Queen of the Jammed

Nanna would be so proud of me. I'm a master Jam Maker!

Josh hates it and calls it poo jam, but I'm pretty sure he's just jealous. 

Yesterday, I made a Jaboticaba Jelly and a Jaboticaba and Port Jam from our copious amounts of Jaboticaba fruit. The jelly has a nice flavour, but the texture isn't quite right. The Jaboticaba and Port jam, however, is DIVINE!

On the shelf at the moment, I've got:

Apple and Lemon Myrtle Jelly (Apples from Stanthorpe, 6 hours away and Lemon Myrtle from our bush tucker garden)

Pineapple and Jackfruit Jam (Pineapples from the local fruit stand and our own Jackfruit)

Dragonfruit Jam (Dragonfruit from our next door neighbour)

Amla Jam (Our own Amla, or Indian Gooseberry)

Passionfruit Jam (Passionfruit from Jeff's friend)

Jaboticaba Jelly (Our own Jaboticaba)

Jaboticaba and Port Jam (Our own Jaboticaba and our own Jaboticaba Port!)

Mandarin and Kumquat Marmalade (Mandarins from Gayndah, an hour away, and our own Kumquats)

It's pretty cool being able to create things from local (and quite often our very own grown!) produce. 

We have a few different events coming up soon too. This Friday, Josh and I are heading to Hervey Bay to host an AA meeting... It's an over 50's social group called 'Alcohol Appreciators' and they get together once a month to sample some wines. We've been invited along to present our wines and liqueurs - and hopefully sell a bucket load!

Then next Saturday we're attending the Relish Food and Wine Festival in Maryborough. It's focussed around the beautiful local produce of the area and should be a lot of fun. Originally we decided to give it a miss, as we weren't sure if we'd have enough produce to attend. Then the guys at the Fraser Coast tourism office twisted our arm...so we're going. Not only that, we've also been asked to present a thirty minute 'foodie presentation' to the festival go-ers! We've teamed up with a local chef and we're going to collaborate on the presentation. It'll be a pretty nerve-wracking experience, but awesome exposure! (Lets hope we sound like we know what we're talking about!!)

After that, we've got a seniors group coming to visit for an orchard tour and wine tastings. Then the Childers Festival at the end of July. 

Aside from that, we've had a few 'issues' with the local council. It seems like we've turned a bit of a corner with that though, and that's as close to a win that we're going to get. The cellar door is quietly ticking over. Weekends have picked up a little, however there are still quiet days during the week. We still need a way to convince the booze-lovin', big-spendin' caravanners to call in and spend up.

Aaaaand...I think that's it!

It's pickin' season!

Woohoo! It's very nearly time to start picking the Jaboticaba fruit!

A jaboticaba is a Brazillian tree grape, which we use to make our Tawny's, fortified wine, liqueurs...and soon to be table wine (all going well!)

We have about 400 trees on our property and some are starting to fruit. I haven't googled it, but I'm pretty sure we would have one of the largest plantations of Jaboticaba in Australia. It's relatively unknown, but SO DELICIOUS! The only problem with it, is that once it's ripe, it doesn't last very long and starts to ferment in its own sugars.

Great for winemaking (yay!) but pretty crap as a commercial crop.

So, it looks like we have a very busy few months ahead of us!

One of our Jaboticaba trees. When the fruit is dark purple, plump and shiny - it's go time!

Sad days

I'm going to keep this short and sweet.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a crazy cat lady. Princess Jasmine was the best little buddy a girl could ask for. She provided me with endless entertainment in the thirteen/fourteen years we shared together.

Nearly two weeks ago she spent the day hanging out with us, enjoying the Queensland sunshine as usual. That evening she had her dinner and then went out for one last adventure.

We're not exactly sure what happened to her, we've searched high and low and there is no sign of her. In one way I guess its good that we didn't find anything...but it still doesn't feel great having absolutely no idea what happened to her.

All I can do is take comfort in the fact that we were best friends and got to have her here for a few weeks of love and snuggles. She got to chase toads, roll in the red dirt, snuggle up to her beloved Josh and spend hours lazing in the sun watching the birds play in the fig trees.

Thanks for being awesome, Jazzy, despite how annoying you were at 5am meowing to be let outside. xxx

Mums the word

Holy smokes. Mother's Day. I'm glad it's only once a year!

Yesterday, we had our first 'event' - Mother's Day. We didn't do a lot of advertising for it, but as it turns out, we didn't need to. We had a grand total of 32 people booked in for lunch, with the first table arriving at 11, and the last at 1:30.

'How nice!' I thought, 'they've spread themselves out for us!'.

I was wrong. The first table arrived late and the last table arrived early - so in the end it was just a big crush of people at midday!

It was really, really good though!

We'd done a lot of prep the night before/the morning of, so it wasn't a huge panic putting together the lunch platters for our guests. Josh was loving being the 'front of house' greeting people and doing the wine tastings, and our special guest (Josh's mum) was our head waitress.

Although we had 32 booked in, we ended up serving food to about 50 people. Later in the day, we had a few more 'drop ins' who ended up sharing a few platters.

And along with all of that, we still had some regular cellar door guests, who were enjoying their Mother's Day visiting the wineries in the area!

It certainly was a busy day!!

And best of all, we made a heap of $$! (Double our busiest day since we opened!)