Projects and Adventures

I've realized something over the last couple of weeks, my husband and I are quite perfectly matched in an odd way. We take on projects with a frenzy and often our projects tend to morph into something far bigger than we ever expected. In addition, we seem to encourage each other in our little "projects" and soon they become adventures.

For example, my family has a tradition of making homemade root beer. Over the summer my dad made several batches for our summer vacation and this got my husband interested in making homemade soda. We started by purchasing the necessary tools and educating ourselves about the process. Soon, we were making root beer, gingerale, cream soda and sarsaparilla. Then it morphed into much more. We decided that we not only loved the process, but also quite enjoyed the results. In addition, with a gluten allergy in our home, we decided to try to make some gluten-free sodas. Therefore, we started with a recipe for homemade root beer (without using an extract). First, gathering the ingredients was a bit difficult because the only place we could find them was either online or at the brewing company. Second, we realized that most traditional root beers were made with roots from fairly obscure plants. Then, as we started putting the ingredients together, I believe the wintergreen did not quite ferment. Consequently, our first batch tastes more like a mead than anything else because the recipe called for honey as the sweetener. So, it's back to the drawing board with that one. We will continue to brew our own sodas because we do enjoy it. However, this little project has definitely morphed into a life-long process. I think for Christmas we might make a couple "Christmas only" batches for gifts. My thought is a combination of cranberry soda, orange soda, and possibly a very gingery gingerale... and maybe some cran-orange or maybe even a cran-ginger soda? If we have several different varieties, we could give out little six-packs with our gifts to business-associates, friends and family. What do you think?

Another example of our craziness is our recent obsession with canning. My mother-in-law has a special place that she likes to pick wild plums. We were invited on a picking adventure about 4 days ago and ended up with a 5 gallon bucket of wild plums for our own processing. Then, my husband had the brilliant idea to make plum jelly (not jam- but jelly where it is clear and pretty) as gifts for Christmas. So we embarked on a canning adventure. First, we pitted pounds and pounds of plums and put them in the food processor. Then, in order to get the juice out, we put the cooked pulp into flour sack cloths and squeezed the juice out. Of course, this is not quite perfect, so we did this process once more in order to make sure that there was only the clearest of juice. After a weekend's worth of work, we made 4 batches which puts our count somewhere around 35 or so jars of plum jelly. As we were doing this, my husband wondered if pepper jelly might also be a great gift during the holidays. So, we made a batch of habenero/red fresno pepper jelly this evening.

I know... kind of nutty.... a little frenzied to be doing all this with 4 kids running around. Alas, it's a good sort of frenzy. It's all about doing things as a family and accomplishing something. Our adventures end up bringing us together as a family and somehow we all end up in a positive mood after all our work.

So, what do you think about our Christmas offerings this year? Do you think it will be good?
I was wondering about making a couple different batches of spiced nuts too...