homebrew #7: sleepytime wit

We started a batch of wit beer that features honey and chamomile!!  I'm pretty excited about its potential!  Check out our recipe over on Hopville.

For my own purposes of record keeping, here's what kinds of beers we've made thus far:
#7 Sleepytime Wit
#6 Barn Owl Saison
#5 Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Stout
#4 Ginger Snap Brown Ale
#3 Walter Cronkite IPA
#2 Christmas Dinner Cranberry Porter
#1 Lost Wisdom Pale Ale

honey glazed carrots and a november salad

We're starting things off easy peasy for the Dark Days Challenge. Though to be honest, my original plan was spoiled - literally. I had planned on making matang, a Korean candied sweet potato, but the sweet potatoes that Eric picked up last weekend from the farmers market did not survive the week. I was pretty bummed so I took myself on a walk.  During said walk I realized that I could just make honey glazed carrots instead.  When I got home I cut up the carrots, steamed them for about 5 minutes, then coated them in honey and cooked for a minute.  Since I steamed instead of fried, I didn't get the crispy matang effect but, hey, it was good anyway.

And as planned, we threw together a simple local salad of tender mixed greens, goat cheese, and homegrown counter-ripened tomatoes.  The only thing not local about this meal was homemade vinaigrette!

honey run

We rode our bikes up to Lyons, CO (32 miles round trip) and refilled some empty containers with 20 lbs. of affordable, local honey from Madhava. We also stopped at Oskar Blues for beer ice cream. Mmm... It was a good ride but a really windy day as you can see from the photo.

We'll be making similar posts in the upcoming weeks. Why? Because we plan on doing several bike trips to surrounding towns this summer. The long term motivation is to increase our fitness and endurance so that we can eventually do longer trips across Colorado, around Lake Michigan, maybe even across the U.S. The more immediate motivation is to get out and enjoy surrounding microbreweries, campgrounds, etc. without any need for a car.

dandelion rhubarb mead

Once again, the dandelions are saying hello. Modern U.S. society has a funny hatred for dandelions. The truth of the matter is that for a long long time people across the world have found dandelions valuable for their early spring nutrition and for their medicinal values. In fact, European immigrants purposefully brought dandelion seeds to North America. So quit spraying your lawns with herbicides and start being thankful!

This time last year, Eric and I started fermenting dandelion rhubarb mead. It took about a month of going on walks and picking dandelions to gather enough flower petals. It's kind of a process, but its a good excuse to take a walk! It is good to pick right now because people haven't gotten fanatic about their lawns yet. Later in the season you have to pay more attention to who sprays herbicides and who doesn't.

We painstakingly removed all the green sepals from the yellow petals. Some recipes say you should, some say it's not necessary. Next time, we'll try using the whole flower heads, because this was WAY too much work--although it was a nice meditative kind of work (see middle photo below).

Ingredients:
3 qt. rhubarb stalks, chopped and frozen
~1 qt. dandelion flower petals, frozen
2.5 lb. honey

Bring 2 qt water up to almost boiling (180F). Stir in honey and maintain temperature at 160-180F for a while to pasteurize. Higher temperatures are fine, but you will lose honey flavor. Pour the hot honey-water over the rhubarb and dandelion petals in a primary fermentation bucket. You can use an airlock fit in the bucket lid, or do what we did and just cover the bucket with a towel--there should be enough CO2 being belched out that baddies can't get in. After a few weeks, strain out the solids and rack into a secondary fermenter with airlock. Rack it again and bottle when it's done bubbling.

The finished product! It has a nice pink color. Our last rhubarb mead was yellow, strangely--maybe the rhubarb wasn't ripe? At first tasting, the mead was a bit harsh and I would say it needed some aging. But after sitting out for an hour or so, it got pretty good. Maybe this is similar to the effect of decanting wine?

homemade honey oatmeal soap

About a month ago, a friend and I made a batch of honey oatmeal soap. It is finally done curing and ready for use!

rose hips

On a bike ride the other day, I came across a few rose bushes that were loaded up with rose hips. I loaded myself up with 11 oz of these fruits that have numerous health benefits. They are best harvested after the first frost makes them kinda squishy. Last year, we dried out our harvested rose hips for tea, so this year I wanted to make something more wet, like rose hip honey freezer jam:

Someone told me that you could put raw rose hips in a food mill to extract the pulp from the seeds. It didn't work out so well for me--the flesh was just too stuck to the seeds. Maybe it would work in a motorized juicer.

So, instead I stewed the rose hips in water for a long time and strained them through a jelly bag. I cooked some sugar into the liquid to make rose hip syrup. I put the now cooked seed-pulp through our food mill (thanks Davey for giving it up!) and was able to get about half a cup of pulp out. I combined with an equal amount of honey to make this delicious jam. I'm keeping it in the freezer because the water content might be too high to safely leave out as you would with honey. Luckily, it doesn't freeze solid, so it is convenient to pull out to spread on spent grain bread. Technically, this still contains the irritating hairs that surround the seeds, but they've been cooked so much they haven't bothered me yet. The cooked berries have long been used in native cooking, in soups and stews, as well as a dinner vegetable, served with butter and salt.

The pulpy seeds that were left in the food mill looked like they would be good for some more flavor, so I stewed and strained them again and boiled with sugar to make another syrup. This second one came out pretty thick...almost like candy.