Xmas Tutti Fruti 2014 - The Making Of ...

I can take or leave Christmas these days. Days off work, spending time with family, feasting and drinking are all good points. Exchange of gifts and having to be in a jolly mood from early December are rubbish. However, for me over recent years, Christmas begins with carrolling around Moortown with the Wrights. It is the only time of the year that I sing in public, and Christmas carols take me back to my childhood. The tunes are simple and evocative, the lyrics are often unintentionally hilarious. Fourth verse of We Three Kings anyone? How about abhoring not the Virgin's womb?

Anyway, after singing heartily in North Leeds on 22nd December, I came home to measure fruit. This year I have 8 lbs 14 oz of ingredients plus 2 satsumas. This is made up of 1¼ oz rosehips, 9 oz sloes, 14¾ oz apples, 1 lb 1 oz gooseberries (mostly green), 10 oz gooseberries (entirely red), 1 lb 14½ oz blackberries, 2 lb 5 oz blackcurrants, 1 lb 1¾ oz elderberries and 4¾ oz rose petals.

I let it all defrost overnight, during which I got exceptionally cross with Aggie for her unearthly mewing, and the next day, which was my last day in the office until 5 January.

On the evening of 23 December I boiled 12 pints water and poured this over the mashed fruit. I added 6 lbs sugar. Claire kept me company in the kitchen, crocheting bladder tumours while I crashed about, mostly dropping things and saying "oops". It has been a lovely evening and we have spent the last half hour finishing the Christmas jigsaw in a vaguely competitive manner.

The Christmas Jigsaw

I put the yeast and a teaspoon and a bit each of nutrient and pectolase on Christmas Eve morning and spent the next few hours working more dilligently than befits one on holiday. The contents of the bucket were given a stir and then left until we came back from Newcastle on Saturday afternoon, when it got another stir.

The mixture fermenting

I put the liquid into its two demijohns on Monday afternoon, 29 December, while suffering from a heavy cold. I made sure that my sneezes and hacking coughs were always directed away from the wine. It is currently an attractive dark purple and the taste I took at the end was encouragingly fruity.

NB - This is my 700th post since I started the blog in April 2011.

NB2 - If you want to see how this wine turned out, click here

Elderflower Wine - Second Bottle (A2), 7th-10th September 2014

On Sunday Claire dragged me to the British Wool Festival in Harrogate. Rather than spend the £8 entrance fee to look at coloured yarn, I spent my time outside in Hookstone Forest foraging for berries. I need more blackberries for the freezer, and elderberries are mostly ripe. It was a lovely way to spend Sunday midday and did not involve overpriced wool, though Claire came out with stacks of the stuff.

In the evening we drank most of a bottle of elderflower wine to curries made from lamb and potatoes.

Orange Wine - First Bottle (A5), 5th- 6th March 2014

This is a very good batch of orange. It is a little sweeter than most years, but the acid-citric flavour is subtle. There is a sharp orange taste and the clarity is excellent. So on the whole I am really pleased.

Wednesday's glass was after WYSO, where the music is starting to come together. I spent my time drinking while ordering the cat food into a sequence the cats will eat. They can't have the same flavour or the same brand within three pouches of each other. Fussy buggers.

Then on Thursday I drank wine while sitting motionless. Claire needed me to be the model for a hat she is making for Todd's 50th birthday (NB - Photo to follow very soon, after Todd's 50th birthday so he doesn't see it here first in case he ever reads this!).This involved her sewing a long pink woollen cable to a balaclava I was wearing at the time, only occasionally sticking my head with needles.

*

If you want to see how I made this wine, click here

WYSO's next concert

Orange Wine 2014 - The Making Of ...

Evidence of Spring

Claire mentioned the possibility of doing a single batch of orange for 2014. This, of course, is sacrilege and I have done my usual double. I acknowledge that I am running out of both wine bottles and anywhere to put them, but this year could  prove to be a poor one for fruit. And orange wine is such a standard that it would be a shame not to have one bottle for every month.

Irritatingly, Noshis was selling their oranges at six for a pound when I bought them, rather than the eight for a pound they have been in the surrounding weeks. This means I have spent one whole pound more on my ingredients than I had planned. How can I justify this extravagance? They are good quality oranges, though, unlike the small and manky ones I used last year.

I started making the wine on Sunday 2nd March. A double batch of orange wine requires 24 oranges. My first job was to peel half the oranges very thinly, trying to avoid any pith. This is a tedious and time-consuming job, and these oranges seemed particularly resistant to a thin peeling. I had a Radio 4 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice to help, but I gave up after 10 oranges. I poured 2½ pints of boiling water over the peel and covered this with a lid, letting it sit for 24 hours or so.

I squeezed all the oranges, which resulted in 3¾ pints of juice and bits. This went into my bucket and I boiled 9 pints of water and put that in, along with 5½ lbs sugar. This is the first time I have added boiling water rather than cold.

Fermenting orange liquid

I added the yeast and teaspoons of nutrient and pectolase on Monday morning and put in the water that had covered the peel on Monday evening. My plan was to put it all into the demijohns on Thursday evening, but I spent most of Thrusday night being the dressmaker's mannequin for Claire's latest knitting project and went straight to bed afterwards. So I sieved out the orange detritus on Friday early evening instead before Book Group. The amount of water I used was nearly exact, and the colour is a bright, pleasing yellow.

A bright, pleasing yellow

If you want to see how this wine turned out, click here

Crab Apple Wine - Sixteenth Bottle (A1), 24th February 2013

Sunday nights are to be cherished. They are the last of the weekend, a time to hold on to a slower pace of life. I avoid my thoughts turning to work - there is plenty of time for that on my Monday morning walk. And crab apple wine, tonight, has helped the relaxation process. Much of it was drunk to our evening meal - a pork and lentil casserole bulked out by elderly vegetables - though I spent some of this bottle on the sofa reading whilst Claire was knitting sea creatures. My book is Capital by John Lanchester and I am enjoying it immensely. It is one of those with many characters not quite colliding with several strands, all of which are gripping.

Elderberry Wine - Bottle B4, 22nd April 2011

This wine has been brought to you by Moussaka and Knitting.

I was on cooking duties today, as I have been for the whole week, and had planned to do something entirely new. However, on looking through the many cook books, nothing jumped out saying "make me". So, I dug out Delia and made Moussaka, which I have not done for a couple of years, and therefore that almost counts. Elderberry wine goes well with it - the sweet, deep red complements the lamb and cinammon.

Elderberry wine goes less well with knitting. Sooz taught me the basics this afternoon and then needed a gin to recover. I am getting the hang of it, but have to concentrate extremely hard. There are meant to be twenty loops in each row, but within three or four rows of me knitting solo, there were twenty seven. I do not foresee this becoming a regular hobby.

Redcurrant Wine - Bottle B5, 20th & 21st April

This was our first bottle of this flavour and it was, frankly, disappointing. The overall taste was bland, backed up by an aftertaste of mustiness. Claire described this as 'dead mouse'. I sent an e-mail to The Good Life Press, to whom I had sent a bottle of this (and eleven other flavours), apologising and advising them not to feed this to any bulk book buyers.

We finished the bottle tonight, once Sooz had arrived for the Easter weekend. She was less damning than Claire, but drinking the wine chilled helped. This evening Claire and Sooz have been discussing knitting fossils and dinosaurs and have threatened to teach me how to knit one, pearl one. I see tomorrow ending in tears.