Make Lemon Squash with Lemongrass

Happy Monday!  Do you remember I posted a picture recently of all those lemons I bought at the market? Well, I finally got round to doing something with them! I used a recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook for Lemon Squash, which is especially perfect since we have been having some really lovely sunny warm weather here lately.

Since we had a stick of lemongrass in the freezer I thought I would add this for a fragrant twist (you can never buy a single stalk of lemongrass so I always end up freezing the rest of a pack when we cook Thai curries). I was inspired by Belvoir's delicious lime and lemongrass cordial, which you can buy in the supermarket here in the UK. We drank a lot of this Belvoir cordial on our honeymoon in Dorset a couple of years ago, especially as a cocktail with sparkling water, ice and gin! The taste always reminds me of sunny, lazy summer afternoons in the garden with a drink, a book and a blanket, and it is this that I wanted to recreate.

So here's the recipe:

• 7-10 lemons (I think I used the full 10)
• 650g granulated sugar
• 1 stick of lemongrass (or whatever extra flavouring you would like - I think root ginger would work really well here as well)
• water

As explained above, you pare the zest of four of your lemons and set it aside. I used a vegetable peeler because I don't have a special citrus parer, which would create fine shreds (you might have see the type of thing, a small tool with a row of little holes at the end).

You put the lemons in a pot of boiling water for one minute, which flavours the water and makes the lemons yield more juice. I also put my lemongrass stalk in the water with the lemons too. Take the lemons out and squeeze them once they are cool enough to handle. You need to keep going until you get 500ml of lemon juice, which in my case meant adding another lemon's worth of juice, but it will all depend on the size of your lemons.

Put the lemon zest and sugar in a pan with 500ml of the water you boiled the lemons in, and bring this to the boil. When it is just boiling, take it off the heat for a minute and add the lemon juice. Put it back on the heat and bring it back up just to the boil. Then you just have to strain it through a sieve and pour it into sterilised bottles while the bottles are still hot (here are Delia Smith's instructions on how to sterilise bottles and jars - along with a recipe for strawberry jam!).

PS. Another new font I downloaded for this post! I really like this handwriting font, appropriately named Sunshine in My Soul, which I downloaded from Dafont.
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Making Sloe Gin Out of Season

Normally making sloe gin would be an autumn/winter activity, often made just in time for Christmas presents. But we picked so many sloes last autumn that we couldn't afford to buy enough gin for all of them! So we stashed what we had left in the freezer and pretty much forgot about them until this week when we came to defrost it. So this week I ended up making spring sloe gin! It is a simple assembly job really, and sloe gin is a big favourite of mine so I like to make as much as possible when we can get sloes.

We gathered our sloes in the woods nearby where we live. Once you know what you're looking for you'll find that sloe bushes are all over the place in the woodlands and hedges here in the UK. Here is a handy online guide to recognising wild sloes, along with rosehips and blackberries.

My recipe for sloe gin comes from one of my absolute favourite and most used recipe books, The River Cottage Preserves Handbook. You will need 450g sloes, 450g granulated sugar and 600ml gin (it can be the cheap stuff!). Traditionally you are meant to prick all the sloes individually, but for reasons I don't completely understand, instead of doing this you can simply freeze them, which has the same effect. You then mix your sloes, gin and sugar in a large clean jar and put it somewhere cool and dark. Give it a shake every now and then to make sure the sugar dissolves.

Most recipes say that you should strain it to remove the sloes and rebottle the gin after a month or so. I must say, with our last batch of sloe gin, we left it all in the jar, sloes and all, for about a year, and never removed them except to serve, and it was really great. I was amazed how much better it was than shop bought sloe gin, plus it is cheap and easy to make and a good excuse for a walk in the woods. And since you can freeze sloes, you can pretty much make it whenever funds allow you to buy the gin!

I'll have to post some of my favourite sloe gin based drinks once we break open this lot later in the year. Happy preserving - and drinking!


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