Homemade wine tasting
I sampled our two and three year old rhubarb wine on Monday. And the 2006 greengage wine. All pretty good and as Danny said, “They taste just like wine.” But I reckoned that they need more time. As Daphne Moore writes in Discovering Country Winemaking, a wine that is unpalatable can often improve with keeping. Now I can see where she is coming from. I started winemaking with enormous enthusiasm and hope. I like wine. Always fancy a glass or two with supper. If we could make our own gluggable wine it would be brilliant. So I...
read moreDon’t miss the dandelions. Gilbert’s dandelion wine recipe
Have you ever tasted dandelion wine? Dandelions can be annoying in the garden. They’re a palaver to remove as their tap roots are thick and sturdy. But they are the key ingredient in an excellent homemade white table wine. Gilbert will sometimes pour a glass if you pop round on a summer’s evening. As long as you are on foot. The first time that I sampled his patent recipe, it slipped down like water from a clear cold stream. I accepted a second glass. After the third, I had to feel my way home. Two years ago I picked the dandelions...
read moreA fruit a month (AFAM) event. April 2008.
I had just finished my post for this evening – April flowers from the garden and was planning to drift upstairs to bed and the solace of clean sheets and a Min Pin or three, when Margot from Coffee & Vanilla invited me to the A Fruit a Month blogging event that she is hosting. Last day today. Blogging events are good news. They open up the blogging world, introduce people to new blogs and ideas and a whole lot more. It’s easy to slip into the rut of writing a post, chatting to virtual friends and rarely leaving home. I...
read moreFarmer’s marrow rum recipe update
Marrows were half price in the supermarket last weekend. I hovered by the stand, wickedly tempted. It wasn’t the prospect of stuffed marrow that had this magic effect. We have completed stage one of our marrow rum experiment. It has finally been transferred to a demi john and is now skulking in the airing cupboard. It smells delicious, just like rum. Suddenly I joined those triumphant Neanderthals who discovered they had inadvertently made something delicious. When I appeared in The Rat Room with a very long plastic bucket and a marrow...
read moreChilli Sherry revisited
When I was ten I was given my first glass of sherry. My mother and stepfather threw a drinks party. “As you are now ten, you can come to the party,” my mother announced with a twinkle. She must have seen my apprehension and added brightly. “You can wear your best dress.” This dress was dark blue velvet with a lace collar and cuffs. Worn so rarely, it never lost its starchiness. The run up to the party was intense because my parents had never thrown a drinks party together. They decided to serve the drinks from a small...
read moreSuperb sloe vodka recipe
We have found that most fruit recipes work equally well with gin or vodka. With a few exceptions. Raspberry gin is sublime and dessert gooseberry vodka is to kill for. Their cousins, Raspberry vodka and dessert gooseberry gin are companiable and gluggable but not the super stars of the cocktail cabinet. We traditionally always make sloe gin. Lots of it. This year I has so many sloes that I decided to give sloe vodka a whirl. A litre of vodka made two 750ml bottles of grog. One for the cellar and one for testing and tasting. I need to clear a...
read moreFarmer’s marrow rum recipe
I have discovered that stored in a cool location, marrows keep for weeks. Our marrowhas waited to be turned into something delicious since mid September. It had gradually changed in colour from dark green to a paler green with small dashes of orange. It was time to give it the Cinderella treatment. When Lindsey emailed me with a recipe for marrow rum that she had found in a 1954 cookbook. I could see a great future for our companion vegetable. Lindsey had tried to leave the recipe as a comment on the site and I discovered a few days later that...
read moreJosé Antonio Garcia’s recommended recipe for Pacharan
José Antonio ventured onto the site a couple of weeks go. He had been picking sloes in Spain, was planning to make Pacharan and wanted to find the English name of the fruit. Sloes. Having read our post The Great Sloe Gin Challenge – Three variations of our sloe gin recipe he decided to make sloe gin but he left the recipe for Pacharan in the comments section. This is a drink from Navarra, a northern Spanish province. It’s a liqueur that combines sloes and Anisette. This comment has haunted me: .My own first “grown up”...
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