------------------------------------------ Living Homegrown Podcast Episode 67 Infused Gifts Show Notes are at: www.livinghomegrown.com/67 Theresa: This is the Living Homegrown Podcast, episode number 67. Announcer: Theresa: Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast, where it s all about how to live farm fresh without the farm. To help guide the way to a more flavorful and sustainable lifestyle is your host, national PBS TV producer and canning expert Theresa Loe. Hey there everybody. Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast. I'm your host Theresa Loe and this podcast is where we talk about living farm fresh without the farm and that can mean preserving, fermenting, small space food growing and just taking small steps towards living a more sustainable lifestyle, all the different ways that we can live closer to our food even if we have little or no garden space at all. If you want to learn more about any of these topics or my online canning academy, just visit my website livinghomegrown.com. Today's episode is all about making really simple gifts now that we can give away at the holiday time. It's about pre-planning a little so that we are ready when it gets really crazy in December. Now before I had kids I used to spend all summer making my gifts to give away at Christmas or if I was running behind schedule I was doing it in the fall. That was just something I love to do so every weekend I was crafting up something to give away at the holidays. Then kids came into the picture and my life became very, very hectic and crazy and I didn't do that for a number of years until my kids got older and then we started making gifts together which was a really fun project to do. My kids are older and I'm back into trying to pre-plan and get my gifts done a little bit ahead of time so that when I get to December, I'm not trying to frantically make homemade gifts
------------------------------------------ because I want it to be fun. That's the whole process is to be fun, that's the point and also to give a little bit of something from my garden or a little bit of something that I've hand made to my friends and family so that you're giving a little bit of yourself. People love it when they get something that's homemade. It makes them feel very special. It's something that they know that you gave something up to create that for them. You had to give up your time and then there's just something wonderful about homemade gifts because they always taste better than something you would get in the store. That's what this episode is all about. I want to give you a chance to get a head start on the gift giving. What's really important about the recipes that I'm going to cover today is that they really do need to be made ahead of time because they need time to mellow and to age. What we're going to be creating here are infused gifts, things that are like a tincture, things where you are flavoring an alcohol and then straining it out to create your gift. Specifically, what I'm going to be sharing with you is how to make a spiced rum, an orange liqueur like Grand Marnier, and a homemade vanilla extract. Now all three of these are super simple to make but they take a little bit of time so you want to be making them now in September, October if you want to be giving them away in December. Then also, on my website in the show notes for this episode I have a bonus PDF for you, it's a downloadable PDF with a recipe for making homemade cranberry liqueur and this can be made with fresh or frozen cranberries and what I love about this particular recipe is that it is so gorgeous to give away at Christmas time because it has this beautiful cranberry red color and it looks beautiful in the bottle. Now, in the PDF I give you two different versions of this recipe. Most liqueurs that are made with fruit require sugar. They have to be sweetened to be a liqueur. It's usually a sweetened alcohol with fruit. Now in cranberry you really have to sweeten it because the cranberries are so bitter and tart but in this particular PDF I have a recipe for regular cranberry liqueur using granulated sugar but also another recipe that does not use granulated sugar. If you're looking for making something sugar-free or if you want to
------------------------------------------ use a different sweetener I do have you hooked up there in this particular PDF. If you want that PDF or you want any of the recipes that I'm going to be sharing in this episode with any of the resources that I mentioned then you can get all of that in the show notes for this episode. All you have to do is go to livinghomegrown.com/67 and I'll have everything there for you. You can download the PDF. You can get all the resource information and the recipes that I'm going to cover today. No need to write everything down as I'm talking, just listen to the process and how we make it and then you can go to the website to get all the information when you're ready to dive in. Let's start with talking about when you do make some of these homemade gifts either the rum or the vanilla extract that part of the charm is in the packaging. When you do go to package these gifts up later in December or November when you start putting these all together you want to always try to put a little bit of extra time into how you package up this particular gift. That is part of the charm. It makes it feel more special and it doesn't take a lot of effort. That means that you could yes, use very fancy bottles and fancy labels but there's a lot of charm in keeping everything really simple using just plain bottles with plain labels that maybe just have a color border. You can tie the bottles with garden