Elderberries

Several Bunches of Elder Berries in Differing Stages of Ripeness

The first time I tried anything with elderberries I was still living in town.  My friend had two trees and a dog who would eat anything, she’d already lost all of her grapes the year before to this dog. But as elderberries are poisonous before they’re cooked, this was potentially a problem. So she was cutting them all and thought of me.  You see, even in town, I was the kind of person who did this kind of thing.

I was given 2 buckets full of elderberries, one 20 litre and one 10 litre.  I had enough elderberries to be doing just about anything I could think of!

I went on the search for an elderberry wine recipe.  I found a few but I wanted one that didn’t contain a million and one additives.  That’s not how I like to do things.  I found one that I liked and started off.

3 lb Elderberries (stripped from stalks)

1 qt boiling water

1 lb raisins or sultanas

3 lb sugar

Juice of 1 lemon

½ oz yeast 

The recipe even stated that it was easiest to strip the berries from the stalks using a fork – awesome, I wouldn’t have thought of that, not straight away anyway. 

I looked at the two buckets of berries, and decided to start with the smaller one.  I tipped it into the sink and covered it with water to wash the berries and started stripping berries from stalks.  6 hours later, I had about half a kilo of ripe berries, but still a sink full of berries and purple water.  Hubby said he’d do some while I went out that night.  I got up the next morning and said to him “I thought you were going to do some?” He had, he’d spent several hours doing it too.  I made the decision then and there that I would get it done that day, I couldn’t have my kitchen sink out of action for another day, and I was sure it wouldn’t be too good for the berries.  I stopped to take my kids to school, and that was about it.  After another 6 hours still working on the same sink full, I realised that the recipe said nothing about only using the ripe berries – I could leave some of the green berries in, and I also realised that the riper berries sunk, the unripe ones floated, and I really didn’t need every last ripe berry.

After that things went far quicker.  I stripped the berries into the sink and used a sieve to scoop the unripe floaters out and discard them, and then to scoop up the ones from the bottom.

I mashed the berries, and started them soaking with the raisins and went to see my local home brew shop.  I didn’t know what yeast I’d need, and also wasn’t sure if I multiplied the yeast as well as the other ingredients – 3 lb from the recipe had become 6 kg of actual berries – more than four times what the recipe called for.  It was also fun doing the conversions into metric, as there was no clue where the recipe had come from and one lb in the UK does not always equal one lb in the US or one lb Imperial.

The owner of the home brew shop gave me the right yeast, all 5g of it, and told me that it would work for up to 23 litres (mine had made up to 20 litres), and also explained the reason many of the modern recipes call for other additives.  The old fashioned recipes are great, if they work for you, but often are inconsistent or taste like crap.

I followed the instructions and had a barrel full of elderberry wine starting.  It needed sugar tomorrow and then another straining a day or two after that, then to be left until it stopped fermenting.

So I made a large batch of elderberry cordial.  That was much easier, stalks and all go into the pot for that.  We found that the number of cloves in the recipe was far too much and that it could use some lemon, but the kids loved it and everyone swore that it killed a cold faster than anything else they’d tried.  The number of cloves in the recipe below is the reduced amount.

The day after we’d added all the sugar to the wine was the devastating February 22nd earthquake.  The brew barrel was sitting on a bar stool in the corner of my kitchen and I lost about 5 litres of the thick syrupy mix all over the floor with broken plates, glasses and the food that had spread itself out of the pantry.  We had no water and no electricity and absolutely no desire to be inside (in case of more aftershocks) to clean it up.  Hubby stood the barrel up, popped the bubbler back in (it had leaked out through the bubbler) and decided to see what happened with it.

It never bubbled again.  After a few months I was talking to a neighbour who was also a keen brewer.  I was thinking about adding more yeast to see if that made a difference - she recommended more sugar instead.  I did that.

The barrel moved with us out to our lifestyle block and I bottled it out here.  I’ve called it Shockwave and there’s a note about earthquake blended on the labels.  It tastes great, but it’s rocket fuel.  A glass or two and I’m almost asleep.

Last year, I missed our elderberries.  I made plenty of cordial with the flowers, but missed the berries altogether.  This year I’ve been keeping a careful eye on them.  I’m not going to make wine, I’ve still got bottles and bottles of that, but I am out of cordial.

Elderberry Cordial

Fill your pan with Elderberries (leave the stalks on) and barely cover with water.  Simmer until fruit is soft.  Strain.  Return liquid to the pan, adding 500g sugar for every 500 mls of liquid and 1 whole clove per litre.  Heat until sugar is dissolved.  Cool and bottle.

In my first batch, I’ve added a whole orange and a whole lemon while the berries were simmering.  We’ll see how that tastes.  Next batch is brewing now.

The cordial is drunk diluted with water.  It’s nice cold, but better with hot water.  Even my teenagers swore by it for colds and flu.  At the first sign of a sniffle or a cough, Miss Sixteen would start drinking hot elderberry cordials and usually it was all gone within a day.  The bonus is that it tastes far better than the more traditional lemon and honey drink.

