Wine Report

It's been three weeks since we racked the plum wine, so it was time to re-rack, and lose some sediment. It was also the Big Check - is it wine, yet?

Oh, yes.

After we siphoned it into a new bucket, we took a taste. It's very dry, which I think is wonderful. I prefer dry wines, and I was afraid this would be too sweet, since it started with plums.  But, no. It's VERY dry.


I think it's almost perfect, but Rick wasn't sure. According to the instructions, if we want it sweeter, we can add sugar just before we bottle it. So we'll decide then.

It's also done fermenting. The SG is 1.006, which means there's almost no sugar left. What's the alcohol content? Well, that's an inaccurate guess, due to my faulty record-keeping. We need to know the starting SG, and I forgot to write that down.

But I do know it was in the normal range for starting wine. So we have a range of 7%-12% alcohol. I think it's at a reasonable level, because what we tasted (about a 1/4 cup each) was enough to provide the beginnings of a tipsy feeling.

I'm excited about it. We'll let it sit for a month or two more, to get rid of more sediment. Depending on how clear it looks at that point, we might bottle it.

Next year, I'll make an effort to use all our plums and make a bunch of wine. This is great stuff.

Even Better Pickles

My pickle kick is continuing unabated. We eat a little bit every day. But I've discovered that I'm not quite on the right track with the pickle thing.

Pickled foods are the right idea, but the REAL idea is fermented food. The vinegar-sugar route is a short-cut.

So I'm trying it the old-fashioned way.

I sliced up some cucumbers, onions, and carrots. These were all mixed together in a bowl with 2 tbsp sea salt, a few cloves of garlic, and some mustard seeds. The idea is to mix and mash for 4 to 10 minutes, until the vegetables have reduced and let off a lot of their juices.

Then I packed them into jars (which I first sterilized). I filled the jars to the top, making sure there was plenty of the liquid covering the veggies.

Aren't they beautiful? The jars are left on the counter for three days, with a loose lid. After that, they can be stored a few more days in a cabinet, then refrigerated.

I really want to be able to store these things in a cabinet, to have veggies throughout the winter. In the past, I think people kept them in their basements or someplace very cool. Perhaps I can keep them in our garage. It stays plenty cold in the winter. But for now, I think the jars have to be refrigerated, which is disappointing.

The quandary is, the vegetables are in season now, so now is the time to ferment them. But I don't have a cool place to keep them.

I'll have to work on that.

Oh, and one tip I found out about: putting a grape leaf in the jar keeps the vegetables crisp. So I "borrowed" a few leaves from our neighbor's vines that grow over our fence.  We'll see if it works.

Saving Seeds

No, not saving seeds as in reserving from your crop so you can plant next year. That's good to do, too.

This is saving seeds in the doomsday-apocolypse-kind-of-way. I didn't know we did this. That's "we" as in the human race. Yep, this is a joint effort, world-wide. There are "seed banks" scattered around the planet, where the seeds for our food are safely stored in case of disaster.

Cool, isn't it?

The reason I heard about it is that a new seed bank has just opoened in Norway: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built deep in the permafrost in a remote Arctic mountain. It can withstand earthquakes, storms, and nuclear attacks.

You know, in case there are any survivors of said nuclear attack and they want to eat. Of course, we have to hope that someone with the keys to the place also survives, but that's another issue...

There are other seed banks, not all in great places and some have been destroyed (such as one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan - guess who might have, indirectly, had something to do with that?). A bank in the Phillipines was flooded after a typhoon.

So it's important where these are built. Having worked on the Yucca Mountain Project - our feeble attempt to find some place to bury nuclear waste - I have a good idea of hard it is to find these places. There are so many factors to consider.

But the idea is great. The seeds will be safe and people can withdraw them as needed (no, it's not necessary to wait for the nuclear attack). Any country in the world can deposit seeds for no cost.

It's funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, founded by U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International.

Now for the cynicism: we need to make sure Monsanto doesn't have any ownership in this thing. They'll patent all the seeds and indenture future generations who need to make withdrawals.

Tomorrow, I'll get more cynical and talk a little about the "diversity" side of this issue.

Preserving

September is Eat Local Challenge month, and of course, I signed up. I try to do this even in months when there is no challenge.

I like this month's theme, though: the beginning of the harvest and turning our thoughts toward preserving our food. I love all the blogs about people canning their harvest, and all the wonderful pictures of glorious jars on shelves, but let me be honest: I'm food preservation challenged in the biggest way.

I grew up typical 60s American suburban. Our food came from the grocery store - in cans, boxes, and preferably frozen. TV dinners were the rage. Add to that a mother who worked full-time and who hated fish, cheese, and mushrooms. When it came to most of our meals, it needed to say Swanson or Chef Boy-ar-Dee. I was 16 before I saw a fresh strawberry.

My mother grew up on a farm in Texas and she hated everything to do with it. She hardly ever talked about it and I never heard her pine for the fresh vegetables of her youth. Except for okra. When okra was in season, she bought it by the bushel-full and mixed it up with cornmeal and salt, deep-fried it, and we'd sit at the table eating pounds of it. I still love that stuff. She also bought yellow squash and cooked it with a cream sauce and lots of pepper. I loved that, too.

So you can see it was unusual to ever get "fresh," let alone freshly grown. And the idea of canning anything - well, the idea just never occured. I didn't even know the average human being could do that kind of thing. If you had asked me, I probably would have said it came from a factory somewhere. Everyone knows that!

I've done some canning over the last few years. Just fruit - chutneys, sauces, butters - easy stuff. I've never even tried jams because the idea of using pectin makes me nervous. I'm not sure what it is, you see. Any other food I want to preserve, I do by freezing. I'm the freeze queen, or I would be if I actually had something other than the side compartment to our Amana. I'd love to buy a chest freezer but what do I do about our famous California brown-outs and blackouts? Does a freezer need a separate generator?

So here's my problem: I'm totally enamored of Real Food. I would love to spend days cooking and canning all kinds of fresh produce, in all kinds of exciting ways. But I need a teacher. I need people to do it with, who'll talk and laugh and have a good time while we work. Who'll show me what pectin looks like and how to use it. Who know how to use a pressure canner or what the saurkraut is supposed to look like after a few days. People with Experience.

It would be so cool to really know how to do it.