twine or with baker's string so that they're very simple and plain or you could use vintage ribbons. You can also use things like paper tags that you get at the stationary store that are normally used for like price tags. Those look really cute tied on to bottles. You can also get out that glue gun and glue things on to your tags and your labels. Things like old buttons or jingle bells or ribbons, things like that and then of course, you can get all kinds of ideas by going to Pinterest and looking up packaging or gift packaging and you can get a ton of ideas there. Now one of the simplest things to do when you're all finished and you're bottling up these different gifts is just to put it into a simple bottle with a simple string and then tucking in maybe a sprig of rosemary or a sprig of your Christmas tree just into the ribbon on the bottle and giving that as your gift. There're some really simple things you can do but when you do these things it bumps up the gift and makes
------------------------------------------ it extra, extra special. I just wanted to mention that so that when you later are going to bottle these up just remember to put in a little extra something to make that gift look extra special and it just everyone always loves it. It always goes over really well. We're going to start with a recipe for how to make spiced rum and here's the thing. There's no reason to go buy a spiced rum when you can make it yourself. It is so, so simple and the minimum amount of time if you want to make this, if you don't get to it right now and you want to make it just before the holidays, the minimum amount of time needed to make the flavored rum is 48 hours. I actually recommend that you make this several weeks ahead or months ahead and you let the rum soak or steep with the spices for about four to five days because you're infusing the rum with the spiced flavors and then you strain it and let it sit on the shelf for at least a month before you actually use it for making mixed drinks or for consuming it. When you do that, the flavor is so much better. Here's how you make a spiced rum. You're just going to take a 750 milliliter bottle of rum like an 80-proof rum, I like to use a dark rum, and that's about equivalent to about three cups. It's about three cups and a quarter, so about three cups or rum and you place that inside a large glass container. It can be a large jar, that you can put a lid on or if you don't have a lid for your jar, you'll be able to cover it with plastic wrap and a rubber band just to keep any insects or bugs out of there. You're going to place that into a large container then you're going to gather up your spices and all you need is one star anise, one whole vanilla bean that is split down the middle, six whole all spice, four whole cloves, one cinnamon stick and then this is optional but I really like to add two whole cardamom pods. Now if you've never used those before, you can get them in the spice section of your grocery store and they have a very unusual flavor and if you don't have them, it's fine. You don t have to add it to the rum but it does add a little extra layer of flavor to this particular recipe so you take all of these spices and you place them inside a plastic baggy and then you're going to take a hammer or something heavy and you're just going to give one good smash to all the spices.
------------------------------------------ You don't want to pulverize the spices, you don't want to make them into a powder but you just want to kind of split open or crush the different spices just a little bit and that's just to help release some of the flavoring, okay, but don't crush them into smithereens because you'll have trouble getting those spices out of your flavored rum if you make them too small. You just want to crack them so give them one good smash with the hammer or with the back of a heavy pot and just to crush everything just a little bit. Then you pour all of that into your bottle of rum or your jar of rum and then at this point you're just going to cover up that jar either with a lid or a with a piece of plastic and a rubber band and you're going to set it in the pantry or in a cupboard or someplace dark. You just don't want it sitting in front of a window. You can even have it on your countertop as long as it's not sitting in direct sunlight and you want to set it aside and let it sit for at least two days and up to five days. If you want to, you can stir it or give it a shake every day, that helps a little bit but it's absolutely not necessary and then at the end of that time you're going to first strain out all the big pieces by just pouring everything through a strainer, into another container and then hold up the rum and look at it in the light and see if there's a lot of particles. If everything is pretty much been strained out, you can be done but if you want to have a much clearer liquid then strain it a second time through a piece of cheese cloth, okay, and that will take out any last little bits or powder of some of the spices from when we crushed it a little bit. At that point you are finished with the steeping. It was really that easy. You're just going to steep the spices and strain them out. You don't need to add any sweetener, there's no sugar that needs to be added so the next step is just to bottle up your rum into smaller bottles that you can give away as gifts. Now how big of a bottle depends upon how much you want to give away. In this particular case we have about three cups of rum that we want to bottle up. I would say one cup bottles or eight-ounce bottles is a great gift. That's really all you need to give. You don't need to give the whole three cups.
