This week the WHB-Event 27.04.2021 ** travels to Pat in New Hampshire.The rules of WHB 27.04.2021 ** allow entries with recipes and/or informative posts featuring any herb, plant, vegetable, or flower.This week I am featuring Blackthorn and its fruit sloes. This year is a very good year for sloes in our hedgerows/Knicks. Sloes have a light bitter and sour taste, so it would be the best to pick them after the first night frost. But if you wait too long others will get ahead of you, so pick them and freeze them for a few hours.

I found this shrub in the hedgerow of our open air museum.

To make sloe juice you give the sloes into a saucepan and cover with boiling water. Let stand for 24 h. Pour off the juice, bring the juice to a boil and cover the sloes again. Repeat this for the next to days and give the juice through a kitchen towel.

In autumn there is every year a big market in the Freilichtmuseum Schleswig-Holstein where more than 100 exhibitors of crafts, handicrafts and art present their products. My favourite booth is from a small destillery: Destillerie Gottesgabe. We discovered it last year and my husband and I fell in love with their products since we visited the small destillery. This time we tasted a very fine aperitive/apéritif: a kind of sherry made of sloes.

They called it Sloe-cherrie, because by law, Sherry must come from the triangular area of the province of Cádiz between Jerez, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and El Puerto de Santa María and made of grapes. The Destillerie Gottesgabe produced a slow wine and after fermentation the sloe wine was fortified with brandy. After that it matured like Sherry.

BTW Gottesgabe is the name of a small village.

** 27.04.2021 https://kalynskitchen.com/whos-hosting-weekend-herb-blogging/, https://kalynskitchen.com/establishing-some-rules-for-weekend/ no longer available