water and a book

[Guest guest]

Hey yous,,, hope ya'll are having a great day! I have been playing all day! I

tried to work and since I couldn't (artsy girls flown the coop) I decided I

needed to play with my probiotics.

First thing I did was make up the black and green teas for my home grown Kombu

mothers. I'm so happy! There are now 2 small mothers from the beginning of

this experiment. I'm still experimenting with the green tea as I haven't used

this before. Black, sugar and me go way back. So I did up 10 bags of the black

with my normal sugar, don't measure as I have a cup in my canister of sugar

which isn't a measuring cup and I have always used 2 of those. So the green got

8 bags and about 12 oz of commercial honey. It did REALLY well making the

mother so I'm thinking it will work even though all the web sites say don't use

honey. Ya'll know me by now... against the grain and the biggest thing is to

PLAY AT WILL!

After the Kombu was done I wanted to go hard into my water grains. I figured

out a lot of things. First let me tell you that there are 4 of us who want to

drink the WK here. We have real grains that I bought from and 's

should be here by Saturday. Eventually I need to have 4 different jugs going

every day. I have been playing with the recipe of the fruits to satisfy

everyone but that's not what I wanted to talk about. I re-read Dom's site and

it hit me that my WATERS not optimal for GROWING the grains. So today I boiled

a dozen eggs,,, ONLY 4 are left uneaten, I guess I should boil eggs more often.

BUT the fun I had getting the shells off for my kefir! I found that under the

strong stream of water out of the sink was the best way. I unzipped them from

around the middle of the shell by getting that inner skin off and then gently

prying my nail under the shell and the water lifted the entire shell out of the

egg! Incredible! What fun we had - all of us learning how to " unzip " our eggs

to keep the shells whole. Till I get my plastic strainer I'm not too thrilled

about having tiny things in my grains. All that just to say that I added a

shell to my recipe. I also added the 1/8th t. of baking soda. Then I figured I

was done... but continued to think about our water. We are on well water that's

poisoned with neutronium and fluoride,,, overly much eh! So we have had a

softener and a reverse osmosis for drinking. There's NOTHING in our water,,,,

nothing good,,, nor anything bad... so I remembered Concentrace... which is a

liquid mineral for those drinking RO water. I added that in the end. WHAT FUN!

YUP this is the kind of stuff I get off on.

My Kombu teas are still cooling so they aren't done yet. Can't wait to play

more even if it's only to pour the teas into the jars and put them where they

will set. I figure on trying them at about day 5, I used to go to 7 but till

everyone's acclimated 5 might be better so I will start testing them. OOOO I

almost forgot, the thing that took the most amount of time! See my family

doesn't like my plain 7 day Kombu which is very like ACV! I love it but it's

too strong for teens and a granny who love sweets. BUT in all fairness they did

like the stuff from the store with the elderberry's. So here's what we did. We

had this massive bag of frozen berry's from Costco. It has raspberry's,

blueberry's and blackberry's in it. We defrosted the berries in a bowl and they

hit the blender. DS is very good at blending fruit into liquid! He kept

ramping it up till they were all liquid nummies, which we then put through a

strainer with a spoon and pushed out the liquid fruit. NUM! These went into

ice cube trays, 5 in all and then can be put into the finished Kombu for those

with delicate tastes.

I'm so thrilled! I found the plastic lids and the small strainer I needed as

well as a set of corked 32 ounce bottles! What a boon that was for secondary

ferments if I ever decide to add more flavor! Oh and I'm getting a pound of

hibiscus flowers and rose hips too! Thanks to you all chatting about them I

want to play with them too.

Found a small downloadable booklet on SKG's too!

http://www.google.com/search?q=water+kefir+recipe+juniper & ie=utf-8 & oe=utf-8 & aq=t\

& rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official & client=firefox-a I hope this URL works for you

it's from www.cleansingministries.com if it doesn't work. Gives a plain SKA

recipe and one for Coconut and a bunch of what ... how... I dunno, claims of

what drinking kefir can do for you. I'm making a book of recipes and all the

goodies (only 11 pages so far) I can find all about fermenting as it's just flat

out TOO MUCH FUN! It comes in doses that I seem to be able to maintain what

with not being able to walk/stand for long. So this is an ideal " hobby " life

style to adopt again. We need to clean up our act even more around here so I'm

really excited to get " cooking " .

We eat a lot of yogurt too so I'm looking forward to getting all of this down

pat and getting the 5 pack sample of the different cultures. I found it on eBay

of course! Oh dear,,, now I can't find him. There were 5, Villi, Caspian,

Piima, Fil Mjolk, and one other. Oh dear. Really should have bookmarked it.

sigh well, it's a bit soon to talk about this now anyway.

This is all so exciting! I love throwing myself whole hog into things.

Obviously.... so glad ya'll are here so talk with.

XOXO

http://wmdramble.blogspot.com/