Glogg

I have been on an ethnic kick lately and did a complete Finnish Christmas this year because Kevin is Finnish. So in keeping with this Scandanavian tradition, I have to tell you about a wonderful, warm, winter alchoholic drink: glogg. I was first introduced to this from a friend that worked at Moreys in Brainerd. They had a package of the dried fruit and you added port to it. Then I found this recipe and made it for Christmas this year. I changed a few things to make it my own. When you first put the cup up to your nose, the alchohol hits you with some pretty potent fumes. Then you take a sip and you think...awww! That was warming and good, all the way to my toes! This is great to put in a thermos and take out to the fishhouse in the winter. Nothing better than pulling a walleye through the ice with a cup of hot glogg in your other hand. So here is my recipe for glogg. Enjoy!

1 bottle of dry red wine
1 bottle of port
1 bottle of brandy
10 inches of stick cinnamon (about 4 sticks)
2 dozen whole cloves
peel of one orange
1/2 cup of raisins
1 package of dried apricots
2 cups sugar

Pour the red wine and port into a stainless steel or porcelain kettle. Add cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, raisins and apricots. Warm gently, but do not boil. Boiling will burn off the alcohol and that's not what we want!

Put the sugar in a separate pan and soak it with 1/2 the bottle of brandy. Warm the sugar and brandy over a low flame. The sugar will melt and bubble until it becomes a clear golden syrup of carmelized sugar.

Add the carmelized sugar to the spiced wine mix. Cover and let mull for an hour. Be careful not to let it boil. Add the other half of the bottle of brandy and strain the mixture into a bottle. You can serve it immediately or let it age for a month or two. If you age it, make sure the bottle is filled as high as possible and sealed tight.

To serve, warm it gently over a low flame or microwave for 1 minute in a mug. Remember, do not boil. Drink while seated and give your car keys to a friend.

Grandview Crabapple Wine

It all started last fall when I grabbed two five-gallon buckets and my daughter and picked enough crabapples to fill one and half buckets. It was a beautiful evening for picking and would have been even more beautiful if my daughter wouldn't have been whining the whole time about "Are we done yet?" Our friend's family owns Grandview Resort in Nisswa. He has been so kind as to let me pick the crabapples for the last couple of years because they would most likely go to waste. The first year I made jelly out of them. This year it was five gallons of wine.

This was my favorite batch of wine so far. Kevin loved it. For Christmas he asked for his very own bottle to do whatever he wanted with it. It was a huge hit at his office Christmas party this year. But because of all the drinking before it was ready to bottle, I only got a solid eight bottles out of five gallons and the rest went down the stomachs.

I started this wine on 8/30/07. I boiled all the crabapples down and squeezed them through a cheesecloth like you would for jelly. I poured everything in a five-gallon carboy (bottle) and added about four cups of sugar, one of brown sugar, four packets of wine yeast, a tablespoon of yeast nutrient and four tablespoons of tannin. Someone told me at a wine class once to just brew some very strong black tea and use that as tannin which I did in this case.

When I tasted the wine after a couple of weeks, it was very puckery from the crabapples. I bought an oak stick online through http://www.midwestsupplies.com/ (I love them, they have everything and they are so great to work with!!) I added the oak stick to the mixture and left it. Eventually the wine started to mellow. The more sugar I added to keep the yeast going, the more the taste mellowed. I didn't want to make a super sweet wine so I kept the sugar to a minimum. I racked it three times. Racking is when you syphon the wine into another jug so that the pulp, also called the lee, will sink to the bottom. I put a packet of clearing gel into it before I racked it the last time because it wasn't as clear as I wanted it. That made a huge difference and the final product was beautiful!

The taste of this wine is not real fruity. You can taste the oak and you can taste the crabapples but neither flavor is prominant. The finished product is mellow with a hint of sweetness and a slight smoky flavor.

I was so excited to get these bottles and some really pretty labels. I also bought some corks and a cheap corker. With the cheap corker, you definitely need two people to cork the bottles. Kevin and I got the hang of it after two bottles. I would recommend a corker that stands on the floor for any more than ten bottles. I would like to get one next year. I handwrote the labels as I was too lazy to set up a template in Microsoft Word. That will be my next project.

I feel very rich with twelve of my own bottles of wine. Along with my crabapple, I have two bottles of strawberry wine and two bottles of peach wine. I can't wait for the spring and summer next year, I will be a winemaking machine! I want to try dandilion, plum, strawberry, and blackberry wine. And you can bet next fall I will make about fifteen gallons of the crabapple!

My First Post

Hi! I created this blog to talk about all the fun things I attempt (notice I said attempt) to create. I am not a professional chef, I am just very creative and one of my creative mediums is food. I love food and I love wine and I love to create both of them. Fortunately, my husband, Kevin, is not a picky eater and he thinks it is just wonderful that I can cook because about the only thing he says he cooks better than me is ramen noodles. When we first moved in together, he made some comment about how much more garbage we have now and I told him that the cardboard bottoms of frozen pizzas don't take up much room in the garbage can!

I heard this quote once, "Cooking is as much of a sense of self-expression as any of the fine arts" and I agree. There is nothing I love better than spending a Saturday afternoon in my kitchen chopping veggies and creating a big pot of chicken wild rice soup. Sometimes it turns out, sometimes it doesn't. Kevin still eats it regardless and will compliment me even when I am hard on myself. Now my daughter...that is a different story! If the world was made of nothing but chocolate, that girl would be a happy kid!

Living in Minnesota has influenced my tastes. I love a great piece of walleye, I cold-smoke salmon, I grill in subzero tempatures and I make wine from whatever fruit is available during the summer.

I hope you will follow me in my amateur pursuit of these hobbies and hopefully you will be inspired and you will inspire me!