Tag: grape juice

Nothing gold can . . . ape. 

Happy Friday! Here’s what we had this week: 

SATURDAY
Rotisserie chicken, salad, bread

Saturday I did the shopping and got started late, so I decided I would splurge on rotisserie chicken so I could relax and have an easy meal afterward. Got home, started unloading the groceries, realized it’s hard to have a relaxing chicken experience withouten any chicken. 

So I went out again in great sadness and bought some chicken, but! they had just put out some freshly baked baguettes, still warm! So it all worked out. 

I got a couple of those caesar salad kits from Aldi, and it was a very pleasant little meal, and yes, easy. 

Saturday night, I made a batch of streusel using the King Arthur Flour recipe, which is only just barely a recipe. You mix boxed cake mix with melted butter, scrunch it into streusel lumps, and bake it until it’s a little bit crunchy. 

Turned out great. I know basic streusel is super easy, but I have mixed success with it anyway, and this method has pretty great possibilities, considering you could use any flavor of cake mix. You can freeze it and have it ready to sprinkle on muffins or cakes or ice cream or cheesecake or whatever. Mein gootness. 

SUNDAY
Bacon cheeseburgers, chips

Sunday after Mass, I picked the very last of the peaches. 

I don’t know why Corrie stood on a chair to take this picture, but I cannot argue with the flattering angle! Makes me realize that when Damien says I look good, he probably really means it, because this is essentially his viewpoint. I’m all boobs and eyes from up there. And sometimes peaches. 

We had freshly ground beef and bacon from Sally Wilkin’s homestead, and I thought that much tastiness deserved to stay together. So Damien fried up the bacon and made burgers on the grill, and OH IT WAS GOOD. 

Bad picture, but there’s a reason people pay more for local meat. Mmmm. 

I cut up the peaches and left the skins on this time, which was so much faster and easier than blanching and peeling them. I basically followed the peach part of the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, but since I wasn’t using a streusel with cinnamon in it, I put some into the filling. 

Lovely, lovely.

I had meant to serve this with ice cream, but forgot to put the bowl in the freezer, so I just whipped up the heavy cream instead, with a little sugar and vanilla. 

Fabulous. So meltingly sweet and creamy and lovely. 

Corrie said there was a frost when she woke up, so that means it was time to pick the grapes! There wasn’t a huge harvest this year. There were plenty of grapes, but they weren’t very big, and they were especially tart this year (even for Concord grapes). 

Benny and Corrie and I picked them until we got tired of it

and this time, I smartened up and wore GLOVES for the sorting process. 

It only took me three consecutive years of being baffled and amazed to find that grapes make my skin itch and burn! I can learn! Actually this photo shows two lessons learned: Wearing gloves, and having gloves in the house in the first place, because my kids simply cannot abide having natural colored hair, so I finally wised up and started buying gloves in bulk.

It took probably three hours to sort all the grapes. I ended up with I think 32 pounds.

and I really didn’t have space to refrigerate them, so I decided to forge ahead and make the juice that evening. In the past, I’ve made grape jelly, but it turns out nobody really likes it; and grape sorbet, which really only I like. Those kids do like their juice, though. 

Making juice is very simple. You sort out all the stems and unripe and rotten grapes, rinse the good grapes, and put them in a stock pot and mash them with a potato masher somewhat, to release the juices.

Then you just heat it up slowly, skins and seeds and all, until it’s simmering, and let it simmer for ten minutes.

You can mash the grapes again while they’re simmering, to make sure they all get juiced. 

Then you pour the hot grape mash over cheesecloth (I like to use a few layers of cheesecloth in a colander, just in case anything slips out, because it’s HOT) and let the juice strain through. 

And that’s it. You can add sugar at this point, if you want. 

This year, I put about two thirds into the huge stock pot and the other third into a smaller pot. THEN I BURNED THE HUGE POT. I tried to convince myself that the burned taste hadn’t permeated the whole batch, but it certainly, certainly had. Then I tried to persuade myself there was something else I could do with a giant batch of hot burned grape mash, but my friends, there wasn’t. So I sadly dumped it in the compost heap. 

I did get three quarts of juice from the remaining pot

and GOOD HEAVENS IT IS TART. The kids have been mixing it with sugar, and still only drinking small portions. 

So that was a bit of a sad grape story for me this year. But at least they’re not hanging on the vine, begging to be picked while they’re slowly nibbled to death by yellowjackets, and at least I don’t have a giant batch of half-processed grapes slowly fermenting and attracting fruit flies. The only bug around here is me, and I’m used to me. 

