Summer in a bottle

"The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."

Ever since I was assigned to read Fahrenheit 451 (I think it was in middle school) I have been a Ray Bradbury fan. His prose is brilliant, and he's got great old school sci-fi style.

My favorite of his books, though, has always been Dandelion Wine. Because when summer started and I had warm and sunny afternoons all to myself, Dandelion Wine congealed all my thoughts about summer into one book. Central to the book was the dandelion wine of course, and thus  I was forever intrigued about what dandelion wine would be like....

"The medicines of another time, the balm of sun and idle August afternoons, the faintly heard sounds of ice wagons passing on brick avenues, the rush of silver skyrockets and the fountaining of lawn mowers moving through ant countries, all these, all these in a glass."

"Peer through it at the wintry day--the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind And peering through, color sky from iron to blue."

This was something that Mr. Bradbury seems to have loved deeply. My grandfather, who grew up in Montrose, Colorado, also had fond memories of family members making dandelion wine. It was something that made me nostalgic and for which the thought of it made me feel comforted, though I had never tried it.

I had just come back from Peru in February 2012. When April hit, the dandelions started to pop up all over the fields behind my parent's house where I was residing while still unemployed. One lovely evening while the sky was still pink with the sunset I went out with a shopping bag and spent an hour collecting dandelion heads, procuring two quarts of the lovely aureate blooms.

There were manifold permutations of recipes for the wine on the internet. I consulted many sites, the two of which that stood out as most detailed in the wine-making process were these: Jack Keller's Winemaking Home Page and Mother Earth News. Though I followed neither recipe, really, they were great guidelines.

I liked best the idea of using citrus and dried golden-colored fruits, and I think #17 on Jack Keller's page came closest to the ingredients I used. Now, I had never made wine before, and I had none of the winemaking equipment that the recipes required. So I made things up as I went along, seeing as I had neither the money nor space to meet traditional winemaking standards.

But a year and a half later, when I've uncorked my first bottle of wine, it turned out better than I could have ever imagined. I expected something like a cross between moonshine and dandelion tea, but what I made became more like a lovely champagne; it was a bit dry, had a lovely pale yellow color and a complex tart but faintly sweet taste. It uncorked like champagne too--the bubbles were incredible and quickly threatened to overflow when I poured my glass!

So, I wanted to share my winemaking success, and get the point across that while more convenient and refined, carboys and bottling equipment aren't always necessary to making a good wine, All you need is flavorings, sugar, yeast, bottles, and patience.

Dandelion Wine

Ingredients:

-2 quarts dandelion heads (just the yellow flower and the green back to the flower, no stems)

-1 c. dried apricots

-1 c. golden raisins

-The juice and zest of 3 oranges

-3 lbs sugar

-1 gallon water

-1 tube fresh champagne yeast (you can find this at your local brew shop)

Directions:

Bring water, apricots, raisins, orange juice and zest, and sugar to a boil. Place washed dandelion heads in a large bowl, and pour boiled mixture over them. Cover with cloth, and let sit for 1 week. Strain the mixture through several layers of cheesecloth or an old T-shirt, add the champagne yeast, and pour into sanitized bottles (preferably Grolsch bottles, since they're built to withstand pressure and you need that. I had a weaker tequila bottle I was using explode! The Grolsch ones did great, and were safer), and cork the bottles. Store in a cool, dark place (such as a basement) for two months.

After 2 months, uncork the bottles, and pour the top portion of the wine from each bottle into a large bowl (here, you are trying to get rid of the sediment that forms at the bottom of each bottle). Add 1 c. sugar to the wine, and pour into sanitized bottles. Cork the bottles, and store in a cool, dark place again for at least 6 months to 2 years. Mine was drinkable at 6 months, but tasted great after 1 year. Before drinking, put the still corked bottles in the fridge until thoroughly chilled. Uncork (watch out, it's like champagne and comes with a lot of carbonation), and celebrate summer!

Umezing! 手作り梅酒

My host mother in Japan used to keep a jar under the sink. It was full of viscous liquid and little green balls, so I never touched it. Who knows what could have developed under that sink.

One night at dinner, she hauled the jar out from under the sink, and unloaded it into ice-filled glasses for my friends and I.

