Early Autumn walks... Blackberry and Sloe picking

Even though it's only late August, we've noticed lots of blackberry brambles around Dulwich starting to turn a lovely juicy purple. Of course, the most appealing brambles, absolutely laden with ripe blackberries, seem to be just out of reach, fenced off by East Dulwich station. So we decided to go for a walk to Belair park yesterday evening and see if we could forage any ripe berries there.

We struck lucky within a few minutes of arriving in the park and spent a happy hour or so, wandering from bramble patch to bramble patch and by the time we'd finished, we had about a kilo of ripe blackberries. From all the footprints and trampled grass around the brambles, we obviously weren't the first people to visit the park, but there were plenty of berries in various stages of ripeness scattered around and between the sports fields.

Just as we decided to leave the park and make our way home, I spotted a sloe berry bush, then another....and we ended up staying for another half hour picking sloes. I couldn't believe they were ripe so early, but the temptation to make sloe gin was too much and so we picked some of the ripest sloes that had a nice powdery appearance and left the rest to continue ripening.

Ripe blackberries Belair Park - Dulwich

There were clouds of these pretty seeds close to one of the bramble patches

Early Sloe berries

Acorns with Knopper Galls - these are growths caused by chemical reaction to the Gall wasp, which lays its eggs in the developing acorns...and more information about that can be found here
  

Evening sky in the park

Harvest!

As it was so early for sloes - usually they are picked after the first frost - I popped them into the freezer overnight so their skins would split.

And I decided to turn the blackberries into Blackberry and Pinot Noir jam. I found the recipe in my Salt, Sugar, Smoke book*, which looked delicious and was surprisingly easy!

                         Blackberry and Pinot Noir Jam

Pop a small plate into the freezer before you start, I use this to do a wrinkle test to see if the jam has reached settling point

Ingredients

1 small cooking apple - peeled, cored and chopped into small pieces

1 kg blackberries - washed and picked through for stalks and bugs

700g granulated sugar, with pectin (jam sugar)

350ml pinot noir wine

Put the apple into a saucepan with about 4 tbsp water and cook until it is almost completely soft

Put this into a preserving pan (I split the mix between my two largest saucepans as I don't have a preserving pan) with the rest of the ingredients, hold back about 30 mls of wine and slowly bring to the boil, stirring to help the sugar dissolve. 

 Boil hard until the setting point is reached. I tested for setting point using my thermometer (the jam has to reach 104° C) and doing the wrinkle test on a plate just out of the freezer - when the jam has reached 104°C, put a small blob onto the plate and put into the fridge for a few minutes,  if the jam wrinkles when you push it with your finger, it's done and if it's still runny, boil for another two minutes and test again. 

I skimmed a small amount of scum off the surface and stirred in the rest of the wine, then potted in warm, dry jars (thank you Lloyd Grossman) and sealed.

Sticky blackberry jam

The end result!

                                                Sloe gin

After freezing the sloes overnight, I made the sloe gin today...it won't be ready to drink until December 2014, so I'll just have to admire it until then.

Ingredients

450g sloes

450g sugar

600 ml gin

I put the frozen sloes into a bag and bashed them with the meat tenderiser to break the skin, I then dropped them into a large Pimms bottle I'd cleaned out earlier. 

I poured the sugar into the bottle, followed by the gin, sealed well and gave it a really good shake.

The bottle will need to be shaken daily for the next week to prevent the sugar from settling on the bottom and to help release the sloe juice. Then it will need to be shaken once a week for the next eight to ten weeks.

After ten weeks, the mixture should be distilled through a fine sieve, then poured into bottles and left in a cool, dry place for about eighteen months.

The gin soaked sloes can be used in desserts (the stones must be removed first) or folded into melted chocolate and made into petit fours...I think that sounds delicious and I'm definitely going to try that when the sloes have finished steeping in the gin

Photos of the maturing sloe gin to follow

28 September 2013

Notes from the Garden.....Galeuse d'eysines pumpkin...part 1

And it's off!

For the first few months of growth, I was convinced this was a butternut squash...um... I got my seedlings mixed up..... I had used a colour chart for the little pots I propagated the seeds in (previous post) but somehow mixed two of the pots up. This is my first time properly growing from seed and I decided to experiment with some heirloom seeds I found on http://www.realseeds.co.uk/, which I really liked the look of!

We could see how much the vine had grown each day - I tracked it using the patio tiles and it literally grew inches each day

The pumpkin vine is to the left (half hiding the tomatoes), summer crookneck squash are center and the Cheyenne bush pumpkin are the brighter green plants on the far right

Then it started spreading further out over the patio...the bees loved the bright yellow flowers, we could hear them buzzing from the back door and I spent ages trying to capture a good "action" shot of a bee pollinating one of the sunshine yellow flowers

First photo of "Big Daddy"

At this stage of growth, I still thought it was a butternut squash....I kind of thought where the squash was growing (just over the edge of the patio) may have stopped it growing into the usual bell shape....