Happy Easter, Happy Passover, and mostly happy Spring! Life returns. Which is the perfect time to restart this blog.
Full disclosure, my New Year's resolution was to return to blogging, but well... that didn't happen.
I have no excuses... just explanations - this past year really sucked politically. And since it was so crazy it was all I could do to meet my obligations and then go home and pull the covers over my head. I have high hopes for this November though. Something's gotta give.
There is much to catch up on and report. Last year my blog came in very handy as a diary of things that have happened, including a "neighbor" who wanted to re-zone his property inappropriately. I was able to go back and document the baloney he had pulled on us. Super motivation to keep this little project up! But with what?
Well, the one idea I've wanted to do is post more of my recipes. This year at work I've started leaving historical recipes in my "out-of-office" reply email. I've had some very fun responses. The last one was Martha Washington's Metheglin recipe.
This is from Karen Hess' fabulous transcription. If you have any interest in historical cooking, this is a Must Purchase. The introduction and appendixes alone are worth the price. (It's still in print!)
I've wanted to make mead for a long time. We went to a mead tasting a few years ago at the Wyck house and I was converted. Mead is not just thick, super-sweet, syrupy alcohol, it can be light, bubbly, and pear tasting. Now that I have a surplus of honey, time to try this out. But looking online is a little intimidating. There is all this crap about chemistry and ph, and managing the yeast and blah blah blah. Finally last week I stumbled on a blog post that basically said, hey - people 400 years ago didn't know or monitor any of this stuff. They just put things together and watched what happened. That gave me courage. Onward Ho! and I have forged ahead.
A quart of honey is about 3lbs of honey. Yep - I've got that. I gathered the rest of the ingredients and got started.
The honey.
The water.
I forgot to take a picture of the three races (hands) of ginger. Not quite used to this blogging thing again I guess. The thing I remember is how good it smelled! Fresh peeled ginger. Hmmmmm.
Combined it all in my "vegetarian" pot and measured the liquid so I could be sure to boil away exactly 1/3.
5 1/8 inches or 13cm. Well, one third less of 5 1/8inches is 3 7/16inches. OR, one third less of 13cm is 8.7cm. Much easier. Stupid Imperial system.
When the liquid was reduced by 1/3, about and hour and 15 minutes later, I turned the heat off and allowed it to cool before adding the yeast along with a yeast nutrient the shop owner convinced me I needed. It was $1.50 so heck, why not?
While it was cooling I prepped my containers.
I've been buying my olive oil in bulk from the International Food and Spices shop in West Philly. And yes, I'll admit, I was sold on the bottles! ;)
Unfortunately the bottles don't stand up to much heat.
The first one I poured boiling water into burst at the base! Thank goodness I was holding it over the sink at the time.
I was a little concerned that I didn't have enough space after that, even though the label on the bottle states 101oz.
Hm. Yet there are 64oz in a gallon.
Somethin' don't add up here.
I didn't have much choice. I don't have anything else i can put the overflow into. I bottled as much as I could with a bit of ginger and we'll see what happens next!
Now I let it sit for three days and then I'm supposed to add the cinnamon, lemon and raisins.
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