Welcome Back, Farm

The farm share distribution started today - a little late due to the late start to Spring. It's so nice to be back out there! Given that it was the first week, the amount of food was more than expected: Napa cabbage, broccoli, a bunch each of radishes and Hakurei turnips, 12 garlic scapes, a pound of komatsuna greens, and 2 pints of strawberries.

For dinner we had a big salad with some of the radishes, turnips and strawberries, as well as goat cheese. I made another champagne vinaigrette for the dressing, this time I added a little fresh parsley and some cayenne pepper for a little extra kick. Tomorrow I plan to have a stir fry with the cabbage and the komatsuna greens and some beef and a little venison - I have random individual servings of various meats in the freezer that should be eaten and I've been looking for ways to use them. This seems like a good plan.

Also tomorrow I might pickle some of the red radishes!

A Whole Bottle

One of the nurses at work, after hearing about my culinary exploits, brought in a bottle of champagne for me to make into vinegar.  She said she'd never drink it and was glad to see it get put to good use.  It was in her locker, and she asked me to get it before the end of the day, so it wouldn't be left there.  That would just be weird, right?  I said I would and...

promptly forgot.  Of course I did!

I remembered after I got home, and called her to apologize.  She put the bottle in the desk drawer under my computer and, after 2 days, it was there when I got back to work yesterday.  Thank you!

When I got it home, I poured the whole bottle of champagne into a half-gallon jar and added about 3/4 cup of that cider vinegar with the vinegar mother in it.  I topped it with cheesecloth and it's resting on the counter for the next month or so.  Since it loses about half its volume in the process (evaporation, I suppose) I should end up with about a pint of vinegar.

An Experiment

We'd had some champagne a while back and didn't finish the bottle.  I have been thinking about making champagne vinegar with it, but never got around to it until now.  The question was, how do I do it?

After a little online research, I decided to combine a few techniques and see what happened.  I poured the champagne into a mason jar, and then emptied my bottle of white wine vinegar into another container temporarily.  Then I put a little water in the white wine vinegar bottle and picked up the sediment, hoping that the "vinegar mother" beasties are in that sediment.  This was added to the champagne, and that jar was topped with some butter muslin.  Then I put the white wine vinegar back into its bottle.

The jar of champagne is tucked over on the shelf where I tend to ferment things, and let's hope for the best.  Supposedly it takes at least a month.  I'll keep you posted.