win some lose some....

its been a slow week or so, not that much harvesting going on. as the seasons change, all my plants seem confused and have slowed their growth.

but, there were two developments... plum wine and crazy juice mashup wine are complete!

juice wine was great! a little fizzy, pretty strong, and *very* sweet. it was kinda like an aperitif wine or a ghetto muscato. i actually ended up cutting it with a white and then it really hit the spot.

the plum wine... sniffle... i was so excited. a real air lock and everything. but it seems like i either stopped it too soon or the plum by itself was just to light for the yeast that i used. while it was strong and dry, it had a faint bouquet of bread and tasted like cheap sake...

eh, so it goes.

i'm pulling in a harvest of apples today. gonna make some more cider and make some of it hard. depending on how much i make, i might end up making applejack :)

more on that later

cider and wine

so there were all those left over plums, right? so first, a little plum rhubarb pie was in order... didn't really dent the pile. so what did i do? oh you know the answer...

plum wine! woo! better than previous experiments, because i actually purchased a decent bottle and an airlock for this one.

ooh just look at it, isn't it pretty?

then there were the 10 extra pounds of apples, left in the crisper. apple butter had been made, and at this point, the house had had enough crisps and pies, so... i made apple cider. hand pressed apple cider. so. good.

ovens ready. gotta go throw some sourdough in there. if anyone knows a good place to get an inexpensive baking stone, leave a message in the comments.

a busy week full of deliciousness

its been busy busy busy here, but in a good way. so many tasty treats, as autumn approaches, the harvest is starting to roll in. but first, i helped a good friend make some beer. his beer, it is very good. when we finished the initial brewing, he sent me home with some spent grain. i mixed it into a batch of bread. it turned out great (though it did need a bit of extra baking). it was doubly good with the applebutter that was made from that huge pile of apples gleaned the other week.

then there were the plums. now, our summer was short and dry, so the normal plums that i was looking to pick were small and puny. but next to those plums was a big tree with what looked like rainer cherries on it... i tried one to see if it was ripe... ! they were tiny plums! so cute, so tasty. we picked as much as we could, there was much standing on shoulder and climbing done that day. after we got those bad boys home, they were pitted and made in to a very yummy plum jam. there's still a grip in the fridge too. i gotta figure out what to do with them....
the canning went well into the night. and started up the next morning, with me finally getting around to taking care of the huge bag of string beans and wax beans that had been sitting in the fridge, waiting for attention. this is good news, the pantry is beginning to fill right up, and the asian pears aren't even ripe yet :)

yogurt - home made and better than ever

made some homemade yogurt last night.

easier than pie and soooo tasty

there are dozens of recipes (all the same) out there, i won't bog you down with another

but its super tasty and easy and cheap. i highly recommend it.

in other news, the fermentation is going splendidly! still fizzing along merrily after weeks. the dark burgundy colour is fading out, leaving a dusky rose... i am really expecting it to pack a punch.

the sumac berries are done drying and are being used as spices. very good in sauces

nom, i need to go make more food now...

All things juicy

The sumac extract was a huge success! so tasty, so delicious, so not having a photo here cause we drank it all in sumac-aid....

except for the pint or so i threw into the latest batch of wine. This was a hodge podge ferment, to be sure. oregon grape juice, sumac extract, orange juice, blackberry juice and a little fruit punch to top it off, let me tell you now, i almost drank it straight before the yeast went in.

now it's sitting in a 2 litre bottle, with a balloon airlock, fizzing away at a merry pace. i'll take some pictures and post the recipe if it turns out tasty.

Bounty!

went out for a little walk... thought to pick some blackberries. well, one thing led to another and the next think you know...

blackberries, oregon grapes, apples and a bag of.... sumac!

behold! the ripe drupes of the staghorn sumac! that's right, drupes. google it.

now i'm sure you see this stuff all around the city. its kinda flashy, used ornamentally, and it is a-m-a-z-i-n-g!

go ahead. next time you are walking around and you see one of these guys poking up from the leaves of a sumac tree, walk up, and just... grab it. now, lick your fingers. that's right, don't be shy.

sumac has this fantastic lemony tangy taste (mostly tannins and malic acid). it's good stuff. and the cool part is that the flavour is mostly on the outside.

what does this mean to you? it means that you can take a bag full of ripe sumac heads (like the above specimen), soak them in a pot of cold water overnight, strain it through a cheesecloth, and the resulting rose coloured liquid is delicious. try adding sugar to make sumac-aid or even more sugar, some yeast and ferment for sumac wine :)

more on the fate of the other goodies in later posts

Like a fire!

the wheat was dry! and so we threshed it, collected the wheat berries, ground them up and made some bread, all in one fell swoop!

here is the wheat and the finished collection of grain

now i was going to go way old school and grind this stuff between two rocks, but there is a line between doing cool old school stuff and adding particulate stone material to my foodstuffs. that would be the line.

so instead i hit it with the coffee grinder, did it in stages and here is what i ended up with:

well, sheeeeeet, that them there looks like sum mighty fine whole grain flour!

baking then ensued.

i used a simple recipe of:

3 cps flour

.25 tsp live yeast

fatty pinch o' salt

1.5 cps water (note: seems this was too much water, maybe it was the recipe, maybe it was the flour, shrug...)

mix and let rise for 4 hours

knead up and rise for another 30 min

baked at 350 till it 'looked right'

aaand voila!

yep. pretty tasty lookin. and it was. tasty. it was consumed with butter and honey. it was the noms.