Upon that night, when fairies light,
On Cassilis Downans dance,
Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze,
On sprightly coursers prance;
Or for Colean the route is ta’en,
Beneath the moon’s pale beams;
There, up the cove, to stray and rove,
Among the rocks and streams
To sport that night.

UK spending on Halloween is expected to exceed £120m this year, ten times the amount that was spent just five years ago. The pumpkin market alone is worth an estimated £25m now that Hallowe’en has become the third most profitable seasonal push in UK supermarkets after Christmas and Easter.

On the other side of the pond, the National Retail Federation of America estimates over $5 billion was spent in 2006.

Read more about the commercialisation of Halloween in this article, Corporate Halloween Hegemony, over at the Fuel Ghoul.

If you are going out trick-or-treating tonight then make sure you watch out for the ghoul!

Complete text of Robert Burns’ poem Hallowe’en. More Hallowe’en facts.

Fresh from River Cottage, Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall cooks up a seasonal pumpkin recipe perfect for those chilly autumn nights.

Well, autumn looks like it’s finally arrived with a vengeance. Walking into work this morning I noticed that it’s now the majority of trees that have dropped all their leaves. There is also a noticeable chill in the air on most mornings now - so much for the Indian summer most of us have been hoping for!

Anyway, one good thing about autumn is that it’s soup season, and there’s nothing quite like some home made vegetable soup now that the nights are drawing in.

So, with Halloween just around the corner, get yourself a fresh organic veg box from Ethical Superstore and then indulge yourself with Hugh Fearnly-Wittingstall’s recipe for Whole Pumpkin Baked with Cream.

Serves 4-6, generously

1 medium (3-4kg) pumpkin or several small squashes

Up to 500g Gruyère cheese, grated (depending on the size of your pumpkin)

up to 1 litre of double cream

freshly grated nutmeg

a knob of butter

salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Slice the top off the pumpkin or squashes three-quarters of the way up and retain – this is your lid.

2. Scoop out the seeds and surrounding fibres from the pumpkin and place the scooped-out pumpkin on a baking tray or in an ovenproof dish.

3. Put enough grated Gruyère into the empty cavity of the pumpkin to fill about a third of it, then pour in double cream until the cavity is two-thirds full. Add a few gratings of nutmeg, a little salt and plenty of black pepper. Throw in a knob of butter and replace the lid so the pumpkin is whole again.

4. Place in a fairly hot oven (190°C/Gas Mark 5) and cook for 45 minutes to one and a quarter hours, depending on the size of the pumpkin. Test by removing the lid and poking at the flesh from the inside. It should be nice and tender. At this point, the skin may be lightly burnt and the whole thing just beginning to sag a bit.

Hugh’s advice:

“When the pumpkin is completely soft and cooked through, there is a real danger of collapse.”

“The larger the pumpkin, the bigger the danger. Don’t panic if it happens - it will look a bit deflated but will still taste delicious.”

5. Serve small squashes individually in bowls, with spoons to scoop out the flesh. Serve the larger pumpkin by scooping plenty of flesh and the creamy, cheesy liquid (the Gruyère comes out in lovely long, messy strings) into warmed soup bowls. Either way, serve piping hot.

Find out more about getting the best quality local organic food from farm to fork.

Recipe reproduced with kind permission from rivercottage.net

These might be the best invention ever.

Take some delicious Divine Dark Chocolate and coat whole, dried apricots in it.

Shazam! Dried whole apricots, richly covered in Divine dark chocolate.

These really have to be tasted to be believed.

Get some today!

http://www.ethicalsuperstore.com/products/divine-chocolate/divine-delights-apricots/

Hey kids, don’t you know it’s wrong to cut up little cute mice and froggies?

No? Well, it is! So stop it!

Sign the Pledge: Refuse to Dissect is the latest campaign from peta2.com, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I refused to dissect “when I were a lad” and that was like, ages ago.
Please join the growing number of students who have said “no” to cutting up dead animals and sign the pledge refusing to dissect. Thank you!

The postal strike is having an impact on EthicalSuperstore.com but I worry that real loser in this will be the environment. We’ve had to suspend our cheapest delivery rate, but generally most parcels are being delivered by our friends at Parcel Force. However, the long terms implications of a weakened Royal Mail are definitely for bad the environment.

Our postie—she’s actually a young woman—drops our letters and small packets off every day at home around 9am. She walks from the delivery depot with a small sack of letters and then collects the rest of her letters from strategically located pick up points round her route. It works because all letters in the UK outside of London are still delivered by the Royal Mail. She passes every house every day.

Now imagine a world where Royal Mail is weakened to the point where they no longer deliver to every house every day. Either we’ll all be driving to the sorting office to pick our mail up – 500 houses on our postie’s route might mean 500 more journeys each day by car!!!! Alternatively, lots of new van or car based delivery schemes get launched and we all get multiple deliveries each week from multiple companies. May be slightly less impact than us all driving places but ultimately much worse than the system we have now.

Postal delivery is an environmental issue. The government—the current owner of the Royal Mail—needs to focus less on preparing to sell it and more on building the service it has to be truly world class. We have cost effective, environmentally sensitive delivery to every home in the UK – do we really want to squander it?