Homemade Cherry Wine Pt. 1

This year was a big year for cherries in the Pacific Northwest. Our friend planted two backyard cherry trees a few years ago -- a Rainier and a Black Tartarian -- and both had full boughs loaded with big, tasty fruit this June. The birds got some, as usual, but by the time the cherries were ripe and ready they'd had their fill and it was time to pick. So pick we did. The Black Tartarians ripened first.

We had ideas for lots of different cherry preparations and one that we followed through on was cherry wine. I used Sandor Ellix Katz's basic fruit wine recipe from his book Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition and Craft of Live-Culture Foods. If you want to check out an abridged version of the recipe head over here for a fruit wine story I wrote earlier this summer for Portland's alt. weekly Willamette Week.

Cherry wine is really easy, like most country wines, and the hardest part is having the patience to wait the nine-plus months till it's ready to drink.

We picked three gallons of Black Tartarian cherries for five gallons of wine and then we rinsed and sorted them into two large food grade buckets. We covered them with boiling water and let them steep, buckets covered with towels, overnight.

Black Tartarian cherries steeping

The next day, when the buckets had completely cooled, we added a packet of champagne yeast. For the next few days we stirred the wine regularly -- I'd say six or seven times a day. Once the bubbling had slowed a bit we made a big vat of simple syrup and added that to the buckets.

The wine bubbled and fermented a lot with that for several days. Again, at this stage we stirred the buckets regularly. After a couple weeks once the fermentation had slowed and the bubbling had settled down we filtered the wine.

Bonnie milking cherry udders

And then we funneled it into a 5-gallon carboy. Next we took the fermented cherries, covered them with water, and mashed them by hand to create enough juice to fill up the remaining space of the 5-gallon carboy. For the record, mashing cherries by hand feels great -- especially when the mash is cool and it's a hot day.

Sitting pretty -- homemade cherry wine

I tested the sugar content today and it's good to go -- I don't need to add any more. Now it's the waiting game. In two months I'll rack the wine -- siphon it into a clean carboy -- but until then it'll sit pretty in a corner of the kitchen. I'll keep you posted on its gurgling.

Homemade Cherry Wine Pt. 2

If you're still thirsty you can read about my dandelion wine here and here.

Read about my dandelion wine here.

Ready about my hard cider here.

Yard Fresh

I buy plenty of farm fresh local food year round but my favorite time of the year for eating in Portland is the summer and early fall because so much of what's on the plate is yard fresh -- straight from our garden. Last year I expanded the vegetable garden to the front yard -- before I just had beds and mounds in the back. The front yard up until then was mainly fruit trees, berries, herbs and perennial vegetables such as asparagus, artichokes and cardoons. This year I have tomatoes, tomatillos, basil, chiles, celery, pickling cucumbers and more in the front in addition to a whole bunch of veggies in the back. In the last several weeks the garden has been very giving. Here's a bit of what it's offered and what I've made of the offerings...

I harvested this year's hard and softneck garlic last weekend and now it's curing in the utility room. Rubin eats just about anything -- in this case dirt.

These are some of the softnecks. I mulched them with straw this year and it really seemed to help with weeds and warmth. These are the biggest softnecks I've ever harvested.

A couple weeks ago I took this...

And made this -- garlic scape pesto from the hardnecks finishing off in the backyard.

Gooseberries look like marbles.

I made them into gooseberry chutney with mustard seeds and all kinds of curry spices.

Dandelion salad with hot bacon vinaigrette and a side of canned tomato chile puree from last summer.

Vine to mouth sugar snap peas

Butter lettuce, sorrel, mint, chive and chive flower salad with red wine vinaigrette and crumbled feta

Caramelized onion spaghetti with roasted hazelnuts, arugula and feta

Sorrel pesto with hazelnuts, parmesan and lots of olive oil

Yes, I do eat meat and seafood too but other than what the cat drags in and we drag back out -- every spring a couple unlucky starlings and usually a mouse or two -- we aren't producing any animal protein on our urban lot. I have half wondered about the slugs but will leave that culinary experiment for someone else to try.

Eat, drink and be hairy!

You can also check out: Yard Fresh Pt. 2Yard Fresh Pt. 3

Plant a Row for the Hungry -- Oregon Food Bank

My Plant a Row for the Hungry

I've been volunteering now and again this spring at the Oregon Food Bank'sEastside Learning Garden. Along the way I've helped plant bush beans and calendula, lay garden paths, harvest collards and more. To sign up for Eastside Dig In! shifts go here and fill out a quick form. There's also an OFB Westside Learning Garden in need of volunteers. The last time I was on the OFB site I came across Plant a Row for the Hungry. The gist: plant a row of vegetables and donate all of the food it produces throughout the season to local hunger relief agencies.