And I had the fun of taking my annual Judith cosplay photo:

The last thing I did on Sunday was clean off a few dozen peach pits from that final batch, and set them to dry on a rack.

I am following instructions from The Philadelphia Orchard Project.

Yes, I am going to try to grow some more peach trees. A few people have expressed surprise that I would put the words “peach” and “more” in the same sentence, which makes me think I have been misrepresenting my attitude toward peaches. Of course I want more peaches! They are peaches! I don’t know how else to explain it. (But actually if I do manage to grow a dozen baby peach trees, I will probably give them away or sell them. But the main thinking here is: MORE PEACHES. You are talking to a mother of ten; I don’t know what you expected.) 

MONDAY
Pizza

Just regular begular no fancy tricks pizza, one plain, one olive, one pepperoni. Oh, actually I put some leftover bacon (WHICH TELLS YOU HOW SMALL OUR FAMILY IS NOW BECAUSE WE HAVE LEFTOVER BACON) on the pepperoni one, and it was, of course, delicious. 

TUESDAY
French toast casserole with fried apples, peach butter, grape juice; deviled duck eggs

Tuesday was primary day in NH, so Damien was going to be out; so I made a meal he’s not crazy about. We had tons of leftover hot dog and hamburger buns in the house, and they make great french toast casserole. I don’t really have a recipe for this, but you just mix up eggs and milk and add some sugar and maybe some vanilla, and pour it over some torn-up bread and mix it up. Butter a pan, pour the bread mixture in, and top it with some sugar and cinnamon if you like. Bake at 350 until it’s a little toasted on top, and not too damp inside. 

We had a giant backlog of duck eggs. The kids don’t really like duck eggs, partly because they don’t like the ducks, and partly because they don’t like their eggs, which pretty much covers it. But they do very much like deviled eggs, which I hardly ever make, because it’s a hassle. I thought I might lure them into eating duck eggs this way. 

Welp, I forgot that, because they are so much bigger than store-bought chicken eggs, you need to boil them longer. So they were really soft boiled eggs. I went ahead and mixed up the yolks with mayo and a little mustard and salt, and even I had to admit they were kind of gross.

It was kind of cool to see a cooked double yolk egg, though. 

We get lots of double-yolkers! It’s weird. I looked it up, and these eggs would not necessarily develop into twins born from one egg, because there’s not really enough room in there, so one chick would win. It’s possible both would develop and survive, but it’s rare. Nature, man.

We are planning to incubate some eggs in the spring, though, just for the hell of it. When Corrie was in first grade, her class was incubating eggs, and then she got sick and missed seeing them hatch (she is a covid baby, and you had to stay home for several days if you had basically any symptoms of anything, at the time). Missing this has formed a Core Sadness for her, which is understandable! So we’re gonna try and ameliorate that a bit. 

Oh, also, I remain TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE at peeling hard boiled eggs. 

I know there are methods where they slip out of their shells perfectly every time, but I do not wish to do them. Science cannot explain this; it’s just how I am. I just enjoy having traumatic flashbacks to the time I was working with the boss at Todafrali’s Deli and we had to peel a few hundred hard boiled eggs for a catering job, and boy, she was so MEAN about this poor lady who wanted a tacky dish like deviled eggs at her wedding. SO mean. Oh, there was so much cocaine in the back room of that kitchen. Mein gootness. 

Anyway, I was just gonna serve the french toast casserole with peach butter and maple syrup, because that was a lovely combination with waffles last week, but I noticed we had a bunch of apples that had gone soft and sad while we were busy eating peaches, so I cut them up and fried them in butter with a little brown sugar and cinnamon and a tiny bit of salt. 

Absolutely delicious. 

Was I proud of myself for serving a meal made with leftover bread and eggs from our ducks, peach butter from our peaches, and grape juice from our grapes? Yes. Insufferable, even. But it was a really good meal! Except for the eggs. And the juice. 

WEDNESDAY
Steak quesadillas with peach salsa

When I picked the last of the peaches, I used the ripest ones for the peach crisp, and set aside the others. By Wednesday, they were perfectly ripe, not too soft. I diced them up with the skins on and mixed them up with a diced red bell pepper, about half a red onion minced, some fresh lime juice, chopped cilantro, half a minced jalapeño, and a little salt. 

The picture shows garlic, but I don’t actually remember if I put garlic in there or not. I’m leaning toward not, and I think it was hanging around because I had made some marinade for the beef. 

It’s a great marinade, always popular. Lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic, with a few other ingredients. So nice and lively. 

