Into 2009
Here we are, almost halfway through January of 2009 – how did that happen so soon?
We had a lovely holiday, all things considered. Portland got more snow in the last few weeks of December than we generally get in 1-2 years, at least. As this city is prepared to deal with rain far better than snow (after all, we generally get an inch or less at a time, one to two times a year, so it’s not usually much of an issue) everything more or less shut down.
So I ended up housebound with Sean for about a week, and we absolutely made the most of it. He works nights, so we generally get limited time together because of the schedule mismatch. But with a week and a half at home, I was able to switch my schedule around to nights – I’m quite a natural night owl myself, so it was nice not to have to fight it for a while.
We decided to give almost entirely handmade or self-designed gifts this year. I think the only purchased present we gave was some microdistilled brandy and raspberry liqueur that we picked up for Sean’s dad this summer while taking a tasting tour at the Brandy Peak distillery on the southern Oregon coast. I also designed a handful of custom laser cut keychains, ornaments, and jewelry items for other gifts, knit one hat, and we made the Kahlua and two different flavors of infused vinegars pictured above.
The Kahlua was Sean’s idea, months and months ago. We got a recipe from someone he works with who makes it occasionally, but the recipe called for instant coffee, and that was just not going to fly in our java-soaked household. We drink a lot of coffee, and we like the good stuff, so we weren’t about to go out and pick up something we wouldn’t drink ourselves to make gifts for our friends and family. So I flexed my google-fu a bit and came up with this recipe, using toddy coffee.
Speaking of which, if you haven’t tried toddy coffee, you should! It’s a cold-brew method that involves soaking very coarsely ground coffee beans in cold water for 12 hours. You end up with a coffee concentrate that you then dilute with water, milk, cream, etc to make your drinks (for hot drinks, you can either mix with hot water or heat in the microwave once diluted) . Because no heat is applied, the compounds that can make coffee acidic and bitter don’t get pulled into the drink, and the taste is closer to how coffee smells. You can get cold-brew coffee makers that include a large container for brewing, filters, and a carafe for around $30-40 (this
Anyway, back to the topic – I also wanted to talk a bit more about the vinegars we made. I decided on two different flavors – Scarborough Fair (yep, that would be parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme) and Pesto (basil and garlic). I made the pesto with plain distilled vinegar, and put a bunch of garlic cloves and fresh basil in to soak. The Scarborough Fair was made from a mix of distilled and red wine vinegars, with a combination of dried and fresh herbs. Both of them were set up in gallon jugs and left alone to sit and infuse for about 5 weeks, then I strained out the herbs by pouring the mix through a fine mesh strainer. That worked perfectly for the fresh herbs, but the dried ones ended up with some little bits that made it through the strainer, so I popped a coffee filter into the funnel I was using to fill the bottles and got rid of the rest that way.
For some added visual appeal, I put a couple of fresh herb sprigs into the S.F. bottles, and each of the pesto bottles got one of the garlic cloves that had already been soaking in the mixture. If you’re going to do that, you want to make sure that whatever you leave in the bottle can stand up to the vinegar (the main infusing time is a good place to check this). Garlic does fine, as do the woodier herbs, but leafier ones like basil and up breaking down to a bit of a goo – which is not a problem when infusing, but would end up making the final product pretty unattractive if you put it in then. As a bonus, we have a bag of slightly basil flavored pickled garlic cloves in the fridge now, as there were more of them than bottles. Yum!
