Not quite the spring garden post I'd planned.

I was going to write a totally ordinary spring gardening post. Then, at about 7:30 last night, this happened.

There's really nothing like being inside your house, a foot or two from the back wall, when you hear two gigantic crashing noises in close succession, coming directly from your backyard.

So we went outside and discovered this.

That's our pineapple guava tree.

It had rotted enough at the root for its weight to tear it at ground level. I imagine the first noise was the initial tear and the second was the impact.

This one is foreshortened, but it gives you a much better picture of the breadth of the crown. It spans almost the entire width of the backyard.

Did it hit the house? No. We were super lucky there. But it did get within about a foot of the back door. There are a bunch of branches resting on our meyer lemon tree, right behind the back porch slab. The lemon tree seems okay so far.

Needless to say, this trumps my newly planted seedlings and mole-stolen tomato plants. (This year we suddenly have a mole. I am pretty annoyed about it stealing an entire tomato plant. It was yanked straight down into the ground and the roots eaten entirely. Only a pitiful tuft of leaves were left peeking out through the top of the soil. I was too mad to take pictures. BUT ANYWAY.)

I'm happy not to have to deal with 100 pineapple guavas per day for the entirety of October and November anymore, but otherwise, this is not a great situation. Our backyard is going to be much, much sunnier than it has ever been before, even if our landlord decides to plant a new tree. This could be good for growing sun-loving plants in the back bed, but not so great for the temperature inside the house, and definitely not good for soil moisture retention. And losing this massive crown of flowers is going to be terrible for the pollinators in the neighborhood.

For those of you keeping track, here's the tally of house catastrophes in the past 5 months:

- roof leak
- furnace breakdown
- no heat for a month over the holidays
- refrigerator breakdown
- mold influx
- gigantic fallen tree
- and also we're supposed to be having a full roof replacement soon.

YAY.

In actual garden news, we have one single solitary volunteer tomato plant this year. It's a Caspian Pink, which is perfect for our partially shaded main bed. I think a couple other guys may be volunteers too, but the location suggests that they're red peppers. That's actually even better, since I didn't buy any red pepper plants and have no intention of starting any at this point. Bell peppers really don't produce that many fruits per plant -- I got four total last year. By contrast, our yearly jalapeño harvest is always gigantic in number, even if the chiles themselves are small. I'm definitely going to keep putting those in as long as we live here.

I got two tomato plants (one of which has officially been eaten by the mole) and two jalapeño plants. I may get a few more tomatoes and plant them up in gallon containers, for strategic mole-outwitting purposes. Otherwise, I think I will start a bunch of green bush beans in the next week or so. I have some scarlet runner beans and cucumbers in the back of my mind too. So it's essentially my usual garden lineup: lots of tomatoes and spice, plus a handful of bits and bobs.

Drought is still a definite and serious concern. I think a dry-farmed tomato experiment might be a good idea. This depends on the moles, though. Any tomatoes in containers are going to need water all summer, and need it seriously.

What is happening in your spring garden? Hopefully nothing this exciting.

Fun times for children

Ok, you guys. I have to tell you something, and that something is that our furnace has been out since December 6th.

Don't panic! We do live in California, so no one is freezing. Our pipes are not freezing. Our landlord is being very good about everything too. But the furnace is not fixed yet. Do you know why it's not fixed yet? Because we have a 70-year-old furnace, and when you have a furnace that old, it's not just an issue to find parts. No. Furnace companies actually won't repair your out-of-date equipment because it doesn't meet modern safety requirements and is thus a liability for them to touch.

So we are getting an entirely new furnace system. In January.

In the meantime, we've been burning a lot of candles, wearing wooly sweaters, and generally reacclimatizing to a vaguely midwestern level of low-grade chilliness.

I've been doing a lot of baking. I made Love and Olive Oil's Molasses Snickerdoodles, which were excellent and vanished in short order. I made Cookie and Kate's Orange Poppyseed Pound Cake for the fourth? fifth? time and it was as delicious as always. I made a vat of kale and olive minestrone, which is always delightful and warming, and I'm pretty sure I should make some sort of huge stew in the next week or so.

