I have enjoyed a very lazy weekend with Hubby, every third weekend we get the house to ourselves and it is pure bliss. No one to cook for, no one to tidy up after, just a trip to M&S; on Friday to stock up on easy to cook food and wine and then lots of lounging around, recovering for the onslaught of the weeks to come.
 
This weekend we have ventured from the house and our duvet, the weather has been so amazingly beautiful that we felt that this may be our last burst of summer that it would be wrong to not get out for at least a little while and soak up some precious vitamin D while we still could.
 
So off we went for a walk with a picnic lunch made by Hubby and a container for sloe’s. It was lovely sitting in the sun in the middle of a field eating our lunch after completely filling our container with our little harvest of sloe’s.
 
Sloe’s our now washed and drying on the side ready to be turned into gorgeous sloe gin and we are safely back on the sofa under the duvet with a restoring glass of wine.
 
Buon appetito


Ingredients:
1lb/454gm of washed sloes
4 ozs/112gm of white granulated sugar
75cl bottle of medium quality gin
Sterilised 1 litre (at least) Le Parfait jar or wide necked bottle
2-3 drops of almond essence
Method:
Wash sloes well and discard any bruised or rotten fruit. Prick fruit several times with a fork and place sloes in either a large Kilner/Le Parfait jar or a wide necked 1 litre bottle. I put several sloes in my palm to prick them rather than picking them up one by one.
Using a funnel, add the sugar and top up with gin to the rim.
Add the almond essence.
Shake every day until the sugar is dissolved and then store in a cool, dark place until you can resist it no longer (leave for at least three months, most people usually let it mature for a year), but some people strain the gin (through muslin/jelly bag) after 3 months and bottle it, leaving it mature for six months, some like to strain and bottle after a year. Don’t leave the straining process any longer than a year; leaving the fruit in too long can spoil the liqueur. So its a little trial and error as this is our first time making sloe gin.

Pricking the little sloe’s can take a while, so here is a little tip if you have an old cork & a few pins (see photo above).








http://writingacookerybook.blogspot.com/2011/10/lets-make-christmas.html