Oregon Food Bank has made this national campaign easy with various online Portland maps with Plant a Row drop-off points, contacts and times. There are three drop-off spots in North Portland close to my home so that makes it easy.

I planted my Row for the Hungry this weekend -- well really my small mound -- and I think it'll be make for a nice and diverse mini harvest. I started everything from seed during the past few weeks except the eggplants which a friend gave me.

My Plant a Row for the Hungry:

3 Thai green eggplants

4 royal burgundy bush beans

2 purple calabash tomatoes

2 Cabernet grape tomatoes

1 pineapple tomato

The OFB site has a list of vegetables that they'd most like home gardeners to plant for the campaign. They also remind gardeners to cultivate and harvest vegetables that will store and transport well i.e. harvest your tomatoes when they're a bit under ripe...

Oregon Food Bank's most wanted produce:

Food pantries and soup kitchens need produce that stores and transports well.

Refrigerated space is often limited, so foods that don't require refrigeration are always wanted. Here are some recommendations:

* Tomatoes (pick while slightly under-ripe) * Green beans * Winter squash (acorn or butternut) * Garlic * Hot peppers * Cucumbers * Zucchini * Collard greens * Onions

If you have any additional questions contact Eric Sopkin at 503-282-0555, Ext. 260, or esopkin@oregonfoodbank.org.

It doesn't look like much now but come mid-summer I'll be making weekly deliveries from my Plant a Row for the Hungry to local hunger and relief 

Oregon Food Bank

Oregon Food Bank Learning Gardens

Plant a Row for the Hungry in Portland Plant a Row for the Hungry national campaign

Grand Central U-Bake -- June 6th, 9am-1pm

I'm much more of a cook than a baker. I make my own pizza dough and every once in awhile I'll bake a cake or some cookies but that's about it. So when Piper Davis of Grand Central Bakery came by the other day with a big bag of GC's soon to hit the market U-Bake frozen cookies, puff pastry and pie dough I felt pretty unworthy. Turns out I'm the ideal person to give them a try because I'm a novice baker who loves tasty baked goods but rarely takes the time to make them. For my U-Bake pie I started by making this...

A strawberry, pear and rhubarb filling

Then I filled this...

Grand Central's U-Bake pie crust

And I ended up with this...

Just out of the oven and soon to be topped with vanilla ice cream

The line of frozen pre-made and formed cookies (oatmeal chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter and ginger molasses) are even easier. You pull out the frozen dozen, separate a few cookies, roll them in sugar, put them on the cookie sheet and 10 minutes later you have delicious home baked cookies.

Ginger molasses cookies straight from the oven

I made a whole bunch of savory treats with the puff pastry dough for dinner with a friend's family but I didn't take any photos of the cheesy puffs because the dinner was at their home and I didn't want my camera to get in the way of our eating. Luckily right before we left for their place I took a photo of the fillings...

Ricotta/sorrel pesto/mozzarella mix with bulk spicy Italian sausage

If you have a chance this Saturday, June 6th GC is rolling out its new U-Bake line (pie dough, puff pastry dough, pre-made pies and cookies) at all of its Portland bakeries. From 9am to 1pm each bakery cafe will be staffed with a baker sampling U-Bake products and sharing recipes and advice. Added bonus: 50% of the proceeds of U-Bake products sold that day will be donated to the Portland Schools Foundation. Be sweet and go buy some sweets.

Grand Central www.grandcentralbakery.com 9am-1pm Saturday, June 6th U-bake roll out at all Portland Grand Central Bakeries

Tea: Foxfire Teas, Tea Chai Te and DIY Home Herbal Tea

I think that this year is the first that I'll actually have enough herbs to dry for herbal tea. The old garden adage -- the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and and the third it leaps -- is ringing true in our yard. It's the beginning of our fourth year in North Portland and plants that never before seemed to take a shine are going off -- namely the blueberries, raspberries, fruit trees and lots and lots of herbs.

I think we'll have enough lemon balm, mint, sage, thyme, valerian and other herbs to keep us sipping plenty of home grown and blended herbal tea for months. I recently read that the best way to dry herbs for tea is to take the entire plant or sections of it, leaves still attached, and tie it upside down so that the oil and flavor gravitates to the leaves.

