Nov. 21-27, 2021

Weather | 11/21, 39°, 55° | 11/22, 21°, 35° | 11/23, 24°, 53° | 11/24, sprinkles, 40°, 57° | 11/25, 0.04" rain, 21°, 29° | 11/26, 13°, 41° | 11/27, 29°, 57° |

• Sunday, 11/21: Autumn Olive Wine Bottling
  
  • Bill and I cleaned up bottles I put in OxiClean about 2 months ago (cutting trees and putting on a roof with a lift got in the way). Those bottles were only supposed to be in that solution for a week. Needless to say, the labels came off easily.
  • We racked the second batch of autumn olive wine I made this year. The specific gravity is still 0.990, giving it a 12.34% alcohol content. The acidity is 0.625 tartaric, which is close enough to 0.650. There were very few fines. We tasted it. The wine contains a good autumn olive taste, but with a tang. It's very smooth. We added 4.75 Campden tablets. The other quarter tablet went into cork soaking solution. We bottled 25 750-ml bottles. We soaked the 3" long solid corks for 3 hours, which wasn't quite long enough. Some of the corks are slightly wider and don't go all the way into the bottles. I re-corked 3 bottles.
  • It was nice to take a day off from deer hunting. A strong NW wind, with gusts over 30 mph, blew all day.
  • Mary cross stitched and did the evening chores.
  • Mary saw a pair of bald eagles flying side-by-side, circling over the house, and calling.
    
  • I built a small fire outside and we cooked up smoked scrambled eggs. We drank a bottle of Bill's strawberry wine. It's very good. We also ate one of the Sweet Dakota Rose watermelons. They are known as a long keeper and, indeed, that's what we experienced. This watermelon was picked in early September and we're eating it the week of Thanksgiving. That's amazing.
  • I texted Katie, asking how she was coping with low Alaska temperatures and she replied that she is sitting in the Atlanta airport. She flew out of Venetie, AK, yesterday around noon. She wrote, "It's so hot down here! It was -26 the morning I left Venetie, and to be honest, I think I was pretty acclimated to it."
    

• Sunday, 11/21 Addendum: Stuff I Forgot
  
  • Bill aired the Minnesota Vikings game via his smart phone and a Bluetooth speaker while we worked on bottling wine. He tuned into KROX, out of Crookston, MN, the same town Katie was born in. It was fun listening to the Vikings beat the Packers and it was a stroll down memory lane listening to radio ads from an area where we once lived. We even heard an ad for a lumber yard in Red Lake Falls, MN, the exact town we lived in from 1990 to '92.
  • I worked up a recipe from 2 other parsnip wine recipes.
    

• Monday, 11/22: Shot a Young Button Buck
  
  • I didn't like the parsnip wine recipe I developed, so after talking about it to Mary & Bill, I looked up ideas online. Most parsnip wine recipes are from the UK. I like one by a woman in New Brunswick, Canada. Her recipe is simple, a factor I prefer.
  • Mary made a delicious venison stew and biscuits meal.
  • I left for the Wood Duck Deer Stand at 3:10 p.m. and was on the stand and loaded my rifle by 3:25 p.m. The air was very calm, with a hint of a breath of air out of the southwest. I didn't see a thing, other than an army of squirrels running around like kids at a county fair's amusement ride section. They made a ton of noise. As the sun faded away, I heard turkeys flying into trees south of me. At 5:10, just five minutes shy of the end of legal shooting time, I heard loud footsteps west of me. It took awhile before I saw 2, maybe 3 deer. The leader, stood still and looked up my way on the far edge of the dry creek bed. While looking through the rifle's scope, I noticed the deer didn't have a rack. It walked across the dry creek bed toward me. I took a right-handed shot and hit it through the shoulders. It dropped instantly. After a couple hours of silence, other than raucous squirrels, the report of my 30:30 rifle firing was extremely loud. The deer turns out to be a button buck (see photo, below). The meat will be very tender and good.
  • After telechecking the deer in through my phone, I texted Mary and Bill that I got it, then walked home. They were dressed for helping field dress a deer as I walked through the door. They headed out while I changed to lighter clothes, poured gas in the 8N Ford tractor, and drove it to Bramble Field, just SW of where I shot the deer. Mary and I field dressed it and hauled it through the woods, while Bill held flashlights, knives, and saws for us. After driving it home in the trailer behind the tractor, we washed the body cavity out and hung it up from a machine shed rafter. It's below freezing, tonight, which is a perfect temperature for hanging a deer. We'll be butchering venison in the morning.

  

  A button buck I harvested at 5:10 p.m. today.
  

