Autumn - a time to sloe down

I love this time of year. 

OK, so the clocks go back on Sunday but we have some clear, crisp days and Guy Fawke’s Night to look forward to. It is also the season for picking sloes for sloe-gin. We were out at the weekend and collected 4½ lbs (slightly over 2kgs). Don't expect me say where - people guard their sources!

We first started making this warming and delicious drink when we moved out of London 5 years ago.  The first year we tried a small batch made in a large glass coffee jar but, as demand from family and friends has grown, production has increased.

This year the ‘foodies’ have tried their hand at sloe-gin, both online and in the media, and are already complicating what is a very simple recipe. So how do you make it?

First pick your sloes. These are the fruit of the blackthorn: the last of the English fruiting trees to produce in the year and the one with the bitterest fruit.  Sloes should be plump, marble-size, black-blue in colour, often with a white bloom on the surface. Avoid other black berries which are shiny and which cluster together as they may be poisonous. 

Traditionally you wait to pick sloes until the first frost, which breaks open the skin ready to release the juice. But if they are plump with ripeness, pick then rinse and stick them in the freezer overnight. When you defrost them they are mostly already split and ready to infuse the gin.

You will need an air-tight jar or demijohn. Kilner jars (with the rubber seals and metal clips) work well, but you can use any glass jar that seals.  Sterilise the jar by washing it and then leaving in the oven for 20 minutes on 130C/Gas Mark 1.

Pour the sloes, sugar and gin in the jar.  To 500g sloes, add 230-250g sugar (some like their drink less sweet) and 1 litre of gin. Use really ordinary, basic gin – Sainsbury / Tesco / Asda own brand.  Although Jamie Oliver and others will argue for using more expensive gin, we have found the cheaper the gin the more the end flavour is truly sloe. (TV chefs may be able to afford lots of expensive gin but who else can?). Seal the jar and give it a jolly good shake. Shake it daily for a week, then every other day for a further week, then weekly for two months. Then put it away in the dark somewhere and leave it there for a year.  

Yes, a year.

If you’ve picked the fruit in October, some very impatient people will be drinking the product at Christmas but it really does pay to wait at least a year before drinking. Strain the mixture (try using a coffee filter paper) and then enjoy. We are currently drinking 2012 sloe-gin but know of friends who allow theirs to mature far longer, apparently with excellent results.

Remember that it has a very high alcohol content.

If alcohol is not helpful to you, another autumn favourite is an excellent Ginger cake, for which the recipe is here in a blog from September last year.  

Enjoy!

Death and friendship

On Friday evening my sister telephoned to say that one of our childhood friends had died. He was my age.

We had not kept in touch. Whole decades of his life were a mystery to me. Now gone.

I am fascinated to discover how life has turned out for those with whom I grew up, went to school, studied or worked. Why will two lives rooted in the same soil grow so differently? Why – given a shared start – did their life take that turning; mine another? 

And then the phone rings. In the midst of life, we are in death.

It seems to me that life holds very few deep friendships. We overlap briefly, owing to shared time, location or circumstance.

Not knowing quite what to think about William’s death and how to react, I was glad of an opportunity yesterday to spend the morning helping more recent friends to move house. We shared the morning disassembling furniture, filling the van and then bringing a first load round to the new home. Five hours where time was spent purposefully together in a shared space; a finite time counting far more than a shallow and casual acquaintanceship.

Then, for the afternoon and early evening, some time spent with a group of friends with whom we had shared a journey of 28 years: reminding, listening and dusting off old jokes. Telling heartrending stories of what had happened since we last met but knowing that, despite the pain, the stories are safer in the telling.

Some were there who had lost touch with us and now promised to come soon to have fish and chip suppers with us in Southend. And for us to visit them – making that slight detour from the A1 that we had always promised to whenever passing. 

This was a time to note with much pleasure that, for the Cranbrook family, at last ‘the lines had fallen for them in pleasant places’ as it says in Psalm 16. I saw the next stage in the mending of broken things beyond, perhaps, what I had thought possible.

“Life is made up of meetings and partings. People come into your life everyday, you say good morning, you say good evening, some stay for a few minutes, some stay for a few months, some a year, others a whole lifetime. No matter who it is, you meet and then you part.”

Important, then, to be mindful of the people in our lives who matter most. For all times seem short when they have gone.