Sunday dinner, Feb 19

Slept in today, skipped church, and napped most of the afternoon. Finally feel like the head cold is on its way out. I didn't even take any decongestants today! Here's hoping it lasts. 

Rinsed my soaked Lady Cream peas and put them into a sprouting tray. Cycled my water kefir. Made more tea. Checked on the fermenting mustard  I'm making for Patti - they're still bubbling, so they need to sit for a while longer. I estimate at least another week. 

Breakfast was my regular morning smoothie. Lunch was a low-carb tortilla lunch meat wrap. Switched it up a bit for dinner by browning some Italian sausage and setting it aside while I prepared the veggies. 

To one cup of store-bought vegetable broth, I added all of my garbanzo bean sprouts (probably about 3/4 cup), plus two big handfuls of lentil and mung bean sprouts. Threw in 1 cup of diced tomatoes plus a can of tomato paste, half a medium zucchini, and 2 small carrots. Finished it off with a generous sprinkling of Italian seasoning and a spoonful of pesto sauce. 

Once all the veggies were heated through, I threw the sausage back into the pot and heated it for another 3 minutes. Dished it into bowls and topped it with grated pecorino cheese. 

 

Pretty good! 👍😄

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Morning weight, Feb 19

 

Dinner, Feb 18

Since we slept in today, we didn't have lunch. I had my regular smoothie for breakfast, then mid-afternoon Brianne went to the freezer for some meat for dinner. She thought she was bringing in pork chops, but actually brought in another pork roast. 

I didn't want to make the same thing I made earlier this week, so I googled a bit for ideas and finally decided to make a slow-cooker balsamic pork roast. 

In addition to the frozen one-pound pork loin roast, I put the following into the slow cooker and set it on High:

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 cup balsamic vinegar

1 Tbsp Worchestershire sauce

2 Tbsp ponzu sauce

1/2 tsp pink Himalayan salt

After about 1.5 hours, I added one cup of store-bought vegetable broth and 1/2 cup rice vinegar, plus one onion (cut into wedges) and two small carrots (cut into pieces). 

In another hour or so, I was able to cut the roast into 4 large chunks. After that, it only took another hour for it to be ready to eat. I didn't make any additional vegetables because I'm still not over this head cold and I'm just exhausted. 👎🤧

We ate the whole thing and it was tender and yummy!

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Morning weight, Feb 18

13.1 lbs gone so far!

 

Stormy Friday

Bad storms in SoCal today and tomorrow. With winds upwards of 70 mph, I'm very glad we took out the last 2 dead trees yesterday morning. Especially since they had vertical tears in their trunks, probably from previous windstorms! It would be no fun at all for them to fall onto the house. 😳

Breakfast was my usual smoothie and I used some of my kefir water as the after rinse. There were some chunks of kefir grains at the bottom, which were like flavorless gummy bears, only not that big. Ah well, that which does not kill me strengthens me, as someone once said. 😉

I also used my kefir water to start up a batch of Lady Cream peas to sprouting. 

 

For lunch Brianne had the leftover pork roast from last night. I was going to have another lunch meat sandwich but decided I'd rather have a quesadilla.

 

It's just one of the low-carb tortillas heated in a skillet, filled with cheese, and folded in half. Easy-peasy!

For dinner, I dug through our teeny-tiny fridge-side freezer and found two chicken breasts. Put them in to bake and prepped my veggies to go with them. 

 

That's 1/2 cup of kefir water to get things started, then mixed garbanzo bean sprouts, mung bean sprouts, and lentil sprouts with 2 small carrots and half a medium zucccini, followed by some green onions and beet greens, and finishing with some of the pesto I made the other day. 

Here's the end result:

 

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Morning weight, Feb 17

 

Dinner, Feb 16

Dinner tonight was super simple, too, since I'm still not feeling well. 

About 1:30 this afternoon, I realized that I didn't have any meat thawed for dinner, so I asked Brianne to go out to the garage freezer and bring some in. She asked me what kind of meat to get and I said I didn't care. She returned with a frozen one pound pork loin roast. 

I put it, still frozen, into my smaller crock pot, dumped in a container of homemade chicken broth (about 2 cups), a cut-up small onion, my jar of sprouted mixed white and speckled beans, and some salt & pepper, then set it on High to start cooking. 

 

At about 4:00 pm, I dumped in a can of cream of mushroom soup, plus a can-full of water kefir. Happily, cream of mushroom soup only has 7g net carbs per 1/2 cup! Who knew?

 

I let it continue cooking for another hour and a half. 

 

At that point, I cut the pork roast into about 4 chunks and dumped in the leftover vegetables from the other day, then let it cook for another half hour to let them all heat through. 

