Archive for the ‘wine’ Tag
As I sit here nursing what could be called a mind numbing, brain busting, and painful hangover I made the decision to stay in bed until it goes away. Unfortunately since I cut my alcohol intake by 75% for the last six months I’m now what is commonly known as a "cheap date". A few glasses of wine and all of a sudden I’ve got a serious glow on and no longer have the ability to stop drinking. After last night I now know what my new tolerance level for Sangria is. It’s a sneaky drink that crept up behind me when I wasn’t looking and BAM, trashed.
Being in a semi-intoxicated state I decided I should help my better-half make dinner. I was assigned the task of cooking up a batch of skillet cornbread which is my specialty. I have numerous recipes for cornbread but did I use one of them? Of course not. I decided to adlib a little. As you can see the batter looks as it should even though I had to read the recipe a number of times due to my alcohol induced focusing problem.
I added a few new ingredients to the recipe which included a cup of crushed corn and heaping tablespoons of jalapeño and red onion powder. I diligently checked the skillet periodically and things seemed to be progressing as expected.
I did the tried and true toothpick test and removed the skillet from the oven. I was happy with the result, it looked great and smelled even better. I patiently waited a few minutes, had another glass of Sangria, and then sliced it up.
Being a caring and meticulous chef I never present my food to others until I’ve tried it myself. I cut a large slice, slathered it with butter, and pigged out. It wasn’t until I swallowed the second bite that the heat caught my attention. Within a few minutes my head was sweating, my lips were on fire, and I felt myself sobering up rather quickly. It was so freaking hot. I guess Chef’s Tip #1 for anyone deciding to have a piece of this cornbread is to cover it with jam of some sort to help knock down the heat. I guess I’ll file this new recipe away and save it for my friends who wish to be sobered up in a hurry.
The morning is slipping away and it’s time for me to get my lazy ass up and do something. I was planning on doing a serious detailing of my car today but I’m having trouble motivating myself. I need two large hot cups of coffee, a few pieces of crispy fried bacon, two Tylenol, and one more big slice of that cornbread. If that doesn’t cure me nothing will.
I should be back to my semi-normal condition sometime tomorrow. Hopefully I’ve been made a little smarter with my new understanding of Sangria and the pitfalls of drinking it like fruit juice.
“I really believe that the feet give the wine that little “special something”. LOL
I’ve been in heaven for the last few days. We’ve been having San Diego style weather and that’s damn unusual for sure. I’m pretty good at adapting to change so I’ll be just fine, really! I’ve been tending the garden, completing a host of BS projects from my better-half’s To-Do List and generally feeling relaxed and at peace with things.
I took a ride without her today (she’s working) and decided to hit a few of the dozens of yard sales in the area. You just never know what you might find and I do love surprises. Unfortunately yard sales have been losing their charm for me of late and today was no different. Too many people watching too many TV shows that have convinced everyone that every piece of crap that would have been thrown away in the past is now a precious antique worth big bucks. I visited three yard sales in a short period of time and it was all I could do not to say something totally inappropriate like “Are you f…ing kidding me!”. No purchases today for me and much less interest in visiting any more this summer. It’s just ridiculous and really getting out of control.
I returned home and decided to take a few minutes to check the wine I’ve been making. I racked the red wine. For those of you not familiar with home brewing terminology racking means siphoning off the clear wine after the yeast had settled to the bottom of the fermentation container. This is done two or three times during the winemaking process until the batch is crystal clear.
I think this may turn into a rather nice medium sweet red wine. I haven’t used Concord grapes in the past and now I’m thinking I probably should have. The wine has a beautiful almost black color and it cleared itself of yeast very quickly. I started out with four and a half gallons and lost a half in the siphoning process. I should be bottling approximately 18-20 bottles in a month or so.
The Dandelion wine will continue to ferment for a while longer. I think it may end up being rather dry with a fairly high alcohol content. I can’t wait to taste the final product because dandelion is one of my favorites.
I need to get these two batches completed and in the bottle as soon as possible. I suspect I’ll be doing two more batches of fruit and berry wine this fall and need to make a little room for them. All in all it should be an excellent year for winemaking.
After thoroughly enjoying my day-off and cruising around the area with my better-half it was once again back to work. It seems that we’re finally free of the frost for this year so we I began planting the next group of plants which included black beans, green beans, wax beans and snap peas. Any or all of these are delicious to eat fresh from the garden but they also can be canned without losing their flavor. Normally we use them as part of the vegetable mixes we make for use through the Winter in stir-fry’s.
