crystallized ginger

I'm a ginger fiend. I like my chai and ginger snaps to be overpowering with ginger. So, I made crystallized ginger the other day, using Alton Brown's recipe. It was surprisingly easy. Watch close, because the moment the liquid sugar recrystallizes happens in the blink of an eye. I made some delicious ginger snaps using this homemade crystallized ginger.

Boiling it:

bottled the ginger brown

We bottled our ginger brown ale that we started back in November. The recipe is on hopville, a nice calculator tool and way to keep track of recipes.

We now have a big enough collection of flip-top bottles to fit a 5-gallon batch of beer, without needing to use wine bottles (too big) or crown-top bottles (requires borrowing the capping tool). Conveniently, all of the bottles fit (just barely) in our dishwasher for sanitizing.

For a little experiment, we used three different priming sugar recipes (priming sugar is added just before bottling to create carbonation). One gallon was primed with blackstrap molasses, one gallon was primed with cane sugar boiled with 1 oz. ginger root for extra ginger flavor, and the remaining three gallons got half molasses half cane sugar for priming.

jam-eric-can recovery and reinvestment act

This summer we picked 14 lbs of crabapples (the nice, large variety) from a single tree. They all got turned into various jellies (some with watermelon added, some with grape added, some just plain crabapple). Because crabapples (and apples) are naturally high in pectin, we didn't have to add store-bought pectin. But it made adding the right amount of sugar more of a guessing game. Especially because the water-pectin-sugar ratio is constantly changing as water boils away. By the end I had it down, but several of the jars came out runny--more like syrup than jelly (and really sour too). One jar came out like a solid piece of candy!

Fortunately, you can revive those runny jellies and jams by adding sugar. Heat up the syrup right in the jar in the microwave or on the stove and add sugar a half cup at a time, until you think it will be the right thickness after cooling down. Watch out for bubbling over. You can always add more sugar later. Instead of re-canning these, I reinvigorate one jar at a time, keeping it in the fridge after doing so.

Viva la jam!