Tea time with Quinn and Katherine Losselyong owners of Foxfire Teas

I didn't learn this from Quinn and Katherine Losselyong of Portland's Foxfire Teas but I did learn a lot when I met up with them recently at their shop. Here are a few things that they told me while we shared a pot of Golden Yunan tea.

1. They like to use steeped Darjeeling and various green teas as a substitute for broth in risotto. 2. They met on a plane heading to Portland and were engaged three months later. 3. Their business is often referred to as Firefox Teas because people confuse them with the browser. 4. You can find Foxfire Teas in cafes as far away as Raleigh, North Carolina and Santa Barbara. 5. Marco Shaw of the much missed Portland restaurant Fife did some amazing things with their lapsang souchong (a smoked black tea) and duck.

At first sniff Foxfire's smoky lapsang souchong doesn't even smell like tea. Close your eyes, inhale, and you might think you're sitting around a campfire.

Some of the best kombucha I've ever had -- Quinn and Katherine's home fermented pu-erh kombucha

After hanging out at Foxfire I met up with Tami Parr of Pacific Northwest Cheese Project at Tea Chai Te in Northwest. Not great planning on my part -- I think I filled up on my tea intake for the week in one day. Tami's book -- Artisan Cheese of the Pacific Northwest -- is hot off the presses and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy. We talked about the book, about her blog and about random things like our favorite Indian restaurant in Vancouver B.C. and why we both want to keep chickens.

Tami had an iced black tea (any of their teas can be iced) and I had a cup of the ginger pu-erh. If you haven't been Tea Chai Te is a really nice space nestled in the second floor of a beautiful old house. When we arrived at 3:30pm it was quiet but by 4:30/5pm it was almost full and there was a long line for steeped goods.

Please don't buy the terra cotta looking large clay teapot that's cut in half on the bottom right of the photo. I'm saving up.

Tea Chai Te does tea right

Foxfire Teas 2505 SE 11th Ave. #105 503.288.6869 www.foxfireteas.com

Tea Chai Te 734 NW 23rd Ave. -- upstairs 503.228.0900 www.teachaite.com

Pacific Northwest Cheese Project www.pnwcheese.typepad.com

Tami Parr's spring 2009 title Artisan Cheese of the Pacific Northwest

Wild and Free: Another Wild Food Adventure with John Kallas, Dandelion Wine and more

In the past few weeks I've done a lot of foraging. First I gathered dandelion petals with my friend and her daughter for this year's batch of dandelion wine. If you want 3 gallons of dandelion wine you need 3 gallons of dandelion petals. That's what we wanted but we settled with one gallon -- which took the better part of an afternoon to collect. I wrote about last year's dandelion wine for Imbibe.

Yes, those scissors are a little big but she insisted. At least it's not a sweat shop.

Another wild food event this season was an informal gathering of all sorts of Portlanders -- connected via food, work, friends -- that I won't share too much about since a story is currently in the works. I will show you a photo of a bit of the resulting food -- 3 jars of delicious collective kraut. In our collective batches of vegetable ferments, amongst MANY ingredients, were backyard bull thistle, dandelion greens and black radish...

There are things in these jars that I'd never heard of until this spring

This past weekend I was lucky enough to attend another one of John Kallas' Wild Food Adventures. Kallas is one of my favorite Portland food people because he often goes where no one else does in search of delicious wild foods growing all around us -- urban, suburban and off the beaten path. This Sunday we went to Oxbow Park out in the Sandy River Gorge not far from Troutdale.

Eat me -- stinging nettles

We were lucky that we didn't get rained or hailed on as we hiked around sampling all sorts of wild spring greens including sheep sorrel, waterleaf, salmonberry stems (the inside of new growth stems tastes sweeter and juicier when peeled than fresh asparagus), miner's lettuce, stinging nettles and much more. Well, we didn't try the nettle but John did. He has a trick for plucking them with his bare hands and eating them on the spot without a sting....

Our fearless leader John Kallas -- stinging nettle in hand

I haven't been foraging for morels yet this spring even though one popped up in our backyard a few days ago! I hear it's a later season for them this year so maybe there's still hope. Happy foraging everyone.

Wild Food Adventures John Kallas www.wildfoodadventures.com 503.775.3828 mail@wildfoodadventures.com ***Most workshops still have openings but they fill up fast***

Home Orchard Society Arboretum

Sometimes rain -- even at the end of a long sopping stretch of days -- is magical. In this case it made for some very ethereal photos of Home Orchard Society Arboretum manager Karen Tillou. Yesterday I took a trip south to Clackamas Community College home of the HOS Arboretum and met with Tillou. We snuck in and out of the tool shed (rain and more rain) for a couple hours talking about fruit trees, shrubs and vines, the history of HOS and why I should use an ale or a cotes de blanc yeast the next time I make hard cider. It was a great day and worth the trek. The HOS Arboretum is always in need of volunteers so if you or someone you know has time to thin, weed, prune or harvest for a few hours in upcoming months the 1.6 acre arboretum is a great place to lend a hand.

