Sarsaparilla Soda

No matter how hard I try to cut soda out of my diet, I just can’t help but grab one every once in a while!  So it might as well be homemade.

For the first time around I bought a couple soda extracts from my local brewery supplier, sarsaparilla and birch beer.  Which it turns out, both are basically just root beer, coming from different plants but similar in taste.

Recipe went as follows…

Rehydrate 1 tsp brewer’s yeast in warm water.

Combine soda extract, 4 lbs (or 8 cups) sugar with enough warm water to dissolve.

 

Stir in yeast and add warm water until you have 4 gallons of soda.

 

Fill bottles leaving 1-2 inches of head space.

 

Age 3-4 days at room temperature, then store in cool, dark place for total aging of 2 weeks

Refrigerate and enjoy! 

(My 4 gallons filled 28 12 oz. glass bottles and 2 2 liter soda bottles)

 

Can’t wait, it already tastes good, just needs to carbonate.

Keeping Up With The Garden - Basil and Upside 2-Liter Containers

It’s so hard to keep up with basil!  If you don’t keep it from flowering it gets all bitter tasting, plus cutting basil back makes the plant grow bigger.  And since I put basil in the top part of over half of our upside down 2-liter containers, we have a lot of basil!  So I had no choice but to take some time and make a huge batch of pesto!  Just look at all that basil.  And that is the biggest bowl I own!

I used my PurpleShisho Pesto Recipe as a base, substituting basil for shisho of course and eliminating the cheese.  I would have added some pine nuts if I had any, and I tried sunflower seeds a couple weeks ago and it turned out great.  But all I had was basil, garlic and olive oil.  I also decided to use a blender this time, which was way easier than a mortar and pestle and creamier.  A chunkier pesto is still awesome though, just more work.  I basically just blended the basil, added garlic and oil till I had the taste and texture I wanted, which means super garlicky!  And I mostly harvest our Spicy Globe Basil which made for an amazing pesto pizza!

Also here is an update on some of our 2-liter containers.  Everything is doing pretty well, other than a couple of the tomatoes that have outgrown their containers.  And I used a natural twine to hang some the 2-liters, which is beginning to rot out (one fell already, but survived!).  So next time I will have to stick with the nylon macramé cord I started out using.  The peppers are doing great; creating a beautiful, spicy canopy over the bench in front of the hoop house.

And I excited about our cucumbers!  I really want to make pickles this year.  So we have Russian pickling cucumbers growing down out of the containers with some dill on top.  And then some massive 18 inch long Japanese slicing cucumbers growing up out of the ground.  They are starting to get intertwined and producing a few baby cucumbers.   We’ve already had some cucumbers come out of the hoop house so I hope these are soon to follow!