Cornwall. CoaST consists of 3 women and 1 man who variously:

• encourage,

• inform,

• network,

• research,

• lobby,

• measure,

• persuade,

• object,

• question,

• bend ears,

• break boundaries and

• never knowingly give up.

Most of Cornwall's visitors come for the environment and visit one or more of the 12 distinctive Cornwall Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) during their stay.

We are asking you - followers and friends of Bedruthan Steps and the Scarlet hotels, and as visitors to Cornwall - to answer a few simple questions about how we can develop sustainable tourism in Cornwall's beautiful protected areas.

CoaST's short survey only takes 2 minutes of your time, and we would really appreciate it if you could complete in the survey online. The deadline is 31st July 2011.

Click here to complete the survey.

And click here to find out more about what Bedruthan Steps and the Scarlet's sustainable practices.

Click on the following links to read more about our commitment to the environment in various different guises:

Bedruthan and the Scarlet's Sustainable Travel Press Trip

Simple pleasures and Upcycling

Bedruthan wins Green Tourism Awards

Thank you so much for helping. If you have any questions, please contact:

Marja

At CoaST

01872-562057

info@coastproject.co.uk

Baby Swimming

by Genevra Fletcher

Here's a lovely moment captured at Bedruthan's baby swimming class on Tuesday. Gorgeous Georgia seems to be lapping up every moment of her swimming lesson.

She, her big brother Reuben and her mum and dad all had a whale of a time with baby swim teacher Lisa Zachary of Swim Academy for Babies.

I like the authentic swimming pool steam-on-the-lens quality of these photos.

The underwater shot demonstrates in action the mammalian dive reflex (which stops a baby taking an immediate inhalation of breath when submerged in water).

I always get this baby reflex mixed up with the moro reflex - the one where a baby throws up its arms when it feels unsupported.

We are running baby swimming sessions as part of our programme of activities for Bedruthan's Young Families Month - our June long celebration of mum, dad and baby bonding!

The baby swim lessons are for Bedruthan guests only, and are for 0-5 year-olds. We run 2 classes, each for half an hour.

What's so good about swimming for young babies?

• Warm water and gentle exercise can help your baby sleep and stimulate your baby’s appetite.
• Babies are more relaxed in water, and it’s a fun environment for babies to develop strength, to exercise, and to explore balance and buoyancy.
• Babies are well adapted to swimming and are born with a swimming reflex. When placed on their tummies in warm water, babies will move their arms and legs in a swimming motion. By encouraging this, you can help baby transfer these involuntary movements into coordinated swimming movements.
• Water play is a multi-sensory activity. Babies use all of their senses to explore water: sight, sound, touch. They also engage their sense of balance and muscular movements and pressure.
• Your baby’s brain is developing rapidly. When you expose your baby to water environments, your baby is more likely to have successful water experiences in the future.

More useful information about baby swimming here.

And also:

Swim Academy for Babies

www.birthlight.com

www.littledippers.co.uk

www.starfishswimming.org

www.swimbabes.co.uk

www.waterbabies.co.uk

Should Cornwall Council Tax Tourists £1 per night to say here?

Should Cornwall Council Tax Tourists £1 per night to say here?

Click here for more information.