Friday's Featured Foods: Grape Juice

With just a few days left before school starts, we have spent the last week or so trying to get done all those summer projects, those activities that are too time consuming to accomplish in the evening or too dreaded to wrap up earlier in the summer. For me, that means canning.

Today's canning

I love canned vegetables... in the winter. In the summer, canning veggies means a hot kitchen and a day at the stove. But, it is worth it in the long run. Last week, I chopped and froze onions and potatoes. Today, I made Italian tomato sauce, pizza sauce, pickled okra, and sweet and sour pickles. I also processed grapes for jelly, which is the actual feature of tonight's post. No, I'm not going to share our Top Secret Grape Jelly recipe, but I'll show you the steps we go through to make the juice that eventually becomes the jelly.

 The grapes used in our jelly come from my parents' vine near Wichita, Kansas. It's not a fancy fruit farm; they just happen to have a fence of grape vines that my dad planted when I was Maggie's age. For the last few years, we've gone down to visit around the time of grape harvest and came back home with a cooler full of grapes. Grapes and grape vines are as full of metaphors as they are of insects; no wonder the Bible has so many references to them!

So, we came home with about 40 pounds of grapes. Maggie, Lainie and I spent a couple hours separating the grapes from the stems and tossing any bad grapes. Lainie was so proud to get to help and have a task that she could do well.

Next, I rinsed the grapes and removed any floating debris or bad fruit.

I then mashed the grapes with a potato masher, just enough to break some of them.

Next, add 1/2 cup of water for every quart of prepared fruit. I had four saucepans, each with 6-8 quarts of fruit.

Bring to a boil, the reduce to simmer for at least 15 minutes. I think getting the juice out was easier when I let them simmer for 30 minutes or more.

Here's my juice extraction set-up: cheese cloth on a strainer that just fits into my stock pot. I pour the grape mash onto the cheese cloth; the stock pot catches the juice and the strainer catches any grape pulp that makes its way out of the cheese cloth.

The juice then got poured into the measuring cup, then pour into quart jars.

The end result: 10 quarts of grape juice into the freezer. Once these freeze solid, I will move them to the deep freeze, for better storage.

My mom always says that clean-up is part of the recipe. And there were LOTS of little spills like this one. My kitchen had a bit of a purple splash to it tonight.

And last but not least, the cook gets to taste the product first. (Yes, the picture is sideways, but it's 1:14 a.m... it can stay sideways.) The little remaining grape juice tasted delicious! If grape jelly sells are down this winter, we could always thaw this juice and have it for breakfast. It doesn't need any sugar, thanks to the natural sweetness of the grapes.

Next on the list: chop and freeze bell peppers (the ugly ones our customers don't want to buy) and make and freeze some fajita and stir fry kits. Oh, and a Farmers Market in... six hours.

Friday's Featured Foods: Grape Juice