Making Peach Vinegar

After canning a batch of peaches recently I was reluctant to throw away the scraps. They smelled good and there was a fair amount of scrap. What to do with bruised peach flesh and skins? Hmm... How about peach vinegar? Wild yeast fermentation and conversion of the resulting peach liquor by further bacterial activity into vinegar. Pretty nifty trick. It's simple, takes mostly patience and provides another way to not let something go to waste.

There are many many sources online about fermenting and making vinegar. I'll include a bare minimum here and a few ideas for what to do with your vinegar. It should also be noted that while I used peaches, most any fruit will work. Most sources say citrus vinegars don't do as well and don't taste so great but that is admittedly hear say on my part. Peach, berry and other stone fruit vinegar is sometimes considered a drinking vinegar rather than something you might use for preservation. It has already graced our table in a nice peach vinaigrette and been made into a nice fizzy beverage. That alone would be enough to make a batch but I'm sure there are other uses ahead. Knowing that commercial vinegar is distilled to a standard 5% acetic acid, I'm left wondering what my recent batch is. That would certainly help if I intend to use it to make pickles or some other acid dependent thing. At least one source says this is a bad idea and that litmus paper cannot accurately measure the acidity of home brew vinegar. Not really worth getting sick over.

The basic method is nothing more than letting the fruit scraps ferment in sugar water, straining out the fruit and letting the resulting liquid acidify.

Sugar water

1/4 sugar dissolved in 1 quart of water

Make enough to cover the fruit in about a 3 or 4 to one ratio.

Put it into a glass or stoneware container, not metal. Cover the top with cloth or mesh to keep fruit flies out and let it sit for a week or so, stirring daily to prevent surface mold. Easy.

You will notice when it smells fermented. At this point strain out the fruit scraps and pour the whole thing back into the container you had it in and let it sit covered for a minimum of about two weeks but up to several months if you like. A white "scum" will form on top of the vinegar. This is the mother and should not be removed. Acetobactor is an aerobic bacteria and needs oxygen to do its job. Hence the floating mass on the surface of your liquid. Once your vinegar is at a point where you like it, you can bottle it or can it using plastic or old style glass lids. Vinegar will corrode metal lids and containers over time. Stick to glass, ceramic or plastic.

To make your peach vinegar beverage:

Add two or three tablespoons of peach(or other) vinegar to a pint glass, add a teaspoon(more or less) of your preferred sweetener and top off with ice and soda water.

For a dead simple salad dressing:

Splash enough vinegar over your salad to leave it wet, drizzle on the olive oil of your choice and top with sea salt and fresh cracked black pepper. Almost too simple to call it dressing but it makes for a very nice salad.

You can read more about vinegar at Bragg and if you want to speed up your vinegar making process as well as insure positive results, you could add a couple tablespoons of Bragg's vinegar to your batch after the fruit has fermented. This wasn't necessary with mine and I had no trouble with the three week process but it's out there if you want it.

BSA 574 Yucca Pack

For me the BSA 574 Yucca pack will always be "the" pack. A timeless classic that has carried gear unimaginable miles on countless treks through urban and wilderness environments alike. It's a simple design with only two pockets, one internal and a smaller external is for the most part adequate. I have two vintage Yucca packs, an early one for the 1930's and a later model made in the 1960's that are of nearly the same design and both still in usable condition. Though not exclusively, I've carried canvas packs and bags most of my life, the Yucca being one of the first I remember using for Scouts as well as non-scouting adventures.

Diamond Brand built the first Boy Scout Yucca packs way back in 1931 and they remained in use for decades, both durable and versatile, especially with the addition of an external frame. Many scouts built frames themselves using everything from metal tubing to scrap wood and occasionally even saplings or tree branches. When packed lightly the Yucca is more than adequate for as much as a week on the trail depending on how much food you pack in, with a frame they are good for most any length expedition if you accept them as they are and don't expect them to perform in the same ways a modern rig built from man made materials will. If you follow the same simple rules scouts of generations past did, a Yucca pack will serve you well and outlast many of their modern counterparts. Personal experience with canvas packs and sea bags leaves me noting that I have used the same canvas duffels for years while theoretically better bags have succumbed to the scrap heap due to everything from broken zippers to torn cloth that wouldn't take a patch. Unless canvas molds and rots, it can be repaired. The Yucca in particular is pretty accepting of most repairs from replacing grommets to sewing torn fabric and seems to riveting on new leather parts. 

Canvas isn't hard to care for but it does have a few special needs. It isn't waterproof though it will shed water for a bit and will do a pretty decent job in the rain if you Scotch Guard it. I have also used either a rain poncho big enough to cover my pack or covered it with a black lawn and leaf bag. Either method works fairly well. All in all, water is not a friend of canvas. So, rule 1 is keep it dry. That means let it hang and air out at night, don't set it on the ground and if it gets rained on, hang it up and let it dry. There is usually a handy tree branch to hang things on. If not you can use a tent pole or run a line and hang it from that. 