The vegetable mixes are usually the last thing we do before closing down the garden. The mix can contain any number of veggies that are left over at summers end. We try to make a number of different assortments as you can see by the photo’s.
The better-half has been trying unsuccessfully for years to grow gourds. She gives them a great start in the house under glass as you can see. Then they are moved to the cold frames before final planting. We decided this year to move some of the gourds out of the garden to a spot closer to the house where they can get sun and be better protected from the weather. We’ll cross our fingers and hope for the best one more time. In my opinion it’ll take a minor miracle to get them to grow large enough to produce anything useful. She’s forever the optimistic and is certain it’ll work this year. Half full is her manta in all things.
I wanted to plant the jalapeños and cayenne peppers but stopped myself. As a rule peppers do best when they have warm nights so I decided to wait another week or two. I’ll be able then to put the cucumbers, zucchini, and squash in and finally be done with the garden planting. So for now they remain in the cold frame.
My winemaking efforts continue and that red wine I mentioned in an earlier post has completed it’s hard fermentation and moved into glass jugs and sealed with air locks. It’s now just a wait of a few months for the jugs to clear. Eventually gravity will cause all of the yeast to drop to the bottom of the jugs and I can siphon off the clear and finished wine. I have to say I love the smell of yeast and wine when it’s fermenting. I wish some company could bottle that smell because I’d make sure my man-cave was always filled with that fragrance.
While I was cleaning and organizing my man-cave I was pleasantly surprised to find this bottle of wine.
This is a bottle of blackberry wine that I made back in 1986. I’ve recorked it a few times over the years and each time I’ve taken a small taste. It’s pretty potent after all those years but I think I’ll put it back in storage for a few more years before I try it again.
I really seem to be getting readjusted to this warm Spring weather. Yesterday was in the low seventies for the first time in almost seven months and I was loving it. I actually wore a pair shorts for the first time and got a little tan on my legs and they were loving that. I’m still working on the garden but the yard work took precedence this week. Being the dedicated and well trained slave that I am, I was able to make short work of the grass cutting.
Once that was finished I took on the semi-unpleasant task of organizing my compost pile. Some of you have little or no idea what I’m referring to so let me explain. It’s a gigantic pile of decomposing organic material collected by me over the last few years from yard clean-ups and grass clippings. It’s smelly and disgusting but it’s what makes the garden grow as well as it does. Each Fall I cover the garden with it and then plow it under. That gives most of the nutrients time to leech into the soil and reinvigorate it before Spring. Each summer’s garden uses up a great deal of the existing soil nutrients and they must be replaced.
It’s also very important to never plant the same plants in the same area two years in a row. You’ve got to switch it up a little because individual plants requires different sets of nutrients to thrive. In my experience that doesn’t always apply to herbs. They seem to grow well in just about any soil and require little of no fertilizer. The only issue I’ve had with herbs is that some do poorly if planted near certain others. Also, if you plant mints such as oregano, catnip, or spearmint too close together they cross pollinate and their specific scents become diluted.
Once the mowing and composting was completed I decided to do something I really enjoy which is set up my first batch of wine for 2014. I decided to make a nice semi-sweet red wine out of Concord grapes. I mixed the grape concentrate, acid blend, yeast nutrient, yeast energizer, and four and a half pounds of sugar into three and a half gallons of filtered water and set it aside. I then set up what’s called a yeast starter. It’s two packets of brewers yeast dissolved in luke-warm water with one cup of sugar. I let the yeast activate for a couple of hours before mixing it into the the fermenter with the grape concentrate.
Now it’s sit back for a week to let the yeast eat up all that good sugar and create the proper level of alcohol for the wine. Sometime in early August if all goes well I should have approximately sixteen bottles of a beautiful ruby red grape wine.
I normally prefer making fruit wines because getting the ingredients is much easier that coming up with a quantity of grapes. Grapes are expensive and the processing of them into a usable form is time consuming and annoying. Using a simple grape concentrate is much more affordable and makes a better quality wine (in my opinion). This batch will end up costing me approximately $2.00 a bottle including the cost of the bottle and cork. Not too bad for a small amount of work and a month or two of monitoring and tweaking the batch. I’m already planning a second batch for this year if I can find someone nearby with a Mountain Ash tree. The orange berries from that tree make a smooth and tasty white wine that is to die for. I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve been boring the hell out of everyone lately with the trials and tribulations with my garden and my DIY projects. I apologize for that but only just a little. My main goal for April was to get all of my old projects put to bed before I start creating new ones or “God Forbid” before my better-half does.