So I, who will try anything, ventured a sip. 

Lord, was it delicious. A tiny bit sour, syrupy, tangy, and alcohol...y

It was homemade Umeshu, a liqueur made from Japanese sour plums (they're kinda like crab apples), rock sugar (kouri-zatou 氷砂糖, or ice sugar in Japanese), and shochu (Japanese vodka).

Ess gesunt! Pastrami!

My parents bought half a cow, and when they were asked whether or not they wanted the tongue, they said "Sure, we'll give it to our daughter".

 I have never eaten tongue in my life, nor have I expressed a desire to do so. But of course if I am given a raw food material and told that it is mine, that is essentially, a challenge. And I decided, as I had heard of this in New York but had never tried it, that I would make tongue pastrami.

 Reuben sandwiches are one of those pleasures that are very infrequent in my life, they're up there with boneless buffalo wings and good Japanese noodles. There are only so many restaurants that do reubens right, and I have not found one in Denver. Plus, I'm one of those freaks that usually doesn't eat meat, so that complicates things more.

 I didn't use any particular recipe for this, just read a lot of food blogs and instructional tips. By the end when I was ready to smoke the sucker I had serious doubts that this would turn out well, since I had never smoked a thing in my life, much less used a charcoal grill.

 But...OH MY GOD it was delicious. If you want to achieve happiness, follow the recipe below:

You'd remember drinking horchata

I don't know about you, but if I hear "horchata", I think Vampire Weekend. Click this to dig it.

TIP = horchata is pronounced "or·CHA·ta"


Recently, I became inspired to make horchata.

Nutty

This is one of the things about living in a different country than the United States: you crave peanut butter, but you can't buy it.

So I did what was necessary.

Unfortunately, I have heard about blenders breaking while trying to make peanut butter, so my blender was not an option. Neither was my nonexistent food processor or electric grinder. There was only one option left...




...el Molino

Homemade yogurt and cream cheese

Thank you to alpharubicon.com for the recipe!

Where I live in the Middle of Nowhere, Peru there is no cream cheese. Not only that, there is no real yogurt. We have yogurt, but it is drinkable, flavored, heavily sweetened, and makes me want to throw up.

So I decided to take this situation into my own hands. One inspired day, I began my very own homemade cream cheese. Here it is!

¡NOTES!:
-I washed all of these things in boiling water, then to be safe, I rinsed it in a bleach-water solution. You don't want icky nastiness growing all over your cream cheese.
-ALSO--I I had raw milk to use but if you don't if you can get lightly pasteurized milk it's better than supermarket milk. You could try this with ultra-pasteurized milk, but I'm not sure how it'd turn out. If you use raw milk, besides the first step, boil it and let it cool before using it.
-This makes about 1 to 1.5 cups cream cheese.
-ONE LAST THING: this recipe will take 3 days to make. There's little labour involved, just a lot of waiting.


DIRECTIONS:
1. Begin with 1 cup fresh 2% milk. Let this cup sit, covered, at room temperature for 24 hours. If you use raw milk, don't boil this.

2. After 24 hours, boil 2 more cups milk, then let cool until you can stick your finger in it, but it's still warm. Pour this into the cup from yesterday, cover, and set aside for another 24 hours.

3. After another 24 hours, boil 2 liters of milk and let this sit until warm. Add it to the milk mixture from the last 2 days, and let sit, covered, for a final 24 hours.

4. The next day, boil some water and put it in a large pot that your bowl with the milk mixture will fit into without touching the boiling water. Put the bowl on top, and let sit for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice. Then put your almost-yogurt it in a cheesecloth-lined colander (I just used a clean T-shirt for this), put this over another bowl to catch the drippings, and wait.

...Or at least that's what I did. To get cream cheese this way, it takes 6 hours of sitting and draining. Or, if you tie your cheesecloth/bag/T-shirt and hang it over a bowl, you'll cut this time down to about an hour and a half. This is much better, right? But if you're just making yogurt, the way I just described with a colander is better to get your desired thickness.

Here's where you decide what to do with this mixture, you can either:
a. wait for 1 hour and have yogurt.
b. wait for 2 hours and have Greek yogurt.
c. string up the bag, and have sour cream in an hour, and cream cheese in an hour & a half to 2 hours.


