borei pri hagafen
$320.00 street value
On Sunday afternoon Leah's brother Jake brought over a cooler-full of concord grapes that he picked in his Cambridge yard. Some people have all the luck: we slave over our garden for months in order to come up with a few tomatoes, and he moves into a place where he can pick over a bushel of grapes in an easy hour's work.
Happily, he decided to share them with us, if for no other reason that we have all the canning equipment. Over the course of about six hours we processed almost all the good grapes—neither green nor rotten—into almost two gallons of grape jelly and a similar amount of what we're calling grape juice concentrate. Leah finished up the juicing work on Monday. It was a whole lot of work, but also pretty awesome to bust through that much fruit at once. We're going to take some of the jellies, but Jake gets the majority as befits his status as picker and vineyard owner. I think he's now in pretty good shape for holiday gifts for this winter.
We served up some of the juice to our Bible study peeps this evening, and I'm not sure if it was a complete success. There's a limit to how much particulate matter you expect in your grape juice, and a different limit for a substance to be qualified as a liquid at all, and this juice might have exceeded both limits by a considerable distance. Call it country-style. Our friends are polite and they drank it; they may even visit us again one day. All I can say is that much concentrated grapey goodness must be good for you!
Our counters are stained purple, perhaps forever, and our compost is as well-enriched with grape skins as our minds our with delightful memories of grape canning. There were also a very many seeds down the disposal in the sink, most of which I had to pull out by hand since there were showing no signs of being disposed of by the machinery. I call the move my grape seed extract.