Quick lazy grape juice and cordial

One of our  neighbours at the farm come and go like we used to do, and for the last two years they have told us to pick their grapes as they would not be around when they would be ripe.

They are not a very  nice eating  grape, so when I saw a few fellow canners had made simple grape juice,  I decided That I would give it a go too ( I  had nothing to lose)
We wandered over and picked two buckets full and brought them home.
I tipped them into the sink, washed them and  started pulling the grapes off the stems and gave them another rinse in clean fresh water.

After this I put about 3/4 - 1 cup of grapes into each clean bottle, then added a bit less than a 1/4 cup  white sugar to each bottle, I then finished  filling  up to the   top with boiling water , leaving 1/2 inch headspace  to each bottle.

I  capped each  bottle and  give it a few flips to make sure the sugar is fully dissolved and placed the bottles into my electric water bath canner, bring to the boil and hold at boiling point for ten  minutes.
After  processing time has elapsed, I removed the canner lid,and let bottles sit in the water a further  5 minutes before removing  and placing on a towel covered bench out of draughts to cool and seal.
I use a brand new  cap  on these bottles each time I use  them.

These now are supposed to sit on the shelf for 3-4 weeks for the flavour  and colour to develop.
I have already tried a few after only 2 weeks and I really love the taste already.
We ventured back down to the neighbours  again and picked another 2 buckets of grapes(this time they were a fair bit sweeter, but still not great eating) and as I was really happy with the first lot I decided to make even more quick juice out of the larger bucket full and ended up with another  great batch of juice.

This time I used larger bottles and some quart jars.
With the remainder I decided to make some  grape juice cordial concentrate.
I again picked off all the grapes, placed them in a big stock pot,crushed them  with a potato masher and just covered them with water.
I brought this to the boil and boiled  the grapes and water  for  about  10 minutes.
After this I then strained it all through a strainer and then secondly through muslin.
The skins,seeds and residue I fed to the worm farm, and the strained juice I placed back into a  pot and added  an equal amount of sugar ,stirring regularly until sugar dissolved and it reached boiling point. I then  let this boil for approx. 10 minutes.

I then  filled my pint jars, allowing 1/2 inch headspace,wiped rims clean, sealed with flats and rings finger tight and  placed into the boiling waterbath for 10 minutes to seal.
After the allotted  time elapsed once again allowed 5 minutes with lid off and removed to cool on the bench overnight.

I was really pleased with the  amount of juice and cordial we produced  from the four buckets of grapes. The photo below  is just from the second lot of grapes.

The cordial especially has been a  great success, with myself and numerous visitors having had  a try and everyone giving it a definite thumbs up. It is a lovely refreshing drink to have with  soda water or sparkling mineral water and ice, and I am sure would mix   into  alcoholic  drinks like vodka  equally as well.

I often sit out on the  front verandah with hubby late of an afternoon and  enjoy a glass or two,while he has a beer.
I definately will be making more of both the juice and cordial  anytime I am lucky enough to  have a bulk amount of grapes, it is  well worth the effort.
The prickly pear season will be  upon us soon,( I spotted a huge cactus near our place and the owners said I can have the fruit) and this year I intend to make cordial again from them(last year I made jelly and cordial from other  cactus plants I found along the roads, but we just don't eat much jelly).
So until we meet again,
take care everyone,
Cheers,
Jane. :-)  :-)

Going, Going, Going, GONE.!!!

Hello everyone,
Firstly let me apologise for being a really bad blogger.
We have had the craziest of few months , we have travelled thousands of miles up and down the freeway and out west and carted many trailer loads of  things to the farm.
Hubby made the momentous decision to retire from his job that he had been with for over 42 years, and we made the equally big decision to put the house on the market  immediately.

To our surprise it sold almost straight away and for a better price than we were expecting.The new owners plan to knock it down and build 5 or 6 units on the block.

So then the real madness began, we did lots of sorting and did numerous trips to the tip, caught up with many of our old friends for one last get together at the old place and made arrangements for removalists to  quote as I decided that  for this move we would for the first time have someone else do all the heavy lifting.

The day of moving very quickly was upon us and the huge truck pulled up at our place with 8 men ready willing and able to manhandle ours and our sons furniture into the  back of the truck.

We had made the decision to combine with our son who was also moving his possessions out west further on from the farm, and it made good finacial sense to share the truck  and the cost.

It was a crazy few hours, but they were brilliant, we followed behind cleaning and   we  had been told that they would deliver the furniture up to the farm the next morning....as the loading progressed better then expected they suggested to us that they would prefer to unload later that afternoon, so we then had a made scramble to finish off, load the trailer, get  a quick Macdonalds drive through lunch and head west immediately.

We arrived up at the farm at about 4pm, and to our suprise the furniture truck had arrived there about 5 minutes before us.

The furniture was all unloaded within  an hour,  and the truck moved on to deliver our sons belongings to his stirage unit further  out west. Most things went where I wanted them to, the issue being that  nothing is staying where it was placed as we have renovations to be done and it will all need to be moved again, but WE ARE HERE  !!!

For the time being we have made it comfortable,  and  livable, the worst is yet tocome.

we have  used one of the bedrooms as a "box" room, storing everything in there to be unpacked at a later date after the renovations, but we realise now that probably was a mistake as we will now have to empty that room to lay the new floor coverings and have the built in wardrobe installed.....oh well !!!!!!

over the last few weeks the one constant has been my poor old aching feet, they have been  so sore, I am just getting too old for all this.

My daughter bought me a pair of the most beautiful soft blissfully comfortable gel socks, impregnated with lavender oil. They were my salvation, they felt like heaven.

