The wild grapes

We made our wild grapes into jelly and booze.  We need to remake the jelly.  The booze was excellent.

I tried to make a low-sugar jelly by just cutting back on the sugar and using a pectin that didn't rely on an abundance of sugar.  I've got 21 jars of really tart wild grape jelly.  It's a little thin, too, so I'm going to re-cook it with some more sugar and pectin and re-can it. 

I found the canning process pretty easy.  I used small jars - 8 and 12 ounce - but my canner was made for pints, so that was a bit of a challenge.  The small jars kept falling over on the rack.  I cut a piece of hardware cloth with a 3/8" mesh and put a bottom on the canner rack, and the jars stood up just fine.  It took some organization and coordination to do the canning, and three great big pots.  I've only got three working burners on my stove, so my options for what should go where were rather limited.  I thought I'd be clever and boil my jars and lids in my roaster.  I think that's what destroyed the roaster. 

It was really neat listening to the tops of the jars pop as they cooled.  That was the sign that I'd done my canning properly.  The jelly is really very nice for a first effort, I think.  I'm looking forward to doing some more canning.  Actually, I'll be doing it this week when I re-batch the jelly.

I'm not going to share any recipe, because it didn't really turn out.  With all of the diddling, I don't really know what the recipe is anymore.  When I try it again next year, I'll share the recipe, if it turns out.

The booze is another story altogether.  It turned out fabulous.  It's really good mixed with lemonade or lemon sour.  It's beautiful in the bottle - a deep, rich red-purple that coats the sides of the bottle.  It tastes summery-fruity and deceptively mild. 

Here's the recipe.  The amounts will vary with the size jar you have.

• Fill a large jar with gently crushed wild grapes.  You want the skins broken, but you don't want to crush the seeds.  You can substitute any berry for the wild grapes.  I also made booze from wild raspberries and from elderberries, and they were wonderful. 
• Add 1 Tablespoon of sugar for each pint of capacity of your jar.  For a quart jar, add 2 Tbsp; for a gallon jar 8 Tbsp, etc. 
• Fill jar with Everclear (grain alcohol - 151 proof).  You can also use vodka.
• Store in a dark, cool spot.
• Shake the jar and/or give it a stir every few days for the first two weeks.
• Shake or stir once a week for the next 8 weeks.
• Strain your booze, squishing as much juice as possible from the grapes.  I use a mesh strainer, then squeeze the grapes with my hands.  This stains my hands pretty badly, particularly my fingernails, but it washes out eventually.  You'll have a lot of grape goo left that you'll need to decide what to do with.  If you can get the seeds separate from the pulp, I think that the pulp (which will be boozy) might be nice mixed with jello for some party shooters. 
• Run the booze you've collected through a jelly bag to strain out any solids.  These can be added to the pulp for your Wild Grape Shooters. 
• Give your booze a taste.  You may want to sweeten it up some, or to add some water to thin it down a bit if your booze seems kind of "thick" (think juice concentrate) or too strong or some additional vodka if it's too weak (I don't know what your tastes are).  BE CAREFUL.  No matter what you add, it's going to taste funny if you taste it right away.  It will have to sit in order for you to know what result you've gotten.  You can always add more sugar and water and vodka later, but you can't take it out once you've put it in.  If you want to add both sugar and water, dissolve the sugar in the water before putting them into your booze. 
• Bottle up your booze.  Use glass bottles with screw on tops.  I use old booze bottles, since they're made for the purpose. 
• Store your booze in a dark, cool spot.  If you added any sugar, water or vodka at tasting time, let your booze sit for at least a month (shaking it up once or twice a week) before tasting it again so that the flavors can blend and mellow. 

It's hard to let the stuff sit for months before imbibing.  Ours is just about gone. 
 





FT

The Final Granola Recipe

I've made granola for hubby enough now that I've got the recipe down so that I can throw it together with minimum effort and get great results.  This recipe makes a lightly sweet, toasty granola. 

42 oz rolled oats (standard large, round container that oatmeal comes in at the grocery store)
1 pound of coarsely chopped nuts (we usually use walnuts, but any nut will do)
2 cups whole flax seed
1 1/4 cup water
1 1/4 cup turbinado sugar (or 1/2 cup brown sugar and 3/4 cup white sugar)
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) cut in small chunks
12-16 ounces dried fruit

Combine oatmeal, nuts and flax in large roaster pan*.  Bring sugar and water to a boil, stir until sugar is melted.  Add butter to sugar mixture.  Stir until butter is melted.  Pour sugar/butter mixture over oatmeal mixture.  Stir until well blended.  Bake at 325 degrees for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, stirring every 20 minutes, until granola reaches desired toastiness.  Let granola cool for a half hour or so, then add dried fruit.  Stir until well mixed.  Store in airtight container.