On the bright side, if this furnace lasted 70 years, you know it has done its time and is well deserving of a commemorative plaque. That would be hilarious. Maybe I'll do that.

At home

We came back and were totally shocked to see how much clothing we still owned, how stupidly full our pantry, how empty our house without four more people.

I am a whole lot more inclined to just go with whatever we have and do what needs to be done. Eat that freezer. Lighten that shelf.

The first night I was hungry at 9 pm, so I made macaroni with olive oil, garlic, and broccoli, with a lot of cracked pepper and some grated parmesan on top. It was an excellent plan. With some chickpeas, it could have been a full dinner. It took maybe ten minutes from start to finish, including peeling broccoli stems.

Sandwiches are definitely a larger part of the menu. Mustard, turkey, butter lettuce, homemade pickled peppers & cucumber slices. Our usual grocery store has even just now started carrying the Dave's Killer Bread we've been eating for the past month. The components are a touch fancier, if one can claim that homemade pickles are fancy, but the results are almost exactly like the many sandwiches I crammed down to make sure I wouldn't fall flat on my face while biking 5 miles up the hill home.

I want salad. The one I ate all the time in Portland was spinach with chopped apple and almond, topped with some storebought honey mustard dressing. I could go for another one of those right this second. It's not a shock to find I bought all three main components as soon as we got back.

I really missed soup. The night after we came back I made a pureed carrot soup with a mix of pinto and chickpea broth, spiced with cumin seed, coriander, turmeric, and cayenne, and stirred in some garam masala at the end. We ate it with half a loaf of sourdough and I for one would not have minded more.

Now that we have our toaster oven, I want cheesy toast all the time. Top a slice of bread with cheddar. Put it in the toaster oven. Toast until the cheese is bubbling. Eat. Mustard is optional and I think not necessary. Simple is nice.

That said, I am never going to be that into peanut butter toast.

The August garden

Gardening in California is a little surreal when you compare it to anywhere else. This is especially the case when you're gardening in a bed that lay fallow & covered with compost for who knows how many years before we moved into the house. This is the third year I've gardened here, and the results are still this crazy.

The top fence is eight feet tall. Yes, that does mean those tomato plants are ten feet tall.

Garden contents are as follows:
- 1 Caspian Pink tomato plant (main left body)
- 1 Boxcar Willie tomato plant (main right body)
- 1 jalapeno pepper plant (middle)
- 2 basil plants (left front)
- 3 scallions that have been in the ground for over a year at this point (middle front)
- 2 volunteer tomato plants from those that fell to the ground last year: Cherokee Purple and Sungold Cherry (indistinguishable from the rest of the tomato vines)
- 1 volunteer potato vine (invisible in the back left corner)

This is the first year the squirrels have realized our tomatoes are edible, so occasionally I go out to water the plants and find THIS. I've started heading them off by picking not-quite-ripe fruit and finishing the ripening on my kitchen windowsill.

They definitely won't touch the jalapenos, though. These guys have been ultra productive and delicious: super spicy and shiny and firm and perfect.

It's the best thing ever to go break off a jalapeno on a weekend morning to make a batch of migas. OH MAN.

The basil has been bolting practically since I put it in the ground, which isn't such a surprise when you consider that June was the hottest month of our summer. I've been pinching off blossoms for two full months, but now I'm starting to just let it go. Hey, why not get this corner of the bed self-seeded with fresh basil while also attracting pollinators? That sounds pretty good to me.

In the meantime, I've definitely been harvesting big handfuls of basil, chopping them up, and tossing them with homegrown tomato.

