Sloe Down

Another Autumnal one, but don't sweat - I'll be back to surfing and sunshine before you know it.  It just struck me that this might be one of the last opportunities to remind those of you based in the UK and above legal drinking age to get out and find some sloes.  
The fruit of the blackthorn tree (although you'll find it in hedgerows as it never really grows over twelve feet tall), sloes look like very small damsons, are inedibly bitter, and are found in British hedgerows throughout the Autumn unless somebody has beaten you to it and picked them all.  If you can pick enough to half-fill a bottle then you've got enough to make some sloe gin which should be ready in time for Christmas.  It's one of those perfect mid-winter hip flask fillers and, like most things, tastes so much better when foraged and home-made rather than bought ready-made from a store.
Harvest time is weather dependant, but you should be able to pick them anytime between September and early November.  Many people will tell you to wait until after the first frost (which they say ripens the fruit and reduces the bitterness), however I'd say to follow logic and pick them when they're ripe (not rock-hard).  If you wait until after the first frost you'll probably find that somebody else has beaten you to it and there are no fruit left on the branches.  

Once you have your sloes don't waste your time pricking each one individually.  If you put them in the freezer overnight then each one will rupture evenly, allowing the flavour to diffuse out whilst they are steeping and saving you precious time.  Next, buy yourself a bottle of good gin.  It'd be a shame to have spent all of that time picking sloes and then produce nasty sloe gin because you've bought nasty gin - sloe's won't magically make cheap gin taste nice, so consider forgoing a take-away coffee that day and spending the extra few coins on your winter warmer.  

Half fill your container (I'd suggest a large kilner-jar) with sloes.  Top up with gin.  Leave in a cupboard and shake every other day for a week.  Then shake the mixture once a week for the next few months, the longer the better really but try to last until at least Christmas.  Once your patience has run out you can strain your sloe gin through muslin into a sterilised bottle.  Then make yourself a sugar syrup by combining equal parts sugar and water in a saucepan over a low heat until it dissolves and allow to cool.  You can then add this to your slow gin to taste, which is far better than adding granulated sugar right at the start and then not having any control over the sweetness.  Pour some of the purple goodness out into a hip flask and put it into your back pocket, then set off in a thick jacket on a wild and wooly winter walk out in the cold, sipping sparingly and sharing and enjoying responsibly. 

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Super Sand

I turned out one of my pockets earlier and dumped half a handful of sand all over the floor.  This isn't an uncommon scenario - not only does sand get in my pockets, but it seems to end up in my wallet, fill my socks (when I wear them), and sometimes rains down from my hair when I shake my head.  Ordinarily it's a massive inconvenience, but today I realised just how good sand is and how important it is to me.  I'd miss it if I didn't spend each summer with my bed full of the stuff.    

Sand is different all over the world, and if you look at a load of it through a microscope each grain varies enormously from the next.  It's just ground up bits of rock and minerals, with the most common constituent in temperate latitudes being silica in the form of quartz crystals (which look incredible through a microscope), whilst in the tropics calcium carbonate from ground up coral reefs and shellfish make the beaches tour-brochure white.  Black sand is normally found on coastlines where there is a lot of volcanic basalt rock.

 Sand moves around a lot, and not just by hitching a ride in my pockets.  In the littoral zone waves push it up the beach and pull it back down, shifting untold amounts of it along shorelines each year.  This movement of sand forms the lumps, bumps, and eventually the sand banks that cause waves to break on the beach, so you can see all of a sudden where my appreciation for the stuff comes from.  There is nothing quite so good as some well organised grains of sand.  Whilst on a University field trip five other students and I had to try to hold a sand trap in a French shorebreak to assist with research into the movement of sediment.  We had to keep repeating the measurements, however, because each successive wave knocked at least four of us off our feet and washed us and all of the apparatus up the beach on our backs.  Sand also carries well on the wind, as can be seen in the Pyrenees where the south facing sides of some of the mountains are tinged yellow with sand that has been blown north from the Sahara, and it's even been said that Saharan sand has, on occasions, fallen from the skies over South America having been carried by the trade winds across the Atlantic.