This leads to rule 2, keep it clean. repeating the mention above, don't set your canvas pack on the ground. It'll get dirty. Dirt can get in between fibers act as an abrasive and cut them leading to holes. Dirt also often contains components other than "soil", food and other sticky things often attract bugs and other animals that will damage the canvas. So, avoid that as well and if your bag gets dirty, wash it and hang it up to dry. It's canvas after all, not hard to clean. I've washed Yuccas by hand in the past and more than once successfully in a machine using a mesh delicates bag followed by line drying the pack. Just do your best to look after a Yucca and know they are not hard to clean if they do get dirty. 

In spite of these rules, I have also seen a heck of a lot of dirty beat up packs that have gotten rain soaked, spent time on the the ground and been generally abused but keep on going just fine and still provide years of service before being retired to end up as "art" on a wall or hall tree.  

As of this writing I was finding serviceable examples, some with frames, on eBay for as little as $12 and $15 plus shipping. I have seen a few of the 1307(D), 573 haversacks as well but the 574 is  more common by far. 

Small Batch Canning

Peaches!

When I was growing up in the Midwest we had very stereotypical canning adventures each harvest season.Tomatoes, pickles, peaches, apples in several forms, jams, jellies, even cherry pie filling. It was great and most of it came from our family orchards and gardens or from some place nearby. Now that I'm out in San Francisco both the getting/growing and the amount of canning is a bit different. We're also not trying to feed eight or ten people until the next harvest. One of the things I like about my new canning adventures is opportunistically putting up small batches, even just a jar or two of preserves from the last chance sale bins at the market. For one it takes a lot of pressure off of production and since it's just a small amount, it's safer to try something random or new. This year it's been a lot of peaches and wild berry preserves and since we just finished the last jar of okra pickles, we'll be making more of those soon as well.

Canners aren't always terribly expensive, some are as little as $20, $5 for the occasional garage sale find. Truth be known, you don't even need a canner for the small jobs, it's really just a deep stock pot after all. As long as the water covers the jars you're good to go for fruits, preserves and other acidic foods. A starter pack of jars is often less than ten bucks or again, available at garage sales and thrift shops for next to nothing and once you have some you can reuse them indefinitely with new lids. With everything on hand an opportunistic jar or two is well worth the effort.

So, keep your eyes open for fruit on the trail, your neighbors yard and of course local farm markets. If you barter well you might even trade fruit for canning, provided you can get yourself to part with some of your stores. In addition to the fun, having the best things on hand when you need them and being able to take pride in making things yourself, in this day and age of over processed everything, you control the production. You know exactly what went into your jars and you can feel good about making what ends up being both a frugal and healthy choice. Between, health, frugality, creativity and entertainment value, canning is an art that shouldn't be lost for any number of reasons all of which are good on their own and undeniable in combination.

Bushcraft

The Northern Midwest of my youth was often like living in a time capsule or living diorama of life a century out of date. Growing up under the care and tutelage of great grandparents born in the late 1800's no doubt added to the time warped towns, woods and country roads I was free to roam. Beyond things still being taught in Scouts and summer camps, volumes of seemingly ancient guidebooks and Victorian wisdom still in active memory was the tail end of an age where it was common to allow children to learn how to use tools safely by way of self injury. A world less fettered and free to act as both home and hands on learning lab. It really was great and while some of those skills are no longer terribly PC, they remain useful.

Even if you weren't blessed with that sort of environment there are numerous books like Wildwood Wisdom, first published in 1945, still on shelves and websites. One of my favorite books is a 1967 edition Scouting Fieldbook For Boys and Men that first served my uncle through his scouting years and then mine. My elders didn't call it "survival" by the way. It was simply, "camping". If you were merely surviving you were clearly doing several somethings wrong and shouldn't be out in the woods in the first place. I suppose that's what inspired me to write this post, the idea that there are many kinds of camping and not all of them rely on much gear or even any high tech gear and that doesn't have to mean you are "roughing it". In some ways, roughing it is a state of mind. So, a minor re-framing of "the great outdoors" and the addition of a handful of basic skills changes the experience of being out there quite a bit.

I like "glamping" as much as the next person and having a big tent you can stand up in, a propane grill and cooler full of food is great when you aren't packing it in but the bulk of my camping has been with far less, often little more than an army blanket and a pocket knife. The big secret isn't that someone handed me a pocket knife at age five and said, "Try not to cut yourself." (I still have a scar on my thumb from that day), It was probably just being outside and getting used to it, out there, somewhere beyond the power outlets, pavement and climate control, just hanging out. Beyond a pocket knife and blanket, the radical improvements in comfort offered by an old sailboat mainsail, a coffee can and a metal spoon are exponential. A wine bottle makes a good water bottle once it's viniferous contents are gone. It can be amazing how far simple things go when you embrace how little humans "owned" in the past, how little we actually need and acquire a handful of skills.

