urbandryad

So far:

Apple sauce, 2 slow cookers of apples on low 12 hours, run through chinois, sugar added to taste (2.5 cups per pot, the pot makes roughly 3.5L)

One each of four kinds of vanilla applesauce, with 2 beans per slow cooker cut up and put in with the raw apples: tahitensis bourbon cure, madagascar boubon cure, madagascar mexican curem ugandan bourbon cure. 500ml jars, 20 min water bath.

Two caramel applesauce: boil sugar until dark brown, let cool slightly, add water to make a syrup, put into slow cooker with apples, finish as above. Roughly 1 cup of caramelized sugar per liter of finished sauce.

Two apple jams:

lime apple marmalade (chop a potful of apples with peel, chop 5 limes with peel, combine with 6-7 cups sugar, let sit so sugar draws the juice out until it's covered in liquid, simmer until it starts to gel, water bath.

saskatoon apple jam: chop whole apples and saskatoons (6 cups total maybe) and cover with 4 cups sugar. Let sit until sugar has drawn juices out and they're sitting in liquid. Simmer until soft. Put through chinois. Simmer until gels. water bath.

Dilly beans:

4 cups vinegar, 4 cups water, salt to taste. Boil to make brine.

Fill jars with 1 head of dill, 1 clove of garlic, 2 peppercorns, a sliver of horseradish, a hot pepper, and green beans (can blanch first). Maybe dill or celery seeds. Pour boiling brine over. Water bath.

Last night I lit the woodstove and harvested the turnips because the piglets had got into the garden.

This morning: turnip pickles. Matchstick-sliced turnips with a couple beets in slices 3.3kg. Water 3L. Vinegar 2L. Salt 3%. In the fermenting crock for 7 days (this is the plan), then into jars and either pasteurize or water bath.

I'm also boiling down 40lbs of tomatoes into sauce with a couple jalapenos thrown in, and I'll be setting another jar of jalapenos to ferment and making apple sauce (the apple sauce I'm going to experiment with a chinois since the apples are small and I don't like peeling/coring).

These are boring apples so I'm going to try adding grapes or plums to some of the apple sauce to flavour it.

Edit to add: put some celery, carrot, bay leaf, basil, oregano, and smoked paprika in the tomatoes to make a tomato sauce. Currently pressure-canning that.

Sooo... since kousa dogwood was ready and I knew a very large patch of it, and since I found many mentions of a kousa wine online but no actual recipes, I seem to be diving into winemaking feet-first without a detailed roadmap.

Kousa Wine
Because there was no kousa wine recipe I am going off the strong/dessert version of http://www.eckraus.com/wine-making-strawberry because I like sweet things and because most accounts of people making the wine say they wish they had added more fruit etc.

So far I've picked... an amount of kousa that I think is just shy of 25 lbs. Rinsed, mashed with a potato masher, put in the sterilized bucket with 1/4 tsp sodium bisulfite and pectic enzymes as described, covered with a little water to the 15L mark. It's sitting now. I got 100% distracted in the wine supply store (they are getting in sweet mead yeast on Friday! I am getting some!) so forgot to get something to test the acid level, so that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Took just less than 3 hours to pick the kousa, mostly from the BC Hydro complex by Edmonds Station but some from by my home.

My shoulders are totally destroyed. The kousa branches had to be bent down, held with the hand holding the heavy bag full of fruit while I picked with the other hand. There's a bit of a twist/flick I needed to get the stems off, so the picking hand couldn't hold anything else.

Lots of people came by as I was picking once it stopped raining, all universally pleasant and curious about what I was doing. A couple people tasted the fruit, everyone was approving, many were happy to learn, even the security guard was excited rather than disapproving. One dude who was walking by on his cell didn't approach me, but stared awhile then looked at the berries on a tree nearby, but everyone else said hi, and it was awesome. I used the term 'kousa dogwood' whenever anyone asked me what I was picking, since it seemed easiest for someone to look up later.

It seems like either kousa is, like most trees, a little bit of an alternate-bearer (heavy one year, light the next) or else the dry summer took a bit of a toll on the berries. Both might be the case. I remember last year the trees at BC Hydro were just loaded with fruit. The picking was scarcer this year, but luckily the landscape architect had done 3 blocks of the same repeating pattern of dogwoods, so there were lots to visit.

Next time I should bring a ladder.

I remember how much I love picking undomesticated fruit. It's just more fun, with so much less uniformity from tree to tree and even branch to branch or fruit to fruit. You really have to pay attention. The fruit tastes so different from tree to tree too; so neat. So sad that diversity's been bred out; variety really is a pretty awesome spice.