The finished product?

 

So yummy and super easy, too! 👍

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My water kefir, Feb 16

Today I had to cycle my water kefir. 

I always have 2 quart jars working, helpfully labeled 1 and 2. 

 

Jar 1 is the initial kefir ferment & Jar 2 is the 2nd ferment. Here's a pic of the kefir "grains" at the bottom of Jar 1:

 

I put "grains" in quotes because kefir is not a grain like wheat or rice is. Grain just refers to the size and shape of them. Kefir is actually a clump of yeast and bacteria that feed on sugar. A list of the most common species of bacteria and yeast in water kefir grains can be found here:

http://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/water-kefir/composition-of-water-kefir-grains-bacteria-and-yeasts/

When it's time to cycle my kefir, I take the fermenting cap off of Jar 2, put another lid on it, then stick it in the fridge. More in a moment about what I do with it. 

I then pour the contents of Jar 1 through a mesh strainer into another jar, which will become my new Jar 2. Here are the kefir grains draining in the strainer:

 

Meanwhile, I rinse the previous jar 1 out and then put in 1 tsp of brown sugar and 2 Tbsp of plain white granulated sugar. The brown sugar is there because it still has some molasses in it - that's why it's brown - and thus has some extra minerals in it that white sugar doesn't have. And the kefir like the minerals. 

 

I dump the drained kefir grains into jar 1 and fill it with water then stir it up until the sugar dissolves. Then I put the fermenting cap on it and set it and the new jar 2 in my fermentation station. 

 

There they will stay for 3 days until the kefir have eaten the vast majority of the sugar in Jar 1 and it's time to cycle them again. 

Meanwhile, Jar 2 begins its 2nd ferment. During this stage, the bits of kefir that made it through the strainer (basically bits that hadn't yet clumped together into "grains") eat up the remaining little bits of sugar in the water. 

Theoretically, I could just have Jar 1 sit for 5-6 days and end up with the same result, but that's not good for the health of the grains themselves. Some of them would starve to death and the population would shrink. I've already got my grains on a subsistence diet - the usual amount of sugar per quart of water is 1/4 cup, but I use just a little over  half that amount (1/4 cup is 3 Tbsp) - because I don't really want my colony to get so big that I can't keep up with their kefir water production! I am monitoring the amount of grains I have and if they start to diminish, I will feed them more. 

What do I do with the resulting kefir water after the 2nd ferment? 

• I use it to hydrate the chia and flax seeds I use in my morning smoothie. 
• I use it to fill my smoothie cup to the fill line after I've put all the other stuff into the cup. 
• If I end up with too much of it after all, I can use it instead of plain water to "rinse out" my smoothie cup after I drink it and drink that. (I do this so as not to waste all the good stuff that sticks to the side of the cup when I drink the smoothie.)
• I plan to begin using it for the initial soak of my sprouting seeds and beans. 
• I use it in cooking. Tonight, I used it instead of plain water to "rinse out" a can of cream of mushroom soup I put in with my pork roast. 
• I'm sure I will find more uses for it. As I do, I'll post them to the blog. 

Some people put the 2nd ferment into a tightly sealed jar or bottle and create a fizzy soda-like drink. Usually when people do that, they add some sort of flavoring to the kefir water before beginning the 2nd ferment, such as lemon, mixed berries, ginger, or whatever. I don't do that mostly because I have a SodaStream to make fizzy water when I want it. Maybe I'll try it sometime, but for now I can't be bothered. 💁

Current research shows many benefits to including probiotics into your diet to improve your gut biome. Since doing this, I have found my digestion has improved, my "daily constitutional" has become more regular, and my overall health has improved. Sure, I have a head cold right now, but it's not nearly as bad as what Brianne had last week and not as bad as what I usually come down with. Is this because of the probiotics? No way to tell for sure, but it certainly doesn't hurt! 

To finish up, I'll include this link to a list of 9 evidence-based health benefits of kefir: https://authoritynutrition.com/9-health-benefits-of-kefir/

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Fun with fermentation!

This is a scheduled post, written a few days ago and scheduled to post now. 😀

I got into fermenting food early last year (2016) because I came into a large box full of vegetables such as golden beets, watermelon radishes, and cabbage - for free! - and didn't know what I was going to do with all of them. I googled various ways to preserve them and decided that fermentation seemed the easiest, especially since I didn't own a pressure canner at that time. I've since made sauerkraut, kim chi, East Indian Lemon Chilli Pickle, and various other pickled veggies and have to say I'm impressed with how easy it is.

