What's going on in the kitchen this weekend?

Homebrewing: I have two fruit wines and a simple sweet mead that need to be bottled. I have another bottle of concord grape wine in the storage room that may also be ready to bottle, but if I can get the three I have upstairs racked and into the little single serving size bottles I bought, then I'll be doing well! (Update: the plum wine apparently isn't ready to bottle yet, once I brought it up into the warmer house, it began to bubble again! So, I guess that one will wait for another couple or three weeks. The mead and raspberry wines are bottled, though, and I even "prettied up" a few bottles for a picture!)

Salad Table: I will have transplanted nearly all the salad starts by the end of this weekend. They are actually doing pretty well! The lettuce is about three inches or more tall. The shallots are sprouting like mad and should be ready to start cutting by next week some time. With luck, the lettuce will be ready for a first light picking in a couple of weeks. Maybe I can serve my sweetie a home grown salad for Valentine's Day. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Cheesemaking: I decided to go for broke and make a batch of Cambozola. It's a Gorgonzola/Camembert hybrid that we just love melted on fresh, hot bread. Since we have fresh hot bread nearly every day now, I figured I'd give that a try. It's also a cheese we can rarely find here in the grocery stores, and when we can find it, it's generally 12-14 dollars a pound. So economically, it's a very good candidate for home cheesemaking. If it works, I should be able to make a little over a pound of it for just a bit more than the cost of a gallon of milk.

Dark Days Challenge: I am still trying to settle on my DDC meal to document for this week. I'm leaning towards oriental food (something we eat a lot of and love) but I can't decide between chicken or pork based dishes. We have both local pork and chicken in the freezer right now, so I could do either. My sweetie is nursing a cold this weekend, though - so I think chicken would be a good idea. I can make him bunches of chicken soup (the roasting chicken we got from a local source here is about an 8 pounder, dressed, so there's plenty for several meals on that one!) and still have lots of meat left to make other dishes.

At any rate, I'll have pictures for all of this up at intervals over the weekend. I have some step by step on the Chicken Udon Soup I made tonight, but it's been a long day with the mead and wine bottling and nursing a sick husband, so it may have to wait till tomorrow!