Finally got five minutes to sit down and blog for once.

The reason is that (good news, for me) the DH and I had a sudden glut of work come in.

As ever, with gluts, this means too much of a good thing at once, and since the DH got his first day off yesterday in six weeks, he is feeling particularly exhausted. 

Anyway, speaking of gluts, the blackberries are about done with, so I shall be using the last of them to make vinegar - there isn't really enough fruit for jam.

Fruit vinegars useful in cooking to give flavour to a salad or a stirfry but they are also a lovely drink - about a tablespoon in still or fizzy water is about right. 

if you want to try making them, it is far cheaper than buying them and you'll get a better flavour. Just take a clean jar (some people say clear glass is best, others prefer coloured). Fill it at least half full with blackberries/raspberries, whatever you have, and top off the rest with a good apple cider vinegar.

It's best to use vinegar with the 'mother' in it (this should show as a cloudy sediment at the bottom) but just use what you can find as organic vinegars can be very expensive. Don't use a malt or white vinegar, though, as these are too strong and overwhelm the fruit flavour - it should be cider vinegar. 

The fruits that work best are berry fruits or soft fruits - generally the strong-flavoured, slightly sour kind that you might find in jam: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants, gooseberries, wild cherry, etc all make good vinegars.

Leave the jar on a (hopefully sunny) windowsill for three to six weeks and give it a shake a couple of times a day. Then strain it off into a clean bottle and use it - simple as that.

I strain through a steel funnel with a strainer attachment (you can find these in wine stores for decanting the lees out of wine bottles), but a fine-mesh sieve will do. If there are bits in it, strain it again through a coffee strainer, muslin or a clean teatowel (on which you haven't used fabric softener). That should result in a clear product. If you squeeze the cloth, you'll get a more intense flavour, but a cloudier vinegar.

I keep my fruit vinegars in the fridge, to be on the safe side. 

Phew, I finally have five minutes to sit down and write a blog.

The past couple of weeks have been completely frantic, what with loads of work coming in (a good thing), my bronchitis continuing to give me jip (a bad thing...), helping depressed friends (a bad thing), my machine threatening to die every five minutes (a bad thing) and trying to get all my soft fruit processed (a good thing).

It is always the same every year - a glut of fruit so immense that you get completely fed up with it. Berries for breakfast lunch and dinner until you're sick to your stomach, but also the pleasure of being down in the grass in the evening sun, furtling around for branches that have got hidden (I am not what you'd call a tidy gardener) and pulling off the warm, ripe fruit. 

This year, for anyone who's interested, I've hit on a new method for processing much of my soft fruit - the slow cooker - and it gives you two bangs for your buck. You just put the fruit in the slow cooker, top up with water (not a huge amount, just enough so's you can see it) and leave it for a couple of hours or even overnight. In the morning, drain off the juice and bottle it, and freeze the fruit pulp for use later in crumbles, etc. You can also freeze the juice and later process it into syrup or jelly.

Some of the juices thus created have been fab - whitecurrant, redcurrant, mixed fruit walk (a bit of everything), and now blackberry, as these little darlings are coming in. Next will be the plums, and then the grapes on our vine, which are too sour to eat. If you find the resulting juice is a bit tart, just add sugar to taste (best to add it while it's still hot). I have frozen most of our juice and am just unfreezing one bottle at a time, mostly for use in long drinks (I am off the sauce, on account of the bronchitis).

Owing to my usual habit of taking the tickets off things and then losing them, I don't actually know what's growing in the fruit walk, which I put in five years ago. In bush fruit, there seem to be two types of whitecurrants, a jostaberry, three types of raspberry (which all failed dismally this year) and green, red and purple gooseberries. One gooseberry bush is about six feet high, viciously spiny and gives very small dark purple berries like miniature damsons - the juice tastes very like grape and is my husband's favourite. 

Right, back to the garden for more blackberries.