My idea of heaven is white bread toast, spread with butter and bramble jelly and a freshly brewed mug of tea,
Good enough any day of the week, but it is essential fodder, if by chance you happen to have over indulged in the fruits of the vine the night before! Time to get the jam pan out from the depths of the kitchen cupboard.
Picking blackberries is a traditional late summer task for Joe and I, we are on a mission, we know where are best patches are; (there is wide a variation in the fruit as there are over two thousand mirco-species of this common plant, not all blackberries are equal.)
But the blackberries aren’t very inspiring this year, they seem to lack there normal iridescence, we missed the first ‘flush’ which was ripe just as we set off to go to Fort William. Joe and I usually have several assaults on the blackberry thickets, (for optimum pleasure, when picking blackberries, the sun should be on your back and the fruit warm in your hand,) But this year Joe soon tired of the task, and I found it an effort to get enough for one batch of jam; normally there would be some for the freezer, a few blackberry and apple crumble’s, (but our cooking apple crop is the pits this year, it has been a very strange season) and maybe a bottle of blackberry gin, to drink with good company at new year. But unless we get some warm days to plump up the fruit I don’t think I shall pick any more this year.
I love the colour of the juice, it so rich and opulent, I enjoy making bramble jelly and eating it, and luckily for me the rest of the household aren’t that keen on it so, I have enough to keep me going for a while.
Following on to my chocolate chip courgette post, I don’t want you running away with the idea I am Mrs Beaton meets Delia Smith (and there is definitely no Nigela) there are all sorts of past there sell by date foods, lurking in the fridge, not to mention some very flaccid looking vegetables and in the freezer there are some unidentifiable packages, that I must do something with some time soon; but picking hedgerow fruits seems to bring out the ‘hunter gatherer’ in me nearly as much as seeing a nice log pile, have I told you how much I like like logs? It’s a bit sad really. I’ll tell you about it another day.
My promised ‘chicken post’ is still at the embryonic stage; so here is another chicken before the egg, to be going on with.
That looks sooooo good! I have many treasured memories of going blackberrying, both on Oxfordshire (where I learnt to toddle) and Kent, where I spent my formative years. Less so in Warwickshire, where my parents moved to once I became a teenager, but then we had blackberries in our back garden, so no need to scour the hedgerows.
I miss that all now that I’m in the Big City – I walk past hedgerows of blackberries on my way to the station, but they are filmy with a summer’s worth of commuter exhaust
I’m intrigued by blackberry gin – how do you make that?
I saw a couple picking blackberries at the ‘Tesco’s roundabout’ (every town has one!
) and thought WHY? when there are miles and miles of lanes with scummy blackberries do you want the ones that are layered in diesel deposits, after risking life and limb picking them, they probably had to crack them open; yuk.
Blackberry gin; fill a screw top bottle with blackberries, throw in a couple of spoons of sugar, (more if you like your drinks sweet) fill to cover blackberries with gin, give it a shake and stick in the back of the cupboard for a few months, (six if you can last that long) then pour off the most beautiful coloured liquid (I filter it through a coffee filter paper to make it as clear as possible.) Warning do not make a crumble with the extracted blackberries, you will floor your guests!
Mr Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recommend’s something similar in his book River Cottage Cook Book; but using sloes and vodka, we don’t get sloes around here, but maybe its the year to try blackberry vodka. (I’ve also heard tell of crab-apple vodka, but I’ve never made it.)
Laughing at the idea of making blackberry crumble with gin’d blackberries – would it have the same effect as the christmas pudding the year my mother mistook the sherry for the brandy and poured over half a bottle onto the pudding muttering about how it wouldn’t light?
I shall have to give that a try (nice and easy, the way I like my recipes!) – next time I’m back at my parents and the blackberries are ripe…
Yes please, and I agree that it’s good enough at any time!
I’m looking forward to the chicken post
Sloe / Crabapple Vodka
I live in Dorset and we get the biggest (size of a big marble), juiciest Sloe Berry’s growing around here.
I currently have 3 Demi Jons full of sloes and vodka. I don’t add anything other than the berry’s as they’re sweet when they’re really big. I leave them in the vodka for 3 months and then filter the liquid. Lush!
I also do the same with Crab Apples, again no sugar, just apples and vodka.
After about 3 weeks the apples turn yellowish and the vodka a bright alco-pop pink.
It takes the edge off the vodka and tastes really sweet (You can add sugar if you want it sweeter). I’d recommend everyone tries it.
Next year I’m going to do it with Blackberry’s and then see how it mixes with my other home brews.