Every year since we bought our house and first planted our garden I have made pickles from the cucumbers I grow. The last few years I have made refrigerator pickles mainly because they keep for almost a year, are really easy and always turn out perfect.
Tonight I bottled my first attempt at strawberry wine. Of course the best part of the bottling process is the opportunity to sample. This is a Very light bodied wine. The recipe (found here #1); said it would be light but that is definitely understated. It has a real subtle strawberry flavor and ends somewhat dry. Fortunately I made enough that I can let some age for a considerable time to see how it changes. I also bottled gallon 3 of my dandelion wine. That means I only have 1 more gallon of each left to bottle. Speaking of, a special thanks to Erik for his corker donation. I used to use standard bottles and corks but moved away from them to swingtop style because they are so easy. Part of that was also because I am a cheap bastard and didn’t buy a very expensive corker. You do truly get what you pay for here folks. This one is really slick so I went and bought some standard 750ML cobalt blue bottles for the remainder of my batches. May as well bottle my prized wine in something with a little class right? For those of you thinking about mking wine I do highly recommend buying the EZ-Top or swing top bottles especially if you don’t want to do the whole corking thing. This place sells them in cobalt blue as shown below but you can also get them in clear or brown and 500ML or 1 liter possibly for less. They are reusable and have replacement parts.
Shown here are the 10 I bottled tonight.
The question comes up every so often on the news: “Is Castro Dead?”. Of course that’s a site: www.iscastrodead.com Somewhat interesting, it simply states No, at least today it does. What are their soures? I haven’t a clue however the domain owner is based out of Miami so it maybe a relative connection.
I have written in the past about my hate hate relationship with the current health insurance business. Well, to elaborate on this a bit further, my employer pays around $10,000 a year for my health insurance coverage. Mind you, they are a large corporation so that is below the national average by about $2,000. I personally also pay out a minimum of $7,000 a year out of pocket through deductibles, co-pays and premiums. Stop to absorb this for a moment. Between my employer and myself, $17,000 is paid to an insurance company for coverage that is barely adequate at best. One would think that for an amount equivalent to a new car a year I should be receiving great care and routine physician visits should be covered as indicated by the insurance carriers own preauthorizations. Instead I deal with claims that continue to be denied by the insurance company after they authorized the service. To add insult, they send letters to our Dr. requesting a reduced rate for the services and charges they preauthorized. I ask, for a $17,000 a year premium wouldn’t you think that healthcare services that were preauthorized by the insurance carrier should be paid without a need for more than 30+ calls and 20+ faxed claims to be made? But socialized healthcare would be the death of us. Ask anyone who lives in France or Canada.