A Note About Elderberry Toxicity

Apparently there are two main varieties of Elder Tree.  One has poisonous berries when raw and the other doesn’t.  I find it difficult to tell them apart and as there are complete skeletons of cows underneath two of my trees, I think it’s safer to assume that they’re the toxic variety.  In all honesty, if you’re not sure, assume they’re toxic until cooked.

The skeletons have been there for a while, the grass has grown over one of them, I found it as I was standing on something and kicked at it to see what it was and pulled up a couple of vertebrae, then the puppy dug up the skull.  The other is covered mostly in blackberry and gorse.  As such, my cattle don’t go into those paddocks while the trees are in fruit.

Some Tomato Recipes

My tomatoes are ripening and we’re fighting the blackbirds for them.  Hubby and I discussed the priorities for things to do with tomatoes and I started with tomato sauce.  I think with each picking, I’ll cycle through these recipes.  I’ve certainly got plenty of tomatoes, well, that is if the blackbirds don’t eat too many more.

I love my old Good Housekeeping Board cookbook for this type of recipe.  The recipes that I find in modern cookbooks just don’t seem to work the same.  Their tomato sauces are light and bland in comparison to the thick, rich, spicy sauces that come from the older books.

The added bonus for me was that for the first time ever, it’s purely my own tomatoes, apples and onions going into this.  I’ve had to use red onions as my brown onions didn’t have a very good season and I’ve got red onions to spare.

Tomato Sauce

1.5kg tomatoes, roughly chopped

600g apples, cored and roughly choppped

Tomato Sauce Right at the Start

500g onions, roughly chopped

600g raw sugar

2 tbsp salt

Tie together in a muslin bag (or chux-style cloth):

1/2 tbsp cloves

1/2 tbsp allspice

1/2 tsp peppercorns

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp cayenne

Boil all together for an hour.  Strain and bottle when cool.

This came to 1.75 litres of thick rich tomato sauce.  I don’t strain my sauces as such, I put them through a mouli with the smallest holed blade.  In the past, I’ve left the spices loose in the sauce and processed them with the fruit and veges.  It doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference either way.

Processing Through the Mouli

Next on the list is Spaghetti.  I made some a few weeks ago as a test batch - first time I’d tried my father in law’s recipe.  Hubby had requested it as he and Miss Seven eat a lot of spaghetti.

Spaghetti

12 lb tomatoes

1 lb onions

3/4 C sugar

3 tbsp salt

1 tsp pepper

1 lb spaghetti noodles

Boil tomatoes and onions.  Simmer for 1 hour, then mouli.

Cook spaghetti in boiling salted water, drain and rinse in cold water.

Bring tomato pulp to boil, add spaghetti, salt, sugar and pepper.  Boil for 20 mins.  Bottle.

Tomato Sauce and Two of the Jars of Spaghetti

They liked the test batch, although the comment was made that I needed to process the sauce better - I’d used the coarse blade in the mouli, the smallest holed one would have been better.  Also that there was a lot of sauce at the top of the jar.  The ratio of spaghetti to sauce wasn’t right.

I’ve made some more and I more than doubled the amount of spaghetti noodles.  Hubby and Miss Seven like it a lot better.

The other thing that I make and use a lot of is a tomato puree which can also be easily made into tomato paste.

The quantities are completely random, based on what you have, but I like to have a similar ratio of tomatoes to onions as both the sauce and spaghetti recipes.  I also add in garlic, basil and oregano.

Boil all together, mouli and pour into an oven dish.  Put your oven on it’s lowest setting, usually somewhere between 50 and 100 degrees Celsius and leave slowly thickening for hours.  Until it reaches the right consistency.  As it thickens, the colour will darken and the flavour will get stronger.

Tomato Paste Just Out of the Oven

I’ve never put this in jars, it doesn’t have either vinegar, salt or sugar as a preservative, so I like to put it into margarine pots and freeze it.  A 500g margarine pot works out to be an ideal size for a meal.

See the links below for more inspiration and ideas.

Time Bank Hurunui

At the start of this month, I attended a meeting at the Amberley Library about setting up a Time Bank for our area.

The presenter had been involved in The Lyttelton Time Bank and missed the sense of community since she'd moved to Amberley and wanted to start one up out here.

The concept is simple but exciting.  With the Time Bank, you are trading time - literally. I do an hour's baby-sitting for you, you spend an hour weeding that person's garden, they spend an hour stacking firewood for someone else and somewhere in there, someone will come and spend an hour doing something for me.  The Time Bank is set up so that the hours are recorded somewhere - so that there is a way of knowing who has spent hours and who has earned them.  It also is a valuable place for learning who and what is available locally.

