Bonus Day

The forecast for the second Saturday in April was for cool temperatures, so our expectations were low. We worked inside late morning, but when the sun came out, we took advantage of the unexpectedly favorable weather to get some things done outside.

The pool lounge chairs may be the death of me. Pedro in Coral Springs, FL insists they are properly sized but I have yet to get them installed. They seem to be 3/4" too narrow. I attempted for 2 hours to MacGyver a spreader out of one of my clamps with no success. Lisa put an end to my futility by just ordering one from Amazon.

We turned to the poolhouse, where we have yet to hook up the plumbing for the new sinks. Unfortunately the concrete is too thick for easy installation of the faucets. I trimmed down one of the plastic screws and with one more trip to Westlakes, we should finally have it done. In a last ditch effort to actually accomplish something - anything - I got the water on in the poolhouse. The welded water wrench performed flawlessly.

Dinner was a highlight. Lime jasmine rice, pan-seared garlic asparagus, and salmon with dill and apple chutney.

Rain (maybe snow) is forecast for the morning hours. More progress on the poolhouse seems unlikely until next weekend. Grapes ship Monday and the pool opens Wednesday, so we'll be very busy. 

Dave's Smoked Salmon

My brother, upon learning I now have a BGE, sent me his favorite smoked salmon recipe. We gave it a go.

The fish is soaked in a brine with bay leaves and maple syrup overnight. Then the next morning you form a "pellicle" on the fish by drying it in front of a fan for 4 hours.

The fish becomes tacky. The thinner parts looked as if they had been smoked already by the time this step was complete - they were translucent and firm. The fish then went onto the grill. The BGE was easy to dial in at 200F.

The recipe says to baste hourly with maple syrup. It took only three hours to get to the desired internal temp of 145F.

Delicious! We'll do this again when Jake gets home. Thanks Dave!

Bob Ross is like Crack

Twitch is streaming all 400 hours of Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting. This is addictive stuff.  I am finding it hard to turn off.

Five Thirty Eight did a statistical analysis of his work and 91% of his paintings contained at least one tree.  Bob Ross is pretty good at painting trees.   This evening I watched him paint an "old tired tree," and it was asymmetric and lonely and beautiful.

I have a tree like this in my yard.  It is Diospyros virginiana, American Persimmon. It is solitary, large, crooked, and old. And it is a little tired. But it faithfully produces persimmons every year.  I have gathered hundreds of pounds of these persimmons. I have progeny growing nearby, in and around the pawpaws. Most of the persimmons I have gathered have gone toward futile attempts at persimmon wine.

Today, Lisa and I made persimmon cookies. The effort was much more successful than persimmon wine. Baking soda does strange and cool things to persimmon pulp.

We found a recipe with dates, which strikingly resemble chocolate chips.  These are terrific cookies, and there are enough persimmons left on the tree to get another batch or two.

We found some fresh salmon in town and had a nice supper of salmon with a roasted red pepper sauce, spinach salad, and cookies.

I'm feeling as relaxed as Bob Ross.

Lychees and Elderberries

At long last, we're making lychee wine.  My winemaking schtick originally was that I would grow the majority of the primary ingredient in each wine.  I've loosened that up a bit, and now the idea is that I grow an important portion of the primary ingredient in each wine.  I think this qualifies.

It took a bit of driving around with Shawn and Suzanne, but last weekend we found some canned lychee at an Asian market in Columbia.  My harvest this year was only about 15 fruit, but they are large, delicious 'Sweetheart' lychees, now frozen.

Lychee wine recipe

6 20oz cans of lychee

8oz fresh frozen 'Sweetheart' lychee

1 liter WGC

900g sugar

3/4t Fermaid K

1t GoFerm

3/4t tannin

4t pectic

1.5t citric acid

1.5t tartaric acid

QA23 yeast

6g bentonite

Add together the canned lychee, WGC, tannin, acids, sugar, and pectic.  Allow to sit 12-24 hours.  Check and adjust SG and pH/acid.  Rehydrate and pitch yeast.  Bentonite day 3.  Carboy when around 1.010.  Rack off gross lees after 1-2 weeks.  Rack at 30 days.  Thaw and lightly chop frozen lychees and add to carboy.  Rack again at 30 days and usual care thereafter.

This is basically the approach I took with my passionfruit wine...a "secondary infusion."  The lychee pH was 3.24 but TA a little low at 3.  I think my new WGC has less acid buffer than the old because the last two batches of wine needed far less acid to get to desired pH.  OG was fine at 1.080.  It may need a little more citric acid, we'll judge that after the third racking.  I moved it to the carboy after 6 days.

*****

Allie will be home next weekend from her internship in Washington, DC.  It will be great to hear more details about her adventure.  She enjoys being around people as passionate as she is.  

She will be home just in time to 1) sample last year's elderberry wine and 2) pick some more elderberries.  My elderberries have started to ripen and I have a few handfuls in the fridge.  But our big pickin' spot doesn't have too many ripe berries yet.

Last night Lisa and I popped open the first bottle of 2014 elderberry, batch 3.  Lisa was concerned about how many bottles we would have.  Between the four batches we have about 120 bottles of elderberry from last year so we were safe, in my judgment, opening a bottle last night. 

This wine is very good, just really young.  The color is terrific, so purple it has almost a blue color at times in the glass.  It is a little tart, and a little green peppery.  The tannin adjustments were right on.  I believe and hope this wine will settle down, the fruit will come forward in another several months.

Breaking convention, we had drank the elderberry with cedar-smoke-grilled chinook salmon and a mango-fennel-avocado salad.  Cheers!