I just returned from a blissful week in New England where I attended one of the sweetest weddings ever. We flew from one Portland (Oregon) to another Portland (Maine) and somehow the world did not spontaneously combust. Our friends getting married, Dan and Emily, gave us a great reason to visit this part of the country. Portland, Maine, can be summed up in one word:
Racking Plum Wine
I am happy to report that the plum wine has been coming along very well. This is my first foray into wine-making and it is thus far proving to be pretty straight-forward. The plum wine fermented for a week in a primary container and was recently racked into the secondary. The primary container was a sterilized plastic bucket with a tight-fitting lid. I needed to
Making Plum Wine
Plum season is finally upon us! I found a wild plum tree around the corner on an abandoned lot. Turns out the university owns it and one of their maintenance guys told me to help myself. Awesome! I began plotting what I would make them into as I plucked them from the tree. I have dabbled in brewing hard cider and thought plum wine sounded
Strawberry Waffles and Funny Eggs
Like a crazy woman, I went back to the local farm to u-pick more strawberries. Our cupboards are stocked with jam and I am getting tired of standing over the stock pot stirring. So this round I decided to just freeze them all – easy and versatile. I lightly rinsed the berries, since they can be little sponges and soak up excess water. I then
Strawberry Lemon Marmalade
Marmalade is similar to jam in texture, but typically they include some amount of fruit peel. In this case, I made a delicious batch of strawberry-lemon marmalade or, as my friend Behak described it, strawberry-lemonade in a jar. It tastes like I canned summer and I can’t wait to pop these suckers open in January when I’ve forgotten what the sun feels like. The original
Holy Strawberries
Most years I completely miss strawberry season. It comes so early for us here in the Pacific Northwest that it is barely, sort-of-consistently-sunny when they are ripe. And after about three weeks, they are all but gone for the year. This year, however, I stayed organized enough to stay on top of the harvest season. I called around to several local farms offering u-pick berries
Canned Marinara Pizza
In the glut of summer tomatoes, I put up several dozen cans of marinara sauce and whole tomatoes. When winter sets in though I tend to forget about them quietly waiting on my shelves. I just adjust to knowing tomatoes do not grow in winter, so I plan meals using seasonally available ingredients for the most part instead. Seed catalogs pouring into the mailbox are
Finished Hard Pear Cider
And I thought I dragged my feet last year brewing hard cider! This year we should practically call it an “aged” Asian pear cider. We started the process in early September, let it ferment the first round for a month, then had it do a secondary fermentation for another month. Probably the each round could have been shortened to a couple weeks at a time,
Canning Tomatoes
Class is in full swing at the Urban Farm, but there is still more produce than 68 students can handle. The first week of class I came home with another, somewhat smaller, bucket of tomatoes. I’m not really hurting for marinara sauce anymore and we are pretty stocked on ketchup. I decided it would be best to just simply can these guys as-is. Canning tomatoes