In mid-April, when the Squeeze and I met with the catering manager at Oakway Wine and Deli in Eugene, it was cold outside. And drizzly. And it had been cold and drizzly for as long as we could remember. We thought, perhaps even justifiably, that it would be cold and drizzly forever, even during the last week of June. So when we sat in Jessica’s office, snuggly in our late Winter sweaters, to taste Oakway’s blackened fish and roasted chicken and skewed prawns, the weather did not cross our minds once. Or, more likely, it did – probably we were grateful to be out of the cold and drizzly weather and inside the warm office, eating hot, delicious, free food.

So the Squeeze and I put in an order for our event – spicy chicken skewers marinated with cilantro and lime, blackened cajun salmon filets, lemon rice pilaf, sauteéd green vegetables. We ordered fruit and crudité trays and hummus and pita bread. We ordered a custom salad bar, too – arguably our smartest move in menu planning. The Squeeze and I are dedicated salad people, and we have strong opinions about how one ought to be constructed. And so for this meal, a make-yourself salad with all of our favorite extras: dried cranberries, radishes, snap peas, red onion.

When the day arrived, we were quite in the midst of a most impressive heat wave. Lightning flashed in the skies over the McKenzie River at night, illuminating the tree line and momentarily silencing the river. I am told that Oregon caught fire by some of that lightning. During the day, hot winds blew up the river. The Squeeze said that it felt like having a cow sigh on the back of his neck. Eeks. The cold and the drizzle of April was a distant memory, totally incongruent with the ninety-seven degree afternoon on which we wed.

Our guests moved their tables and chairs three times before the meal was over trying to outrun the aggressive sunshine. The salad was a hit, but not the hot, spicy food. Though delicious and beautiful, it was just too much on such a day. It was even too hot for the lemon curd- and marionberry-filled lemon-poppyseed paisley cake, made by Sweet Life Patisserie. A cake that good should not require a second thought but, alas, I only made it through one piece. Perhaps we should have brought over the Snoopy Sno-Cone maker instead.

Despite the heat and our inability to overindulge because of it, the day was still lovely. Oakway was gracious enough to serve my first batch of raspberry wine, which was surprisingly dry, refreshing, and incredibly fruity. And with help from friend and photographer Kristi, the Innkeeper at Eagle Rock Lodge made a gorgeous edible bouquet for me. Can you spot the artichoke? It’s just a little droopy because, you know, we were expecting a cooler, more drizzly day.

As for the rest – for “part two” is all about remainders – many berries were carefully prepared to ride out the Fall and Winter in the freezer, some berries met their end in the dehydrator, others are being made into fruity wines.

To freeze fruit is to limit its potential usefulness later on, which I find difficult. When dealing with seasonal, highly perishable berries, however, I think it’s a must. Your berries, especially the raspberries, black berries and the like, will never come out of the freezer in nearly as nice a conditon as they went in – you can only have fresh berries for a few moments, you see. The formation and later melting of ice crystals destroys the structure of the berry. Once you’ve defrosted, the best you can hope for is a floppy, slightly waterlogged raspberry. I do not mean to suggest that freezing berries is not worthwhile, only that one ought to be aware of the unavoidable degradation in quality at the other end. Previously frozen berries are great for baking into muffins, scones, pancakes and waffles. They as positively indispensable in smoothie-making and make pleasant additions to certain warm-weather cocktails (perhaps in the place of ice cubes?).
The manner in which you will freeze your berries depends on projected future use.


The current (July/August 2007) issue of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine features a double-page, nearly exhaustive article all about How to Freeze Summer Produce. They believe that the best way to freeze fresh berries is in sugar or sugar syrup because both inhibit ice crystal formation. I have attempted neither technique, my primary objection being that I do not want to douse my fruit in sugar. I suppose that I could rinse them once they’ve defrosted, but since my method works just fine for me, I’ve stuck with it. Plus, it’s much simpler. I do just this:

1. Clear space in the freezer for a cookie sheet – preferably the kind with a lip around the edge to prevent spill – and for whatever containers you’ll eventually use to store your frozen berries. Real estate in my freezer is very tight so for me, this was the hardest part.
2. Pick over your berries. Use the already-smushed ones for jam, puree, cobbler, or sauce. Compost the moldy ones and those yet unripe.
3. Arrange berries on your cookie sheet in single layer and place in the freezer. The cooler your berries are when you freeze them, the less condensation and ice will form on the outside. If you’ve gone u-picking on a warm day, it’s best to wait until your stash is at least down to room temperature before putting them to freeze.
4. Once your berries are fairly solidly frozen on the cookie sheet, toss them into a heavy duty freezer bag (or some other preferred storage container), label and date, and shelve.

According to Cook’s Illustrated, zero degrees (or below) is an optimal temperature for your home freezer. Airflow, too, is very important. The more air you have moving around your product, the more quickly it will cool and the less damage it will sustain when defrosting.

The bulk of my frozen berries I left in whole-berry form as I suspect they are safest that way. I did, as an experiment, make some raw raspberry puree which I froze flat in a quart-sized heavy duty plastic bag. Now I have a thin little raspberry brick standing in my freezer, hardly taking up any space at all. I suspect it will be very delicious swirled into some wintertime oatmeal, or added to a smoothie, or made into sauce for ice cream.