Tools of the trade

Home Orchard Society Arboretum Open year round 9am-3pm Tuesdays and Saturdays www.homeorchardsociety.org Contact: Karen Tillou 503.338.8479 Find directions here

Homemade Hard Cider Pt. 2

A quick recap: We rented a mill from F.H. Steinbart Co. in Southeast early November and supplemented our meager backyard apple supply with some heritage reds from Woodland, Washington. After a day of rinsing, halving, milling and pressing we filtered the cider, added some champagne yeast and then funneled it into a 3-gallon carboy. We let the carboy sit in the utility room to for a few months and do its thing.

That's where we left off.

Come January we racked off the cider which means we siphoned it into a clean carboy. Well, in our case we siphoned the cider into a food-grade bucket, cleaned the carboy and then siphoned it back in. Before cleaning the carboy we poured the yeasty sediment in the bottom into a stainless bowl and then wondered what to do with it.

According to the great Sandorkraut -- Sandor Ellix Katz author of Wild Fermentation and The Revolution Will Not Be Micorwaved:

When you rack and bottle wines, you are left with yeasty sediment at the bottom of the fermenting vessel. This sediment is not pretty, so generally it is not bottled or served. But all the deceased yeast is full of B vitamins. If you’ve ever used nutritional yeast, it is essentially the same thing as this.

Wine dregs make a rich and flavorful soup base. Try following a recipe for French onion soup, substituting wine dregs for one-quarter of the liquid. Be sure to boil it for awhile to cook off the alcohol. Inhale the fumes for an intense sensory experience!

Deceased yeast

Over at the food website Culinate I also got some advice from a site member to marinate some fish in the cider lees. I meant to do that but the only thing I did with the lees was add a few tablespoons to some braised greens. Then it started to make the kitchen ripe so I tossed it in the compost. Next time...

Racking gave us a chance to give the cider a taste (the only other time we'd tried it was at press) and it was already pretty good -- fresh, slightly sour, subtly sweet. Much better than we thought it would be considering we didn't use very complex apples. Typically hard cider includes some tannic, sour and not-so-good-to-eat-fresh apples.

So we racked off the cider and set it back in utility room to do its thing. The cider was fairly clear at this point, as opposed to how hazy it was when we first pressed it, and getting more and more golden by the week as tiny particulates continued to sink to the bottom of the carboy.

Come mid-February we added a final jump of sugar, corn sugar to be exact, for natural carbonation. Prior to this the yeast had been feeding solely on natural sugars -- no sugar added. We did this as we bottled -- adding a half teaspoon to each bottle -- while siphoning the cider and then capping the bottles with an old capper I found at an estate sale.

We kept the twenty-some bottles in a corner of the kitchen until a beer and mead brewing friend told us that would kill off the remaining yeast needing to carbonate it. He recommended a warmer spot for the final ferment so we moved the bottles upstairs next to a small wall-mounted heater and waited.

A month later at our first barbecue of semi-spring we cracked open a few bottles of the cider with our friend. It was crisp, light and effervescent, slightly sweet, and the essence of autumn apple. In other words, it was delicious. We were happy that we hadn't botched the mild carbonation by keeping the cider in our cold kitchen for a few days after bottling. In the end we had less than 30 bottles from about 80 pounds of home-pressed apples.

Will we do it again? Yes. This year? Maybe. I'm making dandelion wine for the second time this weekend but hard cider requires a lot more time, energy and equipment. It was worth it but I'm thinking it may be more biennial for us.

Almost ready and waiting

Hard Cider Part One...

Make Cheese! Kookoolan Farms

The only cheese I'd ever made prior to last weekend was paneer for a chickpea buttermilk curry in college and it was great even though I used regular old store-bought homogenized, pasteurized milk.

If I had to choose one food as a favorite it would be cheese. It's my favorite snack and rare is the day that I don't eat at least a bite of it -- e.g. this morning's breakfast was a feta, sour cream, lime and herb spread on toasted baguette. I love cheese which is why I went to Scott Dominic Catino's goat cheese making class this weekend in Yamhill at Kookoolan Farms. Kookoolan is an amazingly diverse small farm with orchards, vegetable gardens, chickens for eggs and meat and a few Jersey milking cows. It's about an hour southwest from Portland and a beautiful drive once you get off I-5

This is the second year that Kookoolan's Chrissie and Kooroosh Zaerpoor are offering cheese classes with various cheese makers through the spring and summer. Classes fill up fast.