We both let a number of things slide last Fall when I broke my leg. I decided today to do one chore I’ve come to hate and one I’ve always loved to do. The first task was to empty my huge dehydrator that has contained five pounds of habanero peppers, one pound of cayenne peppers, and a tray or two of red chilies, for more than a month. I kept procrastinating because after drying them thoroughly they must be ground into a fine powder. I’ve done it many times before but it’s a nasty job.
The last time I attempted it I paid a horrible price. As I began grinding up the peppers the dust from the grinder filled my man-cave very quickly. I was forced to flee when I couldn’t stop sneezing. Along with the sneezing my face was on fire. I was smart enough to wear latex gloves but I quickly found out they weren’t thick enough to keep the pepper dust from burning my hands and anything I might accidently touch later in the day. I won’t get into any intimate details but I had a selection of body parts that felt like they would at any moment burst into flames. It took the better part of a day for everything to return to normal but I learned a few valuable but painful lessons.
This time I was wearing yellow dish-washing rubber gloves, ten times thicker than latex, a face mask with an air filter, and a long sleeved shirt. I was sitting on an upturned bucket on the back porch with an extension cord to run the food grinder. I thought I had it all covered but once again I was sooooooo wrong. Within minutes the mask turned into a death trap. The filter was keeping everything from entering my nostrils including air. I cracked the mask just enough to get a breath and instead got a nose full of the dreaded pepper dust. It was all down hill from there and another day of pepper pain awaited me. I finally finished the job and now I have these three jars of hot pepper dust that I need to use sparingly so I don’t have to do this again any time soon. I might be forced to rent a SCUBA outfit the next time.
The second job is a fav. I need to explain that I’ve been a winemaker since the mid-1980’s. It’s a skill I picked up from my late grandfather whose elderberry wine was to kill for. Late last summer my better-half and I decided to make a batch of blueberry wine made with good old Maine home grown berries. The wine was almost forgotten with all of our Fall activities, my broken leg, and the holidays. It’s been sitting for the last ten months in my man-cave and today I shook off my laziness and bottled it.
And here’s the finished product.
Of course a good winemaker always tastes his final product and I tasted the hell out of it. I was as surprised as anyone when it turned out to be possibly the best wine we’ve made in the last ten years. I’m going to find a dark corner of my wine cellar and hide it for a few more months. It should be spectacular by then.
And our Spring continues to roll right along.
Today I get to play winemaker. I’ve been making homemade wines for more than twenty years and plan on making it for twenty more. My better-half became so interested that she began making her own batches about five years ago. She leans toward berry wines and her specialty has become Tripleberry Wine. It’s made from a mix of blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries. I have to admit it’s damn tasty and goes well with almost any dish.
For years I only made your basic wines. Some were made from fresh fruit while other were made from professionally produced concentrates. I’ve always tried to be creative with my winemaking and I’ve even made excellent wine from the fruit of the Mountain Ash tree. My all time favorite over the years has been dandelion wine made from blossoms collected from nearby fields. It’s a killer to make because you sit for hours removing only the yellow petals. The first time I attempted making it I found out much too late that rubber gloves should be worn. I had really disgusting yellow fingers and hands for weeks.
I enjoy experimenting a great deal and in recent years have made a number of cooking wines which turned out rather well. I first made onion and garlic wine which turned out to be an incredible marinade. Then I made twenty-five bottles of habanero wine to be used for marinades and cooking. I found as time went by it actually became hotter as it sat in the bottle. Some people actually like drinking it but that’s not for me. If your doing a stir-fry adding a cup of it will spark things up nicely. Again a safety tip, when making anything with habaneros wear a double layer of latex gloves.
Today is bottling day for a fifteen bottle batch of the better-half’s wine and a twenty-five bottle batch of my latest experiment, gin wine. I’m a big fan of gin but drinking the hard stuff is a little much sometimes. I decided to make a wine out of the same ingredients that actual gin brewers use. If recent taste tests are any indicator this batch isn’t all that good. It has an alcohol content of about ten percent and might just make a great tar remover for our cars. The smell of gin is there but that’s about it. It tastes like a cross between battery acid and Lysol. I’ll bottle up a few bottles for long term storage but the rest will unfortunately be discarded. The better-half’s Tripleberry tastes great and will be bottled and stored today.
Making wine is always risky and ever so often you’ll get a batch that is just God awful. I’m hoping this summer is hot and sunny making our blackberry crop fat and juicy. We have a few secret spots in certain areas of the county where we harvest blackberries by the bucket full. They make the best jams and wines and we’re looking forward to doing it again this summer.
I’ll be sure to have a glass or two today to toast the arrival of Spring and the demise of the gin wine.
