Kombucha

We have been making and drinking our own kombucha for a couple of years now. It is an easy, inexpensive, yummy, and refreshing way to enjoy some probiotics. I purchased my first culture, called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) online, but have made multiple ones on my own since then from bottled GT Dave's kombucha (which has currently been taken off the market for too high alcohol content/labeling issues). Here's what we do:

Kombucha
3/4 c. cane sugar (any kind - honey also works although some sources say it doesn't)
3 quarts of water
2 or 3 quart-sized tea bags (must be caffeinated)
SCOBY
1/2c. kombucha or distilled vinegar

Bring water and sugar to a boil, and boil for 1 minute. Remove from heat, and steep tea bags ~10 minutes. Remove tea bags, cover sweet tea with a clean cloth, and cool to room temperature. Rinse a 1-gallon glass jar with distilled vinegar, and place SCOBY and either 1/2c. kombucha (from a previos batch) or distilled vinegar into jar. Pour cooled tea into jar, and cover with a clean cloth held tight with a rubber band. (Be sure that your cloth is a tight weave that will not allow fruit flies to enter.) Place in a dark area and check every few days to see if kombucha is growing a new layer of SCOBY and to see if it has reached a desired sourness.

When it is ready (a totally subjective call you will have to make), we chill our kombucha. It is quite a refreshing drink - especially on a hot day. We generally pour it into clean glass jars, but we have also experimented with bottling it in recycled kombucha bottles and in capped beer bottles. Both these have worked well, and you can get a bit of carbonation if you bottle it when there is still some sugar left in the tea or if you prime it with a bit more sugar or fruit juice before bottling. The trick is not to add some much sugar that the bottles explode :o).

You can grow your own SCOBY, a gelatinous culture that grows thin and flat about as wide as your jar, from ready-made kombucha very easily: I make a smaller batch of the tea and add the kombucha. Generally, I start with 1 quart of tea and 1-2c. of kombucha. Then you wait until you see a very thin, new SCOBY form. I take that SCOBY and some of the kombucha to make another batch, and then scale it up, ~ doubling each time to eventually get to the size I want.
I generally just pour the SCOBY from one jar to the next or often use the same jar again and again, pouring most of old batch into a fresh jar and adding the new tea to the layers of SCOBYs already there.
Eventually, you get quite a stack of SCOBYs, and you'll want to remove all but the newest and start fresh. You can keep only the newest one each time, but I'm just too lazy. When you go to separate the SCOBYs, wash your hands, and then rinse them well with distilled vinegar (and hope you don't have any little cuts on your hands because they will STING!). Then gently peel the newest SCOBY off, and put it into a vinegar-rinsed jar. You can compost your old SCOBYs, feed them to your chickens if you're lucky enough to have some, give them to a friend, or just throw them away. They can also be sent through the domestic mail; just include enough of the kombucha to keep the SCOBY moist, and double bag it in clean ziplock bags.
You can rest your SCOBY by placing it in a jar in the refrigerator. Make sure it is covered with kombucha, and place a lid lightly over the jar so that the SCOBY can breathe. They can be left a couple of months, but may not be as vigorous when you first bring them back from vacation.
There are numerous mail-order businesses that will sell you SCOBYs (here's a page with some in NZ) if you can't find any commercial kombucha for starting your own.

Dried Tomatoes

My friend Dianne gave me some of the last of this year's tomatoes when we were down visiting in Virginia, and I decided to keep a few to eat sliced, but to dry the rest. Dried tomatoes are great as a snack or added to tomato sauces to give it a rich flavor. We like them chopped up and mixed into meatloaf, boiled with a little water and blended to make pizza sauce, and just plain. Most of the tomatoes were Romas which are great for drying since they are really meaty - not watery.

Dried Tomatoes Wash tomatoes. Cut away stem ends and any spots. Quarter Romas, or cut other tomatoes into ~1" wedges (or for crispier ones, 1/4 -3/8" slices). Place on dehydrator trays, leaving room for air to flow. Dry overnight at 135F. Cool. Pack into glass jars for later use.

Chistmas Goodies

We really like to make as many of our own Christmas gifts as we can. Here is a partial list of what we are doing right now:
coffee liqueur (both)
orange liqueur (both)
tarragon vinegar (both)
felted ornaments (Melinda)
chain mail jewelry and other items (Abram)
reusable shopping bags (Melinda)

Abram roasted the coffee himself for the liqueur. We are straining it after allowing the infusion three weeks.
Here's the recipe:



Coffee Liqueur
8 cups sugar
4 cups water
1 cup freshly ground coffee beans
2 vanilla beans, split lengthwise
brandy
vodka
Make a simple syrup by heating the sugar and water until the sugar dissolves completely. Add the coffee, vanilla beans, and the simple syrup to a 1 gallon jar and allow to cool to room temperature. After mixture has cooled, add 1/2 brandy and 1/2 vodka to fill the jar (about 5 cups each). Set aside for three weeks. Strain liqueur, and bottle.

