kombucha

batch #4 - mango kombucha

A few weeks ago, I started making kombucha at home after finding instructions on foodrenegade.com (which has become one of my favorite sites recently). I remember my sister telling me about the first time she and her husband tried kombucha - they both took a sip and instantly and violently spit it out. I will admit that the first time I tasted it, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I immediately connected the smell and taste to vinegar, but was won over by the subtle sweetness and tingly fizz. At first, I tried a variety of brands but quickly learned that I prefer ones that don't leave (or add after brewing?) a lot of sugar.

I'm learning that the beauty of some living foods (I'm thinking yogurt) includes the ability to recreate them at home using a bit of store bought product to get started.  So, I grew my own SCOBY using a bottle of GT's Original Organic Raw Kombucha. My recent foray into the realm of probiotics has also involved making my own yogurt and water kefir, and there are two bottles of probiotic ginger beer fermenting on the counter as I type this. 


For the kombucha, the only additional things I needed after GT's original were a glass bowl, sweetened green tea, and a kitchen towel, all of which I already had. We went on our trip to Kentucky a few days after I put the bowl in a warm corner, and when we got back, the SCOBY was nearly ready to use.


The first batch, flavored with fresh peach juice, was too tart and syrupy for our tastes, so it's still sitting in the fridge waiting to be used in a salad dressing or something.  Batch #2 was a great success and include the juice of one orange. The third batch was the best, with a mix of grapefruit (suggested by my sister who's on "The Paleo Diet" after doing the 4-hour body diet for about a year) and orange. It was so good that we drank it in just a little over one day.

For batch #4, I shredded some mango with my new (and much needed!) grater. Hopefully it will be at least as good as GT's mango, even though I didn't use juice.

      These bottles have been awesome for amping up the fizz.

kentucky

june 21 - 24

horse race at churchill downs

gold David, downtown Louisville

bike share

The Comfy Cow - ice cream shop

Louisville Civil Rights Icons

the bridge to Indiana

Lexington Farmers Market

Lexington Art League

strange sights on the road

the garden

putting compost around some plants

the last of the butterhead lettuce. so delicious!

a blurry shot of me in the garden. 

the first of the currant tomatoes. anxiously awaiting their ripening

my whole bed

most of the plants were started from seed. this pepper was not

delicious "patio star" zucchini, grown from seed

photos taken june 27, 2012

i'm back

In my last post (over a year ago!) I said I wanted to start writing more here since we were planning a trip to Portugal. Well since then, we moved away from Portland, went to Boston to visit my brother, and then spent some time in Portugal in July. I wish we could have traveled more around Europe and seen more friends, but we were limited by our funds. We chose Portugal because I had read online that it was one of the cheaper countries to travel in in Europe (which was true). It was great to meet up with our friend Ondrej and his wife in Lisbon and then later in Porto.

Portugal was wonderful, and I wish we could go back this summer  (and every summer!), but I don't feel like writing about our trip now as it was so long ago. Our camera broke early on into the trip when we were in Coimbra (an old, mysterious and beautiful university town) so we were freed from the self-imposed obligation to document our trip.

As a result of that experience, I'm seriously considering traveling camera-free from now on. After all, I travel to experience new places and people, not to have photos to show my friends and family. There are postcards for that, right? But at the same time, it would be nice to have images to go along with whatever I write. We'll see.

So in thinking about this blog, I've decided that I want it to be more than a travel blog. We have no plans to go abroad until hopefully summer next year, and I want to write about topics I find interesting and worth sharing as I come across them.

Our lives are completely different now, with LB being in graduate school. These following two observations are totally unrelated, but it's my first time living so far from an ocean and also the first time living in a car-dependent city without a car. It was a bit of a struggle at first, arriving here in 90+ degree weather last August without a clue, but we've found our way of making things work and have come to really love living here. We spend most of our time in a small area near where we live, but even so, I don't have that trapped feeling I used to have while living in Florida as a teenager.

I'll probably write more about living car-free later.