------------------------------------------ That means that you can get three gifts from that one 750 milliliter bottle of rum. Now if you want to make multiple gifts then you just multiply this recipe and use more rum and more spices. From the 750 milliliter bottle of rum we get about three bottles to give away. It's like you're giving a sampler size to each friend, all right? That's how you make the spiced rum, pretty simple, pretty easy and the longer it sits on the shelf, the mellower the flavor gets. If you make it now or sometime in the next two months, it will be perfect to give away at Christmas time or any time around December. Now the next recipe is for making orange liqueur or a Grand Marnier. Now the thing is about Grand Marnier is that it is actually made with a bitter orange so the best time of year to actually make a Grand Marnier that's very, very authentic is when the Seville oranges are in season. That isn't until around February and since we're now in September you probably would not have access to a bitter or sour orange that you could make this particular recipe. However, it works really well with regular oranges, you could use like a Navel orange or a Valencia orange and you can get a fantastic orange flavor liqueur that you can use to make your Cadillac margaritas so it works great. Then later if you ever want to make a very authentic tasting Grand Marnier, then make it in February and use a bitter orange like a Seville. The way this is made is with the peel or the zest of about three to four oranges. Now I say three to four because if they're very small oranges then you're going to want to use four and if they're large giant oranges then you can get away with three. Now what I recommend is that you wash the oranges really well before making this recipe and it doesn't matter if they're home grown or if you get them at the grocery store or from the famers' market or locally sourced, when you get the oranges the peel can have a lot of dust and dirt in it and also, if they are from the grocery store, the peel may be waxed. A lot of the oranges in the stores are waxed and we want to get that wax off so that we can get the oils of the oranges to release. All you need to do is wash the oranges with warm water, not hot, just warm water. You don't need any soap and if you have a
------------------------------------------ vegetable scrubby, one of those little scrubbers for cleaning your vegetables then use that on the orange as well and just give it a rinse under warm water with a little scrubber. If you don t have a scrubber you could just use a sponge or the scrubby side of a sponge and just wash the outside of the peel to make sure that you don't have any wax on that orange peel. Even if it's a homegrown orange I still do this just to make sure it's really clean. Okay. Now the best way to get the peel off of the orange so that you're just getting the orange part, the zest, is to use a potato peeler. It works really, really well and you take that potato peeler and you peel off the orange part of the orange and if you're using a standard Navel or Valencia orange, it's okay if you get a little bit of the pith, the white part of the orange. It's okay if you get a little bit of that in there because that is actually bitter and it will give you a little bit more authentic flavor. You don't want to use a lot or it gets so bitter that it needs to be sweetened more but if you are just getting a little bit in there, it's totally fine. After you have peeled all of your oranges, your three or four oranges, then I roughly chop up the peel. You don't have to be pretty about it. It doesn't have to be perfect little squares, just give it a rough chopping so that more of the orange peel is exposed and you place that inside a clean glass jar and then you're going to add one half cup of granulated sugar. Now the sugar is there to help draw out the oils that are in that peels so it's an important step. I place the sugar on top of the peel, give it a good stir and then set it on the countertop for about 24 hours before I do anything else. The next day, then you're going to pour about two cups of brandy over the orange peels. Now, it doesn't have to be an expensive brandy, you can use an inexpensive brand and you pour that over the orange peels and just make sure that you've added enough that the orange peel is either completely covered or it's floating. You don't want any of it to be sticking way above the alcohol. Give it a good stir to make sure that anything that is just touching above the alcohol, it has been covered in alcohol and that will prevent any problems so give it a good stir and then set it aside in the cupboard or out of direct sunlight for at least one to two months.
