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Friday, February 26, 2010

Homemade

around the Quinnery, things were usually homemade. My Dad instigated homemade rootbeer...a mystery product that we bottled with our amazing capping machine. Often when we would come home from school, we would hear a popping sound in the basement and know that our rootbeer was exploding and we had better go drink a few bottles.
Also homemade was the ice cream we would eat in the summer on the back porch..usually made of peaches we had picked outselves or even bananas. If you have never tasted homemade ice cream...you are living a deprived life. Later when my brother Colin came to live with me in San Francisco, he used to invent flavors that were out of this world. We would make a batch each week and he would be the designated designer of flavor....chocolate peanut butter chip, juicyfruit vanilla...always something new.
And then there was the wine....the first year it was grapes from Granny's arbor..concord grapes...delicious. The next year it was elderberry and every kid in the neighborhood sported pink legs to the knees after stomping berries in a porcelain vat. The pink lasted a few days if I recall right. The next year Dad sent us all out to pick dandelions and much to our surprise he was able to make wine out of that too...it was bitter and not one I am fond of to this day.
I remember going down to the basement and hitting the kegs a little too hard. I must have been all of 8 or 9 yrs old...and I could not figure out why I could not get up the basement steps. My mother found me sitting there on the basement steps in the dark much, much later and asked what was up. I told her there was something wrong with my legs...they just didn't work right. She was appalled to find that I was drunk as a skunk on Dad's wine.
He was known to invite neighbors in for a sample and they had the very same leg problem that I did as they tried to leave our basement!