Sloe Gin...

...Only it isn't!

I was doing fine - just getting over the hectic last six weeks [mum & Dot came to stay at the gîte round the corner for a week, then we hurtled back to England to move house - if you're remotely interested, I shall post about this on my other blog - fitting in a van trip to dump a load of stuff here in the process, not to mention the dozen or so calls to BT ("what, when you asked us a fortnight before you moved, to move your broadband with your phone , you actually wanted to take your broadband with you to your new home? Oh, that will take another five days...". Internet finally connected: "Oh, you wanted to take your 'Broadband Talk' as well?" Guess what, yup, the usual efficiency! And another five days). Did I mention the dentist visit - tooth extraction(s?) to take both halves of my fractured tooth out?]...

So, I went to look for the blackthorn bushes to see if I was in time for sloe gin.

The plants I'd been eyeing up two years ago (when I didn't have time to harvest the magnificent crop), had been hacked back, and all the other ones I found only had a few sloes in the upper branches; too few to be worth taking the step ladder out in the car!

And then I came a different way home & found the perfect bush - covered in the little blue-black beauties, almost all at grabbing height.

So, no problem there then...

Till I started Googling to check the recipe!

Having gone out yesterday to buy a litre of gin & a kilo of sugar, I knew I'd be fine, till I came across at least one different recipe on each site I looked at.

No problem, just pick one, and do it!

But then I got caught up in the comments on whether freezing the sloes was better/necessary on the Cottage Smallholder page...

The short of it was: 'if you make different recipes, you can compare which you like the best' [make notes on the bottle at the time of making], and 'keeping the gin improves the flavour - compare different vintages' [someone was the lucky possessor of a bottle of 30 year old sloe gin].

So, guess what?

Instead of enough berries to fill one bottle, I went out yesterday evening and picked a decent sized bag, and not being sure whether we'd had a frost, cleaned them and froze them. About 4 pounds of them - enough for four bottles...

Still "so far, so good", but the page I'd clicked on the get to the "sloe gin challenge" page had a recipe for wild damson gin...

Having walked past the damson sapling in the hedgerow earlier in the week, and noticing that the damsons I couldn't reach last visit were still there, I was now thinking "hmm, sloes will be ok in the freezer, let's harvest those damsons & make a bottle of damson gin".

The "few" damsons turned into more than two pounds, and thus two jars of damson-gin-in-waiting (thankfully a small bottle of gin was nestling in the cellar in case of "emergencies" - sorry, David!).

So, now I'm off to town to buy more gin (and sugar), and hopefully avoid being branded as one of those alcohol-fuelled Brits who go abroad to make trouble...

Or an alcoholic!