At the moment, in my mind, these bad boys take top spot at proving how shitty and dumbed down imported-out-of-season-food can be. Fresh strawberries from a plant that was actually bred to produce tasty strawberries, kick ass. If they were a wine, I’d score them 95+ while the crap-styrofoamy-immitation strawberries we get from abroad [no offense, cali-foilks, but the strawberries … Read More
Apple Blossom Time – a new vintage begins
Never in a million years did I think I’d be deeply connected to apples blossoming. Never. But a strange journey happened. My perhaps-slightly-out-of-balance-lust for wine and wine knowledge [I’m moderating out of that phase, honest] led to trying to grow wine grapes in a marginal climate. Which led to lots of research about growing grapes, as that’s how I roll. … Read More
Apple Cider Vinegar, Day 1
One of the benefits of cider making [/winemaking] is the opportunity to produce high-quality, negligible cost and effort vinegar. The last batch of vinegar I made was apparently back in 2007, and I recall it being a painless process. Except for maybe the lingering smell. Now I have more space, so I can choose a more appropriate location for the … Read More
Saskatoon Wine – 2009 Batch 1 Update
Batch 1 of 09 Saskatoon wine was bottled this week, and I figured it would be useful for other would-be-saskatoon-wine-makers to have some thoughts in the otherwise gaping void of online information about tackling this. First, I’m pretty sure this wine will mature nicely. For a long time, the wine had a tart cherry vibe that was awkward, nearly metallic, … Read More
Ketchup…from scratch
Having made lard, I’ve been mucking about [very successfully, I may add] with pastry dough. Which lead to tourtiere. Which lead to copious amounts of ketchup being used, which is how I roll with tourtiere. Heinz. I used it up, yep I did. Onto the grocery list it went. Then I considered a ketchup a friend of mine had given … Read More
Saskatoon Wine – 2009 Batch 1
As with quite a few other items lately, I’m posting about making ‘Saskatoon Wine’ because there seems to be a hole in online information about the topic. After doing some research, I realized that it’s partly because it’s very Canadiana to even call them saskatoons. Amélanche, juneberry, serviceberry, shadberry are more common names elsewhere. I’ll use the terms interchangeably, just … Read More
Apple Harvest Day 2009
Apple Harvest day. A big deal in my little world as it means my first adventure in scratch wine/cidermaking begins now. We picked roughly 75kg of apples today of 4 varieties. Tomorrow we’ll pick from our tree hoping for an additional 40kg. For all those hitting my blog looking for crushing/pressing help, tomorrow will be a big day to find … Read More
Saskatoon Picking: Day 2
No, apparently the 75 lbs of berries picked Friday was not enough. We’d committed to at least giving the crop one more shot before resigning the bulk of it to the birds and rot. My earlier estimates of there being 200-300 lbs of berries was revised today to perhaps 1000-2000. So we optimized. The bushes at the ends of the … Read More
My Explosion of Kleenex Needs Bees
Our Red Sparkle apple tree is a giant riot of white. It makes me happy, many times a day. From afar it looks like a kleenex box exploded all over it. If number of blossoms correlates to number of fruits, we’re in for a crazy yield this year again – last year was 100kg+. Now all we need is those … Read More
Strawberries!!!
Today we went on a culinary adventure to Parkberry Fields. Where have they been all my life?!? We picked 3 pails of wicked, fragrant, super-ripe strawberries in 15-25 minutes – and that was slow because Evelyne wasn’t picking very fast. Yes. A joke. Hah. We kept a few for fresh, and man do they make the ‘store-variety’ look like crap. … Read More