Hey folks…we’re rousing from hibernation, getting back in to the swing of things, and looking forward to picking some fruit!
We’ll be making a short presentation at Pecha Kucha Night, this Sunday March 21 at 7:30pm at Octane Coffee near Tech.
Come hoot and holler for us!
Maaaannnnnn! I didn’t even know pomegranates grew here, and I just happened to drive by a beautiful 60-year old tree that was full of weird-looking apples. This was a wonderful and very generous donation, and we’re thrilled to get it!
We’re going back on Sunday to pick some black walnuts and hopefully a few more pomegranates, so you should come along!
Short of making our own acorn flour, prickly pears are probably about as fringe as we can get for things that grow readily in Atlanta.
Well, that, or eating the actual green cactus pads.
I once had some delicious licor de tuna (prickly pear liquor) from the heart of Mexico, and it was supremely delicious: sweet without being overwhelming, and a unique, pleasant taste.
Such is always the curse of high hopes, as prickly pears we’ve found growing in Atlanta to be less then supremely delicious, with a taste somewhere between a beet and a cucumber. Perfectly edible of course, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to make you want to keep eating it. And since it is covered in tiny thorns that can be carried by the wind to your most delicate of extremities, the fruit is actually in solid negative territory right now.
We’re hoping that the fruits we picked were simply not fully ripe, but we don’t really know. Do you?
20 lbs of nice, fat little native persimmons. We don’t need no Fuyu or Hachiya to get down in A-town (not that we’d turn them away). Diospyros virginiana all the way. Yeah…
These little fellows were growing out in Tucker, GA at a car repair shop. A fellow there talked our ear off about topics far and wide, and was in love with persimmon bread. Our recipe unfortunately ended up tasting like spice cake and had no resemblance to anything with fruit in it.
Anyone got some good persimmon recipes? They’re delicious as is, but this dude really sold us on the bread. In his words, it’ll make you wanna slap your grandma, which I think is good.
Well, we had a lot of things up against us this year: small apple harvest (1/3 of last year’s monster 3100 lbs), discovering the night before that we’d lost up to 40% of our apples in a faulty freezer, late-night screen printing issues, exhaustion, and even rain during Ciderfest proper, but all-in-all, everything worked out and everything worked well. Even the grinder! For all of our fussing and fretting, it was no sweat. It might be the kind of “no sweat” that requires two nights to catch up on sleep, but no sweat nonetheless.
Thanks so much to everyone who came out, and everyone who donated money and bought T-shirts. It was a great time as always, and we got to meet lots of new and old friends, plenty of stomach gurgles from too much cider, lots of dogs, lots of swimming, and general mirth.
Also, for anyone that missed it this go around, we’re planning on making cider for the Faster Mustache 24-hour relay going on next weekend from noon Saturday to noon Sunday at Elliot St. Pub in Castleberry Hill. Come on out in the heat of the day and cool off with some refreshingly brown liquid!
Under a month away! It’s happening on Saturday, September 5th, so you better start training! Aubrey, our resident champion eater, has hired one of the legendary gut massagers from the island of Gozo in preparation for consuming massive amounts of cider. You’re going to have to work hard to beat him!
Check out our dedicated Ciderfest page for more info!
