Fruity Cordials

I will pick the last of the raspberries from the patch tonight and head out to a local orchard (Cherry Hill) tomorrow for my last batch of fresh picked cherries. I need a few more pie cherries to dry and maybe make a cherry crisp.

After every batch of jam I've made the past few weeks, there has been enough berries to do something with, but not enough for another batch of jam. What to do?! Then, I remembered a good friend saying something about cordial so I searched the internet for recipes. Be careful what you seek, there are nearly as many cordial recipes as there are people who drink cordial.

The raspberry cordial (on the right) is made with 2 lbs. of whole berries, 2 cups of vodka and 1 cup of sugar. It took about 5 days for the sugar to dissolve and the fruit to start breaking down. You can see a layer of seeds at the bottom of the jar.

The cherry cordial is made with a mix of bing and rainier cherries. I had two large bowls full of cherries and am home alone for a few days. It contains 2 lbs. cherries, 2 cups sugar, 3 whole allspice, 1 cup of brandy and 1 cup of rum. Hopefully the bing cherries will add some of their deep red color to the mix. I don't like the dirty look of the rum/brandy mix. The sugar dissolved better in this mixture, but you can still see a thin film of sugar at the bottom of the jar. I'm sure this is going to be one "sweet" drink when it is ready.

I used these wonderful 2 quart Kerr canning jars that I rescued from my aunt's garage. As a kid I remember her making grape juice in them - it was wonderful stuff. I'm hoping these cordial recipes turn out as well.

Little Pumpkins

Our neighbor visited this weekend with a wagon-load of home grown pumpkins. Tatum, Keeli and our neighbor's daughter, Darby, took a little ride on the wagon in the driveway.

He had several GIANT pumpkins, each well over 50 pounds. He also had several unique varieties, shapes and sizes. We chose pumploms in several shades or orange and even a few with green stripes remaining (Rikard's favorite color is green).

He offered the girls any pumpkin they wanted. Tatum immediately tried to roll the big one (she's leaning on it) off the wagon. In addition to the big on, we have a few of the smaller ones for the kids to carve and roast the seeds.

Old Time Threshing

We commonly see all sorts of harvesting equipment from potato and onion diggers to grain combines and manual laborers who pick the fruit and other vegetables we enjoy.

Sunday we had a rare treat. We came upon an old time threshing, complete with steam engine, threshing machine and cut and bundled wheat.

Threshing means: to separate seed from (a harvested plant) mechanically. The word "thresh" is actually Old English and Old German and dates back to before the 12th century.

The Case steam engine is connected to the threshing maching with a wide belt. Workers took bundled wheat from a flatbed trailer and loaded it into the threshing machine.

This machine takes the grain from this:

to this:


We all had a great time enjoying the heat, dust, flying chaf and noise.