The Morning Bounty

Every morning,  I send the kids off to school about an hour before I need to be at work.   This leaves me with 15 minutes or so of free time,  which I often use to read email,  drink coffee,  and just get centered for the day.  

However,  this morning I used that 15 minutes to do all of the following:

Start a pot roast in the slow cooker.
Chop roughly 30 jalapeños for canning -- the ones on the left are in a Korean soy recipe,  while the ones on the right are more traditional vinegar pickles. 
Put bbq sauce that I made a few days ago into jars for canning. 

Tonight when I get home,  dinner will be ready and I'll have half a dozen canned items ready to process in cans.   Anyway,  that's the idea. 

"Off The Fruit"

Mr.  X and I took our plum wine -- soon,  hopefully,  to be plum brandy -- "off the fruit"last night.  This just means that we removed the fruit from the mixture and poured off the yeast,  mostly stopping fermentation.

While we stopped to sample each,  we're going to be aging them a bit while we acquire a still and hope to be distilling them into brandy in a matter of weeks. 

Vacation 2015

We're off to the beach!   So far,  so good.

1 for #2

Isn't she beautiful?  Georgia is one year old today.

New Culinary (Mis?)Adventures

Recently I've been on a reading jag of both first person narratives from the American south and my own heritage.   In the process, I discovered that one of my first ancestors on American soil was a maker of whiskey and "a fine peach brandy. " So, I researched both the ancestors and brandy and found that,  at least in theory,  it's not hard to make.  

Here's the process by which I started making brandy.  

Ingredients:
Spring or distilled water
Roughly 4 pounds of fruit per gallon of water (I'm making both peach and plum)
5 pounds of sugar per gallon of water
6 teaspoons of active dry or other yeast  (any kind seems to work for this purpose)

1. Dissolve 6 tsp. yeast in a warmed cup of spring water.
2. Pour a fine bed of sugar on the bottom of your chosen container -- a 5 gallon bucket is ideal.  
3. Slice the fruit and layer it over the sugar.   Alternate layers between sugar and fruit.   (If you have an assistant like mine,  ply them with fresh fruit slices. )
Don't remove the pits!  They're an important part of the flavor.  
4. Pour the activated yeast mixture over the sugar/fruit.
5. Top with spring water.  Leave enough room for fermentation -- generally a few inches. Put the top on loosely-- you do not want to pressurize this mixture. 
6. Wait!   No,  seriously.  Now you wait a lot.   If you've done everything correctly you should have a kind of murky grey concoction that's releasing bubbles occasionally,  but mostly looks like it's doing nothing.   That's the correct look.   For the next month, you'll want to use a long handled spoon to mix the concoction at least once a week.  Recitations of the witches' speech from Macbeth optional.  
7. At the one month mark,  you should have a concoction that is stable enough to bottle,  if you wish.  To get it,  you'll need to filter the fruit from the liquid.    Generally you can do this by pouring first through a colander and then through cheesecloth.   It will improve by aging -- but it's edible now.  So bottle it!  Get creative with containers and enjoy.   The fruit that is discarded can be fed to animals (carefully,  as it's alcoholic -- don't feed too much at a time) or baked into quick breads.

Enjoy!

Ta da!

Welcome Georgia Bijal! 

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Thi post is about my goals for the year.  I know, it's July.  But it always takes me some time to really think about what I want.  And I also have some challenges, this year and every year, that I take a whole to grapple with.  So, here are some goals, big and small, that I want to share with you all.

1.have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. Due August 24th, and no we don't know the gender. 

2. Destroy our debts and manage our taxes better.  A small goal, this one.  But summer of 2015 is when I think we can make it all happen.  

3. Get back to derby by the end of 2014. Grrrrl, I need an outlet.

4.live more efficiently.  Cut costs and use up my CSA.  Really.