Grape Goodness

While Brian and I were still in Massachusetts, we received a voicemail from my mom, telling us that the next day would be grape-picking day. I had luckily taken the following day off of work, so we took off from Boston right away and got home around midnight. The next day was grape picking. The family that allow us to pick at their vineyard have a beautiful place overlooking the lake. It's just beautiful.

















We picked about 110 pounds of grapes (which was more than I was planning), and as tradition would have it, the kids got on top of the car to ride out of the vineyard for the weight-in. I remember enjoying this part of grape-picking trips as a kid almost more than the grape-picking itself.

They enjoyed themselves immensely, and I drove slowly so that none of them would fall. It's weird to be one of the grown-ups. I used to be the carefree little kid joyously singing at the top of my lungs on top of the car, and now I'm the one driving, trying not to accidentally kill one of my neices or nephews. 
We took the grapes home, and immediately went to work. Making grape pie filling is a long, laborious project, but it's worth every bit of the effort. Grape pie is Brian's favorite pie, so I always make a good bunch of pie fillings and can them for the coming year. Here's how it goes:

First, take the grapes off of the stems and measure how much you've got (this takes forever). You need 4 cups of grapes for a pie, so figure out how many pies you have enough grape for.

Next, slip the grape skins off of the gooey inside. It starts to get sticky at this point. Concord grapes are not seedless, so it's necessary to go through this step in order to remove the seeds.

Once you've got them separated, you can begin the seed- removal process. This sounds hard, but it's not too bad if you've got a food mill. The old-fashioned way to separate the seeds is to cook the insides until they fall apart and the seeds rise to the top, then you skim off the seeds. This leaves plenty of room for error though, so I avoid it.

With a food mill, you simply cook the insides until they are soft, then you pour your filling through the food mill and mill out the seeds. This simple machine is genius. You role that wooden pin around and around on the mill, and it eventually pushes all of the juice and pulp out into the bowl below. Then you end up with just the filling and the juice. The seeds are left in the colander, and you just throw those out.
Then you throw the filling and the skins together in a pot and mix them with the ingredients for grape pie filling, cook those together for a bit, then process in canning jars for 25 minutes to store. I don't have a water bath canner, which hasn't really caused any issues in the past, but with pie filling, it just doesn't work so good. One batch of 9 pies went over just fine in the stock pot. I hot-packed those, and they are perfect.

Two other batches, however, slightly burned (HUGE disaster). One burned so badly that we just chucked it. Believe me, dumping would-be grape pie filling down the toilet is not a pleasant experience.

The other batch, I caught just as it began to taste a little smoky. I canned those anyway. My husband said the taste was barely noticeable (who knows if he's just being nice). I couldn't bear to part with it though, so I kept them and marked the cans with a B (but not for baby and me) to distinguish the good fillings from the burned ones. I think it was the pot. I stirred the fillings every 4 minutes in both pots, but the one pot burned 2 batches. I took vengeance on that pot by chucking it. Sad day.

As I mentioned earlier, we ended up with more grapes than expected. Grapes perish super-quick, so I decided to juice them. I don't have a juicer yet (my wallet dictates that I have to wait a little bit longer for it), so I called my Mom to find out the old-fashioned way of doing grape juice. My grandmother used cheese cloth, so I went to the local store and got some.

Here's the process: You cook the grapes (whole, but separated from the stems) until they are super-juiced. Doesn't that picture look like something from a horror show? haha.
Once the grapes are cooked down, you dump them in a cheesecloth-covered pot, like so:

The picture's dark, but you get the idea.  Let the grape juice drain out for a few minutes, then remove the clothespins and squeeze what you can out of the cheesecloth. This part was a little weird, because the cheesecloth became thoroughly dyed, and I felt like I was squeezing a human organ.

Now that definitely looks like something out of a horror movie. The trouble was, the cheese cloth's fibers were too far separated, so the guts of the grape poured through a few times.  This wouldn't do, so we tried something else: an old Tshirt.

This worked marvelously. We poured the grape filling into the tshirt (cut into one big piece of fabric), let it drain, and then squeezed the life out of it to get the grape juice out.

We ended up with 9 jars of grape juice. Each quart makes a gallon with some water, and you can add some sugar if you like. Mix it with lemonade, and you've got "gremon" a family tradition. Yum!