In that first meeting, as an exercise we had a mock Time Bank exchange.  We wrote down 5 skills we have - what we could offer and went around others at the meeting seeing what they offered and where we could do trades.  In exchange for baby-sitting, preserving fruit and tarot readings, I was getting Freeview set up, Reiki, a singing lesson and the dog walked - although I got the feeling from her that I'd be doing her a favour by having her walk the dog.

A community's greatest asset is it's people and the different skills they have.  Many of those skills are underestimated in their importance and undervalued for their true worth.  There was an elderly chap at that meeting.  He was interested in the concept, but could only see physical labour type scenarios, but as it turned out, his depth of knowledge with plants and gardening is extensive so he could spend an hour teaching others how to propagate plants - just as one example.  How many jobs are there that just take time?  If I had a few more hours in the day, I could get so much more achieved and here is the way to do it.

We also get a bit hung up on returning favours, on giving back to someone who has been generous to us, paying them back.  My neighbour has been tremendous, I am so immensely grateful to him for his time, experience and willingness to come and help me with things that I don't fully understand, or have the facilities for (like cattle yards).  I've said to him, repeatedly, if there is anything at all that I can help you with, don't be shy, sing out.  He (and his wonderful wife) just laugh at me and I haven't had any kind of request for help with anything yet.

The Time Bank is a way for me to pay that favour forward.  So I put my name down for being involved in setting ours up.  Our first meeting was this morning.  Mostly this was the initial getting to know each other, who is willing to be a part of what aspect of the organisation and the first steps towards making it a legal entity.

It will take some time for Time Bank Hurunui to be fully functioning, but the ideas, experience and motivation of the people who were at the meeting was inspiring.  I'm glad that I did put my name down and attend this meeting.

For more information on Time Banks, or to see if there is one operating near you, check out Timebank Aotearoa.  From there are links to various groups, explanations of how it all works as well as many resources that are useful for any groups of this sort.

The Gorse Project

Jokingly, I said to a group of friends “Since we seem to be farming gorse, we need to find a way to make a profit from it.”

One then told us about a gorse mill they’d seen on a trip to the UK.  Gorse is apparently very nutritious for many animals, the problem is in the hard prickles.  Grinding it up makes it more edible for horses and cattle.  This reminded me of a conversation held with the breeder we’d gotten our Dexter girls from.  Hubby mentioned that we had a lot of gorse, and the breeder said “Don’t waste a resource.  It’s a nitrogen fixer and the cattle love it.”  He pointed out a gorse bush growing up beside the fence that looked as though it had been trimmed about 6 inches from the fence - his dexters had done it, that was as far as they could reach through the fence.

We very quickly found out that they’ll eat the young soft shoots happily enough, but the harder older growth only when there was nothing else to eat (like many other “great gorse clearing animals”).  And as we usually were cutting honeysuckle with the gorse, seeing my girls sift through the gorse to pull out the honeysuckle (they’re anyones for an armload of honeysuckle), gorse as it is wasn’t practical.

Gorse is Moby Dick to Hubby’s Captain Ahab.  He is so passionate about getting rid of it, it’s become almost an unhealthy obsession.  One morning he left for work, only to be back home about 20 mins later, vomitting and tucked back into bed.  He woke from about an hours nap telling me that he now felt fine and was going to go out to the back paddock with the scrub-cutter and clear some gorse.  Uh huh. He came with me as I fed our pig, gang of unruly chooks and two young weaner calves. He then needed another hour long nap.

So mention of milling the gorse and using it as fodder caught my imagination.  A little bit of google fu showed me that no one is really doing it, but it has been discussed a time or two.

Perhaps that should be that no one is doing it in New Zealand.  This webpage shows that it is grown in the UK deliberately (the page author talks about how difficult it is to propagate!!) and talks about coppicing it and hanging it for his horses who love it and will carefully peel it and eat it.  This is almost unbelievable to us, here in New Zealand where Gorse is a noxious weed and there are penalties for not keeping your gorse under control.  Arguments rage over the best way to remove, dispose of it and then keep regrowth manageable. Contractors make a decent living out of clearing gorse.

I have absolutely no chance of spending the money to buy a mill to try it out (I’m struggling to buy the food for the animals at times which is why the gorse fodder seemed like a plan) so I put the idea out there to my engineer/farm-raised Dad and my engineer/gorse-hating Hubby.  Hiring a wood-chipper for a day was one suggestion, as was trialling it by putting it through the old food processor and then a mouli.  Labour intensive but workable for a trial.

I filled a fish crate with youngish stems of gorse and put them through the food processor.  What came out smelled quite edible even to me.  It took a very long time to have only a small amount though.  The girls loved it.  The first day they seemed more interested in playing with the crate, but the second day I gave them some, they were shoving each other out of the way to get to it.

We’ve talked about using a wood chipper to process it.  We don’t have one, and they’re fairly expensive to buy.  We’d need a petrol powered one to process it as we cut it.  I keep seeing the Tree Tech trucks around and wishing I could get one of those.  They have the big towable chipper that fires the chips into the back of the covered truck in front.  Might have to hire one first and test the theory.