the stink of fecundity

[ritaxis]

Okay. I have almost 10 gallons of plum must in primary fermentation. Translation: I have squished nearly 20 gallons of plums into broken, wet masses, and compacted them almost to 10 gallons, and I have set them to fermenting in big plastic buckets bought from restaurants for a dollar, with nutrients and yeast and sugar, and now my kitchen is full of vinegar flies. Along about now a day or two from now the kitchen will begin to smell of raw alcohol and decaying fruit. Just in time for the young man to return from New York.

I have three gallons of wine from last year in its last settling, with bentonite clay to draw off the sediment. Next weekend I bottle. Fifteen bottles, maybe? At least a dozen. Next year, more like two dozen.

I lost a couple of gallons of apple juice due to the Breaking Glass Syndrome -- if there's something glass in my house it will be broken. This time it wasn't by me, but I gloat not. Anyway, the apple tree will be full of huge ripe apples again in a couple of weeks, so we'll do the hard cider thing then.

I have dried six pounds of plums into a quart of yummy purple sweet-tart chip things. I am now doing the same thing with apples. Come Christmas, I will make fruitcakes with the dried fruit in them.

Yesterday we found out that we're not fond of Nagasaki-style saraudon, and that I am still inordinately fond of miso soup with soba (buckwheat noodles). Tonight I have tiny onions which I am going to cook very slowly in oil until they are tiny globes of goodness and then we will put them on to baked potatoes. And we will have long beans and we will have beast.

And then -- well, I'm dragging the kid to the practice competition even though she wants to go to bed at 8:30 -- she'll get in bed by 9:15, anyway. But she has to do something to prepare for the real competition Friday. Which is when Frank gets home, at the same time as she has to compete, so Ted will pick him up while Emma and I deal with Pleasanton.

The kids sounded very good when they debuted their new march tune for the band mommies Saturday night, especially considering they'd only been working on it for a few days and didn't know it very well.

Oh, and I wrote 52 words today.

"Some days are diamond, some days are stone . . ."

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Heh. Realtime livejournal threading. You should be in bed, ne?

So it's basically mead, but you stick in peaches to round it out, the way people do different grains in their beer or their whisky.

On Saturday night I was kind of babbling to one of the other band mommies at the end-of-band-camp potluck (you know how they talk about band camp in teenage sex comedies? this is not like that.). It turned out she and her husband used to teach brewing classes in the Parks and Rec program, and she not only knew what I was talking about but had advice! So very odd -- I thought Jehovah's Witnesses didn't drink fermented things -- maybe that's why they don't do that anymore.

A local winery makes different meads, that's why I thought I ought to know. I like it. But the main reason I make wine is to use up my own fruit.

[kiya]

Heh. Realtime livejournal threading. You should be in bed, ne?

Nah; I'm generally nocturnal. If I were in a state to be writing, this would be prime writing time. I'm probably going to bed soon, though; headachy in addition to emotionally weird.

So it's basically mead, but you stick in peaches to round it out, the way people do different grains in their beer or their whisky.

Pretty much, yeah. The term for mead-with-fruit-in as a generic is a melomel, but that's a terminology-geekery thing, I don't tend to use it in casual conversation because people don't tend to know what I mean. (Let alone the more specific terms, where you get into the names for mead made with specific fruits.)

I don't think there's a specific term for mead-with-peaches-in, though, so it would just be a 'peach melomel'. But who knows? There's a term for mead-with-chili-peppers-in, there could be a term for anything.

A local winery makes different meads, that's why I thought I ought to know. I like it. But the main reason I make wine is to use up my own fruit.

I am slowly working up to merely being an inept gardener. I may do better with actual land to grow on, someday.

I brew in part because I have the random experimenter nature (the grape-strawberry wine came out interestingly; I suspect it wants more aging) and also because mead is occasionally hard to come by, and interesting as a concept.