Tag Archives: sloe

Quick week, sloe sherry

7 Replies

Thursday went by in a flash and Friday wasn’t much better, so it’s now Saturday and this is another of those catch-up posts.

First photo is a night shot of the Christmas tree and fountains at Sneinton Market. Technically it isn’t great but it has the tree and fountains and I thought I’d be a bit festive.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

The rest of the time, when I haven’t been catching up on my reading of other blogs, has been taken up with parties, Men in Sheds, sloe gin, sloe sherry, looking up recipes, tidying cupboards and procrastination.

The sloe gin is looking a bit light, though it often does in photographs, but is tasting OK. I’m also making sloe sherry this year, a drink I didn’t know existed until a couple of months ago. After bottling the gin I put the sloes back in the bottle and covered them in a bottle of Sainsbury’s sherry. Yes, it’s that simple. The choice of sherry took more time than the “making”.

In two months I expect to have a dark, sloe flavoured drink that is also good added to stews and gravies. I say “expect” but as yet I have no personal experience. For £5.50 it’s a gamble worth taking.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Meanwhile the “shed” is making progress. We now have the skeleton of a vestibule, so the wind won’t be so much of a problem from now on. We also have the stud work up for a wall to shelter us from wind from the back door. Yesterday we sited the chalk crosses on the walls where our new sockets are going to be fitted, so things are looking up. At the moment we’re using just two sockets and a rat’s nest of extension leads, which is, to put it mildly, a practical and Health and Safety nightmare.

Imagine that you are working on the lathe when someone wants to plug the kettle in. It’s rare we manage this without either the lathe going off or one of the lights going out.

Two more donated filing cabinets were delivered yesterday (meaning we have more and better cabinets in the shed than we do in the office).

By the time we come back in January it will be a lot better from so many points of view.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

 

Catching up

5 Replies

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

You wouldn’t believe how many small steps there are in producing a decent bottle of apple juice.

Apart from the preparation and pressing there’s the bottles – wash, dry, heat to 140 degrees Centigrade, fill, put lid on loosely (after boiling lids for 5 minutes), pasteurise, screw tops down, put bottles on side so that hot juice covers the inside of the lid, wash so that you don’t get sticky bottles or mould growing round the cap, apply labels.

That’s eleven operations. With Saturday’s production that’s over 700 individual operations, without taking temperatures, stacking, moving, burning fingers, swearing and mopping the floor. And printing the labels, recounting the labels, realising you don’t have enough and ordering more from Amazon.

And I thought it was all about good quality fruit, the right scratter and plenty of elbow grease. How wrong can you be?

It’s the same with sloe gin. What is basically a simple process – bung sloes in gin and add sugar, shake, wait, drink – becomes much more complex when you start reading the various recipes.

How much sugar, whether to prick the sloes and whether to wait for the first frost are all matters of debate. Extensive debate,

Here’s my answer. Do what you want. We used to buy sloes from a grocer in Bakewell at the end of the summer holidays, drop them in gin or vodka (we often didn’t prick them all because it’s tedious, and possibly even dangerous), shake them when we remembered, leave them till Christmas and it always tasted good. Once someone told us about freezing – thereby splitting the skins and simulating frost – we never looked back.

There is no mystery to sloe gin. There is no need to spend two hours looking at recipes. All I learned from that two hours is that I know all I need to know about sloe gin (that’s not being boastful – there just isn’t much to know) and that it is very easy to waste the best part of an afternoon browsing the internet.