Waste Not Want Not

Kevin and I started some parsnip wine the other night. It used 5 lbs of parsnips for one gallon! And barely used them. I thought we'd end up with a sloppy mess of parsnip mush that would go straight into the compost. But the recipe said boil until tender but not mushy and then remove the parsnips. So they were still very edible. ...So now we are up to our eyeballs in parsnip soup. Luckily we had a dinner guest last night to help us get through some. We have some more to eat this lunchtime but the rest has gone into the freezer. I am glad we were able to get maximum use of those parsnips.


The soup tasted really good. Very rich which is why it's usually served as a starter (but that's no way to get through it). I used this recipe as a guide and replaced the heavy cream with raw cashew cream a la Dana Shortt like I did here.

In other brewery news, we also started some wine made from Welch's grape juice, recipe here. And we are attempting to start some black currant wine using Ribena but the yeast just won't get started. We have also had a chance to taste mostly everything from our cellar. Everything has been very good. The clove wine was a hit over Christmas, a great liqueur type drink that I think should be a Christmas tradition. The pineapple wine was pretty good, quite pineapple-y and quite dry. Might make it again someday. And the dandelion wine was finally ready over Christmas and it was delicious, should definitely make that every Spring.


And here's a picture of the little piglet gobbling up his own little bowl of popcorn last night. He was so into eating it he didn't even flip the bowl over right away.

In the brewery: Clove Wine and Pineapple Wine

We did some bottling tonight. Bottled our clove wine and our pineapple orange juice wine that we started a few months ago. This meant we also got to taste them! The clove wine tasted like cloves but tasted better and not as weird as we had guessed. And the pineapple orange juice wine had a lot of pineapple taste but no orange taste. And it was weird because it wasn't sweet at all. Mostly though it really tasted like a white wine and it was pretty good. We just had a gallon of each and we did half of each sparkling and half flat. We will be drinking them soon.

Both of these are recipes from First Steps in Winemaking.

And Henry was keeping us company while we bottled and was being a bit moany. Until we put him in the bucket that is. He loved it in there and played happily for around 15 minutes.

Quince Wine

We started some quince wine yesterday. We decided to try this this year instead of quince jelly and luckily there was a recipe in our First Steps in Winemaking book. First we picked the quince from the bush in our backyard. Before we started we were planning on having enough for one gallon, hoping we might have enough for 2 gallons. It turned out we had enough for more than 10 gallons! That's over 200 quince! Luckily we decided to do 5 gallons because it was tough dealing with just that many. The rest are still in our garage, maybe we'll do something with them later. But after processing 100 quince, I am a bit sick of them right now.

In the brewery...

Kevin and I have been doing lots more brewing. Right now on the go we have raspberry and red currant wine using fruits from the garden (just one bottle because it uses a lot of berries!), a wine from pineapple and orange juice, clove and ginger wine, and in the big 5 gallon jug a ginger champagne. Of course we have to wait and wait and wait to try them.

We are drinking the cocoa vanilla stout and it is good but we are still hoping it will get better in another month or so. And we have tried some flat cider that we made and it was very good. So far we are fans of home brewing. And it lets us make use of our humungous laundry room, nowo laundry room/brewery.

Dandelion Wine!

Kevin and I have made some dandelion wine. And yesterday we got to try it! We picked the dandelions - 3 L of them I think - at the very end of April when they first sprung up in our local park. We added lemon and orange juice, raisins, sugar, special wine yeast and let it bubble away for a few weeks. We only got 4 1/2 bottles. So we drank the 1/2 bottle right away last night. And it was really good!!

We have the other four bottles doing a little more bubbling with balloons over the necks (acts as a cheap fermentation lock) and when the balloons stop inflating for good we will have to borrow or buy a corker. Then we leave them for 6 months. It might taste even better in 6 months!!! We had fun doing it and love the feeling that we did it all ourselves and it turned out so good that we think we might even go ahead and buy a corker. Next on the agenda is parsnip wine.