• Tuesday, 11/23: Deer Butchering
  
  • We butchered the button buck deer today, and added 27 packages of venison into the freezer. With venison from last year, we have a grand total 58 venison meals in the freezer. Mary says if I get another deer, it has to be a young one, because we're limited on freezer space. This was a deer with a long body, which gives us more meat. With an overnight low of 24°, we had nice, cool meat today. It looked like very nice venison. I deposited the carcass in the north woods for our wildlife friends.
  • Today was the last day of firearms deer season. Anterless season runs Dec. 4-12. I might hunt during that season, but I don't have to, since we have enough meat.
  • Bill washed 2 loads of his clothes and bedding. It's cheaper for him to wash at our house.
    
  • We watched the movie Forrest Gump, which was Bill's choice. 
  • We enjoyed some beer Bill brought with him, as we watched the movie. One was a Russian Kölsch beer and the other was a vanilla porter. Both tasted good.
    

• Wednesday, 11/24: Smoke & Shopping
  
  • I opened the curtains upon waking and there was a young red-tailed hawk in a walnut tree in the east yard. A cardinal and several blue jays were pestering it. The hawk flew off to the east the moment Mary stepped onto the porch.
  • As we walked down our lane for the morning dog walk, we smelled smoke from burning grass and a few black pieces of grass floated down from the sky on a strong south wind. Concerned some idiot lit off a fire in gusty wind, we jumped in the car, drove east, then south to Highway 156, then west to try to find the fire. We didn't find it. Then, we drove back to near the house and took a small gravel road south until it turns into a dirt road. Still we couldn't find the fire, so we went home. Bill and I later saw the smoke from a fire lit by a farmer about 2-3 miles due south of us. Today was a poor day to be burning anything.
    
  • Bill and I went shopping in Quincy. It was Edgewood Orchard's last day of the season, so we bought a 1/2 peck of Jonathan apples from them. I got items to make the greenhouse on our south-facing porch at Menards. We got another turkey to eat later in the year from Sam's Club. We also got veggies for the Thanksgiving meal from a couple food stores. The whole town of Quincy was packed with shoppers.
  • Mary baked 2 pumpkin pies and several flour tortillas while we were gone. She also did some cleaning.
  • After getting home and finishing evening chores, Mary fixed up chimichangas with fresh winter greens. 
  • We tried the first bottle of 2021 grapefruit wine. It's very good. The wine tastes like alcoholic grapefruit juice. Bill says it has an olive taste to it.
  • Mary whipped up some homemade cranberry sauce for tomorrow's Thanksgiving meal. I felt lucky enough to be around to lick the spatula...yum, yum!
    
  • Light rain is falling tonight. It's so nice to have a solid roof over our heads.
    

• Thursday, 11/25: Thanksgiving Day
  
  • Mary made a glorious Thanksgiving Day meal with a 20-pound turkey, homegrown sweet potatoes and beans from our garden in the green bean casserole. There were mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, and Mary's cranberry sauce from a recipe she dreamed up, which makes it extra good. We also had radishes, green onions, cauliflower, broccoli, celery, carrots, and olives, all to be drawn through dip Mary made from whole milk Greek yogurt, Miracle Whip, and ranch dressing mix. Bill selected blackberry wine, which he said matched the turkey similar to the way cranberry sauce goes well with turkey. He was right. After two big helpings of everything, we didn't have room for the pumpkin pie, again, made from a homegrown pumpkin.
  • While Thanksgiving meal prep took place, I used info from a Popular Mechanics article signifying baking soda and water as the best way to take labels off wine bottles. It does work, although I had one bottle label that seemed like it was put on with Contact cement. I cleaned labels off 10 bottles.
  • After eating, Mary cleaned meat off the turkey for future meals. Mary and I marched the turkey carcass to the north field and left it for the wild, furry friends.
  • Bill helped me start a brew of parsnip wine. I scrubbed parsnips from our garden while he cut out bad parts and sliced them. Our garden parsnips gave us only 2 pounds. We added 2 store-bought parsnips to get 3 lbs., 14 oz., which is close enough to the 4 pounds needed for a 1-gallon batch of wine. We boiled them for 15 minutes, until the slices were soft, but not mushy. We all tasted them and agreed parsnips aren't worth growing, again. After dipping out the parsnip slices and pouring the liquid through a wire mesh strainer, we added a can of apple juice concentrate, zest and juice from 2 lemons, and a pound of golden raisins that Bill chopped up, which we put in a nylon mesh bag. A crushed Campden tablet went into the mix, along with a teaspoon of pectic enzyme. We covered it to let it sit overnight.
  • Katie called while we were making parsnip wine. She made apple crisp, a caramel sauce, and added ice cream, which she took to a turkey dinner party. She came back with turkey meat and trimmings. She should get notice by Monday of getting hired for her new UIC job in Anchorage. She's planning on moving her pets north via air flights in March. Katie also plans on selling most of her belongings in Gulfport, such as vehicles, and picking up newer items in Anchorage. The date of her medical work in Seattle for her burns is Jan. 14th. Flights haven't been arranged for that, yet, but I'll be with her in Seattle. They'll use lasers to knock out hard tissue in burn areas, which stops itching that she has today. She'll be knocked out, so that's where I come in, to help her get home to a hotel room after the work is performed. Katie said they wrapped up the work in Venetie, AK, and the school district was happy with the repair done to their school. She said they worked through several sub-zero days while putting steel on the school's roof.
    
