Here is my son miller up the medlar tree in our local park. I must find some good recipes for  medlars this year. They were not that good in my home made chutney.

Picked quite a lot of psb at the weekend and made this large tart with it. First time at making my own pastry too – not sure why it took me so long. The resulting tart lasted a few days worth of lunches.

Made some sloe gin at the weekend.

I was on a walk around the countryside surrounding Eastbourne – walked from Polegate to Hankham and then back via Stone Cross.
I was walking up a country lane and saw the largest Sloes I had ever ever seen. This climate change seems to be doing us some amazing favours. The long extended summer this year has obviously meant that the sloe growing season has definitely not been slow. it’ s been long and fast.

I picked as many as I could reach and took them home and used my usual recipe to make up 7 bottles of sloe gin.

Quantities for 7 x 750ml bottles:
4 x 750ml bottles of gin
About a bucket of sloes – or about a mugful per bottle.
About 3 mugs of sugar – granulated or castor – I don’t think it matters.
dash of vanilla essence

Half fill each bottle with sloes – pierce or cut them before they go in the bottle.
cover these with sugar
top up the bottle with gin ( I have also done this with Vodka in the past)
add a drop of Vanilla essence.

Job done!

But over the next few weeks and months try to give each bottle a turn to keep the sugar from settling down to the bottom for too long.

After a year I usually sieve and funnel the flavoured gin into other bottles and it will probably make a lot less than you are expecting but should hopefully still equate to the original 4 x 750ml bottles – although the sloes will have soaked up some of the gin. This is where I usually decide to re-use the gin soaked sloes in a chutney – and then spend the rest of the year spitting out the pips when eating the chutney. If anyone has any better ideas what to do with the gin soaked sloes please let me know.

You don’t have to leave them for a year but a year always works well for me – as that is when I need to use the bottles again for a new batch.

Here are 5 of the 7 bottles. I like to use a big black marker pen to write over the existing labels.

Went for a walk in the woods the other day to seek out some mushrooms – since it is the season for free food – it’s everywhere!!

It did rain fairly soon into our walk and my son and I had to shelter beneath a dense tree. but we were already about 2 miles form the car by then. We ventured a bit further once the rain had abated then on our return to the car we found a huge beefsteak mushroom attached to the base of a large Oak tree. We had seen it on they way into the woods but it looked quite dull brown.
Once it had been soaked a bit by the rain though it was looking really crimson Red and dripping with a red blood-like liquid.

I know quite a bit about wild mushrooms so I knew what it was 100% (I wouldn’t recommend anyone else try this unless they have a reference book to check off all the identifiers) so we pulled it off of the tree and took it back home.

Its quite a solid heavy fungus – and unlike anything else – apart from beef steak – which it looks like!

I looked into a few ways of cooking it and opted to thinly slice it and stewit in shallow water along with some salt, pepper, shallots and garlic. It made a great stew and I ate this with a couple of sausages and some more roasted onion. it was Lovely – although next time I would add in some more vegetables.

The usual metallic sourness that I had heard about was not present when cooked this way – so I think I’ll try this again.  there was another fungus growing further down the tree – so I may have to go back and get the other bit at the weekend if it is still there.

Anyway – here are a few pictures of the process.

Here is the stew – not the most beautiful looking supper – but damn tasty!