Omelette Happiness!

Last Sunday, I made an omelette that was faaaabulous:

Inside: green onions, green bell peppers from the farmer's market, fresh garlic.  Topped with goat cheese, side of blackberries from the farmer's market.

I made another awesome omelette today and started thinking...what if I blog the omelettes I make?  Why not?  I'm proud of them once I'm done and it's a way for me to share my ideas with others!  Omelettes are cheap and easy to make.  So here's today's:

Inside: Banana peppers from my parents' garden in WI, chives and beet greens from my patio garden.  Topped with goat cheese, and fennel from my parents' garden.

When I was about halfway through, I decided I needed Sriracha sauce.  The result: perfection.  Also, this way you can see what it looks like inside!

Happy cooking! =) I think next time I will attempt a dessert omelette...

Exploding Apples?!

Here is a slightly edited e-mail sent to me from one of the recipients of the (supposedly) NON-carbonated cider:

"Hi,

I went into the basement this afternoon to do laundry. Smelled something.....nice..... rather fruity.
Checked the potatoes - no rotters.
Checked the jelly - all of it OK.
Followed my nose (and [the dog]) around the corner - to the "wine cellar".
The 1000 Apple Cider had blown it's [sic] cork.

Not a problem. I put towels over what was on the floor and am drinking what was left in the bottle.
It's quite good. I'm sad that so much of it is on the floor.

Love, [L.]"

Uh oh. This means our stabilizing chemicals didn't work the way that they should have, or that we bottled too early. So when we added our sugar, it kept fermenting and therefore carbonated, generating pressure on the cork and causing it to blow. We're lucky we don't have glass all over her basement floor.

Problem: We bottled about five gallons total of the apple cider! If I remember correctly, four of those gallons were of the exploding variety, the last of the not-wanting-to-carbonate variety (why is this backwards?!).

Other problem: Joe is away on vacation in Canada. He probably doesn't know right now that his basement may be doomed to an appley mess, so I may have to consider calling his mother in the morning to warn her that she may start hearing some explosions...

Bottling Grape and Cider

Oh no, we're down to our last carboys! Now we have to decide what to make next!

This is the final color of our grape wine. Gorgeous! It darkened up since the last time we took a look at it.
Bottles of grape wine, ready for labeling. We left it unsweetened since after a taste test we realized that it still seemed quite sweet. Also DELICIOUS. Seriously, we were very pleasantly surprised by the flavor of this booze. We've titled this batch "The Forgotten Carboy" since it sat around way longer than it was "supposed" to.

Here's what it looks like in a glass.

This is the color of the cider getting ready for bottling! Isn't it awesome? It smells and tastes like cider, which is a very good thing. We bottled a few gallons into beer bottles to carbonate until ready for drinking, then took the rest of it, sweetened it, and stuck it in wine bottles. This batch is titled "Thousand Apple Cider" since it took a ridiculously long time to prepare.

And here's the box Joe packed up for me so that I can share it with family. It's a jumble of all the wines we've got. I gave one carbonated and one sweetened cider to Dave, my fiancé; the requested bottles (and then some) to my parents; and one carbonated cider, one sweetened cider, and one grape wine to Dave's parents. Whew! Free booze sure disappears fast!

Maybe up next: Dandelion wine (dandelion heads courtesy of Dave's parents), peach wine (once peaches are in season), and something possibly involving rhubarb... This has turned into quite the project! My mom is now considering starting to make wine herself, and I'd LOVE to help her do it. I think if she wants to start this summer I'll start her off with cider since it takes such a short amount of time and I can help her with the bottling before I leave the state for graduate school in August.

Bottling Strawberry, Racking Grape and Cider

This was back on the second of April. Sorry it's taken me so long to post all of these! I'm splitting them up into three posts to sort of try and break up the information a little.

Here's the strawberry, ready for bottling! Just look at that color!This is the yeast poop from the Welch's grape after racking it for the final time. We've decided that it's the most beautiful poop we've ever seen.

This is the cider after a couple weeks. It was off to a good start! After racking, the bottom looked like yeasty apple sauce.

Bottles of strawberry wine, all corked! These are the unsweetened bottles. We kept one gallon for sweetening.

These were the labels I drew for the sweetened strawberry wine bottles. The strawberry drawn on there is extra sweet, so he wants a hug. The strawberry on the unsweetened bottles is just happy looking.

