Yesterday, Hurricane Bill was downgraded to Tropical Storm Bill as it raged straight north into Texas. We were expecting 6+ inches of rain and dreading every bit of it. We actually lucked out because the main body of the storm passed just to the west of us, and we were stuck in the armpit between it and the following tail as it lifted north. We caught the tail end of that tail around 9 PM and it just poured for awhile.
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| 8:51 AM |
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| Evening! |
My mint beds are totally out of control, and I don't want to lose ANY of the minty goodness I've grown, so I took a big harvest of the chocolate mint. I filled all nine trays of the Excalibur dehydrator and still had a lot left over, so I made a mint simple syrup and canned it to put it in iced or hot tea all year long. I might use it as part of a liquid substitute in some baking recipes as well.
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| LOTS of mint. (You can see I've already started filling trays in the background.) |
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| NINE trays... becomes one quart of dried mint leaves. |
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| Boiling down the sugar, water and mint. I had about 4 quarts of water and added about 9 cups of sugar. |
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Final result... 8 pints. My small water bath canner only holds 7 pints, so the open one went into the fridge when it had cooled a bit.
Today, I'm going to run out very soon and plant some of the stems from yesterday's harvest into the NE side of the house to get it started there. I love Chocolate mint. When I'm done with that, I'm going to go harvest an equally large amount of the peppermint!
Thanks for reading!
Dawna |
MMMmmmmminty goodness! Great job! I never thought about making mint syrup.
ReplyDeleteI think it has a little bit of a bitter after taste, kind of like tannins in tea. When I do the peppermint, I think I'll try to follow the Ball recipe for mint jelly and simply omit the pectin.
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