Lobster Shorts wine

Wine-ing and Tumbling

It was a productive weekend. Projects were worked on and hobbies were started. Mr Lobster Shorts is building a shed from scratch. Neither of us has built a shed before. This weekend we finished the base. It seems sturdy and I’m hoping it keeps going so smoothly. I’ve already got plans next year for him to build a pergola in the garden, but one thing at a time!

One of my hobbies is making wine. I used to make it at home frequently with take-home kits. It’s a lot of work and it’s messy, so now I go to the winemaker shops. It’s been a long time since I’ve had some made and I was out of bottles. You need 30 bottles when you bottle wine. If you don’t have them, the shop will provide them, but it’s $2 a bottle. That adds another $60 to your winemaking bill. I put an ad out asking for leftover used wine bottles, I figured it would take a while to collect enough, but a generous soul donated 4 1/2 cases of old bottles they no longer needed. One and done!

Over the weekend I cleaned and disinfected all the bottles in a bleach solution. There were a lot and I did it in two stages.

I have the second half still drying on the bottle dryer. The dryer is handy, but it’s two days later and they are still wet inside. I don’t currently have a better solution. Also pictured above is a 4L wine jug I found at the thrift store for $3.00. That one still needs cleaning and disinfecting. I bought that little jug for a reason. Rhubarb wine!

On top of having wine made at the shop, I’ve gotten back into making it at home. I bought a lovely book at Chapters years ago, by Beshlie Grimes. It’s no longer available at Chapters, but I did find it on Amazon. I’ve made her apricot, and plum wine and both were delightful. This time I wanted to try rhubarb wine. My rhubarb plant is thriving and had tons of rhubarb stalks. I usually harvest the rhubarb for pie, but this year it was time to try something different. I’ve never had rhubarb wine before. This book is for small-batch wines (about 5 bottles) and it’s the perfect size for me not to feel too overwhelmed. Maybe one day I’ll get back into the thirty-day kits, but for now, this is much more manageable.

I washed and chopped all this rhubarb with a pair of scissors. I would not do that again. I’d use a knife. I’m pretty sure my cutting board was in the dishwasher, which is the reason I went with scissors. Next time I’ll wait for the washer to finish! My hand was aching!

The next step was to pile a ton of sugar on top of all this rhubarb and wait 3 days. And that’s the step I’m at… 24 hours in. The rhubarb is starting to get liquidy at the bottom. Two more days and it will be time to add water, yeast and yeast nutrient, for fermentation. It’s such a fun hobby. I’m enjoying myself.

Now for the second hobby…. rock tumbling! I recently got a new toy on Amazon. A National Geographic Rock Tumbler. I’ve had a rock tumbler before, but it was damaged. I love rocks. I love to search for neat rocks in all sorts of random places. At the same time I was thinking of getting another rock tumbler, I found out my spouse wanted one too, for completely different reasons. He wanted one to clean up nuts and bolts. I had no idea you could even put those in a rock tumbler.

The rock tumbler kit came with some rocks to tumble (and they are much prettier than mine). But I had a few of my own to add. The colours of my rocks aren’t really showing up very well. Two of them have red running through them. Mr Lobster Shorts asked to tumble these bolts. This is our contribution to the first tumbling batch.

And these are the rocks that came with the kit. There is a really pretty blue and white rock in there that I am super excited to see come out. A lot of these rocks look so small that they will be just ground down to sand, but maybe not. I might have overfilled the barrel with all these things, but it’s my first try in the new tumbler and I’m allowed to make mistakes.

The tumbler is LOUD and it’s going to take about a month to get these rocks polished. The tumbler has been tucked in a back room out of sight, but we can still hear it. I can’t wait until my first batch of rocks comes out!

Lobster Shorts cooking, Food, foraging, vegetarian

Foraging For Lilacs With Old Man Oats

Lilac flowers are abundant in my area. Last year I had my heart set on making lilac syrup and ice cream, but I missed my window (lilac season is over in the blink of an eye). If you don’t have lilacs in your area, just know, they smell incredible! The scent is strong, the flowers are pretty, and there is a ton of them nearby.