If you like a more nuggety granola, increase the sugar to 1 cup brown sugar and 1 cup white sugar, and increase the butter to 3/4 cup.

*  You want the granola spread out, and you need to have room to stir it up, so you want a big, deep pan.  I use the inside pan from our 18 quart electric roaster.  That's about the perfect size.

FT

Tomato Sauce

Hubby won't be home until late tonight, and I've got a bunch of tomatoes that need some attention, so I guess tonight I'll make tomato sauce.  I've got to make it work with the stuff that I have and hope for the best.  That works for me.

I thought I had some fresh garlic, but it was far from fresh.  Do you remember the part of the movie where the mummy disintegrates into dust?  That's what my fresh garlic was like.  I had a jar of garlic with about a teaspoon left in it, but that also has been in the fridge too long.  Rather than resort to powdered garlic, I think that I'll just do the maters and some herbs in the sauce and worry about sauted onion and garlic when I go to use the sauce. 

So here's what I'm doing...

I cut up about 6 pounds of  fresh sauce tomatoes (mine are Romas and Opalkas) into larger bite-sized chunks and out them in my big wok-like fry pan (I don't have a dutch oven at the moment or I'd be using that).  I've turned it on at low heat (about medium-low on my stove) and put the cover on.  I grabbed a handful of basil, thyme, chives and parsley out of the herb garden, crushed it up and threw it in there.

After about a half hour, I took the cover off.  The tomatoes are heated through and getting mooshy, and I want some of the liquid to evaporate.  I cooked it for about 2 1/2 hours, until I had to leave to go pick up hubby.  A good deal of the liquid evaporated, and I've got a pretty chunky sauce. 

It's Saturday morning and I just took the sauce out of the fridge and put it back on the stove.  I'd like a little more of the liquid to evaporate, but I think I'm going to leave it chunky rather than squish it through a seive. 

After an hour on the stove (med-low), it's looking pretty good.  It smells pretty good, too.  I've turned it off so that it can cool down.  I started picking the herbs out.  I didn't chop them up, just scruntched them up and threw them in there.  The thyme leaves all fell off the twigs, so they're still in there.  The chives are rather stringlike and the parsley is just big gobs - looks like of like canned spinach.  Some of the basil will stay in there. 

Once it's cool, I'm going to put it in freezer bags, about 2 cups to a bag.  I wish I had a silicone muffin pan.  Freezing the sauce in that would make it really easy to pull just what I need out of the freezer.  I'll have to try that next time. 

FT

Granola Update

Hubby is pretty happy with the granola.  I cooked it for about an hour and a half, and that wasn't quite enough.  This made a LOT of granola - a little too much to fit in the jar.  I used the liner pan from my 18 qt roaster oven for this.  It holds all of the granola, but it's a trick getting it in and out of my oven. 

When I do this next, I'm going to use 10 cups of rolled grain and more nuts and fruit.  Hubby wants me to try honey instead of sugar.  We'll see how that goes. 


FT

Recipe - Hubby's Granola

Hubby is a big fan of granola, but not the stuff that they sell in cereal boxes at the grocery store.  As is the case with so much of our food-life, he likes the stuff that I make best.  So tonight, I'm making granola for him.  Here's the recipe I'm using tonight.  This is one of those things where I just throw together what I've got, so the recipe isn't consistent from one batch to the next.  I'll let you know if this batch is a good one.

Ingredients
   18 oz turbinado sugar
   18 oz water
   1/2 cup butter
    6 cups rolled oats
    4 cups rolled wheat
    3 cups rolled barley
    2 cups oat bran
    1 1/2 cups flax seed
    18 oz dried fruit, chopped small if neccessary

   Combine sugar and water and heat until sugar is completely disolved.  Add the butter and continue heating until the butter is melted and the mixture is bubbly.
   Combine the grains in a large roasting pan.  Pour the sugar mixture over the grains and stir until well blended.  Bake at 350° for two hours, stirring it all up every 20 minutes. 
   Take out of the oven, let sit for 10 minutes or so stirring occasionally.  Add the fruit. 
   Let cool, store in some sort of storage container.  We use a big cookie jar.

I'll let you know how this particular recipe turns out and what adjustments I'll be making next time.



FT