------------------------------------------ That s right, I said months. That is where the oils of the peel will slowly be infused into the alcohol and that's why you want to make this now in September if you want to give it away in December. You're going to set this aside for at least a month up to two months and every once in a while give it a shake or give it a stir just to make sure that those peels are moving around and to keep flavoring the alcohol and then you're going to strain out the peel and you can go ahead and bottle up that brandy. The way I usually do the straining is I first pour it through just a regular sieve or strainer that I have in my kitchen and I pour it into another container and then I strain it a second time through a piece of cheese cloth or if you want a crystal clear liqueur you can strain it through a clean tea towel. Once it is all strained and if you have all the particles out, all the peel, then you can bottle it up in clean glass bottles. Again, you are giving about one cup of orange liqueur to each person so from this particular recipe with the two cups of brandy you end up with two gifts. Now if you want to make much more then you just double or triple the recipe so you would add more oranges and more brandy, okay? It's pretty simple, you can double, triple, quadruple the recipes depending upon how many you want to make. One cup of orange liqueur is plenty and it's a really wonderful gift and it has a fantastic flavor and it didn't take very much effort on your part. It's mostly a matter of waiting and having patience and waiting for those oils to be extracted into the alcohol. Okay, so that's your orange liqueur. We've done a spiced rum and we've done an orange liqueur so let's move away from the drinking alcohol and go into using alcohol to make an extract. This is how you make a homemade vanilla extract. What is really cool about this is it is super easy to make and it creates the most lovely gift that is wonderful for anyone on your list who likes to do cooking and it gets better with age. If you make it now it will be fantastic in December but it will be even better six months from now and a year from now. It mellows and gets much better with age. If you give it as a gift and that person sits it on their shelf and doesn't use it for several months it's fine. It will just get better and
------------------------------------------ better. What you're making here is just a tincture of vodka with whole vanilla beans and it takes about four whole vanilla beans per cup to get a really strong deep vanilla flavor. Now the problem is that vanilla beans can be super expensive but to make this recipe you can use lower grade vanilla beans. You don't have to use really high quality vanilla beans and you can buy those vanilla beans in bulk and you can use a very inexpensive vodka. You can certainly use a more expensive vodka and you get a more refined flavor but for this, it is perfectly okay if you want to use an inexpensive vodka and an inexpensive vanilla bean. You still get a lovely, lovely gift. This recipe makes about one cup of vanilla extract and that's about eight ounces. If you're going to be giving these away as gifts then I recommend giving them away in either one-ounce bottles or two-ounce bottles. That means that you would get anywhere from four to eight gifts from one cup of vanilla extract. You're giving away a little tiny homemade bottle of extract but it is absolutely heaven in a bottle and I think your friends would very much appreciate it. They won't feel cheated at all because it's a very lovely, lovely gift. Now, if you ever want to just make this for yourself one way to make vanilla extract is the way I make it is that I keep a bottle soaking all the time and as I do different recipes when I have little bits of vanilla leftover, little bits of vanilla bean leftover, I just drop that into my large bottle of vanilla extract. I'm always adding more vanilla and I'm always topping it off with more vodka. I always have a bottle of homemade vanilla extract sitting on the shelf steeping away. You can always do that for yourself throughout the year but for gift giving if you want to make this then you need to make it now because it takes about two to three months to really get its perfect flavoring in order to give it away. You should buy the vanilla now and the alcohol and starts steeping right now in September and then you'll have wonderful vanilla extract in December. For that you definitely want to always have at least four beans, four vanilla beans per cup of alcohol and that will give you a nice flavoring. I should say this is not the time
------------------------------------------ to try and skimp like you don't want to just use one vanilla bean for a cup of alcohol. You could certainly do that if you want to steep it for a year but if you want to give this as a gift a minimum of four beans per cup is what you really need in order to get a strong enough flavor in just a few months. All right. Let's do the math on this. If you're already thinking well, this is going to be one heck of an expensive gift. Let's do the math so that you can have an idea of what this particular gift would cost you. Now if you've ever bought a vanilla bean in the grocery store you know that one vanilla bean can cost $8 or more depending upon the quality of the vanilla bean. However, you can buy lower grade vanilla beans in bulk and that's what I would recommend doing here. I have a source in the show notes for bulk vanilla beans where you can get about four to six vanilla beans for $17. Also, you can use an inexpensive vodka. You don't have to use the most expensive vodka and that will save you cost as well. Let's say you make a one cup of vanilla extract, that's eight ounces. When you do the math on all of your ingredients it will cost you about $20 minimum to make that one cup of vanilla extract. However, you can bottle that one cup which is eight ounces into eight individual gifts. You can get eight gifts from one cup. If you were to give two ounce gifts well then, you would get four gifts from that one cup of vanilla extract. Now, that doesn't include the cost of the bottle that you're going to be giving your vanilla extract to weigh in. You have to add that in as well. If you were to pay about a dollar to $2 per bottle then you're finished gift that you'd be giving away when you make vanilla extract could be anywhere from $3 and 50 cents per gift up to about $7 per gift depending upon the size of the bottle and the cost of the bottle that you use. That gives you an idea of what your cost would be for this and that's why I say that the vanilla extract is a very special, special gift that you would give away to someone who loves to cook. I think they would really appreciate it. Now, for this particular recipe I do use vodka. I know a lot of people make vanilla extract and they use a grain alcohol. I don't particularly care for using the grain alcohol for this. Because the
