Port Potager

Now that we've seen our third and second place cocktails, it's time to reveal the winer of the 2013 Iron Bartender Contest! (Drumroll…) The winning drink managed to make our iffy, homemade dandelion wine taste splendid. Not too sweet, not too tart, it's a fruity masterpiece, and won our contest by the judges' nearly unanimous assent. Without further ado: Ubarri Uberry Sangria Presented by Chrisann and Carlos Ubarri For the sangria base: 1/2 cup raspberries 1/2 cup blackberries 1/2 cup strawberries 1 lemon, thinly sliced 1 cup limoncello For the drinks: 1 oz. sangria base 1 oz. limoncello 1 oz. dandelion wine (chilled) 1 oz. Prosecco (chilled) 1. Prepare the sangria base ahead of time by adding fruit to a pitcher. Then add enough limoncello to cover, approximately 1 cup.  2. Chill the sangria base for at least three hours before serving. 3. To mix the drink, use the proportions of sangria base, limoncello, da...

Ahem. It was brought to my attention by one of our mixologists that I messed up the reveal of our drink winners. In my last post on the subject , I mistakenly wrote that the Drink of the Lion Fairy and The Rosemaryclaire were third place drinks.  Wrong!  These were, and deservedly so, our second place drinks. I made the correction as fast as I could, but if you are quick to click, you probably read my mistake. Oops and sorry.  So today, we'll look at the actual third place cocktails. Again, we had a tie for both third and second place, so there are two more great recipes to share. The Raspberry Beret Presented by Meredith Moore 1/2 cup raspberries, crushed 1 cup sugar 1 cup water 3 blood oranges, freshly squeezed 1/2 cup dandelion wine 1. First, make a raspberry simple syrup by combining raspberries, sugar, and water in a saucepan and heating on low until the sugar is dissolved, stirring as necessary. Allow to cool, then strain syru...

Last Saturday we hosted our Iron Bartender contest using dandelion wine as the required (and, I must say, challenging) ingredient. We had a total of eight original drinks, and when the voting was done, we ended up with a tie for third place, a tie for second place, and a clear champion. Today, we'll take a look at the second place cocktails. The Drink of the Lion Fairy Presented by Linda and Eric Getz 1 lemon's worth of juice and zest 1/2 bunch fresh parsley, rough chopped 6 springs of mint 5 1/2 ounces water 1&1/2 cup sugar 1 large spring of fresh mint 3 dots of aromatic bitters 1 oz. absinthe 1/2 oz. Bison Grass Vodka 1/2 oz. dandelion wine 1/3 oz. fresh squeezed lemon juice crushed ice 1. First, prepare an herbed simple syrup by combining lemon juice and zest, parsley, 6 sprigs of mint, water, and sugar in a saucepan. Heat on low until sugar is dissolved and syrup thickens slightly. Strain into a jar after syrup cools and comp...

Remember last year when we made an experimental batch of dandelion wine ? It wasn't very good at all, probably due to our Appalachian-style fermenting methods (a ceramic crock and a towel). Still, we don't like to see anything go to waste, so we figured our moonshine-esque wine might be good (or at least palatable) mixed with something else in a cocktail. But what, exactly, makes a fine pairing with a fume-y, medicinal liquor of weeds? We needed help.  Enter the Iron Bartender Contest, which we hosted this weekend. We invited all of our most creative friends to concoct a drink using at least one ounce (a shot) of dandelion wine. Mixologists whipped up a drink, named it, and then got to taste all the drinks before voting for their three favorites.  And, oh my stars, did our friends ever step up to this challenge! People came with all kind of fruits, simple syrup, herbs, liquor, wine, teas, and tools. And they were remarkably undeterred from the challenge afte...

Now that all our Christmas gifts have been given, we can share how our garden gift boxes turned out without ruing anyone's surprise. For my sister, some homemade cosmetics: Here is a gift bag of oatmeal-comfrey soap  and comfrey lip balm . Check out the fancy-schmancy labels! That was my Christmas craft project last week. Some quality time with PowerPoint and sticker paper made for some professional(wish)-looking presents. For our other relatives, we put together garden gift boxes. They were each a little different, but here is a good example: Kirk nailed together the boxes from workshop scraps, and we filled them some freshly-labeled items from our store of preserves. In this box we have a bottle of dandelion wine , a jar of brined pickles , a jar of tomatillo jam, and a package of tomatillo-lime dodgers.  Kirk made the tomatillo jam back in the fall, when we picked out last major baskets of tomatillos before the frost. This is a made-up recipe, subs...