Of the two intentional tomatoes, I like Caspian Pink by far the best. It's a shade-tolerant heirloom pink medium-to-large beefsteak, and the flavor is just amazing: sweet and floral and fragrant. Boxcar Willie is good too, but it's a lot more ordinary-looking. If you picture the typical tomato, you'll get a Boxcar Willie: also an heirloom, but medium, round, and orangey-red. I like to cook with Boxcar Willie and eat Caspian Pink raw. The split works pretty well, but I think I may want to go for a serious paste Roma for cooking next year.

The volunteer tomatoes haven't yet produced any ripe fruit, but I'm not too concerned there. The Sungolds pretty much took over the yard last year, so it's good that they're getting dominated by bigger plants this time around. And Purple Cherokee is close enough to Caspian Pink in size and taste that I'll be fine if I only get a few late-season fruits there.

In the meantime, I get to go foraging for ripe and near-ripe heirlooms nearly every day. The plants are huge and viney, so the greens look dominant from afar, but if you explore you will find big clusters like this:

Do you have a garden? How's your harvest coming so far?

Meyer lemon limoncello

It's happening.

You guys know we have a meyer lemon tree in the backyard. Our next-door neighbors also have a standard lemon tree that overhangs our driveway, and they've urged us repeatedly to take as many as we like. So what I'm saying is: we have some lemons around.

So last week I grabbed ten lemons and set out to make some limoncello.

Limoncello is really easy to make. It mostly takes patience, which admittedly is not necessarily the easiest thing when you want to drink delightful lemon liqueur NOW. I find that it helps to bury your limoncello-in-process behind your other bottles of liqueur, or to tuck it into the highest cabinet in the house. That way it's easier to forget it's there and let it age appropriately.

Meyer lemon limoncello

10 unwaxed meyer lemons
1 quart 80 proof vodka
simple syrup

Zest your lemons, being careful not to include the bitter white pith. You don't need some fancy zester for this. I used my vegetable peeler, which is at least 25 years old, and it worked very well.

Put all your zest in a clean quart canning jar or other reasonable jar of your choice. You should have enough to fill the jar about halfway full, depending on the size of your lemons. Pour your vodka over your lemon zest, up to the top of the jar. Lid the jar and put it in a dark cabinet.

For the next week or two, steep your limoncello. I let mine steep for about ten days, but you can go longer or shorter if you prefer. Shake the jar every time you think about it--every few days will be fine.

When you're done steeping, strain out your peels. I find a canning funnel to be very helpful at this stage of the proceedings. Quart jar, canning funnel, strainer. You may need to strain your limoncello a second time, using a coffee filter, paper towel, or fine nylon sieve, to get out the tiniest bits of sediment.

Sweeten your limoncello to taste with simple syrup. I'd recommend starting with about 1/3 cup of syrup for a quart of liqueur, especially since meyer lemons are already so sweet. The act of adding sugar is what takes this from a schnapps (i.e. a basic infused vodka) to a liqueur, incidentally.

Now lid your jar, put it in the cupboard, and try to forget about it for at least a month or so. Give it some time to age. The more time you give it, the smoother and more delightful your limoncello will be.

When you're ready, drink your limoncello. It works well as a single aperitif or as the main ingredient in a really serious lemon drop. Obviously, limoncello is a drink made for summer, so try not to drink it all before it gets warm. Sweet refreshing lemon under the hot August sun? yes, please.

Simple syrup

1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Heat your sugar and water together on the stovetop, swirling the pan from time to time. When the sugar has dissolved completely, your syrup is done. Put it in a jar and let it cool completely (unlidded) before using.

You can keep simple syrup in the refrigerator for a good month or so. It's especially nice to have on hand when you want a classic sour, such as the Fitzgerald.

Last year's batch of limoncello was 100% standard lemons. This batch is 100% meyer. We have, of course, drunk the entire older batch already. So I may start a second standard lemon batch, and maybe even a mixed batch, so we can do a tasting and comparison in a few months. And maybe a couple more batches made with all the other citrus I can get my hands on...

How are you using the end-of-season citrus? Anyone else making liqueurs?

Plums: the boozening

So the other day I went outside to water the garden only to discover that a full branch of our plum tree had snapped under its burgeoning weight of almost-ripe fruit.

