Well, October has been quite a revelation. All the blue skies we should have had back in August, glorious ochre-gold-orange-russet leaves, and a glut of end of season fruit and veg. A last gasp of the great outdoors before we descend into dreary November. Here's what we've been up to...

1) ROASTING - carrots. Not exactly ground breaking but, boy, they do taste good when all sweet and crisped up. We have covered off the classic carrots with cumin seeds but also been feasting on roasted carrots glazed with honey and orange juice and finished with sesame seeds. The picture at the bottom may look a bit unattractive, but when they are roasted till they bend, they are at their best.  Yummers.

2) STROKING - one of our new products. The copper finish on the oroshiki grater is right in line with our current design obsession. That Pinterest board on copper kitchenware? That was us. The fact that something so blimmin' useful also looks so stylish is just fantastic. The perfect housewarming gift for those architect friends where all they have on the kitchen counter is one of these and a stone mortar and pestle. The kind where the kitchen toys and bedroom toys might just be interchangeable. Or just keep it for yourself and stroke it. 

3) EXPERIMENTING - with eel. Bear with us. We are total devotees of unagi - when eel is BBQ-ed and coated in that brown sauce, we just can't get enough. We picked one up at the fishmongers to try and cook it another way. Lightly pan-fried and mixed with a salad dressed with horseradish. It even converted the most eel-phobic of audiences - or so they thought! 

4) CRUMBLING - with the last of the plums. We hadn't made plum crumble for literally years. We did and now we can't get enough of it. Superior to apple, dare we say it! There is no photo of the resultant crumble. We ate it pretty much before the dish was on the table, let alone photographed.

5) NOT GIVING A FIG - end of summer means figs. Of course we have been eating them with parma ham and mixed into yoghurt and honey. One thing we have learned this year is that the fig leaves are not to be disregarded either. We have been experimenting with fig leaf infusions. For panacotta and also for a fig leaf liquor. More on both later when the recipes have been perfected, and when I can force Saunders to go round the corner and illicitly pick more fig leaves for me!

6) PREPARING - we don't want to scare you by mentioning the C-word. But it has been at the back of our mind for some months and our preparations have slowly started to gain momentum. A sneaky peak of some of our Christmas designs below.