a year later

Last year, we tried making umeshu for the first time.

If you remember, when we first put the ume in the bottle with the alcohol, it overflowed, talk about drama!

I removed some of the alcohol from the bottles and put it back into the shochu bottle.

When I went to Hawaii last year, I labelled the leftover shochu bottle so that "someone" wouldn't drink it while I was away...ha!

Fast forward: Wednesday made one year.

I went to the dentist on Wednesday, so I worked on the umeshu yesterday.

The jars from my favorite (for now) peanut butter are the perfect size for "one cup" umeshu.

With the ume, I separated the flesh from the seeds

I froze the flesh and will use them in the various ways, V, introduced me to through this blog post (thanks V!)

The seeds, I froze most, but used 10-12 and cooked it with rice.

The alcohol from the ume really made the rice smell like alcohol so next time I would cut back the amount of ume seeds, and would add dashi and other seasonings to make it more like takikomi gohan.

at 9:30 in the morning, I also "quality controlled" with the tablespoon-ish amount of umeshu that came out when I separated the fruit from the seeds.

I added some carbonated water and it tasted pretty good to me...I hope it was 17:00 somewhere..

We'll be having some of this with our pupus tonight and I plan to send a couple of the one cups to BIL & SIL.

Backstory : It was SIL who gave me the idea to try making umeshu in the first place when we were in Kyoto for MIL's memorial service last March...Hikone grandma used to make the best umeshu.

Hope you all are doing well.

Have a safe weekend.