Beef and Artichoke Stew

We've been eating a lot of soups and stews lately. The introduction to the diet we are eating is based mainly on bone broth soups with vegetables and meats. They are tasty and satisfying and have saved us a lot of money even though a larger percentage of our diet is local and organic/no chem. than ever.
Friday night, we had one of our old favorites - Beef and Artichoke Stew. It is so rich and wonderful, I thought I'd share it.

Beef and Artichoke Stew
2 lbs. beef (lamb also works well)
fat for cooking
3 onions, chopped
8 artichoke hearts, prepared and quartered
1-2 quarts of home-made beef stock
1 lb. greens, chopped or torn
dill
4 cloves garlic, crushed
3 eggs
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste

Cook beef in fat. (or as I did this time: Begin stock with beef shin slices or other meaty stock bones; remove meat and marrow once it is cooked and tender, and return bones to stock to continue cooking. Add extra fat if you use the boiled beef.) Then add onions and brown slightly. Add artichoke hearts (I have used canned in the past but as we are trying to avoid canned foods and artichokes do not grow here, I used frozen ones.) and enough stock to cover all ingredients. Simmer about an hour, adding stock to keep ingredients just covered if necessary. Add greens (We used a wonderful fresh, local spinach.) and dill and simmer until greens are tender. Just before serving, remove soup from heat, stir in garlic. Then beat eggs with lemon juice, and temper by adding 1 1/2 cups hot stew juices about 1/4 cup at a time while stirring. Add the tempered egg mixture back into the soup, and serve. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

GAPS and Lacto-Fermented Salsa

Owen and I are following the GAPS (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) diet plan to help heal our digestive systems from eating grains, processed sugars, taking antibiotics, birth control pills, drinking and swimming in chlorinated water, and the host of other modern activities that wreak havoc on our guts and their flora.
Much of the diet is based on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. It emphasizes eating lots of bone broths and good animal fats along with vegetables and eventually fruits. Grains and other starchy foods such as potatoes and many beans are not recommended since starches are difficult to digest; neither are disaccharides such as table sugar (sucrose) or milk sugar (lactose). The primary sugar in ripe fruits and vegetables is fructose, a simple sugar which needs basically no digesting to be used by the body. Honey which is made mostly of the simple sugars fructose and glucose is acceptable also. Right now we are eating broths made from pastured animals (mostly chicken and beef but also goose and lamb), meats with plenty of fat, cooked vegetables, a small amount of fruit, and lacto-fermented probiotic foods.
That's another thing the diet emphasizes, eating plenty of foods that are fermented. Fermentation preserves food, makes it more digestible, makes more and different nutrients available to the body, and provides your body with beneficial micro-organisms to colonize your digestive tract. These wonderful little critters help you digest your fo od and help fight pathogenic organisms that can colonize an unhealthy digestive system causing chronic illness as well as the ones that show up from time to time and cause acute illnesses.
I have noticed a definite calming for Owen over the last month of eating this way, and I feel less moody too. As babies grow and change so quickly, I hesitate to attribute too much to this diet, but it has also coincided with a language explosion, increased imaginative play, great building skills, more interest in reading, and more sustained and focused play.
We really like lacto-fermented foods, and I try to keep a variety available: I make kefir (fermented milk, similar to yoghurt- for Abram, but eventually we will add this back since all the lactose is used up in the culturing process), sauerkraut, fermented ketchup, beet kvass, fermented dill pickles, kimchi (spicy Korean sauerkraut), and fermented salsa.
I made a batch of lacto-fermented salsa recently and put it into the fridge last night. It smelled really delicious, so I hope we will be able to enjoy it very soon. I can't follow a recipe all the way through without the threat of terrible punishment, but I based the salsa on a recipe from Nourishing Traditions. Here's what I did:

Lacto-Fermented Salsa
6 medium - large heirloom tomatoes (I used black Cherokee, green zebra, and pineapple)
1 large yellow onion
6 cloves of garlic
1 jalapeno pepper (seeded)
1 bunch of cilantro
juice of 1 lemon
2 T. sea salt
1/3 cup water

Peel and deseed tomatoes (and save seeds for next year!). Chop all veggies. Mix. Pack into glass jars leaving a bit of head space. (This made 7 cups for me.) Close jars and leave at room temperature for 2 days, then refrigerate.