My artistic photo of one bowl full of fresh fruit
and another bowl
This was the clean bounty after cleaning out all webs, worms, spiders and raisins!... The following are backward... sorry!
Finished grape juice! ~ 8 Cups
Straining the juice(after food milling the hot grapes to separate seeds & skins)
Cooking the grapes down
Food Processor - before cooking them down (it helps bring out more juice)We were GIVEN a cooler full of freshly picked "Norton" grapes yesterday. Our neighbor went out to Elsberry and picked them with her kids at an uncle's vineyard. Apparently the local vineyards had such great crops this year with all the rain that they are not purchasing from this vineyard. My neighbor tells me they have approximately 1 ton of Norton grapes that will be wasted. WHAT?! How can this be? Norton makes a lovely vintage. sigh. Oh bother, I won't be taking on the expense and time consuming pursuit of making homemade wine just yet. (what with a move in the near future!) But boy was I tempted... :)
Instead, I took the whole lot and cooked it down and made fresh Grape Juice for Chris and I... a perfect breakfast companion! AND a lovely way to have communion in the mornings at home!
It is very surprising to spend time cleaning and cooking all those lovely grapes and then hand mill them and strain them and end up with less than 3 quarts of juice for my efforts!! It does taste incredible though... in an organic way it is worth every second of time spent.
Plus our gleaned fruit just keeps multiplying. hmm multiplying fruit... fruitful multiplication.
The kids are all great! Everybody has been eating apples like crazy... they love them... but they really love them peeled and curlyQ'd. The neighbor loaned me her peeler/corer/slicer thingy and it is fabulous. Going to be looking for one at garage sales... or resale shops. I got a great bargain last saturday after we picked all those apples... somebody had a brand new flat bottom Stainless steel 16 quart soup/stockpot that I got for $5! BARGAIN! I had been looking for a nice sturdy one to handle large batches of soup for church functions, but the good ones are all too expensive and the cheap ones are all too thin and poorly made. This one is thicker than some and perfect for what I need! Yes, that is it above holding the cooking grapes!
We still don't have a signed contract for the purchase of this home... we expect to get that from our buyer any day. He has a financial detail holding him up... it affects the letter of the contract, so we patiently (huh, well, Chris is anyway!) wait. We know God safely has the details.
Incredibly God showed up and impressed a few things to me today... I love the sounds of His voice...
"The fruitfulness of the winter season is now apparent in her life."
The Season of Preparation before the Harvest. ... the vines with tender grapes give a good smell. - Song of Songs 2:13
... for our vines have tender grapes. Song of Songs 2:15
"Sustain me with cakes of raisins, refresh me with apples, For I am lovesick." Song of Songs 2:5
and of course ... the word play...
The fun part about the last scripture is that I don't eat raisins YUK. (um, yeah... I always picked them out of the sweet potatoes and now I just don't put them in!) Yet, I do love grapes any kind of grapes!
anyway.. we have had an abundance of apples around here... I just made applesauce cake Saturday YUM! So I have been sustained with cakes of apples, had raisins delivered attached to fresh sweet grapes, and been refreshed with apples (we just picked our 2nd batch!)
Isn't God fun! He sends us kisses right when our heart needs them the mostest. oh and let me just say again...
I am Lovesick!
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