NOOOOOOOOOO

I immediately dragged a chair outside and started stripping all the plums off the dangling branch. When I was done, I came inside and counted them. 155.

What am I supposed to do with 155 plums?

Well, I immediately put twelve or fourteen of them in a quart jar and covered them with all the vodka in the house. One batch of plum schnapps done.

After a run to the store, I did it all again, except with bourbon. I decided to make a pint and taste it in a week or so, just in case I hate it. Experimentation for the win!

I already know ordinary vodka-based plum schnapps is great, so I wasn't worried about just going for the huge batch of that one. Actually, I probably should get another handle of vodka so I can start several more jars of it. Mental note.

Both schnapps and infused bourbon need awhile to steep, so complex flavors have a chance to develop.

Plum schnapps
Inspired by Danish Schnapps Recipes.

firm, ripe plums
vodka
a clean pin
a clean jar with a lid

Wash enough plums to fill up your jar of choice by about 2/3. Stab each individual plum all over with a pin, making sure to penetrate down to the pit. This will let the plum juice actually permeate your liquor.

Put all your plums in your jar. Pour in vodka to fill. Lid the jar and put it somewhere dark to age for 3-6 months. During the steeping period, shake the jar every few days, or whenever it occurs to you to do so.

After the 3 month mark, start tasting your schnapps. When the flavor is to your liking, strain out the plums and bottle the resulting schnapps. Keep in mind that you're going to have a young flavor at first, ok? The flavor will continue to develop as it ages.

Keep the finished schnapps in a dark cupboard and drink it at your leisure, either by itself (in which case, skål, yo) or in a cocktail of your choosing. I'm thinking it'll make a great vodka tonic, at the very least.

Plum-infused bourbon
Inspired by Boozed & Infused's prune bourbon & brandy.

firm, ripe plums
bourbon
a clean pin
a clean jar with a lid

Do the exact same thing as above, except using bourbon instead of vodka.

I'm not sure about infusion times for plums in bourbon. I don't think it will hurt to leave your plums in the bourbon for months, but I may want to pull mine out earlier. This is my first batch, so I'm not sure. However, tasting is always a good idea.

Hooray!

I mean, except for the broken branch. Otherwise, hooray.

Farmer's market fruit extravaganza

Breakfast time!

I had farmer's market strawberries and oatmeal with yogurt, chopped dried apricots, and a handful of random chopped almonds and cashews.

Snack time!

I had a bowl of farmer's market cherries and apricots.

Dinnertime!

I had farmer's market strawberries and a couple of quesadillas with refried beans, spinach, garlic-sauteed summer squash, and cheddar.

Dessert time!

Note to self: get more fruit next week, okay?

Mutant kiwi: hooray!

So here's what you get when you buy kiwi at the farmer's market in California.

DOUBLE KIWI.

In some cases you even get triple kiwi.

You know how stores select for the most nonthreatening, standardized, perfectly identical produce? This experience makes that even more obvious.

And why? I mean, yeah, it's probably because they don't nest well in standard shipping crates...but come on! Double and triple kiwi look extra gorgeous when you slice them up.

(Yes, I did just eat the equivalent of six kiwis. Why do you ask?)

Pineapple guava invasion

So. When we got home from vacation, guess what we found waiting for us?

A backyard full of pineapple guavas, also known as feijoas, that's what.

When we moved into our house, our landlord told us all about the gigantic tree that shades nearly our entire backyard. Apparently it's the largest pineapple guava tree in the state. You can eat its flowers if you want. When the fruit is ripe, it falls of its own volition. Also, since the tree is getting old, it's getting less productive.

Uh huh. If this is "less productive," I'm a little scared to ask just how many pineapple guavas he and the previous tenants ate.

I think I picked up about 50 to 75 pounds of guavas on the first day.

We ate a few out of hand. You eat a pineapple guava by cutting or ripping it in half, then scooping or sucking out the insides.

