Homemade plum vinegar

Dear Family & Friends

When our fruit harvest comes...it's not time to complain. It's a blessing! It's free! It's clean healthy food that we all need. But I must prepare to work hard because when they come, they come in torrent! With our present plum harvest, we've been eating them fresh, dehydrated them as dried fruit health snacks.  I've also made a few bottles of 'umeboshi' - a Japanese salted pickled plums - using unripen plums - I will try to write about how I do this - next time.

Processing our plum harvest

For this time, I made some plum vinegar. Vinegar is an amazing product...good for health and for organic safe general cleaning product to use in the house. As always, anything we can make ourselves at home is always superior than what's available in shops. The shop bought vinegar is good to use as cleaning product, but homemade fruit vinegar is best for our health food consumption:)

and other fruits that we gather from the garden.

Here's a simple method of how to make fruit vinegar:

Deseed the plums or roughly chop the fruit you have on hand. (you can use any other fruits too like apple, banana, pineapple etc) and put them all in a  glass jar. For 2 cups of fruits, add 4 cups of water and a teaspoon of sugar to it. Cover it to prevent bugs and dust from getting in and leave it out of direct sunlight to ferment quietly for 2 months. After that time...strain the liquid and you now have healthy vinegar to add to the dishes you make:)

In the process of fermentation, if you see scum forming, don't worry... it is just the cellulose formed by the acetic acid bacteria present in nature and all unpasturized fermented food. It happens when airborne wild yeast starts feeding on the sugar present in the fruit. Yes, there's always bacteria present in the air that we breath...just part of our life whether we want it or not:)

homemade food is the best....but it requires time and effort

Now, there's nothing difficult in making homemade healthy food - is there? Making homemade vinegar is definitely one of them.  I enjoy giving my family the best I could...it always brings joy. Hope you enjoy your family too - with caring and sharing:)

Yours