The End of Cinnamon

Well, I'm sorry to report that...there it goes. The cinnamon just never took off fermenting. So we dumped it.We tried to boil some of it down to syrup but it tasted disgusting. We decided to dump that as well. Better luck next time?

For the record: Cinnamon wine = failure!

Apple Cider

I post here today with the sad news that our cinnamon wine is not turning out very well after all. Joe and I have decided to dump it. We didn't get the chance today because we spent too much time dealing with apples (I don't want to look at another apple for a week), but we will figure out what to do with it tomorrow. I will explain later.

Since our cinnamon sugar water is biting the dust, we decided to make some cider next. We went and got 51 lbs (that is not a typo) of red delicious apples and 2 lbs of honey. Then we went back to his place and got to work...grueling, awful, appley work. Here are the apples ready for rinsing in the sink, gorgeous looking and perfect for luring Snow White into her sleepy pseudo-grave:

That's 15 lbs right there. To the left is the cheesecloth and cutting board, ready for chopping, juicing, and straining into this gigantic pot on the stove:

POT OF DOOOOOM! We sliced the apples into quarters and put them through this poor juicer from the 80's which seems to use centrifugal force to get the juice out. The leftovers are everything fibrous and look completely disgusting (and according to Joe, they didn't taste that good).

By the time we were FINALLY finished juicing, we had 4-5 gallons of brown apple juice, strained through the cheesecloth and heating to 60-70 C. We were supposed to simmer it for 45 minutes, and Joe might do that later tonight, but he had to get to work so we didn't have time. We had spent all of our time slicing and juicing. That's almost 3 hours of work. By the time we were finished we were soooo sick of apples.

Since he had to get going, we took the apple juice off the stove and threw it in a big bucket to ice it back down again. I added the honey while it was still warm, which might also help to keep it from oxidizing further. I will return tomorrow to rack the strawberry and grape wines, and to finish off the cider.

We are going to try to make this without sulfonation, and part of the 5 gallon batch will be carbonated, the other part not carbonated. The carbonated part is bound to have stuff at the bottom of the bottle when it's ready to drink. We are thinking that in a mass production setting, artificial mechanical means are used instead of natural ones for carbonating cider so no one gets grossed out by the yeast poo at the bottom of the bottle.

Whatever. Whimps.

When it comes time to top up to 5 gallons, I'm going to inquire about using our failed cinnamon wine instead of water. We could have an apple cider with a hint of cinnamon! Or we could boil some of it down into syrup to use for pancakes and such. Or we could just toss it if we suspect it's no good. We'll see - I will keep you posted.

Stuff from the other weekend

The weekend before last, Joe and I racked all three of our wines. Here is an update of how our strawberry is going:

Doesn't that color look AWESOME? For some reason it reminds me of watermelon Jolly Ranchers. See all the yeast poop at the bottom? Here's how our grape is doing:

Don't you LOVE that color?? Actually, all three of our wines have very interesting and cool colors. The pictures just don't do them justice. Our grape wine is this gorgeous purple. It also smells (and tastes) fantastic so far. On to the cinnamon then!

First, we had to boil cinnamon sticks. Believe it or not, this all started from about a handful, and with the water, they blew up to chunks of bark that made the entire house smell like potpourri.

Afterward, we made a cinnamon syrup out of it with tons of sugar, the cinnamon water (throw the bark away), and hot water. Then you just throw it all in and wait 24 hours before tossing in the yeast.

I did go to Joe's place just last night to rack the cinnamon wine since we accidentally waited over a week to do it (not too big a deal). There was just one problem: our specific gravity was really high! It's supposed to go down over time, and we had waited especially long. So we went ahead and tasted it and realized we didn't taste any alcohol at all. Our other two wines tasted boozey right away, but this still tasted like cinnamon syrup. Thinking that perhaps the yeast hadn't had enough natural nutrients it would normally get from fruit to grow, we mixed together some yeast energizer (super nutrients for cases like this) in warm water, then threw in another packet of yeast to be safe. We decided not to airlock and we're going to see what happens in a week or so. On the bright side, the wine, paired with the yeast and energizer, now smells like cinnamon French toast.

A final picture for your enjoyment. Don't these look delish? They smell great. All three wines are currently sitting in Joe's basement inside the boxes the jugs come in to prevent too much light exposure, these two with airlocks, the cinnamon open with a towel over it. Pictures of cinnamon wine will come whenever Joe gets around to uploading them and I'll let you know how our little yeast buddies are doing.