Rooting around for nuts and berries.

It's that time of the year. It started last month when elderberries were plentiful and hedges were laden with blackberries, now chestnuts are falling from the trees and sloes are being picked by old sots with a taste for gin. So I decided to go for a mix of known and unknown. I love chestnuts there's something comforting and warming about them, especially when roasted and eaten with a little salt. There are two edible trees related to the sweet chestnut (it is a different tree to the horse chestnut- conkers are poisonous). The oak and the beech. I'm having difficulty finding beech trees around here and I suspect the squirrels will get to the nuts before I do, however I'm in a very oaky part of England, so it was easy enough to find acorns.

I roasted them, in much the same way as you would roast chestnuts. I probably didn't give them long enough- they were still very bitter and slightly waxy in texture. However, they had some nice burnt caramel tones to it. I think that with a little more roasting and some dicing they would make a very nice addition to a cake.

Being an old sot with a taste for gin, I thought I'd go the traditional route with sloe and use them to flavour gin. I've pricked the sloe, added a little sugar and placed them in a jar of gin. I need to get some almond essence and more gin. I picked about a 1/4 carrier bag of sloe. This should make about 2 litres or so. Making the stuff is easy but requires patience. You store it in the dark for a few months, mine should be ready for Christmas, but if I make enough, I should be able to leave some seeping until next year.

My other experiments were extracting hawthorne juice (don't bother eating the berries, no flesh and a big pip) and making an elderberry cordial. Hawthorne has little flavour, but it's full of good things- so I dumped that into the cordial. I should proabably add some more sugar, but it's drinkable.

I'd recommend reading up on foraging, There's a lot of interesting flavours out there. But I don't see mention of one thing I've found useful, a pair of thick leather gloves- I use welding gloves. A good rule of thumb seems to be if the plant makes you bleed, you're probably going to like the fruit/seed pod. Just from the top of my head- Sweet Chestnuts are a bugger to harvest and shell without gloves, blackberry plants are loaded with thorns, gooseberries, blackthorns and hawthorns have sparse but quite evil spikes. Gloves will aid in the harvesting- allowing you to grab a branch and pull fruit into reach without bleeding everywhere.