------------------------------------------ vanilla itself is such a delicate flavor I really prefer to use vodka so that the vanilla flavor can really shine through. If you have a particular vodka that you like to drink well then, you will make if it's a very flavorful, nice, delicate vodka and you drink it then it would make a wonderful vanilla extract. You could get away with using something very inexpensive that maybe has a much harsher flavor but it just won't be as delicate when you're finished. All right. Now, the way you make this is so, so easy. You take your vanilla beans. You're going to use four beans per cup of vodka and you split the vanilla beans down the center so that all of the vanilla, actual vanilla seeds that are inside where all the wonderful flavor is, it's all exposed. You take each vanilla bean and you very carefully with a very sharp knife split it down the center and then place those vanilla beans either in a glass container, a glass jar or you can even use a tall skinny glass bottle. If you want to you can drop the beans in and they'll be standing upright, they'll be standing vertical and then you pour your vodka in over the beans. For every four beans you add one cup of vodka. Just make sure that you add enough vodka to cover the beans. If they're standing upright vertical you may have to do two cups of vodka and use eight beans so that you have enough vodka to submerge that vanilla bean. Now, if I'm only making a one cup batch of this which is one cup of vodka then I would put it in a jar where the vanilla beans are lying flat. You could also chop up the vanilla beans into pieces if you only have one cup of vodka that you're using so that all the pieces are covered in alcohol. That's the most important part. You place these inside your glass jar or glass container and you cover it. You either put a lid on it or a plastic baggy with a rubber band to keep out any little critters and you set it in a dark place again and you let it soak for at least a month. If you can let it soak for two months, eight weeks in the alcohol, the longer it soaks the stronger it is infused with the vanilla flavor. When you're ready to bottle this up as gifts then you strain out the vanilla and you bottle that extract into small tiny bottles that have a screw top lid like a traditional vanilla extract bottle or you could use a bottle with a little cork top so it looks country and homey. You can do that if you want.
------------------------------------------ I have sources in the show notes of this episode for different sources for where you can get all the different size bottles and that will be in the show notes, which is livinghomegrown.com/67. I have sources for you for all of that stuff. Now the way I strain it is I just strain the extract through a regular strainer and I do not try to take out any little tiny seeds that are in there because the seeds will continue to add flavor and they would be fine in any recipe. I don't try to make this crystal clear because it actually turns out very dark and black. You can't even see the seeds that might be sitting or floating around inside the extract. Also, I like to place a little tiny piece of vanilla bean inside each bottle so it will continue to flavor after you give it away. If you didn't chop up your vanilla then take one of those vanilla beans and chop it into one-inch pieces and place one little piece inside each bottle that you're giving away. That's it. That's all you have to do. You will have this incredibly flavored vodka that is essentially a vanilla extract that you can use in your cooking and you can get from one-ounce bottle, you can get several recipes that you could use it for because you're only going to be using about a teaspoon or a half teaspoon at a time. You use it just like you would a standard vanilla extract. That's all there is to it for all three of those recipes. They are very simple tinctures that you are making where you are steeping flavoring in alcohol, extracting that flavor and then using the alcohol in some way. You can make the spiced rum and use it for mixed drinks or drink it straight. The orange liqueur, you can make which is the peel of a citrus and it's fantastic or you can make this homemade vanilla extract and give that away as gifts. Remember that also in the show notes I have a bonus PDF download for you on how to make homemade cranberry liqueur and that is just a mixture of either fresh or frozen cranberries that are chopped up and steeped inside an alcohol and you can add other flavorings to that and you can make it either sweetened with granulated sugar with a syrup or you can make it unsweetened or even using an alternative sweetener and it's a fantastic recipe as well. What I really love about the cranberry liqueur is the color. It's
------------------------------------------ a great one to give at the holiday time. Remember everything that I talked about in this episode from the recipes to the resources for bottles and the PDF download are all available in the show notes for this episode. Just go to livinghomegrown.com/67 and everything will be there for you. If you're able to try one or two of these recipes and start them sometime this month of September you will be so in business when we get to December. You will already have some gifts on the shelf to giveaway at holiday time. I hope that helps you out. All right. Thanks so much for joining me today. I know you guys are super busy and I just appreciate that you took the time out of your busy day to listen to this podcast. In the meantime, just try to live a little bit more local, seasonal and homegrown. Take care. Announcer: That's all for this episode of the Living Homegrown Podcast. Visit livinghomegrown.com to download Theresa's free canning resource guide and find more tips on how to live farm fresh without the farm. Be sure to join Theresa Loe next time on the Living Homegrown Podcast.