The holidays are upon us, and Ryan and I have started a new Suburban Farm holiday tradition: Put up as much homemade booze as humanly possible. Back at the end of September Ryan bottled a bunch of wine and mead that we had sitting around in buckets, and I finally got around to making lables. (Because, of course you need fancy labels on your homemade hooch.) This spurred him on to go ahead and bottle two more batches of wine that had been sitting for a while.
Unfortunately, bottling left us with several empty buckets and just like nature and cats abhorring vacuums, Ryan abhors an empty bucket. There is a long (and sorta boring) story about how we came to our fermenting, steeping, and brewing plans for this season, but the punch line is we bought 42 pounds of fresh cranberries.
Yes, that's what 42 pounds of cranberries looks like.
Some of these cranberries have gone into a 5 gallon batch of wine, some went into a bucket with 2 liters of vodka to steep for a month, some went into mason jars to make an orange cranberry liquor, some are in the freezer for other (non-alcoholic) culinary experiments. Ryan also wants to brew in the next couple of weeks, so he'll be making two batches of beer, both with second runnings, and we've set other liquors to steep. Hummm... maybe we should try cranberry beer too.
And yes, it is ironic that we're not drinking and we're squirreling away approximately 50 gallons of booze. (I'm totally not exaggerating at all - Ryan did the math.)
We've also found an exciting new way to spend Tuesday evenings - Lamaze class. Once a week Ryan and I trug out to the hospital to watch live birth videos from the early 80's (hospital gown fashion hasn't changed at in 20 years), read handouts about labor positions, and practice our breathing and relaxing techniques. Well, I'm supposed to relax, he's supposed practice rubbing my back, shoulders, hands, and feet. Apparently the relaxation is so important we even get it assigned to us as homework. Being the model student I am, I insist on studying Ryan's back and foot rub technique very thoroughly in between classes.
Other then back rubs, we cover a lot of different material. At one point the teacher mentioned pets and started the discussion of how to introduce the baby to them. Now out of the other 12 couples in the room, why she had to ask Ryan and I if we had any pets I'll never know. Most people balk at the number of cats, but once you mention the chickens you've achieved a whole new level of crazy. Once her attention was turned to another more "normal" couple I made a side comment to Ryan about a Thunderdome style introduction "Two men enter, one man leaves..." I fear was overheard by half the room.
It's probably for the best no one overheard Ryan when he saw the reproduction pelvis, "If I were a post apocalyptic warlord, I would totally wear that as a hat!"
- Gretchen
P.S. Since you've asked, here's a picture of me and the critter.
Unfortunately, bottling left us with several empty buckets and just like nature and cats abhorring vacuums, Ryan abhors an empty bucket. There is a long (and sorta boring) story about how we came to our fermenting, steeping, and brewing plans for this season, but the punch line is we bought 42 pounds of fresh cranberries.
Yes, that's what 42 pounds of cranberries looks like.
Some of these cranberries have gone into a 5 gallon batch of wine, some went into a bucket with 2 liters of vodka to steep for a month, some went into mason jars to make an orange cranberry liquor, some are in the freezer for other (non-alcoholic) culinary experiments. Ryan also wants to brew in the next couple of weeks, so he'll be making two batches of beer, both with second runnings, and we've set other liquors to steep. Hummm... maybe we should try cranberry beer too.
And yes, it is ironic that we're not drinking and we're squirreling away approximately 50 gallons of booze. (I'm totally not exaggerating at all - Ryan did the math.)
We've also found an exciting new way to spend Tuesday evenings - Lamaze class. Once a week Ryan and I trug out to the hospital to watch live birth videos from the early 80's (hospital gown fashion hasn't changed at in 20 years), read handouts about labor positions, and practice our breathing and relaxing techniques. Well, I'm supposed to relax, he's supposed practice rubbing my back, shoulders, hands, and feet. Apparently the relaxation is so important we even get it assigned to us as homework. Being the model student I am, I insist on studying Ryan's back and foot rub technique very thoroughly in between classes.
Other then back rubs, we cover a lot of different material. At one point the teacher mentioned pets and started the discussion of how to introduce the baby to them. Now out of the other 12 couples in the room, why she had to ask Ryan and I if we had any pets I'll never know. Most people balk at the number of cats, but once you mention the chickens you've achieved a whole new level of crazy. Once her attention was turned to another more "normal" couple I made a side comment to Ryan about a Thunderdome style introduction "Two men enter, one man leaves..." I fear was overheard by half the room.
It's probably for the best no one overheard Ryan when he saw the reproduction pelvis, "If I were a post apocalyptic warlord, I would totally wear that as a hat!"
- Gretchen
P.S. Since you've asked, here's a picture of me and the critter.