I Re-blogged This (the First Time) In 2014. Today, I Tried Half A Dozen Times To Re-blog It, And It

Mulled Wine Recipe

All right, folks, ‘tis the season: winter.

And you need a hot beverage, and you need alcohol, and you stupidly think, I heard of mulled wine once, and search for a recipe, and find only pages of strange ingredients and paragraphs of far too much information on people’s lives. Every year I lose my recipe, and every year I regret it, poring fruitlessly and sadly sober over ingredients like star anise, cranberries, and demerara sugar.

So, to save you my grief, here is my very basic recipe, which my family–who does not drink the other 11 months of the year–finds so irresistible that they get tipsy and wonder why. (This is the recipe for one bottle, but I always make at least two.)

1 bottle red wine (cheap red wine, red blend or merlot, etc.)

½ cup - ¾ cup white sugar (you can add to taste)

¾ cup orange juice (you might want at least 1 actual orange, here’s why:)

10 whole cloves

(life is much easier if you peel the orange so that you get just the outer layer with as little rind as possible, then stab these little guys through, so you don’t have to go fishing them out later on, but feel free to fish away)

2 cinnamon sticks

Mix it all together and simmer it on low heat (don’t boil it, the alcohol boils off) until the sugar blends in. I tend to do it for 30 minutes or so, or just leave it on low and turn down to keep warm in a slow cooker.

¼ cup orange liqueur or brandy – I add this last, to make it as alcoholic as possible, but you can add it earlier. I also add both, and tend to steal the family’s brandy, but you can do this to taste.

Voila! Go, wrap your hands around a warm mug of mulled wine, reheat as desired, and spend the winter pleasantly tipsy.

Spangle-cheeked Tanager

javier.chaves.photography

You mentioned years ago that you once worked on a project restoring former coal mine land, trying to get plants to grow and break up the compacted soil and so on. Do you know how the site is doing now? I hope you don’t mind me asking, but it sounds like a very cool project and I would love to know if it worked!

Oh, extremely well! The trees are about a third of the height they should be for their age, but there's a little woodland there now. This year my uni is taking over the lease for the site, so investigations continue. We got a lot of papers out of it. Plus, we proved that if you get the trees to grow in, you increase other biodiversity, like birds and earthworms and small mammals and lizards (the place is alive with lizards every summer, actually. Sometimes they sit on your bag.)

The main project site is here, if you want a gander.

Did you find your first leaf of autumn yet? Remember to hold onto it, if not in your hands then in your heart, so that you can make use of its tiny magic when you need it most. The uses of first autumn leaves can vary, from enhancing the catharsis of a melancholic moment to tumbling eerily down a seemingly deserted street as a warning of coming danger, but you will know when the time comes to release it and receive its blessing.

That post about 30 year old coming of age stories?

I’ve been thinking about it all morning. What would the plot points be for that? What makes a 30 year old coming of age story?

Old folks sound off in the comments

Frozen waterfall ❄️✨