We inherited more than our fair share of yard work with the new house. Even with all of the pulling out trees, cleaning out beds, adding new driveway, etc. there is still a lot of maintaining. A new adventure was the six very LARGE mature grapevines. My grandma was jealous. The closest I have gotten to harvesting grapes is watching
A Walk in The Clouds. (Love that movie!) Being the farmer's daughter I knew that I needed to attack this new project and make something useful out of it! Hey, someone in our family had to harvest
something this year, right?
These three large mixing bowls are only 3/4 of what I picked, and the grapes on the pergola...well, they are still on the pergola. We don't have a ladder to get up there OK? There are at least four varieties that I could recognize and we ate most of the green grapes, but there was the dilemma of what to do with the Concords. They are too bitter to eat straight out and they have very large seeds. So, I decided to try my hand at making homemade grape juice.
Now purple grape juice is something that I never buy at the store and it really isn't my favorite taste in the world, but what else was I going to do with an overabundance of Concord grapes? :) This is my attempt to document like the food blogs that I am so in love with and visit practically every day (Pioneer Woman, this is for you!)
It took me almost the entire day to finish but after washing, mashing,
cooking, mashing, cooking, straining, washing, mashing, chilling, etc. I got about 3 quarts of very thick juice.
The sad thing is even after all of that work, not very many people in my household were thrilled to partake. I pratically had to force Cristine.
Here is the final product. All in all it tasted pretty good watered down. I think however that next year I will give the Concords to my neighbors :)
These three large mixing bowls are only 3/4 of what I picked, and the grapes on the pergola...well, they are still on the pergola. We don't have a ladder to get up there OK? There are at least four varieties that I could recognize and we ate most of the green grapes, but there was the dilemma of what to do with the Concords. They are too bitter to eat straight out and they have very large seeds. So, I decided to try my hand at making homemade grape juice. 
Now purple grape juice is something that I never buy at the store and it really isn't my favorite taste in the world, but what else was I going to do with an overabundance of Concord grapes? :) This is my attempt to document like the food blogs that I am so in love with and visit practically every day (Pioneer Woman, this is for you!)
It took me almost the entire day to finish but after washing, mashing, 
cooking, mashing, cooking, straining, washing, mashing, chilling, etc. I got about 3 quarts of very thick juice. 
The sad thing is even after all of that work, not very many people in my household were thrilled to partake. I pratically had to force Cristine. 
Here is the final product. All in all it tasted pretty good watered down. I think however that next year I will give the Concords to my neighbors :)
3 comments:
I would have chugged the stuff!!! YUMMY
You are so good. I would never try it. I'm sad the weather is so cold. Is it going to warm up so we can do smores in your backyard?
Way to go! Nik, you have made the Ruckers proud! :) You know Jon's dad sells grapes from his ranch. You go girl! ;)
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