Yeah, it’s been one of those weeks, and it’s only Tuesday night >.< Never mind. Next week is shaping up to be much, much less frenetic, and then there are two weeks of school holidays. Phew.
But! We did make things last week!
In particular, we made something ridiculous like 20 or 30L of grape juice. (5 or 6 gallons, for my USian friends.)
A weekend in the recent past (because what is time anymore when we are all home, all the home, all the us, all the times, every time), a local-ish vineyard opened its doors to the public. Its crops had all been adversely affected by the January Australian bushfires, and were no longer useful for wine-making. Instead of letting the produce entirely spoil, the vineyard chose to offer FREE GRAPES to the public.
Heavenly. In just over an hour, hub + 2 squids + I managed to pick something utterly ridiculous like 70kg of grapes (an estimate; we weighed one bag and extrapolated). That’s 154lb of grapage, mostly chardonnay, but some shiraz. Om nom.
As aforementioned, the grapes were no good for fermenting or they wouldn’t have been free, but over the intervening weeks hub & I (mostly hub) laboriously plucked all the lil tiny grapes from their stems, de-spidering them on multiple occasions, and cooked them up for juice. (Destem, wash, mash a bit, simmer for 5 mins stirring occasionally, mash some more, simmer for another 5 mins then strain twice through a muslin cloth or old, clean teatowel.)
And now we have green juice and red juice in every spare nook and cranny of the fridge, in as wide an assortment of vessels as old milk carton-jug thingies, the blender compartment-cup-thing, the glass water bottles like would be on the table at a restaurant, etc etc and so forth. We are bursting with juice, and in our house, it is an almost unspeakable luxury, because as everyone who has the privilege of dining at our house knows, it’s BYO if you want anything other than milk or water, because we don’t buy juice ourselves and forget to cater for that bit of Having Company. Oops.
Also, the juice is wow-amazing rich, so it’s extremely palatable watered down 50/50 with sparkling water if you like a bit of fizz, or even just tap water. I’m certainly not wasting it neat on the kids.
I don’t have pictures of juice, but I do have one of the car boot full of grapies.
Yay grapes!
It’s important to keep creating in times of stress. It’s good for your brain and good for the world. If you haven’t had time or space to make anything in the last week, I highly recommend it. Don’t do something you think you’re ‘supposed’ to be good at, if that will add to the stress: do something silly and random like draw a deliberately terrible picture, or bake a fail-cake, or make juice. Low-stakes creation is still creation, and you can still be proud that you chose to create this week rather than destroy <3 <3 <3