Yesterday was the final Sunday of Advent, the evening of our Joy supper: This is a spinach and bacon quiche, which celebrates our joy that the chickens are all laying perfectly well again now. We also had a spinach and kale salad, with some matchstick carrots (and apple chunks from a local orchard). The kale has been snowed on a couple times now, and never is any the worse for wear in the elements. The spinach is under glass in the cold frame, and it's just as tasty. It also brings us joy that we can still head out into the garden for our dinners, even though it is now officially winter.  I also had a glass of dandelion wine with dinner. It is definitely better well-chilled (our first tasting  was at room temperature), although perhaps too dry for such a light meal.  Now that Advent is complete, we have just a day to go until Christmas. Hope your holidays are filled with all the hope, peace, love, and joy you can handle!

All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap poured by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly's gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe. ~from Dandelion Wine , by Ray Bradbury Back at the end of spring, I picked a yard's worth of dandelions to make dandelion wine. You check out the process here . It's been sitting in the basement for the last six months, and last night we opened one up to taste for the first time.  Dandelion wine is traditionally not opened until the winter solstice, so here's to bottoming out on sunlight for the season: It...

The wine was summer caught and stoppered. ... Since this was going to be a summer of unguessed wonders, he wanted it all salvaged and labeled so that any time he wished, he might tiptoe down in this dank twilight and reach up his fingertips. And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine.  ~from Dandelion Wine , by Ray Bradbury Our dandelion wine seems to be done fermenting, so we removed the balloons and the cotton  and sealed up the bottles. We went with these bottlecap corks: They are pretty easy to use, and you can twist them off and re-use them if you don't finish the bottle of wine on the first go. We liked that they didn't require any special equipment to use — you may recall that this is the world's cheapest wine-making experiment.  This took no time at all, since all all we did was pop in the cork caps. I suppo...

The golden tide, the essence of this fine fair month ran, then gushed from the spout below, to be crocked, skimmed of ferment, and bottled in clean ketchup shakers, then ranked in sparkling rows in cellar gloom. ~from Dandelion Wine , by Ray Bradbury For several days after we put it in the crock to ferment, our dandelion wine was bubbling up a storm, smelling all yeasty and good(ish): Twice a day for about a week we gave it a stir, and after that the fermenting slowed way down. I tasted it probably every day or two, and each day it was obvious that more and more alcohol was being created by the yeast consuming the sugar. It's still fermenting a bit now — you can still smell it and see the occasional bubble rise to the surface. But it's slowing down, and that means we are ready to get it in the bottles for safekeeping. We probably should have done this sooner, but we have jobs and kids, so we finally got around to it last night. We brought the crock to the...

"Every year," said Grandfather. "They run amuck; I let them. Pride of lions in the yard. Stare, and they burn a hole in your retina. A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion." ~from Dandelion Wine , by Ray Bradbury So after a couple of days of soaking , our dandelion heads were ready to drain: We poured the now yellow water (really a dandelion tea at this point) into a large pot. We strained the liquid through cheesecloth and a sieve, and Kirk also squeezed all the juice out of the mushy flowers: And since we're good, we set the cheesecloth aside to dry and save for later. Here's the base for our dandelion wine: It still smells like spinach to me, but at least it's yellow. I'm not sure why there's a flashlight involved in this process — I have no memory of that. Next up: zesting four lemons and four oranges: As Kirk zested, I cut the fruits in half and juic...

The boys bent, smiling. They picked the golden flowers. The flowers that flooded the world, dripped off lawns and brick streets, tapped softly at crystal cellar windows and agitated themselves so that on all sides lay the dazzle and glitter of molten sun. ~from Dandelion Wine , by Ray Bradbury This is what an organic lawn looks like in April in Massachusetts: As you can see, the grass in our front-yard orchard has a good share of dandelions. The ones in the front are big and old, having never been disturbed by a Bobcat as the ones in the back yard have. There are many in the back yard as well, despite our best efforts at weeding last summer . It seems that dandelions have covered the fields around Low Street for at least a hundred years, before most houses were here. There is a columnist in our local paper who is in his nineties, and he writes about Newburyport as he remembers it as a child in the 1910s and 1920s. His column about foraging for dandelions on Low Stre...