Halloween - Stay Safe My Friends

But Before We Get to Halloween - As I post this, Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on the East Coast.  In DC, the rain is now steady and the winds are picking up.  I'm not tempting fate by going out, but some have to - because of job, family, or an emergency. Wheverever you are, if you're in the path of the storm, stay safe and be sane.  And I hope that you will have power and the energy on Wednesday to enjoy Halloween. 

By now you have seen innumerable cute, Halloween-themed recipes.  And I'll bet you have a Halloween candy plan in place, whether you buy only as much as you expect to give out or hope to horde some for later consumption.  If you have kids or are going to a grown-up Halloween party, you may well have planned, bought or made costumes too.  In other words, you are well prepared to celebrate if you are so inclined.  

The fun stuff is what Halloween should be about - not an unintended and unfortunate “incident” that mars the memories and maybe worse.

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Homemade Vanilla Extract

I rail against stores that display Christmas decorations before Halloween.  And I’m not one of those people who buys wrapping paper on sale at the end of one holiday season to use the following year.  So it somewhat out-of-character, but I have already made two homemade, food-related gifts for the coming holiday season. 

The first gift is limoncello – and it’s already done.  The liqueur wasn’t difficult to make – it just required buying supplies, care in preparing the lemon peels and simple syrup, and the persistence to gently shake daily during the two-40 day “resting” periods.  If you cut the time slightly, you can still make gift bottles of limoncello in time for the upcoming Christmas, Chanukah, and other winter holidays.  I made 10 bottles and have already given 2 away, so the only question is whether I’ll have enough left in December for gifts to family and friends who would enjoy it.  

My second gift will be homemade vanilla extract, another simple-to-make-yet impressive present.  Because it has a shorter “resting” time (about 60 days, instead of 80),  you could start now and have it just about done by Christmas day.  But again, you can skimp a little on the waiting time.  Or you can go with my “better late than never” theory; one year we sent out our “Peace on Earth” holiday cards for St. Patrick’s Day.  

I’m on this vanilla extract-making adventure with Kelly of KellyBakes.  Vanilla beans are grown in many areas of the world, and beans from the various points of origin supposedly have a distinctive flavor.  In order to test that proposition, we are going to make batches with 4 different types of beans.  Our project finale will be a baking orgy with blind taste tests to see if we can distinguish among the various batches of extract.

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Limoncello – Round 3 a/k/a It’s Done!

If you’ve followed my limoncello posts, you know that I started making homemade limoncello (Round 1) in mid-July.  About 1½ months later, I filtered the lemon peels out of the alcohol and added the sugar-water mixture known as simple syrup (Round 2.)  Now, after the limoncello rested in a cool, dark corner for another 1½ months, I am ready to bottle it.

Barb of Creative Culinary is so right (see her comment on the first post), the wait time between starting limoncello and bottling the finished liqueur is a killer.  Many times I was tempted to short circuit this incredibly long process.  I even found support for cutting it short among the many limoncello recipes I consulted.  But ultimately, I remained patient, heeding advice from several reputable sources, including Barb, that the longer wait times yield a better, more mellow liqueur.

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