Probably Random

Racking the wine

Today I racked 3 batches of wine; Dandelion, Marrow (rum) and Elderflower.

The Elderflower tasted like it might be quite good, The Marrow Rum has got a long way to go (okay so far it’s pretty awful) but is starting to clear now and the dandelion…. well, it’s not going well.  What I don’t understand is that I made two batches of the dandelion wine at the same time this one (Batch A) just won’t clear (Batch B got bottled a while back and is still looking good, I’m waiting at least another month before I try it though.), I even resorted to using some finings in it which so far doesn’t seem to have done very much (yet, we’ll see in a week or so!).

Marrow Rum

We have had a bit of a glut of Marrows (or overly large courgettes at least) and we needed something to do with them all, so we’re trying out anything we can! We’ve done one batch of Chutney and there’s another being planned too, but this recipe stood out to be tried!

Marrow Rum! now one book I have says don’t bother with this it never works, another says, you must try it, but it needs a long time to age. I also checked out the Internet a bit and mostly came up with the same recipe.

Get large marrow, hollow out, fill with demerara sugar, squeeze in the juices of an orange then add activated yeast. leave hanging in a muslin bag for 3 weeks with the tops sellotaped back on. Decant juices to a fermentation jar and ferment for a while longer, then rack and bottle and leave for ages to mature.

The only alternative I’ve seen says to pack the marrow with sugar but no yeast, then after 3 weeks pour the resulting liquid into a fermentation jar and start the fermenting then.

I followed the top recipe but I used 3 large courgette things rather than a massive marrow and they are now sat in a bucket covered with a couple of tea towels, so I’m hoping this doesn’t collapse!

We’ll let you know how it goes but this one does say to leave for a while!

Bottling Dandelion – Batch B

One of our jars of Dandelion wine has finally cleared!

So we bottled that up (5 bottles of wine) and racked the still cloudy batch into a new fermentation jar, and topped that up with the clear wine.

Problem is…. it doesn’t taste too good!
It’s still very sweet, so I’m not sure if it should ferment more? It has a sort of desert wine sweetness but not the same thickness as that. I guess if it stays sweet then we can make deserts with it…. it is supposed to get better with age, and not be drunk until December so it still has a chance!
Lets just hope the ones I’ve bottled don’t ferment any more!

Initially it looked a little cloudy in the new bottles but it think that was just some sediment that got stirred up when i was siphoning and that seems to have cleared out now, but the other jar (Batch A) doesn’t appear to be clearing.

Batch 1 – Pickle

We’ve been getting loads of courgette’s and marrows (overgrown courgettes) and we needed to do something with the glut that would last us for a while.

So after perusing a few recipes and seeing what we had in the garden and cupboards we made…. Batch 1 of Marrow and Ginger pickle. (I’m not sure what the difference is to me pickle is anything pickled and this is full of vinegar… so that’s close, and a chutney is smooth more like a jam, ours is lumpy… so this is probably a pickle?).
I’ve said exactly what we used, feel free to change it, this is just what we had in the cupboard!

900g Marrow (overgrown courgette)
900g Tomatoes (a mix of ripe and unripe)
500g Apples (Royal Gala)
500g onion
200g Dark Muscavado Suagr
300g Demerera Suagr
475ml White Wine Vinegar
125ml Red Wine Vinegar
500g Sultanas
Thumb sized chunk of Ginger
1/2 tsp chili power (not sure if this is ground chillies or if its a mix…)

A bag of spices (all these tied up in a piece of cheese cloth).
1 tsp coriander seeds
2 tsp black pepper corns
1 tsp cloves

What we did:
Put a large pan on a low heat with a bit of butter or oil
peel and slice the onions and put in the pan and stir.
Drop the tomatoes in boiling water, drain and peel (do a few at a time) (we used cherry tomatoes as it’s what we had available, we started peeling them but then gave up and picked the skins out later on while it was simmering), put them in the pan and stir (we turned it up a bit now too).
Chop the marrow into chunks about 1cm square(ish we had so larger ones, if it’s to put in sandwiches then maybe cut it a bit finer), put it in the pan and stir.
Peel and core the apples, chop into chunks and drop in the pan and stir.
Put in the sugar and the vinegar and give it another good stir.
Peel and chop the ginger into small chunks (ours were half cm squares or smaller) drop that in the pan, add the bag of spice and stir again.
Bring it all to a good simmer and let it simmer for a good couple of hours or so.
Stir it frequently and when it’s dried a bit so when you draw a spoon through it the mixture is thick and you can see the bottom of the pan then it’s ready to bottle (in your pre-sterilised jars).

At this stirring stage we went and watched TV and popped out in the adverts to give it a stir…. then we switched over to the BBC and forgot to pop out and stir it! so ours burnt to the bottom of the pan.
To rescue this we poured the contents into another pan, but didn’t try and stir or scrape any of the contents out, just took what came easily.
We have put that into our jars and is sitting in a cool dark cupboard for a few weeks before we give it a try.
Some people say to leave it for at least a couple of weeks, some say a couple of months! we’ll let you know how ours goes… probably slightly caramelised but hopefully not too bad!

Broad Beans and Bacon

A really easy Broad Bean recipie which I just had for tea!
Our beans are quite large now and really need eating up, so I went out and picked a fair few and made this. (I cooked my bacon yesterday, I just cooked the whole pack, knowing that I’d eat it at some point over the weekend.)

For me I did:
Broad beans (I did about half a cereal bowl of beans, it was about two big handfuls of pods)
Boiling
Bacon (cooked)
Olive oil
Mint
Chives

This is how I actually did it!
Picked the beans and podded them into a bowl, poured over water (just boiled the kettle whilst podding). thought oh mint would be nice and popped outside to find some, ripped it up and stirred it in.
Left the beans in the minty water for a couple of minutes then drained it all and put it in a bowl, with a pair of scissors cut chives over the top, the put some oil on, then with the same scissors cut up the bacon over the top.
Stir again, eat… tasty

My big worry was that the beans were so varied in size that some might not be ‘cooked’ but as they were all really fresh it didn’t really seem to matter.