The last method I employed in preserving the fruit whole was dehydration. Again, it is important to think about what you have in mind for your fruit down the road, and pick a method that is in line with those ends. I chose to dry my left over cobbler cherries because I absolutely love cooking with dried cherries, perhaps more so than with fresh ones. Dried cherries go just about anywhere a dried cranberry can – sprinkled over my salad, baked into cornmeal cookies, cooked down to fill a bar cookie. I bought my food dehydrator – a magic chef or something – on eBay for about seven bucks. It’s the basic home-use model: round, six trays, a lid and a fan at the bottom that circulates warm air throughout. Much, much fancier models exist, but this one suits my purposes adequately.

I washed, dried, halved and pitted my cherries before laying them out in a single layer in the machine. They took, with only minimal babysitting and one shuffle, about two days to dry. So long as they are stored in an airtight container, I see no reason why they would ever spoil, but I doubt they will survive the year before being devoured. There will be more cherries in a mere eleven months, after all.

I could not resist the siren call of strawberry wine. I made raspberry also. I am a wine novice. I own one how-to book and one recipe book, both of which I have only skimmed. I understand the basic principles and techniques, I think, but am ignorant of the subtleties. I know that there is a way to check the sugar and alcohol content – I may even own the tool for it. I also know there is a way to kill the yeast before bottling to make sure that corked bottles do not explode in my basement. I do not do any of these things in my winemaking, however. I seem, uncharacteristically, to lack some measure of fear or respect that might prevent me from doing such an incomplete job of it. Yet despite my failure to compulsively and exhaustively follow the recipe’s instructions, my first three batches of wine seem to have been reasonably successful. Two – the apple and strawberry – have been bottled, and the raspberry, bulk-aging in my linen closet, was even perfectly drinkable a mere month after it was born.

I will not herein attempt to explain home winemaking. I will say that, the way I have done it anyway, each step is simple and if you have a good chunk of time and don’t mind smelling a bit like cheap hooch once in a while (when racking or bottling, say), nothing should get in your way. All of my equipment and specialty ingredients – food-grade buckets, gallon jugs, rubber bungs, airlocks, a giant funnel, yeast and yeast nutrient, acid blends, corks and a corker – ran a little under a hundred dollars, though I am sure you could acquire all for less.
And while I wait for my closet-wine, I have even begun to dabble in flavored vodkas as well. Dreaming still of the Vault’s habanero “martini,” I have dried three of said peppers and tossed them into a vodka bottle to steep, quite unsure of what will come out the other end. With the remainder of the spirit, I’ve attempted a blueberry vodka (presently submerged with a vanilla bean and lemon juice, the alcohol in the liquor slowly leeching all of the berry’s beautiful color away) and a strawberry-and-vanilla fortified wine (strawberries, vanilla, white wine, sugar, and vodka). All of these I plan to let sit for one month and then taste.
For a more comprehensive – yet totally accessible – introduction to making wine at home, please check out Julia Brews & Julia’s Brews.

My journey to hooch-in-the-linen closet began many months ago, when a good friend discovered – by what means I can’t recall – The Joy of Home Winemaking. Being the type of woman inclined to make her own wine (just as she cooks, bakes, gardens, and makes her own jams), she set to work at all kinds of home brews – dandelion, grapefruit, berry – which, reportedly, not only did not kill anyone, but were also very tasty.

On August 18th of last year, I publicly vowed that I, too, would make my own wine someday. I promptly ordered the book. I even read most of it. And then I put the winemaking project aside in favor of other things. Finishing my Bachelor’s degree, for instance. I imagined that home winemaking could rapidly become an expensive and time-consuming hobby. My kitchen and craft room already spilling over with baking bread, sewing projects, knitting lopsided baby blankets, jam-making, card-designing, writing (in theory anyway) and more, I told myself that I would have to get one or two other projects well in hand (like the degree, see?) before I could embark on another pastime that would only make me giggly and my kitchen sticky.

Last March I could wait no longer. I consulted my guidebook once again, visited my local home brewing supply store and plunged forward.

I made the Easy Apple Wine from Garey’s book. It’s what she recommends for beginners. I also picked up a book at Steinbart’s that had a very similar recipe for apple wine – similar in that both called for apple juice and only one fermentation, instead of “fermenting on the fruit” and then straining out solids, which seemed overwhelming at the time. I made that one too, so that in a few more months when I work up the courage to taste the stuff I can do some scientific-like comparisons. Or something.

When I racked my wine three weeks ago – that’s siphoning off the liquid from the yeastysediment or “must” that falls to the bottom once the initial fermentation takes place – I splashed a bit into my mouth, just to confirm or deny the presence of alcohol where once there had been none. When I splashed the wine into my mouth I also splashed it all over the kitchen.

It smelled a bit like a recycling center in here for a few days. Alcohol? Check.

The book said that it should, at the racking stage, taste a “little raw,” and that the longer I wait before bottling and/or consumption, the more the flavor will balance and smooth, so I’m not worrying yet. For now, I am actually rather enjoying the waiting. I did not, in fact, ever experience the urge to barrel ahead as I was worried I might. Perhaps this apple wine is teaching me patience. Or perhaps I am afraid that it’s been bungled somehow and I’ll be disappointed after all of this blasted patience and restraint.

I just uploaded the images that you see here on my post. I hadn’t looked at them side by side before. See in my closet, the one on the right? That’s the very same that’s above, being prepared back in April. The color difference is really quite striking. Maybe there is some hope yet.