The inside of the fruit is quite a bit lighter than a regular pink-fleshed guava, but it's very juicy, with a jellylike texture in the middle and a grainy pear texture toward the skin (which is technically edible, but bitter). Pineapple guavas taste vaguely tropical, sort of like a more floral kiwi.

They're also super-fragrant. We literally could not keep this many of them in our house after a few days of increasingly cloying scent. An excellent argument for cleaning out the refrigerator, I guess.

So, what do you do with pineapple guavas? You make jam, for one thing. Well, that's great, but since we've previously established that John and I practically never eat jam, it doesn't seem like the best idea. You can evidently also make guava cheese, a solidified block of guava resembling quince paste, to eat with cheese and crackers or just on its own.

One of my friends suggested drying the guavas, which I will probably do later this week. This is definitely an occasion on which I wish I'd spent some time making an insect-proof outdoor dehydrator, so I could just cut them all up and leave them out in the sun for a few days. But since I don't have one, and the ants and slugs in our yard LOVE the small percentage of cracked or split guavas in the yard, sun-drying sounds like a recipe for infestation. Instead, I'm going to give it a shot in an ordinary (although really low) oven.

In the meantime, I turned to the easiest and quickest way of preserving the pineapple guavas: I made them into schnapps.

I can't say I found any pineapple guava schnapps recipes to follow, shockingly enough, so I just loosely modeled my process on the techniques at danish-schnapps-recipes.com. I washed and halved a bunch of pineapple guavas, filled quart jars to about 2/3 full, and then filled the remaining space in each with vodka. After agitating the jars every day for three days (during which the guavas turned a bizarre pickle color), I strained out the fruit through a regular strainer, then restrained through a fine-mesh nylon sieve to remove leftover particulates.

Voila! The resulting schnapps clearly needs some time to age, but that's no surprise.

Now all we have to do is figure out what to do with the remaining 200 to 300 pounds of guavas still on the tree...

End of summer

I really like good, dry rosé. This summer has been full of it.

Today the high is 70F, which seems really low until you remember this is northern California and the general high has therefore been hovering around 75-78F for the past four months.

I remember sweating profusely for the first two weeks in my unairconditioned Chicago high school every year. Then we would have a thunderstorm and the temps would suddenly drop twenty degrees. That crash doesn't happen here.

Now that we live in a neighborhood, we have a neighbor who is so nice as to bring us pints of her homegrown cherry tomatoes. Someone will definitely be getting some tomato sauce in return.

Our own tomatoes are still running completely nuts. They are 6 feet tall and very eager to send out massive extra branches in all directions when I'm not looking. I have been pinching off suckers like mad. We're out of stakes; I actually had to splice a few together to make them tall enough. And since we live in California, it's ok that only three or four of the copious tomatoes are actually approaching ripeness. It's going to be warm enough for them until October at least.

I'm still edging toward cool-weather food. I baked a lemon yogurt cake the other day. It was this cake, but with lemon instead of lime and wheat flour instead of all-purpose and labneh plus a little splash of water instead of yogurt. I baked it in a bundt pan and ate it plain, with a big mug of chai. Later I had another piece with apricot jam.

True to form, however, we have not been able to finish the whole cake.

Of course, I also still have a bottle of this rosé waiting in the cabinet, and our wine store has at least a good four or five more. The high next week is supposed to rebound up to 78. All our little café wineglasses are clustered in the cabinet, ready.

Figs, labneh, mint, pepper

It's September, and you know what that means: fig season.

I like to eat fresh figs raw, but that doesn't mean I always want them plain. Instead, I eat them with:

- pungent soft cheeses: chevre, brie (& I hate blue, but you could try it).
- mild white cheeses: mozzarella, cream, farmer's.
- black pepper & lots of it.
- fresh herbs: mint, basil, parsley, etc.
- thick, serious yogurt or labneh.
- honey (ours is meadowfoam).
- whatever other fruit is around: fig & peach salad, anyone?
- various lettuces, spinach, or arugula.
- toasted walnuts or pecans.

