Fri Aug 25

Breakfast: smoothie. 

After getting everything out to make my smoothie, I opened the fermentation jar of figs to taste it. I think I might have left it for just a couple hours too long because there's *just a hint* of an alcohol taste to it. No matter, though, as it's still mostly (90% or more?) just lacto-ferment and not yeast alcohol ferment, so still fine for my purposes! Next time I'll put it in the fridge the night before. Live and learn. 🤷‍♀️

I used 1 Tbsp of the figs and then added enough of the fermented strawberries to make 1/4 cup. (Instead of the usual 1/4 c fermented strawberries only.) It was really good! 👍

After breakfast, I transferred the figs from their fermentation jar to a storage jar. I like to save my actual canning jars for fermenting and canning since my fermentation lids and canning lids fit them, and use my other miscellaneous jars for storage. That's not always possible, of course, and there are several canning jars in my fridge right now! 😑

Here's what it looks like today in its new jar:

I put some water into the fermentation jar, swished it around to clean the sides, and drank it up - no sense wasting the probiotics or bits of fig stuck to the sides! 👍😄

Speaking of canning jars and fermentation jars. I have found that a 4 oz regular mouth jar will fit inside a wide mouth jar, which makes it a great weight to keep the fermenting stuff submerged in the liquid! And a baby food jar does the same in a regular mouth jar! Then I use a ReCap lid with a drilled #6 stopper and a water airlock on top. The ReCap is slightly domed, so there's room for the little jar to stick up a bit over the rim of the fermentation vessel. You can see this on my jar of mustard seeds:

You can't really see the small jar from the outside with the lid on:

This pic shows a baby food jar used as a weight in a little 4 oz regular mouth jar I used to soften and begin the ferment of some juniper berries:

I wanted to soften the berries so I could easily remove the hard seed before adding them to the jar of mustard seeds for further fermentation. Of course, this time I didn't use a lid, as you can see! Once they were soft enough to easily break open, I removed the seed and dumped the berries and their brine into the jar with the mustard seeds, along with some jalapeños. That's gonna be a spicy mustard!

I also cycled my water kefir this morning:

BTW, in addition to using finished water kefir in my smoothies, I use it as a culture starter for my ferments - just 1 Tbsp per quart - and it seems to really help!

I stopped at Burger King for lunch: chicken nuggets and a Diet Coke. 

Dinner at my friend Barbara's house. I had baked chicken seasoned with bouquet garni, half an ear of corn with butter, salt, & cotija cheese, some fresh sliced tomatoes, and some sausage-and-cheese stuffed zucchini. Then we went to a baseball game with fireworks! I had 2 beers. When we got back home, we all did a 40 second plank, then had birthday brownie sundaes. 

Happy birthday to me!

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