pink

Geraniums in Need

/ lizbaessler / Leave a comment

I don’t deserve my houseplants.

In college I bought two geraniums at a plant sale. I’m reasonably sure I’m watering one of them in this short film my friends and I made in 2008.

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I since gave one to my dad. It’s beautiful and lush and is living out its days on the front porch. The other one stayed with me, and I’ve been treating it with an attitude that could very generously be called laissez-faire.

Here it is.

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It’s been wasting away in the window of our living room for a few years. This past spring I finally got it together to give it a dash of fertilizer, which inspired it to grow this long tentacle off to the right.

To its credit, it’s been blooming more or less constantly all this time. I’ve been hoping to collect some seeds, but while I’ve gotten a few fluffy spikes from the spent flowers, no actual seeds have appeared.

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Deciding I owed it to this plant to try and make things right, I took a few simple but decisive steps. First of all, I cut off the tentacle. It was the newest growth, but it was unsustainable. It could barely hold itself up and was only going to get longer.

For curiosity’s sake, I stuck it in a bucket of dirt to see if I could get it to take root.

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I removed all the flowers (and, since, a few of the leaves) to help it focus its energy on root-growing.

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I trimmed up the main plant a bit and gave both containers a big dose of kelp meal and water. I set them in the dappled shade for a few days, then moved them to fuller sun.

Now it’s been a little over a month and, against all odds, both plants are alive and kicking.

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I’m especially impressed with the tentacle which, with four leaves to its name, has produced a big clutch of flowers and buds.

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If I’d known this thing was going to make it, I might’ve taken a little more care planting it – like cutting it down or sticking it in better soil that wasn’t infested with mulberry seeds.

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I’m not about to mess with now, though. I’ll give it some more time either to establish or exhaust itself, and then I’ll take stock.

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The main plant is looking much better, too. It’s still on the spindly side, but it’s a lot greener and blooming more vigorously.

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I’d say Project Geranium was a success. They have another good month or two outside to build up their strength, so hopefully it’s only up from here.

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If they hold on long enough, they just might get to star in another movie.

 

 

 

Strawberry and Rhubarb Wines

/ lizbaessler / 1 Comment

No, not strawberry rhubarb wine. Though there’s an idea…

I’m making strawberry wine and I’m also making rhubarb wine. Both of these wines hold the hallowed title of Good Enough to Do Again. These were two of my earliest and roughest attempts at wine making, but somehow they turned out the best.

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Last year’s rhubarb wine did not inspire confidence at first. It looked like dishwater and tasted pretty strange. But recently a bottle of it worked its way into the fridge, and I was as surprised as anyone to find that it tasted really good. Everyone says that ageing wine improves it, but I’ve always been dubious. What could possibly be going on in that bottle? But I’ve been at this long enough that some of my bottles are starting to reach the 1 year mark, now, and I have to admit to seeing a difference. (At least with the rhubarb. The bottle of last year’s blueberry I opened seems to have spoiled).

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So I’m back at it! The rhubarb is mostly from my parents’ garden, with a little supplemented from our community garden. I followed this recipe scaled down to one gallon.

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The strawberry wine I did not scale down. Last summer I made two separate gallon batches that were rousing successes, so I decided to shoot for 5 gallons this time. Sticking to my cheap guns, I bought these bargain berries at the bulk supply store. Maybe I’ll do a smaller batch with real local berries and conduct a dispiriting taste test.

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I sanitized my biggest bucket and lined it with a nylon cloth. My first strawberry wine had a lot of debris in it and actually started to sprout. Not this time!

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Berry by berry I removed the hulls and quartered the fruit. All 18 pounds of it. The recipe I’m following recommends 12.5 pounds for a dry wine and 25 pounds for a dessert wine. My past recipes have been light on fruit and then backsweetened with honey. This time I’ve upped the fruit and sugar and am hoping for a natural residual sweetness.

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The berries cut, I barely covered them with water and added a dash of wine tannin, a healthy dose of pectic enzyme, and 1/4 teaspoon of sodium metabisulfite. I draped a towel over the bucket and left it in the closet overnight. During that period the pectic enzyme and water started to break down the fruit and the sodium metabisulfite sanitized it. At least that’s what I’m told.

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By the next night the pectic enzyme had certainly gotten to work. The berries were already limp and pale and the water had become a thick juice.

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I added water up to the 6 gallon line, and then I went sugar crazy. I checked the gravity after mixing in what felt like an unholy amount of the stuff – it was right around 1.060. My recipe recommended 1.078 for dry and 1.100 for dessert, so either way I had to keep going.

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In the end I used one entire 10 lb. bag of sugar on the nose. This brought my gravity to just under 1.100, or a tiny bit less sweet than dessert wine.

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Finally I added 5 teaspoons of yeast nutrient and a 5 gram packet of champagne yeast. I covered it loosely with the bucket lid and pushed it to the back of the closet. By the next day it was bubbling vigorously and giving the bedroom a very distinctive smell.

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I gave the fermentation exactly a week, stirring and prodding the fruit bag a couple times a day. Once the bubbling started to slow (and I found someone big to lift the bucket up onto the counter for me) I racked it into a five gallon carboy.

