Plum abundance

My good friend and fellow food lover, Annette, recently gave me a bagful of plums that came from her own backyard tree. Many people don't realize that you can grow plums here in Alberta, but you can! And these were just delicious.

I think plums are such a beautiful looking fruit, such a gorgeous purple blue colour. Plum colour, I guess you'd say!

 

So what do you do with a bagful of these beauties? I decided to start with a plum crisp. You can never go wrong with fruit crisps, crumbles and cobblers.

 

 

 

 

The basic serving instructions for crisps, crumbles and cobblers is "Serve warm with ice cream." Recently I've been eating them with plain vanilla yogurt, which is great as well.

 

A few days later I decided to do some more baking and made a plum platz. Platz is a traditional Mennonite dessert, sort of like a thin coffee cake topped with fruit and a crumble topping. There are a number of different recipes but this is my favourite. It's included in the Mennonite Treasury cookbook and also featured here on the Mennonite Girls Can Cook website.

Don't you love my nice neat rows of plum pieces? Yes, just call me anal!

 

Here's the platz all ready to go into the oven. I forgot to take a picture after it came out of the oven. I was probably too busy eating!

 

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Wine making 101

I am very happy to introduce a guest blogger today who has agreed to give us a lesson in wine making! Tony Miele is a friend and co-worker who moved to Edmonton from Burlington, Ontario at the beginning of this year.  He's also Italian, and like any good Italian he makes his own wine, as well as homemade tomato sauce, and even his own sausage and prosciutto! Ummmm, makes me hungry just thinking about it.

Tony recently spent some time back in Burlington where he began his annual batch of wine.  Here he is to give us a look at the process.

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I purchase California grapes. In the picture above, we have Merlot (red) and Thompson (White). 

The grapes come in 36 lb cases and you need at least 6 cases for one demijohn which yields approximately 54 liters of wine. The grapes are inspected; leaves and any molding grapes are removed prior to crushing.

The grapes are then crushed into a receiving vessel

 

The crushed grapes (juice and skins). 

Note that the stems, which tend to impart a bitter flavor to the wine, are removed.

 

 

The vessels containing the grape juice are then covered with a blanket to maintain the temperature which encourages fermentation.

Depending on the temperature, fermentation begins quickly. The bubbles indicate the fermentation process is underway. This stage typically lasts 3-4 days.

As fermentation proceeds, the grape skins are forced to the top of the liquid by the production of carbon dioxide.  The grape skins are physically pushed down, “punched” with a wooden paddle into the juice to ensure carbon dioxide is allowed to escape.

After four days, the juice is siphoned off into a glass demijohn.

In order to extract the maximum amount of juice, the skins are loaded into a wine press and squeezed.

 

The juice is collected and poured into the demijohn.

The residual grapes after the pressing process.

The grape juice will continue to ferment in the demijohns.  You can see the bubbles and actually hear the carbon dioxide escaping. I covered the opening of the demijohn with a piece of paper.  It is important that there is no cork or seal on the vessel, as the pressure build-up will cause the demijohn to rupture.

 Also during this time, sediment accumulates in the bottom of the vessel. If exposed to the wine too long, this sediment may taint the flavor of the wine, therefore the wine is periodically siphoned into a clean container.

After approximately a year, the wine is bottled and ready.