  • I put 29 wine corks into a bowl of water to soak for corking jalapeno wine, tomorrow.
  • Mary, Bill, and I played Michigan Rummy from 9 p.m. until around 1:15 a.m. Mary kicked our butts. Twice, she won on bad hands of cards, leaving both Bill and I high and dry with handfuls of paying cards. Her winning ways were uncanny! At the end of the game, the combination of Bill's chips and my chips were less than all of Mary's chips. We had a lot of fun and laughs. Midway through the game, we ate pumpkin pie.
    

• Friday, 11/26: Dusting Books & Handling Wine
  
  • While opening up chickens at the coop in the morning, the hens put up a fit, then Mary spotted a young red-tailed hawk in tree branches south of the coop. At first, the hawk looked like a broken branch, but when the branch flew, we knew it was a hawk. I chased it southward and noticed major animal trails in the south pasture.
    
  • Mary stayed out of the kitchen all day, a reprieve from yesterday's kitchen work.
  • She dusted and cleaned out the books and book shelves in the living room, since parts of them become smothered by a Christmas tree for a month.
  • Bill and I finished the parsnip wine and bottled the jalapeño wine. 
  • Concerning the parsnip wine, we added a strong cup of tea (2 teabags in a cup), a teaspoon of yeast nutrient, 2 quarts of water (for a total of 5 quarts), and only 13 ounces of sugar. Parsnip wine recipes call for 1.75 to 2 pounds of sugar per gallon, which would produce knockout amounts of alcohol. Specific gravity initially was 1.074, with a goal of 11% alcohol. The pH was over 4.4, which is way too basic, so I added 2.5 teaspoons of tartaric acid, which brought the pH down to 3.4. I created a yeast starter with Red Star Premier Classique (Montrachet) yeast, adding wine must to it throughout the day. I pitched the yeast starter into the brew bucket 7.5 hours later and by bedtime, a nice aroma already penetrated the pantry. The pH when I added yeast was 1.079.
  • Bill and I washed and sanitized 29 bottles. We racked the jalapeño wine from 2 containers into a bucket. Since the specific gravity was unchanged, at 0.990, for 13.76% alcohol, we elected not to add Campden tablets or potassium sorbate. Hardly any fines were at the bottom of the carboy and half-gallon jug. It tasted wonderful...hot, but really good. We had 600 ml left after bottling, plus 3 cups with fines in it. Between the 3 of us, we drank all but 1 cup with fines. This is not a wine to be slugged down. It's a sipping wine that certainly heats up your insides. The 3-inch long solid corks soaked for 18 hours, which is too long. If I didn't get them into the bottles all the way, they simply oozed back out of the bottle's neck. I threw away 3 that couldn't be squeezed tight in the handheld corker after a day and a half of soaking. We corked 25 bottles of jalapeño wine.
    

• Saturday, 11/27: Waffles, Wine, Pizza, & Christmas Tree
  
  • Since we had turkey omelets yesterday morning, this morning I made waffles. It was a smokey time of it. Two smoke alarms went off.
  • I racked the pear wine for the 3rd time. It's very clear, yet after draining the carboy, the leftovers held a large amount of fines. We had a small taste test. It's marvelous and the best pear wine I've ever made. The specific gravity is 0.999, compared to 1.000 the last time I racked it. The wine went right back into the 6.5-gallon carboy, after I cleaned and sanitized it. I added 1 cup of spring water to top the liquid up to the neck of the carboy.
  • A check of the parsnip wine showed good fermentation and a specific gravity of 1.070, down from 1.079 when the yeast went in yesterday.
  • Mary got out all of the Christmas tree boxes and decoration tubs.
  • Bill made 3 pizzas. While Bill did this, he played Patrick Stewart reading A Christmas Carol on his bluetooth speaker. We also drank an IPA beer Bill supplied made by Breckinridge Brewery in Colorado.
  • Katie texted that she bought Christmas presents and seven boxes are arriving here to our address.
    
  • Mary, Bill, and I put up the Christmas tree while listening to Christmas music and sipping China Yunnan tea. Great fun was had by all.