About two weeks ago, my sister gave Robin a jingle. Part of their conversation steered to their gardens. Sharon (my sister) and her husband Steve have a really cool garden in their backyard. Raspberries, strawberries, grapes, and red currants to name a few of the items they grow. It was the currants that perked Robin's interest. She told me that we were heading down to pick currants.
Now, we have a few very young currant bushes that did produce a small amount of berries this year so I wasn't too sure that the trip was going to be one of those "wow" trips. Seeing my sister is a delight anyway, so I wasn't going to be too put out if we got a cup of berries for the run down the valley.
We stopped along the way at Snipes Brewery in Sunnyside, Washington. This is a microbrewery with a restaurant. The chef (yep, chef!) made up some great food and we picked up a growler of Dos Barrachos for Sharon and Steve. Dos Barrachos is a specialty beer there and Barracho is Spanish for drunk, I hear. Very tasty stuff and I can imagine that a growler could get a couple folks pretty tipsy.
When we got to my sister's homestead, she showed us her little currant bush. It has been there for thirty years, so you may be able to imagine that it offered up a bit more than a cup or so of berries. Eight pounds of extremely beautiful red currants! I'll scare up a picture of the berries and insert one here as Robin took a few photos of them. (Update 07/21/2012: Here is a lovely pictures of some gorgeous currants tucked in a mesh bag just prior to the crush:)
Robin told me when we got home that I was going to do up a recipe that took three pounds of currants and we whipped up a batch. (One more update 07/21/2012-Robin snapped a picture of the press that we got from my folks. It was in the yard and rusting out. We cleaned it up and restored it)
Here is a picture of it starting about two weeks ago and one from today:
It looks very pretty on the right, don't you think? I almost wish we had had enough to do five gallons, but that is for another day and leads me into our next project...
Last Friday, we got an e-mail from the folks at Blueberry Hill. This is a berry patch over in Moxee, Washington and we visited these folks last year and got on their mailing list. Robin, Conor, and I decided to pick a few berries there. I grabbed thirty dollars and was pretty sure that would cover the tab. They give out some buckets with a line on them. I guess I did not remember how much that line meant. Robin kept asking if we had enough before we hit the line, but we were only there for about 45 minutes. There were some very large berries and the picking was easy as there were loads of them on the bushes. U-pick blueberries run $1.90 a pound. We got thirty and a half pounds at the weigh in... Fortunately, Robin keeps an emergency stash that she pulls out in these types of situations and $60 later, we headed home with an incredible amount of berries and a bit of confusion on what to do with them all.
Sharon loaned us a juicer that we used to extract a pound or so of the remaining currants into juice. It is a heavy duty model that could probably pull water out of rocks. I did want to try our grape press on the blueberries first. That was not a very bright idea. Blueberries have a thick juice compared to the lovely currant. It was almost slimy coming out of the mesh bag and was not coming out too fast. We decided to run it through the juicer. This was a much better option. The down side of this method was cleaning the screen every cup as the skins on the blueberries can clog up the screen pretty quick. We ran about 25 pounds through the extractor. 15 of it was to go into five gallons of blueberry wine! Whoo hoo!. The remainder went into jam and the last of the berries went on ice cream and blueberry pies. We pigged on berries for next day or so.
I found a great recipe for a fortified blueberry wine that suggests using the skins and leaving of the blueberries in a mesh bag along with about a pound of raisins for the tannins. I left the bag in the bucket for a couple days and pulled it out this morning. Here is the bucket:
Soon I will get back to the metheglin. But...the apricots are beginning to drop. Hmmm....What do you think?