If you don't want to attend a class but are in the area Chrissie and Kooroosh also operate a farm store stocked with heirloom chicken eggs, broilers, kombucha and more along with cheesemaking and dairy cultures and supplies including kefir grains. It's best to call ahead if visiting the farm store for the first time. Kookoolan Farms also operates a booth at the Hillsdale Farmers Market in addition to delivering chicken, eggs and more weekly to many fine Portland restaurants such as Navarre, Nostrana and Biwa.

Some of Kookoolan's cheese making supplies for sale

I plan on making some homemade goat cheese this spring. I bought a chevre culture, a cheese making book and vegetable rennet from Kookoolan. Now I just need to source some raw goat milk when I'm ready. Catino keeps Nigerian dwarf goats (he's had 40 births in the last two weeks, including quintuplets) and I've never tasted such sweet, fresh milk. No wonder his cheese is so good...

Catino's raw goat milk cheese that we got to try

Kookoolan Farms (and farm store) 15713 Highway 47 Yamhill, Oregon 97148 503.730.7535 www.kookoolanfarms.com

Call Chrissie at the number above to register for a cheese making class.

Homemade Hard Cider Pt. 1

Last fall my boyfriend and I decided to finally make good use of the apples from the ancient apple tree in our backyard. I'd heard that F.H. Steinbart Co. rented out one of their cider mill/presses every weekend in the fall for $20. I called as soon as I found out last summer when our apple tree was set with loads of good looking fruit. I thought it would probably ripen around late October just as it had the previous fall so I reserved the press for the first weekend of November. That happened to be a very busy weekend -- Wordstock, my first face-to-face with my publisher, an all-day rain garden/stormwater management class for the Organic Gardening Certification Program, and cider making 101.

Two things happened that had a huge effect on the latter. First, we lost a major limb of the apple tree mid-summer, which completely obstructed the street behind our house and sent tennis-ball-looking, unripe apples all the way up and down the street. Because of that we had to do some major emergency pruning to save the tree. The next impediment to our home cidery: the slim-pickings apples that remained ripened early. Very early. Most were good to go by early September. Although apples keep well -- two months was pushing it and to be honest there just weren't that many still on the tree. Our cider press reservation was firm, however, and no other weekends were available. I started hunting for apples.

I surfed Craigslist and found a man with a small home orchard in Woodland, Washington with ripe heritage red apples (not a variety just a description -- he's not sure what kind they are) ready to sell for a good price that sounded like they'd make a decent, but probably not great, hard cider. I was ok with a small batch of decent cider for a small chunk of change. It'd be good practice for our future bumper crop cider. I drove out with my puppy picked up the loot and headed home. The apples had been sweated (stored for a couple weeks so that they'd ripened into peak flavor and sweetness) and were ready for cider. We rinsed them, halved them and threw them into the apple mill/grinder -- stems, seeds and all...

Into the mill

After milling we put the apple pomace (the resulting bits and chunks) into the press and then started hand cranking the juice. That took the most time.

Pressing the cider

Cider Falls

As you can see a lot of bits made it into the cider. That didn't matter because before pouring the cider into the carboy, with a packet of champagne yeast, we filtered it through cheesecloth. Apple Bits was a nickname my friend Mary Ellen gave me in grade school. If only she could see me now.

80-plus pounds of apples became a mere 3 gallons of cider. Our how-to book Cider Hard & Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own by Ben Watson for The Countryman Press doesn't suggest an apple to juice ratio but surfing around online it seems like the consensus is that roughly 15 pounds of apples usually translates to about a gallon of cider. Either we need to do some push-ups in prep. for this fall or our apples weren't exactly up-to-snuff juice wise.

Cider's home for a few months

After all that, which took the better part of a day, we had three gallons of cider in a carboy with a purge tube stoppered to the top leading to a half-full bottle of water. This way nothing noxious or foreign could travel into the cider but if the fermentation got particularly feisty and bubbly the cider would overflow into the bottle of water. We kept it in the utility room and checked on it every few hours at first and then every few days. Once the initial fermentation was over, about a week or two I think, we removed the tubing and topped the carboy with a regular fermentation lock. Then we left the cider largely unattended until January.

Hard Cider Part Two...