Our coast home has now had settlement and we are  now fully entrenched here on the farm, there is much to do, but we have forever to do it, we are so happy to be finally here, and noe the beginning of the next stage of our life continues.

Until we meet again, and hopefully it will be sooner this time.

Take care,

Cheers,

Jane.

A big birthday,preserving, and bee hives and more !!!.

Back in October, my wonderful Mum turned 90 years of age. Most of the family got together  in Dubbo to celebrate the occasion.

We  had a lovely lunch ,a few speeches and the kiddies enjoyed a fun lolly buffet table.

Mum at 90 is doing so well and I am so very proud of her attitude and independence, she has in the past and  still today  sets  a fantastic example for us to follow.
It was lovely to see so many of our family  all get together  and we had a wonderful catch up.

Returning home after the party, we were talking to some neighbours  who told us they had a loquat tree that we were welcome to come and pick fruit from,  so we did  go and got to pick  two buckets and an esky full.

I had never preserved loquats before  and did some research and found that they are mainly used for jam,we are not big jam eaters, so I decided to just halve  and de-seed them( I had to soak  them  in water and lemon juice to stop them browning.)

I then stewed the loquat halves in a light syrup,

I then  filled my jars and water bathed them in my Fowlers Vacola electric water bath preserver.

They  turned out really well,  we ended up with 28 pint jars, and hope that we get the opportunity to pick them again next year( They were a lot of work, but well worth it.) We are also going to plant a few trees of them as well)
Hubby decided to attach the sheets of  bees wax to the frames while we were at the farm last time also, he first tried using battery alligator clips attached to his jump start pack to melt the wires into the wax, but there just wasn't enough power in it to work.

Next he used his small  soldering torch  to melt along the wires to attach them, this worked much better so he continued to use this method to complete all the frames.

The hive is now complete and all we have to do now is obtain a bee colony to move into it's new home, I can hardly wait.
Back home on the coast we decided to dismantle a  metal structure we had with shade cloth  over it that  originally protected the fish pond and more delicate potted plants that we had.

Hubby  will re-assemble it over a new vegetable garden when we  get it established up at the farm.
We also removed  another metal structure  that we used to grow our choko vine over.

We  loaded all of this metal onto our trailer along with a lot of boxes and crates that I have packed  and took it all to the farm ahead of our move which hopefully will be in the next few months.

I decided to empty one of the  spare rooms, and stack all the boxes and crates in there until  we finally move all the furniture in and have some of the renovations  completed.

The time for our move is drawing closer, and we have had a really busy time sorting out a lot of  things and life has been a little crazy. I will try to keep up with the posts, and they may seem a little random at time, but that's how our crazy  life is at the moment,we seem to spend half our life on the roads between the coast, the farm and our children's homes.
So until we meet again,
Take care everyone,
Cheers,
Jane.

An Abundance Of Lamb

At the moment we have a plentiful supply of lamb. We seem to have a few too many of them running around and as the conditions are fairly dry at the moment we made the decision  recently to  butcher two of the whethers to replenish our freezer supply.
A couple of days before we were due to  butcher a young ewe caught her leg somewhere and unfortunately smashed her leg badly and we had to butcher  her as well.

We did all three sheep early one morning to beat  the heat and flies, and then hung them in the cool  room for about 4 days to  tenderize and add flavour.
We  processed all three sheep, mainly cutting into chops(as that's what we seem to use  the most of). a few roasts and cuts for  casseroles and soups, as well as meals of offal(hearts,livers and kidneys)
we also  often cut chops off the legs as we just adore those lovely big round chops( a bit of Tuscan lamb seasoning and I am in heaven.)

The next day, we decided to bone out two of the larger legs of lamb as  I needed to top up my supply of meat sauce in the pantry.(sometimes, we  can soup, sometimes meat sauce or meatballs and other times we make sausages)

We then ground the meat on the coarse blade of our meat grinder.

The  ground meat was then browned, along with garlic, onions and capsicum and all placed into a big pot  .
I added about 5 quarts of  pre-canned tomatoes, , dried rosemary, salt and papper, tomato paste, red wine and cooked this  for about  an hour until it thickened, deepened in colour and developed  that rich tomato flavour.

This amount roughly fills about 19 pint jars.

I then wipe the rims of these jars with a paper towel dipped in vinegar, place my warmed slightly flats on and seal finger tight  with the rings.
These are then placed in two layers into my pressure canner with a rack between the layers.

I then  greased both edges(lid and canner) with vaseline, locked the lid down and  processed the jars for  75 minutes at 15 Lbs pressure(for my altitude).

After processing and  depressurizing back to  zero, I removed the lid,removed the jars and allowed to cool  overnight on a towel on the table out of draughts.

The next day, I removed the rings, checked the seals, washed the jars , labelled the lids and stored away in the pantry. I also washed  and dried the rings and stored them away in their storage box with all the thousands of other rings.
A few days later  we went to my Mum's 90 th birthday celebrations,  so I decided to make a couple of quick lasagna's using my canned meat sauce to have for lunch the day after the party to help feed the overflow of quests that were staying at My Brother's house..

It is just so handy to be able to grab a few of these  for a dish like this or a quick heat and pour over cooked pasta.

I have made  lasagna a couple of times now with the canned meat sauce and it works really well. I will use this  often as lasagna is always a quick and easy  meal for a crowd.
We also make this using turkey  instead of the lamb and it works equally as well.
The freezer is now lovely and full, but it does empty surprisingly fast  as we pass  some on to family  and friends.
It good to know that at least we have a really good meat supply that  we can depend on.
So until we meet again,
take care,
Cheers
Jane.