Now was my chance, prime lilac season! We decided to take Old Man Oats foraging and Oliver to the puppy park. As you can see from the above photo, Oaty is a lazy bear skin rug, but he loves his walks. He’s super calm and Oliver is still young and bouncy. We haven’t got him leashed trained enough to take him foraging, yet. Hence, Oaty went hunting for lilac flowers, and Oliver to the puppy park when we returned.

Here is the haul we came back with. We picked them from a few different trees to avoid over-picking. There were so many flowers, that it likely would have been fine, but I want to forage responsibly.

It took HOURS to pluck all the flowers off the stems (the stems are apparently bitter, or I wouldn’t have bothered).

The recipe I started with was for lilac syrup. First, you start heating sugar and water.

Add a ton of lilacs and simmer for about 5 minutes.

Then let it steep for 3-8 hours (I left it overnight).

The next recipe I made was ice cream (looks pretty eh?). The recipe I chose didn’t add the lilacs until the recipe had cooled. I didn’t want chunks of flowers in my ice cream so I dumped them in to flavour the ice cream this way (like lavender ice cream which I love!). The flowers did turn brown after being exposed to heat, so I see why the recipe creator didn’t add them at this step). I had lots of leftover flowers, so I threw the rest in the pot and let the mixture steep for a few hours.

I strained out the flowers and put the batter in the fridge to cool.

Because I made this into a double batch of ice cream the ice cream maker couldn’t handle it. It didn’t freeze at all. I threw the whole thing in the freezer overnight until it froze solid and then ran the ice cream maker again. Terrible idea. I ran it a really long time, but the texture stayed icy instead of creamy.

Here’s how the syrup turned out after being strained. It was more green than lilac. I was really hoping for a pretty pale purple colour.

All this hard work was for Epic Sunday Breakfast. Sunday breakfast is a big deal for us. You have to go the extra mile and it’s for all of us (pups included). I chose to make waffles with the lilac recipes and have mimosas too. I did not put the lilac syrup in the mimosas, but maybe I should have? Missed opportunity. How did I like the lilac recipes? Sadly, they were meh. Not awful, but not great. I wanted to love them. I didn’t. They were just okay. The lilac flavour didn’t come through very much, even though I added extra flowers and steeped longer than mentioned in the recipes. The ice cream was mostly my fault, I didn’t follow the recipe and I messed up processing it in the ice cream maker, but the lilac flavour wasn’t there. In the future lilacs will be a garnish only.

Oliver impatiently waiting for his waffle.

As for the pups, they didn’t get any of the lilac recipes because I have no idea if lilacs are toxic for dogs. They got waffles with blueberries and maple syrup.

Lobster Shorts books, crafting

I Made Ink!

I was passing time and went into Wordsworth Books, in Waterloo and saw this fascinating book, by Jason Logan.

I’ve tried a couple recipes in the book awhile back and decided to try some more. I made the recipe for yellow ink in the book using turmeric. It turned out really bright and pretty, but as I wanted it for writing letters, yellow was not the ideal colour. It didn’t stand out enough for people to read.

Using inspiration from the book, I decided to go rogue and try my own recipe with wine, cherries, and berries (all things I had at home). I added some salt and vinegar and boiled it down to make the colour darker. I also made sure to run it through a coffee filter a couple time.

It turned out really well! And even better I used it in a fountain pen without the pen clogging! I’m so happy with it. The ink didn’t pool everywhere, bleed through the paper, and it came out really consistently. It was really easy to work with.

The next day the colour had turned a dark blue-grey. I am hopeful it doesn’t fade over time. I’ve had so much fun. Yesterday I went out foraging, looking for things to make more ink with. I brought home sumac and lichen that I found (it was mentioned in the book as good sources of ink). I hope they turn out as great at the wine ink. I am curious if grass ran through a juicer will also get me great results (after all it does stain your clothes. Remember those grass stains a lot of us came home with as kids?).

I’m so happy I found this book. It’s gotten me outside and exploring nature, in different ways. I am so excited to keep experimenting. Go visit your local bookstore, you never know what fun and exciting adventure it will take you on.