Valentines Day is over as I write this and we’ve had a great day. My better-half had the day off so we spent the first few hours in bed this morning exchanging cards and gifts and making good use of our quality time. It’s more difficult than I ever thought it would be to have time together. Her schedule makes it somewhat difficult but we’re dealing with it.
Being the loving person that I am I then volunteered to make us a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, coffee, and a jar of our home made rhubarb jam. It really started the day off right and gave us a chance to catch up on a host of other matters. We’re trying to make plans for an interesting vacation this summer, where to go, for how long, and all of the other preparations that need to be discussed.
We spent the remainder of the day running errands and just having fun together. We picked up groceries for our evening meal and returned home late in the afternoon. Our late dinner consisted of two excellent steaks, a pile of fried onions, a huge salad, and a bottle of pretty decent wine. We then retired to the living room to watch a new movie I just received as a Valentines Day gift. I laughed until I cried as "Ted" took over our reality for a couple of hours. For me there is nothing better than lot of laughter and we enjoyed the hell out of that movie. She had to be at work at 5:30 am so she was off to bed soon after the movie ended.
I planned to remain awake for just another hour or so to give her a chance to get to sleep and was able to read five or six chapters of a new book I just started. The cat arrived in the living room at his regularly scheduled time, climbed up on the chair, and wished me a Happy Valentines Day in his own weird feline way. He also let me know in no uncertain terms that it was time for bed. I opened the bedroom door and he immediately joined her there.
I ended up reading for quite a while and before I knew it it was 2:00 am. I completed a quick check of the house. picked up a glass of wine, and walked out onto the front deck for a few minutes. It was really cold but the night was crystal clear. I sat for a while on a small bench we left out for these occasions and enjoyed the cold air and the absolute quiet. One of the joys of living in a rural area is the total lack of human background noise which we can only hear if the wind shifts in just the right direction. The cat stuck his nose out the door but refused to join me. I thought someone with a nice thick fur coat like his wouldn’t be put off by the cold all that much but he was. He casually returned to the bedroom to enjoy his most favorite thing, the electric blanket. He was down for the night finally.
All things considered it was a really wonderful Valentines Day. I hope we have many more just like it.
Well the first winter storm has come and gone with no appreciable damage to our home or property. It’s been sleeting and raining off and on for most of the night but the plus side to that is the snow will be gone in a short time. It’s a reasonably good start to the 2012/2013 winter when we’ve had 4 inches of snow which required no shoveling.
I spent most of my evening yesterday lounging with my better-half watching a little TV. I’m not sure who’s responsible for giving television the nickname “boob tube” but they certainly hit that nail right on the head. I was reading and TV watching and finally finished the first Harry Potter book. A short time after my better-half went off to bed I turned off the “tube” and opened up book number two. It was an enjoyable read but it didn’t last very long. I become so relaxed when I read that if I’m not careful I can easily doze off. My solution is to sit in an uncomfortable chair in an uncomfortable position and just read. I stay awake longer and in the long run read much more.
Today’s a new day and I’ve got a lot of errands to run and a list of tasks that need to be taken care of. I was happy to finally receive yesterday afternoon a really nice set of wood carving tools that I ordered from Amazon a week or so ago. I like carving but without the proper tools it’s just a waste of time and energy. I spent an hour or two on an old piece of wood learning what each tool will do and what they won’t do. It may take me a little time to get the feel for these tools but I think any carvings that I do in the future will be much cleaner and crisper than in the past. I may actually try to do something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time and that is to attempt wood block printing. It’s been a number of years since the last time but it’s a little like sex and bicycle riding, you never forget the basics. That will be another one of my winter projects for this year and should keep me busy in January and February.
Well, I’m finally dressed with my camera in hand and I’m out the door in five minutes. I need to make a quick stop at a local business that supplies me with winemaking equipment. We have three batches of wine underway and it won’t be long before the bottling will begin. I’m in need of corks and a few other odds and ends. I’ve been experimenting this year with my wines and I’ll find out soon enough if it worked. I’m a huge fan of Gin but drinking too much of it is not a good idea. I decided to gather the ingredients used to make Gin and attempt to create a Gin Wine. I had juniper berries shipped in from California and in combination with other herbs and spices made a three gallon batch. Making wine is always an adventure because you never really have any idea how it will turn out even if your following a good recipe. This experiment has Gin’s aroma but it’s the taste that has me concerned. Our other batches of Blueberry and Triple Berry (Blueberry, Blackberry, and Strawberry) are in their final stages and I’ve given them my first taste test. So far so good.
I’m out the door, let the day begin.
everyuselessthing.com 