Strawberries galore!

We had tons of strawberries from the CSA and farmers' market - OK, not tons, more like six quarts.  So I made lots of strawberry stuff this weekend, including three kinds of strawberry ice cream - and strawberry mead!

On Saturday I made three batches of custard for the three different types of strawberry ice cream - plain strawberry ice cream (which I have made before), strawberry cabernet ice cream, and strawberry rhubarb ice cream.  Here's strawberry cabernet:

It's just slightly darker than strawberry, which is so pale it is practically white.  But both of them were delicious.  There was so much ice cream that the freezing drum has needed a day to recover after each batch, so tomorrow night I'll throw the strawberry rhubarb into the ice cream maker.

A more nontraditional strawberry item that I made today was strawberry mead.  I've been meaning to make mead for a long time - so long, in fact, that my original batch of yeast went bad in our fridge.  No worries...  Today we found a new brewing supply shop, Dave bought some yeast and yeast nutrient, and I used my strawberries and three pounds of basswood honey from the Minnesota State Fair.

I took all my recipe hints from the good folks at Storm the Castle, who appear to be the Renaissance-Faire-going type, so I trust their notions of mead-making.  Making mead is simple and actually much quicker than beer (although the fermentation / aging takes longer).

In the "shaking the shit out of it" step

1. Get your grandma to give you a couple of empty jugs of Carlo Rossi wine.
2. Sanitize everything.  (Especially remove the Carlo Rossi labels.  Dave laughed at my insistence on this.)
3. Heat your honey and water, mix thoroughly.  (Three pounds of honey will make a gallon of mead.)
4. Pour into your gallon jug and add fruit.
5. Shake the shit out of it for ten minutes.
6. Add the rest of the water and any other flavorings.  I added a little green tea.
7. Add yeast and yeast nutrient.  Put in stopper and air lock.
8. Pray.

Hopefully within a day, there will be little bubbles in the airlock, signifying that the yeast cells have begun devouring the sugars in the strawberries, honey, and tea.  After about a month, the bubbles will slow and we'll have to siphon the mead over to our second jug for a fresh fermentation / conditioning.  They say to leave it in the jug for six to nine months, which sounds a bit crazy.  But I don't know, a beautiful strawberry mead sounds like it would taste lovely in February.