Jump to Recipe

I sharpened my knife and cut the roast as thinly as I could,

and let it marinate most of the day. Then I pan fried it and made quesadillas with it.

Served with the peach salsa, sour cream, and tortilla chips.

Dang, that was a tasty meal. I don’t know why I never thought of beef quesadillas before, but I’m happy to welcome into the rotation another meal in that uses relatively small amounts of beef. When beef goes on sale, it’s still pretty expensive, so just a straight up roast isn’t usually an option. 

The peach salsa was fantastic. I really liked having the softer peaches along with the crisp red pepper, and the sweet peaches were so nice with the lime juice and a little bit of spice. Just a really playful, zippy salsa that went really well with the meat. It would be great with chicken or shrimp or probably pork, or just plain quesadillas. 

Wednesday evening, Corrie and I extracted the seeds from the dried peach pits. (Obviously peaches can grow spontaneously from pits that haven’t been split open by humans, but I assume this gives them an advantage, and makes them more likely to grow.) The directions said you could use a nut cracker, but this didn’t work for me at all, because the pits were so hard. 

Corrie developed a screwdriver and sledgehammer technique, but I had better luck using tile nippers. I nipped the seam off until there was an opening, and then pried it apart with the tip of a knife. The peach seeds look like small almonds, 

and yes, they contain amygdalin, which, when digested, breaks down into cyanide (same with apricots, cherries, and plums). You can eat a few without hurting yourself, or apparently you can boil them for half an hour and then safely eat them; but life is exciting enough around here without doing any poison experiments on purpose. 

We noticed a strong almond smell from the seeds. It turns out they are related to almonds, and in fact almond extract is often made from peach seeds. In fact, it tastes more strongly almond-y than almond extract made from almonds! I have now reached the point where the word “almond” sounds weird and foreign to me, so I guess that’s the end of this paragraph. 

THURSDAY
Restes ala purée de pommes de terre

Thursday I got another flat tire.

And I’m glad I compulsively take pictures of everything, because that helped me confirm this is a different tire from the one last week! 

I’ve had a slow leak for quite some time, and concerned dads keep coming up to me and apologetically telling me that I probably know this, but my tire is pretty flat, and then I make them feel bad by telling them I do already know. (I think this is related to #metoo, or possibly regional, not sure.) Then I go put air in my tire and pretend that’s a responsible way of dealing with it, because air machines scare me, and if it’s scary, it must be hard, and if it’s hard, it must be responsible.

So actually it was kind of a relief when the tire finally completely crapped out. Sadly, it doesn’t look patchable like the other one, because I’ve been driving around on the sidewall like an idiot, so we’re going to have to take the extreme measure of buying a new used tire. 

For supper, I was planning to make chicken drumsticks roasted in butter and Old Bay seasoning, but the chicken had gone bad. The afternoon had already devolved into a series of increasingly pathetic attempts to find non-moldy hay for the ducks (I do have a good lead for this weekend! This shouldn’t be hard! We’re pretty rural!), so by the time it was dinner, I was pretty dead set against going to the store one more time. 

So we had whatever. Hot pans of whatever, and cucumbers I didn’t even take out of the bag. 

I made up a big bowl of instant potatoes, and everybody had hot food. Yay! It’s probably self care or something. I do like potatoes. 

We were supposed to go to Corrie’s first Cub Scout meeting, but she was sick with a bad cold and sore throat, and turning up with that seemed like a bad way to introduce ourselves to a bunch of new families. She asked if she could make up for the disappointment by watching Frasier, and in the name of self care, I said yes. 

She really hates the taste of cold medicine, so I suggested she have a shot of grape juice to get the taste out of her mouth, and it worked, but then she needed a cookie to get the taste of grape juice out of her mouth. I tasted it and she was not kidding. That stuff is intense! By which I mean disgusting! 

FRIDAY
Regular spaghetti

Regular old begular old spaghetti with sauce from a jar.

But! Clara and her boyfriend are coming over on Sunday, so I did do step one in my Transcendent Cheesecake Recipe, which is to set out the ingredients for 24 hours so they really truly achieve room temperature for real. 

Oops, I gotta put out eggs, too. I’m going to bake it tomorrow and then let it ponder life in the fridge overnight, and by Sunday it will be wonderful. I’ve made this recipe before, and it does not mess around. 

And what am I going to put on top of this cheesecake?

Do you really need to ask?

I may have picked and cooked the last of the fresh peaches, but maybe you are forgetting that my freezer looks like this:

And I’m gonna plant those peach seeds today. 

Peach season is over! Long live peach season!