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!

   

   

   

   
   
   

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

Dumpster Score

Everyone at the co-op has been working really hard to get through all the deliciousness we picked up last Wednesday evening.  Some truly champion baking by Corinne with applesauce  & banana bread, apple crumble; Zaike whipped up a delicious pasta sauce for dinner using the peppers and tomatoes…we’ve all been eating oodles of omelets and munching away at all the fruits and for those of us brave enough to venture into a relatively unknown territories of meat – salmon, swordfish, chicken, turkey burgers, lamb…

So Alix and I (Micky) went out to check out some dumpsters again this evening.  Since the one last week proved so profitable we have decided to track it and see what we might get and check out some others in the area.  Today we ended up with bunches of TJ’s southwestern salads, italian wraps, white & brown rice, bag of cashews, strawberries, more eggs, corn bread, more salmon, some $20 steaks, a lavender plant…

Despite two security guards catching us in the act and Alix running away for a bit we managed to grab some stuff from whole foods: shampoo, apples, potatoes, fruit juice, salads…as there were only two of us and we didn’t get a chance to properly rummage around before security found us we weren’t terribly successful at retrieving what was probably mountains of food — we just needed more hands & time!

Massive Dumpster Score

Hey we had a little co-op crew hit up a dumpster last night and we found 100s of eggs, salmon, lamb, cheese, bags of oranges, limes, buckets of tomatoes, apples, bell peppers, potatoes etc.  Looks like we will all be eating some kick-ass omelets for the next couple days.  Amazing!  Eat up kids;)