Using Your Chive Flowers for Vinegar! (a great homeschool activity too!)

Hi everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today my son and I have decided that as a part of our homeschooling adventures we are going to um what are we making? Chai vinegar. Chai flower vinegar and we thought we would show you how we do it. So come and join us on our adventure. So we absolutely love making vinegar from chai flowers. Chives are in the onion family and onions are incredibly good for you because they're sulfur containing foods. They are excellent for your immune system and we really just love to use everything that we grow around here but as you can see the pollinators absolutely love them as well so we never take all of the flowers. And just in case you didn't know you can eat chai flowers as well. We love to have them in salads this time of year and you can actually pick off the individual flowers. So all we do is we're gonna take our scissors and we're gonna cut off the chai flowers and you want to get them as close to the base as you can and then put them in a bowl and that's pretty much it. So do you want to try cutting off the first one? So you want to go right underneath here. All right good work and now you just know it's okay. Where did the flower go? Find the flower and put it in the bowl. So we're going to harvest all of our chai flowers and once we get inside we'll show you how easy it is to make a vinegar from these. What's so really nice about them is that the color that you get from the end product is this beautiful purple and it's quite a show stopper if you have people over for dinner and you're providing people with a salad. Why don't we tell everybody why we're cutting so close? Well mostly that yeah that's a great question. So mostly that is so we can save the chives for things like scrambled eggs and salads and all kinds of other things as well. So we're going to get to harvesting and we will bring them inside and show you what to do next. So we're taking a closer look at the anatomy of a chai flower and what do you notice bud when you see it up close? What are you seeing? Is it just one piece? Are there lots of individual little flowers inside the flower head? And so those are the parts that we can actually pull apart and eat and I already know that you're not going to like the flavor but you're welcome to try one of the little ones if you'd like. They do have a quite a pungent onion flavor which makes them really yummy as a substitute for things like red onions and stuff like that in salads. So we're almost done our harvesting but there you can get a nice blurry look. A blurry look at the anatomy of a chai flower. Well you can cut down low if you want but we just want the flowers for the vinegar. All right we're back inside. My assistant is here with me. Yes. And now we're going to be making the chai vinegar. So all I need you to do is put the chives in there. Now I've got another question as you can see on the question asker. What's your question? When will you be using the vinegar? Ah that's a great question. We grow a lot of vegetables in our garden. Spinach and lettuces, kale, arugula, and mustard greens and we like to eat a lot of we like to eat a lot of salads. That's why. Yes does that answer your question? Yes and I've got some other thing. Salads aren't really salads and you can use this chai vinegar at the time as salad dressings. Now we'll show you how to make it. You should usually do this. Yeah so first I'll touch a little bit on salad dressings. It's one of the things that we don't really like to buy from the grocery store because they have a lot of ingredients that we're not really big fans of and in general the oils and things like that that are used in salad dressings can go rancid by the time you get them plus anything that remains shelf stable for that long always makes me question. So when you're making homemade salad dressings one of the ingredients and they're so easy to do that's the thing like I really encourage you if you're not much into cooking from scratch make your own salad dressings because you really only need two ingredients oil and a vinegar of some kind and then you can spice it up by adding you know pureed fruits or spices you know things like oregano and thyme. Where did my assistant go? So we have filled up or I should say my son has filled up the jar with our chai flowers and you can chop them if you choose but we find that the vinegar works just fine with keeping them whole and then yeah and then all you want to do is add we like to raw apple cider vinegar because the raw vinegar has so many wonderful health benefits but you can use any vinegar you would like and that's it. It usually takes at least a few weeks you know before the chai flavor is really infused into the vinegar. Whenever you're working with vinegar and mason jars it's really important that you do a barrier so before you put your lid on it's really important that you use a barrier of some kind so I often like to use parchment paper and I'm just going to grab that now so I'll just cut off a small square of parchment paper oh and um and put that on top so that's going to prevent the vinegar from eating away the metal at your lid which you really don't want um and you have yes um it should look like this by the time you're at this step and we'll fill in the next one well there really isn't any other steps at this point all we're going to do is make sure that we have our barrier between the vinegar and the lid you want to label it I mean when you keep the flowers whole it's usually pretty basic uh it's pretty easy to determine what's inside so I'll just do this and then grab a lid of some kind and then you seal your lid on like you normally would except the parchment paper is now acting as a barrier in between the metal lid and the vinegar and if you're making tinctures at home you also want to do this as well it's really important too to keep it in a cool dark place um and shake it every time you think about it and when why why would the acid in acids in general tend to eat away at a lot of materials right if you were to stick your hand in acid it would eat away at your flesh not this type of acid it would have to be a stronger one but um yeah so that is it that is our very simple video on making chai flower vinegar for salad dressings I don't think so thank you so very much for watching um I really appreciate you guys continuing to tune in and watch these videos as my channel grows it's I'll try to share more and more of what we do on a regular basis around here a lot of herbal medicine some homesteading and in this case a fun homeschool activity as well so there is our it'll be a few weeks before you start to see that really pretty kind of purple color that we're looking for so until next time again thank you for watching you can click that subscribe button if you like what I'm putting out you can also follow me on Facebook Instagram Twitter and all that jazz and uh I will see you on the next video which should be later this week as well I'm hoping to do one on ground level so thanks so much for watching and you can click the next video if you want to see the ground I'll be one but not now because we haven't made it yet thank you very much for watching and you guys take care and have a great day