How to Make Frugal Fruit Fizz

Simple, Delicious and Ever so Slightly Alcoholic

It's the time of year when we find fruit and berries aplenty. The orchard fruits may not quite be ready for harvesting but many of us have accumulated a glut of rhubarb, raspberries, currants and even strawberries so we need to preserve what we can for the winter months.

My poor gooseberry bushes succumbed to the nasty little Sawfly caterpillars, so the berries I did have were added to blackcurrants to make jam. All of the above can be used to make jam and jelly but it's nice to bottle up something with a bit of fizz for the festive season.

 

WHAT WE NEED

• A clean bucket
• 1kg berries or fruit
• 1kg sugar
• Lemon (or lemon juice)
• Small cup of vinegar
• 5 litres of water
• Suitable bottles - screw top fizzy drinks bottles work fine

Sterilise the bucket as best you can - I rinse everything with boiling water before using it. Rinse the fruit and place all of it in the bucket along with the lemon (washed and sliced, not peeled) or lemon juice, sugar and vinegar.

I prefer to boil my water before adding it, but many people don't bother doing this. Pour the water over the fruit and stir until all of the sugar has dissolved. You'll find that most of the fruit floats but it doesn't take long for the colour to begin flowing. This one looks a rich red, as it's made up of rhubarb, blackcurrants and raspberries.

My bucket of choice this year is one that came with a resealable lid and originally contained 50 seed/fat balls for the wild birds. (These are also ideal for holding laundry 'gloop'.)

Cover your bucket with a tea towel or similar to protect the contents from flies, dust etc and then sit it aside for a few days to infuse. I give mine a stir each morning. The resulting liquid can be bottled from as early as day three.

 

Sterilise your bottles as you would jam jars, I like to rinse mine out with boiling water then dry them in the oven - a job best done after having finished cooking dinner so you don't need to go to the expense of heating the oven specially.

Again I use the boiling water method to clean a large jug, sieve and funnel, then decant the fruit mix from the bucket through the sieve and into the jug. From here, it gets poured into the bottles via the funnel lined with a coffee filter, before sealing the bottles. These should then be sat somewhere cool and safe, where the process of natural fermentation can work its magic.

 

Your fizz should be good to drink after as little as ten days but it keeps much longer, in my experience, as we have only just finished last year's batch. You do need to keep releasing excess pressure from bottles if you want to ferment this to a more potent alcoholic beverage and please do remember that it is mildly alcoholic and not a soft drink for children, despite how the final product tastes.

 

This time around, I am reusing my recycled clip-top bottles, of which I now have five, and screw top fizzy drinks bottles for any surplus.

 

You can also make this drink using elderflowers, red clover, honeysuckle blossom or virtually any other fruit or edible flowers, just adapt the amounts accordingly. For example, only use about a dozen strongly scented elderflower heads or quarter of a bucket of red clover heads. (I have never actually weighed flowers when using them.)

You can also use a mixture of elderflower and red clover or any combination of mixed fruit and flowers you prefer. Having tried several different combination, There still hasn't been one that wasn't agreeable - they all tasted lovely, especially chilled and shared with friends.

 

I shall update this post as my champagne-style fizz gets fizzing.

 

Frugaldom.

Frugal, Festive 'Champers'

Frugal, Festive Fruit or Flower 'Champagne'

 

A special blog post about cheap plonk, for 'THEO THE RANDY' and 'TEAM PUGH'.

 

It's not too late to make some for Christmas, if you have surplus fruit available.

 

Elderflower fizz & clootie dumpling

How to make the frugaldom 'champagne' is something I learned while spending time on a tiny island called Shapinsay, which is off the coast of mainland Orkney. It was some time ago, back in the 20th Century, so I can't remember when, only how.

 

This friend (thank you, Emma) taught me the secrets of frugal gourmet wines, from red clover to rhubarb. So easy and so cheap to make. For this, I will always be grateful.

 

For the clootie dumping recipe, that's thanks to my Gt, Gt Granny Kerr, the recipe for that can be found HERE and can also be found in the Frugaldom forum.

 

SPARKLING RHUBARB 'CHAMPAGNE'

 

You can substitute rhubarb with whatever surplus non-citrus fruit/edible flowers you have: brambles, red clover, honeysuckle, elderflowers, but don't add a full kilo of flower heads. (I wonder if nasturtiums would work?)