Today I cut open a handful of black mission figs, smeared them with labneh, and sprinkled them with chopped mint and black pepper. Best breakfast ever.

Lunchtime

Here's what I got at the farmer's market last weekend:

Here's what I ate for lunch immediately afterward:

So I'm pretty happy about that.

PS. Tomato seed collection continues apace.

Midsummer farmer's market

$25 got me:

- 1 dozen brown eggs
- loaf of bread
- bag of grape tomatoes
- bag of green beans
- 2 zucchini
- 1 cucumber
- 1 head celery (which I'm actually v. excited to use to make celery salt)
- 4 ordinary tomatoes
- 2 heirloom tomatoes
- 3 bell peppers
- 3 mildish hot peppers
- 1 red onion
- 2 yellow onions
- 1 head garlic
- 3 yellow pluots
- & 3 white nectarines.

6 pints of strawberries for $6

So when I went to the farmer's market I not only hauled home 5 pounds of tomatoes (not to mention a loaf of bread, 6 eggs, a bag of corn on the cob, two tomato plants, three bunches of greens, and an assortment of other odds and ends), but also half a flat of strawberries.

We ate one pint pretty immediately. Ok, actually more like two pints. Good so far. Now, what are we going to do with the rest?

The obvious answer here is "make jam." Well, there's a problem with that, and the problem is that we don't eat jam. I occasionally have apricot jam on my toast, but "occasionally" = "in spurts of two or three successive occasions, four months apart."

Next: wash, cut, and freeze them, so you can use them for smoothies et al at your leisure. Ok, but I don't really drink smoothies. I suppose I could make the berries into ice cream at some point in the future, but I've never been too into strawberry ice cream either.

Ok. What if I made a pie? What if I made two or three pies, or a couple cookie sheets' worth of hand pies? Then I could freeze those, and have fresh baked strawberry or mixed berry pie at my leisure. Granted, a lot of strawberry pies and tarts are best with fresh uncooked fruit, but this still seems like a pretty good idea so far.

What if I made a crumble with all the different bits of fruit scattered throughout the fridge? That could go in the freezer as easily as a pie, or it could be breakfast for the next week.

Or I could go the other direction, and turn them savory. Spinach salad with strawberries and poppyseed dressing is always a good plan. That's the only thing that comes to mind though. Do you guys have any other good savory ideas for strawberries?

In the meantime, I recommend this strategy: before you go anywhere, wash a couple handfuls of strawberries and stick them in a travel-friendly container. Throw this in your bag. Then, whenever you're hungry, don't go to the bagel shop or the drugstore; instead, bust out your excellent strawberries.

Tomato sass

Yesterday was totally food project day at our house.

My top stop at the farmer's market is the sort out bin: 65 cents a pound for a random assortment of supbar and overabundant vegetables. This weekend the bins were full of slightly bruised but intact tomatoes, so I filled a bag, dragged it all the way around the market, and then hauled my complete load of produce home. I think I may have to get a wagon or something in the future.

At home, we immediately started on the road to tomato sauce.

This stuff is designed for storage, so we kept it simple. This way we can use the resulting sauce for practically anything with no ill effect. I might even cut out the garlic in our next batch.

Basic tomato sauce

tomatoes (lots)
olive oil
yellow onion
garlic
salt

Essentially, we're going to skin the tomatoes, then stew them down with the onion and garlic.

To skin tomatoes, put a pot of water on to boil. Core your tomatoes and cut a shallow cross through their blossom ends. When the water is boiling, gently lower your tomatoes into the pan. We used a large pasta pot and pasta insert, so we could dip all our tomatoes simultaneously. Leave the tomatoes in the boiling water for approximately one minute before lifting them out. When the air hits the tomatoes, their skins should start to split; if this doesn't happen (i.e. if you used so many tomatoes at once that they made the water temperature drop dramatically), you may want to put them back in the water for another 30 seconds or so.

