Saturday, September 26, 2009

I'm back...sort of

It's been a while... I'm re-evaluating my time and the way I spend it. Not sure what this means for this blog... I guess I am trying to decide why I do it and if it's a reason that justifies the time. On top of that, I don't really have much to say :-). I talk about my chickens, my garden, my kids and family, but I'm not certain it's of any interest to anyone other than my aunt.


For example: Here is a picture of our grapes. Not enough to make wine, but plenty to make homemade grape juice.
It might not look like much, but when you have to take the stems off of all of those grapes...well, it seems like the mountain of grapes don't get any smaller. Handy Man and I worked on these grapes for about 4 hours. Of course, we didn't even get started until 9 o'clock. PM!! Why do we always do that?! By the end of the night/morning, I was in a grape juice induced stupor. I think there was about 50 lbs.
Anyway, once I got the stems off about 8-10 lbs, Handy Man would cook them so that the juice was about to burst out of the grape skins. Then, he'd put the purple blob in a straining bag and allow the juice to drip into a bowl. Once he had squeezed all the juice out of the hot grapes, we'd ladle it into quart jars. We ended up with about 15 quarts of grape juice concentrate. We went ahead and canned the juice in a water bath. Now, we just pop open a jar and add about 2 cups of water... It's heavenly. The yummiest grape juice EVER!! You wouldn't necessarily need to add water, but it still tastes amazing and makes it last longer. Now, I can pretend to be a grownup and have a wine glass of grape juice while Handy Man has his evening glass of red wine...for his heart, of course.