If you're impatient like me, you chose to have some yogurt while you were waiting for cream cheese :) Or you could just divide your mixture into yogurt and cream cheese.

Here you can see the progression, I took a photo every hour for the 1st 4, then the last is the cream cheese. After hour 4 the loss of water was minimal, but by these pictures you can see how much liquid really comes out!

Homemade tofu without all that fancy Japanese stuff

Yes, I made tofu in Perú.

It just so happened that one of the local shops was selling soy beans, so I picked some of those suckers up.

Of course, I had no fancy Japanese tofu molds or imported nigari (coagulant) or cheesecloth. So all of the following should be what you can do from your own home-sweet-home without ordering anything from the internet.

My recipe uses a T-shirt (for straining), a plastic colander & tupperware container with holes poked in it (molds), and plain-old white vinegar. Suuuuper cheap. The whole process takes about 2 hours, so if I was in the US I probably wouldn't go through the trouble. But seeing as there is no tofu here in the farmlands of Perú, it'll be worth it once & a while I think. Pardon the pictures, they were taken at night with an old camera :/



First we'll make soymilk, mmm. Warning: this does not taste like Silk unless you water it down and add lots of vanilla and sugar.

STEP 1:

Wash and pick through 500g. soy beans (a little over a pound), and leave them to soak 8 hours or overnight (change the water a couple times).

STEP 2:

Put 16 cups of water on to boil. I used a huge industrial pot for this, you may need to use 2 different pots.

STEP 3:



Discard the soaking liquid from the beans, and put a couple of cupfuls at a time in a blender, filling to a little above the beans with water (just so that the blender can work well). Blend a few minutes until nearly smooth. It turns into a really thick goo. Do this until all your beans are blended. Pour this mixture into the boiling water and turn it to medium heat. Stir this mixture constantly for about 20 minutes. The foam is normal, so if it starts to boil over remove briefly from the heat or sprinkle a little cold water over the top. But stirring constantly should help.



STEP 4:


Turn off the heat and strain. I used an old T-shirt to strain the soymilk into a large bowl. Make sure all the liquid is strained, then put the solids (okari) into a separate bowl. I like to eat this with ginger and soy sauce, it's super good for you.





STEP 5:



Put the soymilk back into your pot, and turn it onto medium-low heat. Sprinkle about a tablespoon of white vinegar over the top, stir, and wait a few minutes. Repeat this process until your curds have separated from the yellowish & watery whey. I wasn't measuring the vinegar, but I'm going to guesstimate that I used about a quarter of a cup of vinegar. Let the curds & whey sit for 15-20 minutes.

STEP 6:

Line the colander with your T-shirt, put it in a container to catch the whey, then pour the contents of your pot into the colander. Squeeze the excess whey from the shirt and twist the shirt so that most of the excess liquid comes off from the curds. Discard the liquid.

STEP 7:



Put your colander with curds inside of another bowl (one that fits so the bottoms don't touch--you want the water to drip away from the tofu). On top of your curds, put a fitting lid or plate, then put a bowl filled with the okari or water on top of THAT as a weight. Let sit for 10-30 minutes, depending on how soft you want your tofu.

STEP 8:

EAT YOUR DELICIOUS TOFU! It's lovely just plain with soy sauce on top. It stays for a few days, and if you don't eat it immediately put it in water and keep it in the refrigerator.

My recent creations...

The lemon spaghetti with goat cheese on top that I sacrificed part of the tip of my finger to create. I feel I should take cooking safety lessons...




My Easter bunny. After I made walnut milk, I used the walnut grounds to make homemade marzipan, shaped the bunny, then dried him in the oven. To quote cooking god Alton Brown, "Awww, he's cute"


Homemade hummus, homemade tzaziki, homemade bread, lettuce (not homemade, though I'm sure in the future we'll be able to gene splice our own lettuce in our very own kitchen!). NEVER AGAIN will buy Costco hummus because this took two seconds of manual labor. TWO. Count them. Costco hummus takes two seconds to put in your shopping cart. Choose your destiny padawan.



Nicaraguan food--fried plantains, gallo pinto, and beets...plus THE GREEN!! (salsa verde, one of the more addicting combinations of water, sugar, and vegetable flavorings)