Happenings...

Nothing incredibly exciting has been happening... Annabelle has spent a lot of time resting on the couch pinned down by Punker Man because of some flare ups with health stuff.. But some things did happen this week. Elly May got a new dress.

Elly May made apple pie out of reject apples. She is going to get mad that this pic is posted because she isn't proud of the crust... She does fabulously beautiful crusts , but she took this one off to stick butter under it and then it wouldn't crimp right after being handled that much. ANYway, it tasted wonderful , and if you just look at the center, it is gorgeous.

Why do they do this to me???

Sauerkraut in the making..

It is a really good upper body workout if you are interested in one. We follow a recipe from either Sandor Katz "Wild Fermentation" or Sally Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions" , sort of anyway. We have since added a lot of things but the steps are the same.

This pounder thing is from Lehman's. It looked a lot smaller in the picture you know... And when it came everyone was all, "What on earth are you going to do with THAT??? .... Uh.. hang it from the ceiling as decoration?? Actually, it works great for what it was intended... pounding kraut. So there.

Such paws..

The weekend's gatherings from Farmer's Market.

Results.

Cobbler to be... 'tis in the oven now. The rest pureed and frozen in bags for smoothies later.

Why so sad J.B.?

Beer , Beer.. Glorious Beer...

Or so the song goes. I'll have to take their word for it because I don't drink beer... I don't like it and it just doesn't settle well on my stomach. But it is fun to make... and my dad drinks it. Sooo..

Well, this isn't beer. It is plum wine. Since we had all the sanitizing stuff out, I decided to sanitize some jugs and rack the plum wine off the sediment (that you see there on the bottom). It still has to finish aging for a few months. We tasted some and boy howdy is it strong . Very alcoholic. ;-) I think a little bit will go a long way.

Okay, is supposed to be peach beer. It is actually a Weissbier (wheat beer) that I'm adding peaches too. Wheat beer is very light and mild so the fruit flavors would stand out better than say... in a stout. (We've made that too.. very good!) . I froze about 5lbs of the peaches I got last weekend and then defrosted them for our brewing day. I mushed them up in the bag so they were more like a puree and then dumped them in the grain bag I have and it went into the wort after the boil.. I didn't get a picture.. but just take my word for it.

This is the "mashing" part. The grains have steeped , the starches have turned to sugar .. now they get sparged with 170 F water.

De hops.. I get organic beer kits from http://www.breworganic.com/ . The fine people at Seven Bridges Co-op are also really helpful. I called them up to ask about the fruit and a very kind lady explained the whole process for me. They also have tons of brewing info on their site .

Pouring in the malted barley..

The brew mistress needs to take a break and get her feet up as she has been standing all morning.. Punker Man sees this as an ideal opportunity for some cuddle time. This is a 60 +lb dog here and he curls up like a cat...

Isn't he precious??

Adding the hops... well, some of them anyway.. after the boil I added the fruit bag... weighted down with marbles so it wouldn't float.. That sat for 20 minutes with the heat OFF to pasteurize
the fruit. Then everything got chilled down so we could add the yeast..

Now if I had a wort chiller.. things would be so much easier. But I don't, so I put the whole thing in the sink and had my brother buy me a bunch of ice because I forgot to make big chunks the night before...

J.J.. can I have some beer???

Okay, then it all got dumped into the primary fermentor , yeast added , yadada.. Put behind the dining room door in the dark to start fermenting.. Well, the dogs started barking the next day at the strange noises coming from that location, Elly May went to check and found the whole thing spewing forth , ready to explode... I guess we'd got the thing a leeeetle too full with those peaches and all... Anyway, she brought it into the kitchen and took the air lock off and the foam just erupted.. :-) It was rather exciting.

So we moved it to a sink and put a blow off tube on it . Actually , before this, we just stuck it in the sink with the air lock and wrapped a towel around it . But the airlock soon got a bit clogged and then it started shooting spurts 2 feet into the air .. and the whole thing looked ready to blow again .. so then we put the blow off tube on..

We are now on day... 3 and things have calmed down so I could put the air lock back on and it is bubbling away nicely. In a few more days, we'll siphon it off into the secondary fermentor and take the peaches out.

Phew, it was a long day.. took 6 hours from mashing grains to getting it in the fermentor. But it was fun. And it smelled hoppy. :-)

Scavenged Peach Cobbler

I was getting peach rejects at our farmers market this weekend for putting into beer later this week . Peach flavored wheat beer actually.. more on that later. But I ended up with a lot more peaches than I needed for a batch of beer so we made cobbler. I remember my grandmother making this every summer. She of course, peeled her peaches. She peeled everything come to think of it. She peeled apples in one long strip. I thought it was the coolest thing. She let me eat the skin, which was my favorite part. I'm not sure why she bothered to peel it if we were eating the skin anyhow but maybe it was just ingrained in her as the way things are done. I don't know. She also cooked broccoli until it was beyond dead. Gotta make sure you kill everything lurking in there you know. It was the same generation that boiled a can of soup for 10 minutes in case there was botulism present. That never made sense to me because if there WAS botulism present , it would have killed you when you opened the can. ANYway, we were making peach cobbler.... yes we were.. .

Ain' t they purdy? Free peaches are always way better than bought. Well, I guess I sort of bartered for them.. I gave him beer. Homebrew. :-)

The rotten ones taste a lot sweeter than the nice looking ones believe it or not. So next time you see a half rotten peach, remember that it just might taste really good once you get the rotten side off because it is just really really ripe.

Adding all the goodies of sugar and spice.. and everything nice.

Voila. Okay, it doesn't look too pretty, but it smells really good. And it tastes really good. So there.