Drain your tomatoes and let them cool. Dump the water out--if you have a lot of tomato matter in your water, you may want to save it for stock--and put the pot back on the heat. Add a generous slug of olive oil, a chopped yellow onion or two, and a handful of whole peeled garlic cloves. The proportions here are entirely up to you. We had about five pounds of tomatoes, so two medium onions and eight garlic cloves were plenty. If you're using more tomatoes, you may want to use more onion and garlic. Or you may want to omit them entirely, and just stew your tomato with a little olive oil and salt. Whatever floats your boat is fine.

Let your onion and garlic cook down over medium heat until they're beginning to caramelize. Stir occasionally to make sure everything is getting cooked evenly.

When the onion and garlic have just developed some delicious brown edges, it's time to add the tomatoes. Pick up a tomato and peel off the skin with your hands, making sure to keep as much flesh as possible. It's best to do this over the pot so you catch all the delicious juice. If you like, you can squeeze the skinned tomato in your hand before you drop it into the pot; otherwise, it's fine to chuck it in whole. Repeat until you are out of tomatoes.

Salt the tomatoes, stir everything together, and bring the pot to a simmer. Put the lid on the pot, leaving a half-inch crack to let steam escape. Turn down the heat.

Now let everything stew together for at least a good hour, and probably more like two. Stir every once in a while, making sure to gloat appropriately.

When the volume of tomatoes has reduced by about half, consider whether you want to puree your sauce. This is totally a matter of preference; I could go either way. For this batch, we took the pan off the heat (important!) and tackled it with the stick blender. If you like more texture, feel free to leave the sauce chunky.

From here, you can either store the sauce or cook it down even further. The longer you cook, the thicker and more concentrated your sauce. I personally just like to cook my sauce down until it's not watery at all, so we let the pot simmer for another half hour or so.

When your sauce has reached ultimate consistency, it is done. Hooray! Now you can either use it immediately, as you would use any tomato sauce, or you can store it. I put mine in the freezer; canning is also an option, for those of you.

Results: a good five or six cups of homemade tomato sauce. We win cooking!

Making schnapps

So you know how we suddenly live in a house with a massive assortment of delicious things growing in its yard? Well, I went and got a bottle of vodka, and started making some of those delicious things into alcoholic delicious things.

I made all of these schnappses from the recipes at danish-schnapps-recipes.com. If you have never seen this site, go browse through all the things you can make! All you need is patience, vodka, and some sort of fruit, herb, or other plant.

First up: plum schnapps. Right now, ripe cherry plums are falling off our tree into our new backyard pretty constantly. It was way too hot to make jam (although I could certainly freeze a nice selection of fruit...), but not too hot to pierce twelve or fifteen plums all over with a pin, put them into jars, and cover them with vodka. Then I just put the jars into the cupboard and shut the door to let the contents age in the dark. That's all there is to it. Schnapps accomplished!

Plum schnapps reportedly has a 3-6 month aging period before you can strain it and drink it. I find this unfortunate simply because I have no idea how my first batch will turn out, and so I'm hesitant to make more right now. But if I wait, all the fresh plums will be gone! I may end up just making another batch anyway.

In the meantime, I also had a bunch of herbs running wild in the front yard. I made lemon balm schnapps and mint schnapps. The recipe is for peppermint, and our mint is spearmint, but I'm betting I still get a good result. Same deal: cover the herbs in vodka, let steep for a set amount of time, and strain.

Herbal schnappses seem to take a much shorter infusion time than fruit schnappses, so I'l be able to report back on these much sooner than the plum. I actually strained the lemon balm one already, since the recipe specified 48 hours; however, it could clearly use some aging time in the back of the cupboard before we do a final taste test. I'm probably going to let the spearmint steep for another week or so before I strain it (and yes, I am totally going to keep it in the Grey Poupon jar; why do you ask?).

In conclusion, schnapps is both easy and awesome. You guys should make some too, and then we can all have a schnapps tasting party on the internet. YES.

NEW HOUSE