Provisions

This was our harvest of Mountain Pepper for the season.  Not a huge amount but not bad for one small tree.
















I had a go at hot cross buns for Resurrection Sunday.

Not bad for a first shot, and they were delicious.

Now there's a tale to these.
I decided to make plum wine.
I had picked heaps of Greengage and Golden Drop plums from Rachel's orchard, and Sue had frozen them.  Freezing makes them easier to pulp once they are thawed, so I set about making up about 7 litres.  Problem: it's hard to tell frozen plums and apricots apart, so instead of plum wine we ended up with plumpicot wine.
It has resulted in a delightful dessert style wine, with a refreshing fizz.
We also experimented with rhubarb wine - 7 litres initially - and the results were so good that we immediately cleaned out the rhubarb patch and now have bottled 29 more litres.
I also made 10 litres of cider from our own apples and have 25 litres more brewing from apples from Rachel's orchard.
I also have 15 litres of ginger beer brewing.
All told, we have about 90 litres of hooch either bottled or brewing....and I wouldn't average a standard drink per day.  Looks like I'm just about covered for winter.

But there's always a catch.  That 40 litres which is brewing will need to be bottled and we're out of bottles.  A message has gone out to friends to save their soft drink bottles.  I prefer the PET bottles to glass for a good reason: I don't like glass grenades.  PET bottles go out of shape before they will burst, so there's plenty of warning if pressure needs to be eased.

I ran the costs.  Cider costs us nothing when I rely on the natural yeast, or less than 1cent per litre if I use champagne yeast.  The other country wines come out at about 15 cents per litre because of the added sugar.  At those prices I could put up with ordinary hooch, but this stuff has all been great.  Ok, the blackberry wine had a stinkbug in it, which made it less than completely wonderful, but otherwise...