I'm revisiting a book I haven't read in years but, like countless readers before me, have found lasting value within its pages. To paraphrase Thoreau, I support the idea that a [person] should be able to walk into the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on their back and feel like they left something behind. That idea holds meaning for me both in terms of being open to the idea that our natural surroundings are enough as well as the idea that we should be able to look after ourselves beyond mere survival. In essence, short of overcoming an injury, being lost in the wilderness can, and should, actually be fun.

Of literary agents, editors and ISBN's

One of the unfortunate results of last years accident, related to getting my head scrambled, was having my

I don't have a compelling ISBN photo.*

nearly finished novel derailed. However, the novel isn't a dead project! I needed help to get rolling on it again, new tools and methods(for me) and assistance from a literary agent and editor, both of whom I am lucky enough to have access to.

Over a recent weekend, I spent time with both, agent and editor, made a loose plan and started the re-write of the first chunk of the book. Among other things we talked about the digital publishing revolution, something I have been a part of as an editor and publisher and now plan to join as an author. While the European market still views self publishing as circumspect, the practice is enjoying wider acceptance in the States. We talked a lot about the virtues of getting a traditional publisher vs going it alone and for my first literary work I think I'm just going to put it out there myself. You don't even need an ISBN to sell on Amazon anymore. That's pretty cool of them to accommodate authors in that way by creating the ASIN or Amazon Standard Identification Number. (Even if Jimmy Wales is not a fan.) ISBN numbers cost and if you are only buying one they cost as much as $125 when you get them direct from Bowker, the company that mysteriously has control of the ISBN market. If you buy 10 ISBN's the price drops to $25 each. That's pretty real savings if you can swing the cash. So, essentially if publishing holding you back, like it may have even five or ten years ago, and you were afraid of submitting to publisher after publisher facing the black box of getting a mythical book deal, fear not, for times have indeed changed.

Incidentally, once you buy even one ISBN number you are technically a publisher. There is a heck of a lot more involved in publishing than assigning a number but if you ever considered getting into the publishing world, writing a few novella's or something similar, there's no time like now. You might even consider forming a little writers collective with a group of friend's. I've been thinking about it recently as I meet more and more photographers who want to make books. Printing a physical book is still a tough thing to even contemplate but more digital books are sold world wide now than print and the numbers have yet to plateau. Don't get me wrong, they will, but this is as good a chance to find your pet genre and dive in on the ground floor as you're likely going to get.

The key thing to remember in all of this though, if you wrote your book, or even your short story, published or not, you have already achieved something. The success is in the act, not the external validation.

*Me in a tree stump near Humboldt. 

Evolv Royale lace up

I am so not shoe obsessed! ...well maybe a little but in the world of adventure sports, shoes can be a make or break item, certainly essential for some activities, climbing being one of those. So, I'm trying a pair of Evolv Royale lace ups. It's another trad shoe with a suede upper similar to the 5-10 Coyote I've come to know and love. (Still in good shape by the way!)

The Royale is comfortable for wide feet and has a slightly more broad sole that works well for smearing but remains stiff enough for edging. The toe isn't terribly pointy but presents enough to get the job done. Good for both gym climbing and outdoor stuff where you are going to be on route for a while. The laces are nice on leather shoes as the uppers can stretch with heat and moisture and be easily pulled tighter on the go. This wouldn't be an issue with synthetic material shoes but I like my shoes to break in at least a little and I feel like the suede breathes better. Just my opinion but I'm sure I'm not alone in it.

So far it's a nice pair of shoes. Thinking it may be time to dedicate a pair foe gym climbing and other for outdoor. Once I put some more time in with them I'll post again. Either way they are affordable and good looking if you like trad shoes.

Climbing at Ocean Beach

There is a lot of climbing in San Francisco, even in the city proper. Some spots are well known and others you'll almost always have to yourself. A little frequented place for climbing is Ocean beach below the Cliff House. It's best to go at low tide and be discrete but you can get in some great bouldering and free solo routes that probably should be top roped or done with a lead climber placing protection. It's certainly high enough to get hurt and be completely out of safe bouldering range.

You can also find a few small caves at low tide if you look carefully. They are mostly tiny things or simply big piles of breakdown. I've never found any sand caves in this area but I would caution anyone who may to stay out of them, as in completely avoid them, sand caves just aren't safe.

It was definitely a good place to test a Go Pro 3 the other day. I'd say it's probably money well spent to get the remote but most smart phones will do the job as well, if only within wifi range of the phone. For sure a good way to document antics and adventures, especially when  you venture out alone, something I do often. Looking forward to giving it a go sailing and on the long board as well as more climbing and bicycle trips.