 

INGREDIENTS

1kg chopped fruit
1kg white sugar - reduce according to how sweet the fruit is, I've used half this in past.
1/2 cup vinegar (I used cider vinegar)
1 sliced lemon
5 litres boiling water

Thoroughly clean and sterilise your bucket. Pour in the boiling water, lemons and sugar, stir to dissolve. Add the chopped rhubarb. (I just top it, tail it and wash it, I don't peel it, as the red skins make pink champagne.)

 

Stir the contents of the bucket, cover and leave to stand in a cool, dark place. I give the contents a stir every day for about 5 days, then strain off all the fruit through muslin, cotton or fine net before bottling in glass bottles with secure caps.

 

When straining the fruit from the liquid, I cut the centre out of the lid of the bucket and used that to clip the cotton in place. The buckets with lids are easy to come by - just ask anyone who's bodybuilding and they'll have plenty of whey shake buckets to rehome.

 

Whatever colour fruit or flowers you use will dictate the colour of the resulting liquid. This batch was a result of a mixture of green and red stem rhubarb, but it paled to pink when done.

 

Clip top bottles are great if you can salvage any, but ordinary glass bottles with sloping sides and screw caps work equally well.

 

Now, I'll also admit to baking the strained rhubarb into crumbles after straining it from the liquid! Zero waste! From the ingredients stated, I can bottle 5 litres of liquid. 





This wine (it's naturally fermenting as time passes) does get a champagne-like fizz fairly quickly, so it's best to check the bottles and caps frequently.

 

The end result, as seen here, is ready for drinking within a couple of weeks of bottling, so there's still time to get a Christmas 2012 batch made.

 

CHEERS!

Storage-wise, I have managed to successfully keep this from one year to the next... other than the year it froze solid and burst the bottles.

 

Oh! And there was also the jet-propelled pink champagne rocket episode, which included a small explosion as a result of my testing out 2 litre fizzy drinks bottles. 

 

If storing it for longer (or in plastic bottles, as suggested elsewhere), don't forget to check the bottles & caps every so often. They WILL explode, just like my 4 bottles of blackberry 'champagne' fizz, they took off like rockets!

 

Frugaldom

www.frugaldom.com

Help! Transplanting the entire garden...

As you may have gathered, we are planning a housemove next month. This means we'll need to move all the fruit trees and bushes that were planted here, and that's going to be quite a task!

I have the beginnings of an edible hedge of crab apples, about a dozen assorted fruit trees (all around 2m height) plus an assorted array of currant and berry bushes. Should I prune these right back before all the buds start emerging? Spring is on its way and everything has started to come back to life.

There's still a nip in the air and we're still getting frost - that can last until mid-May here - but most of the above are in the ground and many are beginning to bud. This means we need to dig everything up and get it into large containers ready for moving; we need to do this as soon as possible, but how do I do it?

I'm thinking large trugs with handles would be alright for the trees, although they're going to be heavy to move, but do I plant them into virgin ground once we move or would I be better to leave them in their big tubs until the end of the year? I've been advised to lift a fair sized root ball and pack them into the containers with as much of the original soil as possible, then keep them protected from the frost. Any other advice would be much appreciated.

I also have rhubarb and strawberries to lift and move. The rhubarb is already quite a fair size in the sunniest corner of the garden, so I'm worried about damaging it by moving it this far on into the growing season. I might be best to leave it for as long as possible, in the hope that it's big enough to pick before we are away from here. Unfortunately, we're working to a very tight deadline, unless the landlord concerned decides to respond to our requests for an extension.

Any helpful suggestions or advice that anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated. Also, if anyone knows of anything lighter weight than soil that can be used to pack around the root balls of the fruit trees, I'd love to hear about it.

Please post comments either here or into my forum thread marked 'Moving Fruit Bushes & Trees'. You can find that HERE. You will need to register a username in order to reply, but it's free to join and, to my knowledge, there are no spammy emails associated with it. It's our own free 'Frugaldom' forum.

Many thanks, in advance, for any helpful hints, tips or suggestions. It's a fairly traumatic time for all concerned, as this move has come very unexpectedly. But I guess that's what happens when you rent from private landlords - they can want their houses back at anytime.

