Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Nance Klehm has solved the floater problem

Nance Klehm posts under "Weed Eater" at Arthurmag.com (click on this post's title to get there). She's a forager and she'll take you on a walk and point out all edibles along the way. The post I'm linking to is an excellent little essay on hunger and dirt and how anything alive experiences the former on their way to becoming the latter. As an experiment to help illustrate her point, she explains how bacteria process veggies and how they work with us in pickling. Along the way, she shows us a neat way to deal with floaters AND obviate the use of an oil barrier- she fills a plastic bag with brine and uses it to weigh down the pickles to be, thus keeping them below the waterline. Using plastic is problematic but then again, floaters and funky batches of pickles COST MONEY. I'm gonna try this trick quick!

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Frontier

It's been a quiet month here for cultures, after the frenzy of last month.

Sometimes right after a big pickling session, I don't even want to look at our abundance for a while. This week my body has been telling me that it misses the live microbial supplements I had been feeding it via the pickles, so I am back to experimenting with our cultures. I feel really lucky, because I do the same thing with my garden veggies, but after a month, the garden veggies are only good for composting, while cultures taste even better after a respite.

I am committing, now publicly, to eating at least a tablespoon of homemade cultured veggies every day for the next two weeks. We'll see how happy my body is then!

Enjoy!