In addition to being super easy to do, fermented vegetables are full of enzymes and live bacteria cultures that are good for your gut. It helps keep digestion flowing smoothly and helps your body fight off colds. Make you strong like bull! 😉

One of the things I made last summer was fermented mustard, which my friend Patti liked so much that she requested I make more, so it's currently in process. It's bubbling away in two 20 oz jars. One jar contains a cup of whole black mustard seeds in water kefir with garlic, a Tbsp of pink Himalayan salt, and some juniper berries. For the other jar, I pretty much followed this recipe from Cultures for Health, with the addition of 3 or 4 juniper berries. I used black mustard seeds and maple syrup instead of honey because that's what I had on hand.

Once they are both finished fermenting (when they stop bubbling), I will combine them to make a nicely textured and flavored black mustard. For previous batches, I've stirred in some chopped Meyer lemons when combining the pureed and whole seeds at the end of the fermentation time. Yum!

I've also got a giant jar of dilly beans working in the fridge. We had a giant jar of kosher dill pickles and when it was finished, I insisted on saving the pickling liquid. The next day I found green beans on sale at our local grocery store, so I brought a bunch home, cut them up and put them into the liquid. They should be finished very soon and I can't wait to eat them. I love dilly beans!

Oh, about the picture: since I don't have a fermentation cap big enough for that giant jar and because the green beans float but need to stay submerged and because I didn't feel like diluting the liquid by filling the jar all the way up, I filled a gallon ziploc bag with water and stuffed it into the jar. This keeps all the beans in the pickling liquid and can be easily removed, washed, and reused later.

There are lots of great fermentation recipes on the internet, and I can't post them all here, but a simple google search with the vegetable you have and the word "fermentation" should yield many to choose from.

The equipment I use for fermentation is pretty simple, especially now that I've done the experimentation and have discovered what works for me and what doesn't.

I started out by trying "Pickle Pipes", a silicone thingy that lets the air produced by the fermentation process out of the jar and prevents outside air from getting in. You use them in conjunction with either metal or plastic canning jar rings. Many people swear by these things, but I didn't care for them because some ferments are more vigorous than others and push the liquid up and out of the device, which made a big yucky mess on my counter.  😒

Now I just use the re-Cap mason jar lids with a rubber bung and a water lock, as described at the NW Edible blog.

I already had the re-Cap lids, and got the bungs and water locks at my local hydroponics store for just a few dollars total. Yeah, I live in California so hydroponics stores are pretty much everywhere. While the stores started out as a supply depot for growing "vegetables" (read: cannabis) hydroponically, now they also sell supplies for home brewing, cheese-making, wine-making, etc. The bungs and water locks are used in wine-making, so if you don't have hydroponics stores where you live, look for wine-making supplies. If you don't have a local source for such things, there are plenty of ways to purchase them via the internet such as Amazon.

I see that the good folks who designed the re-Cap lids have designed their own airlock. If mine ever break, I will consider getting these.

I usually use glass weights to keep the veggies submerged in the brine, but as I mentioned above, ziploc bags full of water (or full of more brine in case they leak) also work well.

I still use the silicone Pickle Pipes for fermenting things like chili peppers - because the smell of chili peppers does NOT come out of silicone no matter how many times you wash it! I've also purchased a larger container from Crazy Korean Cooking for making kim chi and sauerkraut. I haven't tried it yet, but they promise that it contains the smell much better than anything else. The device is apparently very popular in Korea and I figure they know about kim chi, so I'm expecting it to be fabulous. It will also keep my mason jars available for other things, such as water kefir (which I'll talk about in a future post).

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Morning weight, Feb 16

Still stuffed up today. Voice is gravelly. Yuck. 

 

Dinner, Feb 15

With me not feeling well today, lunch and dinner were both very simple. Lunch was just my standard lunchmeat on a low-carb tortilla which used up the last of my previous batch of green leafy sprouts, which is good because I harvested a fresh batch this morning. I still have one sandwich's worth of lunch meat, though, which has to be used soon before it goes bad. Hmmm. 🤔

Brianne made dinner. It was just crumbled hamburger, browned, with the addition of some diced tomatoes (from the can I divvied up a couple of days ago), plus some spaghetti sauce we had on hand, topped with shredded pecorino and cheddar cheeses. (I had some shredded cheddar in the fridge and needed to use it up. The pecorino was freshly-grated for this.) Decided not to make any veggies because I'm exhausted. 

 

Simple but yummy. 

Tomorrow it'll probably be time to start a new batch of water kefir, so I'll write more about it then, though I might write a bit more in-depth about it and schedule the post for a later date. Today's onion jam post was written a few days ago and scheduled to post today. I've got a post about general vegetable fermentation scheduled for tomorrow. 

Now, back to bed. Ugh. 

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