fermentaholic!

Mojito wine (mint and citrus) working in the yeast in a 1-gallon pickle jar - still in the rapid integration phase, the yeast is the light bubbly stuff at the top.

GF toast and eggs for brekky.

We love crackers, and GF crackers are absurdly expensive, so I'm working again on a better cracker recipe. I first soaked this bean & lentil mix over night with water and a little rejuvelac, then cooked them, then used a hand blender to turn them into mush...

Like so! I also added some buckwheat flour, spices, and more rejuvelac. I'll let it hang out awhile, then once I've baked them I'll be sure to share how they turned out.

I am reading Orlean Puckett: Life of a Mountain Midwife, and having reached the part about how all the passers-by enjoyed sitting down to a bowl of her sauerkraut for a snack, I thought, hot damn, I need to make me some sauerkraut! Thank God for my food processor, which relatively quickly sliced & shredded 2 sweet potatoes, 2 onions, 3 carrots, 1 huge daikon, 1/2 head cabbage, 1 bunch kale, about 1/2 head garlic, and 3 apples. You can see the brine is coming along nicely. (More about sauerkraut here, from the master.)

The left is the wine - you can't see the airlock here but it's on and is bubbling away, at a rate of about one to three per minute (there's a second one also out of sight), the right is the sauerkraut of course, and in the forefront is my favourite fermentation book.

Glorious rainbow compost fodder!

I used a few Tattler lids to create a barrier to push the veggies below the brine. And while I have your attention, a reflection: I offered some free kraut on facebook, and while I was working on the shredding, I was thinking about how to pitch it, and I was thinking about the notion of something being an 'acquired taste'. Because in reality... all tastes are acquired tastes. Anybody who grows up with sour fermented foods, but not sugar cane, would perceive Western cake as 'an acquired taste'. It's not a real category written in stone.

There's something about summer...! I just want to ferment things like crazy. I also bought some Rise kombucha to grow a new SCOBY with, so it's hanging out in a wide-mouth jar on my island as well. It's supposed to be raw, so hopefully that will work. Failing that, a few of the members of the WAPF Montreal group on facebook, which I've recently joined and am enjoying daily (as opposed to several other groups I'm in, which I largely ignore), have offered to share SCOBYs with me. Hurrah!