Summer Projects

Have I mentioned how much happier I am since moving to Oly? I am so happy that I've even begun to get back to my old ways of having little (food-related) projects going on! In fact I've got three different projects going right now! Woohoo! I feel good.

There's the sweater of course, that's one. Knitting is always a good project and the best thing about it is that you can put it down and totally ignore it for a while. I have to admit that I'm not making the headway on my sweater that I should be. Part of the problem (if you can call it that) is that the weather is finally starting to behave! We're getting more sun and more warmth and I loooooove it! For a little while there I was thinking we wouldn't get a summer AT ALL. It's not that summer is my favorite season, autumn is, but how can you enjoy the cool crispness of autumn when you haven't had the sun and heat of summer? It would be impossible. Everything in season.

Then there's the beer. Nico and I stumbled through our first batch of home-brewed beer; a stout. It's bottle aging right now, and in another week we'll take the first taste, but I'm betting it will need longer than just 2 weeks in the bottle. I'm sort of itching to begin a new batch tomorrow, if I make it down to the brew shop to buy ingredients. I've found a bunch of good-looking (extract) stout recipes online, and they all use at least twice the DME our kit came with, so now I'm convinced I need to immediately begin a heftier stout. I can't stand the thought of doing it wrong, you see.

And my third project is that I am back to growing chile peppers! Yayyy! I've got 4 generic types in the ground outside, and then another 4 in pots - 2 jalapeno and 2 cayenne. They've started to make progress since the weather's gotten sunnier.



As you can see, they've still got a ways to go and we're already pretty late into the growing season, but these two at least have begun to flower, and I'm hoping the worm tea will help them make up for lost time.

Worm tea?

Yes, worm tea. This morning my upstairs neighbor gave me some extra worm tea since he noticed I've been growing plants. Imagine - vermiculture in an upstairs apartment! That's pretty hard-core. I've never used the stuff before, but I've heard all about how it's the super-magic-grow-formula for your plants, so how could I resist? The guy also told me that he's trying to drum up support for a community garden to be added to the new city park being built down the street, so I promised him I'd whip up a little letter about that.

Other than that, I've got a couple awesome dinners planned for the weekend. Right now I've got chicken strips marinating and later we'll skewer and grill them, serve them with some fancy-pants rice I'm going to make and some mango salsa. Maybe some sliced avocado and some salad greens too. And margaritas, since it's finally margarita weather. Tomorrow we're going to marinate some skirt steak, which Nico will grill and chop up to make a burrito bar. Yum! I wish we could eat like that every night.

And meanwhile, the books are biding their time.

Our First Cordial

cor-dial -noun
a strong, sweetened, aromatic alcoholic liquor; liqueur.

Last November Nico and I started our first cordial. We went to a cordial-making class that some sca people were having in Olympia and were told that we could use any clear liquor as our base. We used vodka, figuring that it was generic enough and probably wouldn't taste too badly, even though neither of us are really all that into vodka. And to flavor it we decided to use pomegranate and orange.

So the seeds of four pomegranates and the flesh and zest of two oranges went into the jug, followed by one regular and one smaller-sized bottle of Stoli. Cap on tight, shake shake shake, and wait. The vodka began to take on the pomegranates' color almost right away and deepened over time to a beautiful dark red. We let it steep for about 2 months, giving the jug a good hard shake just about every day.

After two months Nico did the hard part of straining out the by now extremely unappetizing pomegranate seeds and orange bits. All in all he strained it 6 times with butter muslin folded over again and again. Then it sat for another two weeks, and during that time quite a bit of sediment settled on the bottom of the jug.

Today I poured the cordial into a pot and threw out the sediment. I put the cordial over low heat and added about a cup of sugar. I kept stirring and as soon as the sugar was dissolved I took it off the heat and poured it into a clean jug.

Here's what it looks like now:



The flavor is pretty good; Nico claims he can taste the pomegranate and the orange separately but to me it just tastes bright and sweet. It's smooth and waaaaay better than plain vodka. I think we did well. I wish it was a little deeper red, though.

Next we might try just a straight-on orange cordial, sweetened with honey. I think that would be good to start now while citrus is still in season. Yum.