Recipe for Hard Apple Cider

I know, I know, I just can't resist the diy boozies. This time, we're doing it without any help from Crushpad, thank you very much, and it is entirely a labor of love. Oren built a magnificent cider press using his bare manly man hands and we picked up some brewing equipment (awesome jugs, brewer's yeast, and little doodads that that the Hubby-O found way cooler than I did) from the local home-brew store. Then it was off to Berkeley Bowl for 20 pounds of apples plus some crunchy sesame stick snack mix from the bulk section, to fortify the breweress, clearly.

We let the apples sit out on the dining room table for about a week to soften and let the sugars develop. This made the entire house smell like apples. Lovely! Then on Thursday last, we cored the fruit, put it all through my (beloved) food processor, pressed it in the homemade press, heated the icky bacteria out of the juice, added some brown sugar (how come you taste so good), funneled the juice into the super cool jug, added yeast, mixed well, topped with airlock, done.

Now our gallon of cider-to-be is fermenting away on top of the fridge. Not going to lie: We spend a good amount of time watching the gas bubbles pop in the airlock. You would too, and you know it. So the next tasks are to make a couple more batches (we want to experiment with different apples and change around some other variables) and to come up with an appropriately tasty name, to be printed on a beauteous label. My finest thought thus far: Isn't It Brewmantic? I know, it's punniliciously amazing. Anyone else want to throw out an idea?

Recipe for Blackberry Preserves

I've waxed poetic before on the joys of blackberry picking, so this time I'll get straight to the kitchen, where it smells like sweet fruit and little spots of fuschia dot the counter, floor, and walls like spurts of blood (in a nice way.) I've just turned my two Nalgenes-full of wild berries into homemade blackberry jam. Blackberry jam is wonderful. Particularly on my most favorite food of all (most of the time), toast. I used Nalgenes because we don't have any large Tupperware, so if you are concerned with the BPA and BPB and BPA-to-Z leaking into your preserves, don't eat any of mine. I didn't offer you any, anyway.

I've written down the recipe, so you can give it a shot if you have some blackberries growing nearby, too. Weird blackberry picking almost-ruining moment: There's a horse riding place right near (but about 20 feet above and across the street from) the bushes where I'm picking, and this horse trainer lady comes out and yells to me that I need to move down the road because "you guys" scare the horses when you pick blackberries and there's a beginner class riding right now and that's a problem. Huh. So you're telling me that the horses are more scared of me than they are of the motorcycles growling by every 2 minutes? OK, lady. You're totally nuts. Not wanting to be a jerk, I moved---to a much better spot anyway, thank you very much---but of course proceeded to have a nasty conversation with Evil Horse Lady in my head for the rest of the berry picking excursion. So that's something to watch out for next time you're picking.

Anyway, on to the recipe. Next time I'll add some more liquor, or maybe herbs or spices... ooh, and maybe some apricots to make the flavor a little more complex.