Leftovers, homemade pink champagne and the 2011 budget

Christmas Cheer from Festive Frugaldom!

Much milder here at around -1C so, despite still being frozen solid, it's feeling a little warmer. Weatherman said rain but it doesn't feel humid, still very dry with not much to show for the bit thaw we had yesterday.

Christmas day went well - turkey with all the trimmings including homemade braised red cabbage and a spot of rowan jelly. The potatoes were boiled, veggies steamed and soup made on the stovetop but I finished everything off by roasting it in the main oven, along with the stuffing, pigs in blankets and the slow-cooked turkey. By way of celebration, we drank homemade rhubarb 'pink champagne' with the meal and I was very impressed by the fruity fizz this year! The bottle would certainly have gone with a pop had I not used the 1L glass screw top bottles and, with no proper champagne glasses, the fizz in the wine glasses was quite substantial.

Diehard frugalers, you know what today is... it's leftovers day!

Yes, that's right, it's time to get creative and repack your freezers to ensure everything's rotating, being used up and being replenished by the latest batch of whatever goodies have been leftover from the festive food extravaganza. I have plenty of turkey, a pot of turkey soup that had been made with stock from the giblets and I now have the turkey carcass to turn into the next batch of turkey stock, but the freezer space is still very much at a premium. We're going to be eating soup and pudding lunches for a while longer to use up the rest of the trifle and dumpling. The dumpling has already been sliced and frozen and the trifle wasn't done with fresh cream, so it will last another day if needs must. (I sincerely doubt it, as I'd eat trifle morning, noon and night.)

Fidgetbuzz... your homemade raspberry ruffles and fudge/coconut ice are absolutely delicious! Remind me to give you back the jar, just in case you want to do something similar next year. The jar should be empty by around 2pm today.

Stockmaking has begun - what's left of the turkey has been carved into mealsized portions, bagged up and put into the freezer. As is customary, I've kept out enough for tonight's curry (or stir fry) but the rest should be enough to make up another meal plus a couple of pies. I don't have the space in the freezer to fit in pies just yet, so the meat is going in 'as is' for now. The soup has been decanted into 500ml containers, enough for a lunchtime snack, and everything else - bones and all - is seasoned and ready for stock making. I'll boil down the stock, once it's made, then freeze it for future use. Having received a set of 'Kleeneze' pastry presses for Christmas, I suspect some my leftover turkey might find its way into future pasty-making. A full review of this product will be posted as soon as available. For now, it looks like a bag of trappers' tools modelled in white plastic... scary looking things!

I've got my 2011 challenge budget spreadsheet all set up and ready to go for next week. This spreadsheet is a very simple format that helps me see exactly how much of my annual budget is left at any given time. Each of the columns is preset in January to reflect the challenge targets, so it automatically shows me a running total. Once again, the Frugaldom household is going to attempt to stick at £4,000 after payment of rent, council tax and water. The budget does NOT include the cost of work related items, these have already been deducted. Feel free to play around with the spreadsheet if you think it can be of any help to you. You might also like to take a look at Spending Diary and iMeasure - the former for recording day to day spends and the latter (created by Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, part of the UK Energy Research Centre) to help analyse your week to week electricity and gas use. It also shows how your household ranks in the energy rating stakes. We're currently maintaining a 'C' rating but the system does not take logburning into account.

With only a few days lefts of the current challenge, I should come in just under budget; I won't know, for sure, until the 31st December. Looking good, though, looking good! There wasn't any credit used to fund Christmas (or anything else during 2010, for that matter) and the savings have survived intact. I do use my cashback credit card wherever and whenever possible, it always gets paid back in full each month. I should have accrued around £50 by the end of this tax year.

I love cashback! I treat the interest payments on savings a bit like cashback because let's face it, the interest payments are a far cry from representing a serious income. I now look on the ISA as being there to prevent any bandit stealing my money and, in return for providing me with this free service, it rewards me with enough cash every month to cover the cost of feeding the poultry. It's pretty great, when you think about it - free cash on a regular basis, even if it is only chicken feed.

Hope everyone had a lovely Christmas day and has now had a bit of a boost towards the new year. The final countdown has begun, so make sure all your sums are done and dusted, build up to a huge celebration next weekend and make your New Year's resolution one that can last a lifetime - embrace frugality and all that it has to offer, shift those debts and live a good life.