Fermenting Fruits!

So we’ve been picking up a ridiculous amount of fruits — apples, bananas, raspberries, etc. — from our dumpster excursions.  It’s more than we could possibly eat before it goes bad so we’ve been following Max B.’s favorite way of preservation by fermenting our own wine:)

It’s a pretty simple process really.  Most recently we did raspberry/watermelon and a banana wine.  So the process:

1. Chop up all your fruit and dump it into a pot of water.
2. Add sugar (we’ve been adding a few cups to our giant pots)
3. Bring the water to a boil.
4. Cool and cover with a cloth (rubber band/tie so it’s tight)  – This will keep things like fruit flies out, but let wild yeast enter (yes, there’s wild yeast all around and in the air!)
5. When you feel up to it remove all the fruit chunks (as we did with the raspberries below) and transfer into bottles.  (you can cover these with a cloth again or get some carboy stoppers at a local brew shop/online). We basically just reuse any old bottles we can find.
6. Wait for as long as you can — the longer you wait the more alcoholic (we have trouble with this step and only ever make it past a couple weeks by shear laziness)
7. DRINK!

   

   

   

   
   
   

aPpLeS, aPpLeS, aPpLeS

If you don’t feel like fermenting things and you happen to have a lot of apples laying around we have a couple recipes we’ve been using to get through the couple boxes full of apples we got two weeks ago.

Apple crumble

1. Chop up a bunch of apples and spread them in a 9 x 13 baking pan
2. Cover with topping (Our vegan topping includes variations of: oatmeal, brown sugar, flour, Earth Balance, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, nuts)
3. Bake at 400 F till the apples begin to soften

Applesauce

Homemade applesauce is really easy to make — our problem is finding containers to put it all in.  Later you can use the applesauce just to eat or if you’re feeling up to some vegan baking it’s a great egg replacer.

1. Chop up all your apples
2. Cover with water
3. Bring to a boil
4. Optional: add sugar and desired spices (the apples are sweet just themselves so its totally your preference).
5. Cool and put in jars
6. Refrigerate or freeze

Open House Brunch Feb. 2012

Food…+money?

Rachel, Alix, Corinne, and Micky went out to check out our dumpster and a couple others for what we expected might be a pretty good night, we underestimated — big time.

At our first stop we met a bunch of skaters, one of which hopped into the bin with us, wondering what we were doing.  He was down with the whole thing, but when we said he could have some of the stuff we found he wasn’t so sure.

We ended up bringing home a ridiculous number of treats from mango sorbet to mac&cheese balls to chocolate muffins, mango salsa, yogurt, lots of bell peppers, loaves of bread, 15 apple pies/lemon tarts/other pastry stuff, eggs again, bok choy, more salads, 3 boxes of cereal, gallon of milk, two crates of water, gorgeous flowers, bagels, more meat…when we rolled back to the house around 2:30am we were pleasantly surprised to find most people up and we all had a loud binge eating session while sorting through our bounty.  We might have to do a free pie day tomorrow or something, our storage space is at capacity.

The most surprising item of all, however, we found inside a bagel dumpster we randomly went to while waiting for the TJs to close.  Having passed a Bank of America we joked about perhaps dumpstering some money.  Well, turns out in the bagel dumpster we found a whole wallet with $270! Also in the wallet, this girls ID, her SS card, everything.  Despite our desperate need for a vacuum, we decided the best course of action was to find her and Jeanne ended figuring out her number and we’re hoping the wallet will be back in it’s owners hands shortly:)

Love, TTT