Sand is pretty special stuff.  We once used it to measure our most precious resource - time.  

It covers massive areas of our planet both above and below the water and has a big role in shaping how we have fun, whether with a bucket and spade building sandcastles on the beach as grommets or by facilitating how the waves that we surf as adults break.  For that, I can deal with having to tidy up the piles of it that fall from my body and clothing at regular intervals.

Nature Tastes Delicious

"I love nature.  It tastes delicious."

This is one of my favourite quotes of the year so far.  It came from my housemate Matt in the middle of a dinner table debate about spurious supermarket meat and vegetarianism, and it sums up our household's eating habits fairly well.

Rabbit is dead cheap if you buy it from your local butcher, but it's even cheaper if you have a friend who has an air rifle (and license) and know a few farmers.  In fact, that way it's free plentiful because, well, they breed like rabbits don't they?  A few friends of mine lived off rabbit for a whole summer, just substituting it in for chicken in everyday recipes.  I found a dead easy recipe by Jamie Oliver where you stick the whole rabbit, a load of un-peeled veg and a bottle of beer into a casserole and slow cook it for 12 hours.  Then you put on a pair of rubber gloves and mush what comes out into a new pan, picking out the vegetable skin and rabbit bones.  It's called 12-hour rabbit bolognese, it doesn't even taste like rabbit and you ought to try it.


The same friend also stalks deer in season and so every now and then we get a supermarket carrier bag full of venison sausages and a roast dropped round.  Venison has been getting a lot of good press recently for having the highest protein and lowest cholesterol content of any major meat, as well as being completely free range and sustainable.  If you get a chance to get your hands on some venison then I'd thoroughly recommend it, and if you happen to be in West Australia be sure to check out the Margaret River Venison Farm.

A few years ago I made a lobster snare to take spear fishing with me, in the hope of wrestling a few big crustaceans out of the cracks in the rock.  No such luck just yet, but we have thrown a lobster pot over the side of the boat a few times so far this year, left it a few days and then hauled it in.  Pulling the pot up from the depths is like waiting to get a roll of film developed, waiting to see what comes out.  We've had a few edible crab, some spider crab, juvenile dogfish (a small shark that we threw back) and, deep joy, a few lobster.


But this is what we tend to pull in loads of around the Cornish coast this time of year.  Mackerel.  Loads of them, unless there're a lot of dolphins about in which case they eat them all first.  Fishing for sea bass and bream is a lot more rewarding...when you actually get a fish.  Drop a line with some mackerel feathers into the sea however, either off the rocks at mid tide or over the side of a boat and you'll struggle to reel your line in fast enough.  Gut, slash three or four times on either side, oil, salt, pepper and onto a hot bbq grill later that day or evening.  Fresh, filling and free.

What's the point of all of this?  Well wherever you live, be it in the middle of a city, amidst the fields and woods of the countryside or next to the sea, you can eat pretty well.  Vegetable patches, pots and planters, window boxes, organic vegetable box delivery services, a good local butcher, a decent fishmonger, a fishing rod...the list goes on.  You can eat really, really, well if you grow, catch, kill or buy what's in season (asparagus, radishes, broad beans, crab, mackerel and seabass right now in the uk), it might just take a bit of forethought, some planning, and in the case of skinning and gutting rabbits a poor sense of smell or a strong stomach.

Images from top to bottom:

• Herbs and my annual "tallest sunflower" entries on the kitchen windowsill, a.k.a. "The garden of death".
• One for the pot, Cornwall, Spring evening 2012.
• The Polbilly lobster pot delivers dinner and a marine biology lesson.
• Catch of the day on a Padstow fishing boat.
• Dinner.
• The simplest Summer dinner?

Beauty in Nature

Nature, whether on a large or a small scale, is unquestionably one of the most incredibly, awe-inspiringly, beautiful things that we are all able to interact with on a daily basis.

Planet Earth, you're amazing. Keep up the good work.

Tom Blake wasn't wrong.