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The nylon bag was a lifesaver. I’ve fought some vicious battles with fruit pulp in my time, but the bag just lifted straight out. That being said, a week’s fermentation didn’t leave much inside it. What had been a huge volume of fruit got condensed down to little chunks of seeds and fibers. Strawberries, it turns out, are mostly water.

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Since the strawberries added more than I was expecting to the liquid, I actually collected 6 gallons of wine instead of 5. I filled the big carboy completely with free runnings and a 1 gallon jug with juice squeezed directly from the nylon bag… into an unsanitized bowl. Because I am a fool. I hadn’t been planning on squeezing juice from the bag, so I’d just plopped it in any old bowl. Thank the lord the 5 gallon filled up before I had the chance to fill it with rogue bowl microbes. As it stands I may have contaminated that extra gallon, but it was a bonus gallon anyway. And I may get lucky. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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All told I have some beautiful colors. The two on the left are strawberry, already producing some impressive sediment, nylon bag or no. The one on the right is rhubarb, basically sediment-free and a fantastic shade of pink.

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Maybe I’ll serve the two together and let people make their own strawberry/rhubarb.

Shea Butter Soap

/ lizbaessler / 5 Comments

I’m running low on soap!

I never thought it would happen, but I’ve been giving it away and using it up at such a rate that my old batches are almost gone. It’s time to re-up.

I while ago I bought 3 pounds of shea butter online. It arrived on my doorstep in a nondescript plastic bag, squished together into a big loaf. I may have done an underhanded butter deal.

I cut slices off of it, just like with bread, until I reached the weight I wanted.

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Until now I’ve been following recipes in my soap book, but I’ve more or less run out of recipes in it that I can make easily. A lot of them call for palm oil, which I have a vague sense of being even worse for the environment than the things I normally buy, so I’m making an effort to avoid it.

How’s that for activism?

I’d read that you could substitute other oils for palm as long as you reworked the amount of lye needed. Each oil has a different saponification level, which means it needs a different amount of lye to be made into soap. Change your oils but not your lye, and you may get a soap that’s too basic or too greasy.

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I’d been told to run my new oil amounts through a lye calculator to get a palm-free version of the recipe I wanted to use. But it occurred to me that if I had all the tools to rework a recipe, I could just as easily make my own. Since I had all this shea butter, I thought I’d make a 100% shea recipe. Some words of caution online said that all-shea doesn’t make much of a lather, and that a little bit of castor oil couldn’t go amiss. I’d always wondered what that castor oil was for in my past recipes – apparently it’s bubbles!

I went to the Brambleberry Soap Making Supplies Lye Calculator and entered in 33 ounces of shea butter (to equal about the amount of oil that’s fit in my slow cooker in the past) and 1 ounce of castor oil. I said I wanted a 5% superfatting level (this is extra oil that isn’t converted by the lye, making for a smoother, oilier soap).

The results I got in ounces were kind of rough, so I converted them to grams to get a finer measurement. This gave me 117.4 g of lye and 318 g of water. I weighed everything out, melted my oils, mixed my water and lye, and slapped it all together with my immersion blender.

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After a few minutes with the immersion blender, the soap started to trace and I conducted an experiment. I always check to see if my soap is neutral by adding a couple drops of a chemical called Phenolphthalein. Supposedly it stays clear if it comes into contact with a neutral substance, but will turn bright purple if it touches something basic. With every batch I’ve waited until I think the soap is done, dropped a few drops of this stuff, seen that it’s clear, and rubbed it all over my body without a second thought.

I had never, however, seen how it reacted to something that I knew to be basic. For all I knew I had a broken bottle.

It turns out that my bottle works just fine. I’d say pink is an understatement.

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I let the soap cook for two hours, beating it back when it bubbled up like this. It still had some pink to it at this point.

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I liked how the pink looked and wanted to do something more with color. I shook some purple pigment out into a dish – my plan was to mix it with a little bit of cured soap, then work it back into the bigger batch for a swirled effect.

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This plant worked great until I tried to implement it. The amount of soap I tried to mix was way too small and hardened against the dish almost immediately. I scraped as much as I could back into the full batch, then dumped some more pigment straight into that. I stirred it around a little and hoped for the best.

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I glopped it all into a silicone loaf pan and let it sit to cool. After a few hours I turned it out of the pan and sliced it into bars. All things considered I think the pigment came out well – just enough purple to make it interesting.

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I left the slow cooker to soak overnight to make cleaning easier, and the next morning I made a discovery. All that extra soap caked onto the sides can’t go down the drain (apparently it’s a clogging nightmare) so I scooped it out with my hand. I was planning on throwing it away, but before long I found myself with a big handful of the stuff – at least another bar’s worth. I squeezed it into a ball and saved it. It’s awfully wet, but I’m leaving it to dry to see what happens… though I’ll be very surprised if anything “happens” apart from it going from a wet ball of soap to a dry ball of soap.

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But sometimes you have to inject a little suspense into your soap blog.