Having left it until later this year, the sloes are softer, darker, and they’ve lost their bloom. I’ve always picked them in September, and plonked them in the freezer overnight, because tradition states that you shouldn’t pick them until after the first frost. However, I think the first frost must’ve been earlier than it is nowadays, because the sloes have undergone a transformation and their bitter, dusty taste has been replaced with that of a very tart plum. It’ll be interesting to see how that affects the sloe gin.

Back in August I was featured in Woman & Home magazine talking about picking sloes, and how the annual ritual of making sloe gin marked the beginning of autumn, my favourite season. Yesterday afternoon we got soaking wet, had a lovely time, came home and curled
up in the sitting room with hot chocolate and watched a film.

Sloe Gin Recipe:

Go and have a look in the hedgerows and you’re sure to find some sloes. Don’t forget a bag. If you’re like me, you’ll forget, and have to take them home in a dog poo bag.
This will earn you strange looks from passing walkers.

All you need is a jar, a bottle of gin, a pound (450g) of sloes and 100g of sugar.
Sterilise the jar by washing it in hot soapy water and then rinsing with lots of boiling water.
Plonk the washed sloes in the jar, and add the sugar and gin.
Put it in a dark place, and give it a swirl once a week from now ’til Christmas
Strain it into a bottle, and drink.
It’s that simple.
This year I’ve experimented by using vanilla sugar (caster sugar I keep in a jar with vanilla pods) and I’ve added a vanilla pod to the sloe gin mixture, too.
This may be delicious.
It may be disgusting.
Reports to follow in December.

This is my entry to lovely English Mum’s Great Big Autumn Bakeoff.
It’s not baking, but I’m hoping that she’ll let me off!

I’d like to think she’d be pleased about that. The best cookbooks have floury pages, sticky with sauce, and covered in grease spots. Having had a quick check through for quantities, I washed all the berries (a mixture of sloes, rosehips, blackberries, elderberries and apples from a friend’s tree)

and spent a very lovely afternoon boiling and sterilising and funneling and getting all sticky and jammy.

Jam making is one of the reasons I love autumn: people think it’s impossibly difficult and needs loads of equipment, but it’s really easy, and if you go and forage for blackberries and all the other yummy hedgerow fruit at this time of year, you can make as much as you want for the cost of the sugar. I don’t have posh equipment – jam pans cost about £50, so I just use a big stock pot from IKEA, and my jelly straining bag thingy was about £8 in a cookshop. And the gorgeous jam pots I’ve always coveted that you see above were our bargain in Netto in La Tremblade – I got them for a quarter of the price we pay for them over here.

Talking of bargains, I got the new Nigella through the post the other day – Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home. Nigella’s looking a bit pristine in comparison to Delia:

I suspect that won’t last long though. My copy of Nigella Christmas is looking a bit frazzled. But right now I’m enjoying it over a cup of coffee in the sitting room. The lovely thing about Nigella’s cookery books is that she writes so beautifully that I always read them cover to cover as a book first. This is Nigella’s image-rich, definitive book on cookery, an companion to her lovely, wordy (and in my case also rather tattered) How to Eat. But she still doesn’t tell you how to cook jam from scratch, like Delia. Tsk.

I’d love to say that growing vegetables has had a wonderful influence on the children, and that they happily eat anything they’ve helped to produce at the allotment. But, er, it hasn’t. We have courgettes (aka zucchini) coming out of our ears, and the children think they’re evil. The neighbours are starting to hide when they see us approaching because I keep giving them away.
(Note to self for next year: seven courgette plants is overkill for a family of six. Oops.)