Grandma's Grape Juice

So . . . over Labor Day weekend (which was forever ago) we made the 12 pounds of grapes I picked on that Friday morning into 21 quart jars of Grandma's Grape Juice drink.

Note: the following recipe is for story only, I am not advocating that you go out and do this with your 40 pounds of grapes and you will have perfect juice. This is my first time using it, and I have not got to drink the stuff yet as it hasn't set long enough, so I can't even tell you if I got it right yet.

It started out like this:

After a couple of hours of picking them off the stems, and getting rid of any bugs and ugly grapes, we ended up with this (the 12 pounds of grapes in a big bag for weighing with our hanging scale):

Then we washed them, and picked over them again; you don't want any of the ugly, shriveled up, smooshed ones for making this stuff.

Then you dump a cup of grapes in each jar, which has been washed and sterilized, and is still hot from being sterilized (i.e. just out of a dishwasher where you set all the wash and dry cycles to hot!), and then add 3/4 cup of sugar, and fill the rest of the jar up with boiling water. The rest of Grandma's recipe is kinda vague to those of us used to modern canning techniques. It went something like this: seal the jars, and let cool; then invert for several hours, and then store upright. Will be ready to use in 6 weeks. No mention of what canning method to use to process these babies, and no way was I going to do the old invert to seal thing. We did that with some maple syrup the first year we made it, and ended up with mold. Ugh!

So I go searching the grand old Internet, and come across a magazine article for the same recipe, but with lo and behold, water bath canning directions. Yea!!! So we water bath canned these guys for the time suggested, and ended up with these:

















I have more picture of the actual process somewhere. I think I must have took them with Ryan's phone instead of mine, and I didn't send them to my e-mail yet. When I find them, I'll try to update this post.

In about a month we'll have to crack one of these puppies open and see what it's like.

Where September 1 Finds Us . . .

I find that August ramblings have taken us far from the blog posting world (has it really been since Aug. 3?).  So I'll do a quick run through of August in pictures:

One of the 4 batches of pickles we made. These are my Grandma's bread and butter pickle recipe. We made three recipes of dill pickles (from a mix) for the dill pickle eating machine who lives at my house (i.e. Ryan). Needless to say that's like 20 - 30 jars of pickles ( I've processed so many other vegetables since then I've forgotten the actual number).

Quite frequently during the last few weeks our kitchen table and counters have been covered with boxes that look like this:

As the days have went on, there have been less and less squash and cucumbers, and more tomatoes. Today all my boxes are filled with red, except for the occasional green of a pepper. I don't know how in the world we've ended up with all the tomatoes we have (and they just keep coming), but I'm not going to complain. Can anyone say salsa, spaghetti sauce, tomatoes for soup, ketchup, and did I say salsa? Yum!


Besides storing them away, we've been eating tomatoes too. My favorite? A good ol' BLT with a big chunk of fresh Black Krim. I really don't think there is a better tasting slicing tomato. Though I know that it may be hard to get past the purplish, reddish, blackish color for some. (This picture doesn't do justice to the rich color of these tomatoes!)

Sunflowers have come into season, blooming and ripening seed. Our birds are too big of fans of them to let us dry them before serving, so as soon as the seeds are ripe, you will find a mob scene like this:

Other stories . . . the last cantaloupe out of our garden . . .

This picture isn't much for scale, but it was quite possibly the largest one I had ever seen. Eight pounds, my friends!  I only eat cantaloupe out of the garden. The ones from the grocery store don't taste the same. Needless to say we ate our fill off this one, and still had more for the next couple of days.


Pullet eggs:

We have some new hens, they are pretty, and they have started to lay these lovely little eggs. I will share their story another day.

Yet other stories . . . the pigs went to the butcher last week. We were ready for them to go, they were not. Which made loading them out quite the experience. I'll just say we know what not to do next year, and leave it at that. Sounds like we will have quite a bit of pork in our freezer. One had a hanging weight of 190 and the other was 210. We pick up everything next week after the hams and bacon have been smoked.

We hope to get a fall planting into the garden. There are broccoli and cabbage plants growing in the upstairs bedroom, and bags of garlic dispersed among the boxes on my kitchen table. Now if we could just get a nice soaking rain to soften up the ground so we could till it under and ready for planting.

We finished digging potatoes last week . . . I have never seen our ground so hard; Ryan could barely get the potato fork stuck in the soil deep enough to turn it over. At least we were rewarded for our efforts with some nice potatoes. Though it appears that there is a critter around that likes Yukon Golds as much as I do, at least half of our crop had little (or big) gnawed spots on them.

That's enough rambling for now. Soon I will introduce you to our new flock of laying hens, update you on the meat turkeys, show you my experiment making grape juice using my Grandma's 1930's recipe, and other fun stuff.