Grape Harvest in Kamiah

This weekend we went to Pat and Kathy's house in Kamiah, where they are blessed with Concord grapes and another variety that is sweeter and seedless and delicious for eating out of hand, and harvested some 40 gallons of Concords which we processed into grape juice. The climate is just slightly warmer there than in Moscow, as they are down on the Clearwater River instead of up on the plateau like us.

Pat and Kathy (pictured above on the ladder and at the sink) supplied the grapes and a whole bunch of bonhomie, and we brought a lot of jars and another dose of good cheer and between us we ended up with a very large supply of frozen grape juice. To get it you cook the grapes until they've softened down into juice, seeds, and empty peels, then filter it through a colander and again through a jelly sock. That's it! It is slightly concentrated, too, so each jar goes pretty far. I think we brought home about 15 quarts and about the same number of pints. Pat and Kathy kept a good supply too, hopefully enough to last for a while. Hopefully the purple stains will come off the counter, too. Kathy swears Clorox does the trick.

We brought home some vine cuttings to try to establish our own grapes in Moscow; we'll see if that works out. Next project for our group: our chicken coop!

I made plum jam sometime in the last two weeks, fitting it in where I could, using the entire 5 gallon bucket in two separate sessions. It made beautiful, ruby-colored jam, that needed no sugar at all. So we'll eat it liberally on our toast and cereal this winter and not feel guilty, ever.

Processing Pears

I'll never can fruit by myself again. With Walt and Reed's help, me peeling and him slicing and Reed putting the fruit in the jars, we knocked through a couple of flats of pears in just over an hour, not counting cooking time. If I had done it myself it would have taken three times that long. Walt had picked them last week and let them ripen on a big cushy tarp in the garage. We found that they were perfect just as they had taken on a yellowish tinge, but not gotten all the way yellow. This batch resulted in 9 quarts, which we added to the previous batch that was about the same size, and now we are well-set for canned pears for the winter. The apples are still waiting, and there are a few pears still on the tree in our front yard; I think I'll set those aside for crisp.

Zakarison's Chickens

Two weekends ago we spent a good portion of Saturday morning at the Zakarison farm north of Pullman, processing chickens for the freezer. Eric - that's him in the photo with his hand inside a bird - raises them on pasture, with movable chicken "trucks," a la Joel Salatin (Pastured Poultry Profits, is the name of his book, I think), so they were fat and happy and healthy birds. Also, Eric has an excellent setup for the processing day, which is outdoors, painless for the birds, hygienic, and considering the task, with as little yuck-factor as possible. This was the third time we've killed and processed our own chickens with Eric's help and Walt and I have found it to be a satisfying day of work. At the end of the day, with 20 chickens in the freezer, we feel like we've accomplished quite a lot!

This chicken tastes fabulous, by the way. I had to learn how to cut apart a whole chicken - not a skill one picks up automatically these days - but once I learned that, it was pretty easy to never buy industrial/factory raised chicken again. Eric's chickens are indeed more expensive, but we don't need to eat chicken every day, do we?

Finding Time for Fruit

I picked a 5 gallon bucket of Italian plums last Friday before we left for the weekend; I haven't forgotten how a few years ago we left them, almost ripe, on the tree while we went camping for the weekend, and when we returned, the tree was completely bare - squirrels!! Sure enough, I took a break on Friday and when I came back a squirrel was trying to get what he could before I came back. So I left him a couple and took the rest. They're sitting in the bucket in the basement for later this week when I have time to make jam.

I also bottled up the cherry liqueur on Friday before we left for the weekend. Turns out that with a quart of cherries soaking in vodka, after you filter the cherries out and then filter it through a cloth (a coffee filter won't work, the gooey stuff keeps the liquid from filtering through), add in the 5 oz. of simple syrup, and top it off with water, you'll end up with about 26 ounces of liqueur, or, if you like it a little less strong, about a quart (32 oz.) of liqueur. We taste tested it right away and thought it was pretty delicious all by itself. In a few weeks we'll try it again and see if it has changed any.

Walt helped me process the few pears that were ripe on Friday, we just peeled and quartered and cored them, and put them into a light syrup in a glass jar, which I put in the microwave for a few minutes and then put in the fridge. So they are like canned pears, but not actually canned. We like the flavor and consistency of the canned pears so thought I'd replicate it without all the major work. But now all the pears sitting on a blanket on the floor of the garage are ripe all at once, so we'll have to do the real canning process, and very soon. Probably tomorrow! Thank goodness the apples will wait a little longer.

We got our freezer lamb from SkyLines last week, and this coming weekend is chicken processing at Zakarison's. We're getting 20 birds for the freezer. Eric says he has a new defeathering machine, even faster than the old defeathering machine, that will make it possible for us to do 20 birds in just over 2 hours. Wow. That many used to take us 1/2 a day. I'll report in afterwards. Combined with a sale on Country Natural beef from Oregon that's going on at the Co-op this week, the freezer is rapidly filling up, and that feels great.

Pears, Plums, and Apples Oh My

The plums, the pears, the apples, they’re all waiting for me now, falling off the trees in anticipation of being turned into jam, into sauce, into slightly sweetened preserved fruit with essence of vanilla, just enough to make you breathe deep when you open the bottle, aah.

Walt picked a bushel of each.

The cherry liqueur is ready for bottling. I need to get some pretty corked bottles for it, and then we’ll tuck them away until November or so.

The lamb we ordered from Melissa Lines at SkyLines Farm will be ready for us later this week. I’m really looking forward to having that in the freezer. In anticipation I made my own version of seven-hour leg of lamb today with some I’d gotten from a friend a couple weeks ago; I browned it in olive oil and put it in the crock pot with about ½ an inch of water. I sautéed in the same pan a diced onion, two diced carrots, and a diced tomato, with some rosemary and mint, and added the browned veggies to the crock pot, and put on the lid. I left it on low from 7 am until 5 pm and then turned it down to keep warm. It was fabulously tender and delicious, absolutely the best lamb I’ve ever done. Alongside garlic parsley mashed potatoes made from new potatoes, and a salad, it was one of the more successful meals we’ve had in a while.

Our nephew Steve came to dinner to get a change from UI dorm food and he was gratifyingly grateful for the home-cooked meal. We topped it off with some European cheeses, a Dutch cheese with nettles, a semi-soft cow’s milk cheese from the Pyrenees with peppercorns in it, some domestic blue, and some Morbier from France, with the layer of ash in the middle – but next time in keeping with the locavore theme I’ll try some just from the Pacific Northwest. I bought a Ste Chapelle wine that was cheap, a “soft red”, thinking it’d be just the thing, but I didn’t realize that “soft” means “sweet.” Next time I’ll go with the pinot noir from Oregon or the Okanagan...