Ferment

I processed a lot of food today. Started the first of a batch of four pounds of beef jerky in the dehydrator, started four pounds of cukes on the road to kosher dills, did a two quart batch of pickled peppers, a quart of pickled okra, and three trays of sunflower seeds roasting.

These were 'mammoth' sunflowers, they get fifteen to twenty feet tall, collapse under their own weight mostly. But boy do they put off seeds.

Birthday Soirée

So I've been around the block 47 times. And by block, I mean the sun. Or, put it another way, I have 29 years experience at being 18.

The actual birthday was almost a week ago. My family would have celebrated it with me last weekend except I was pushing my limits. That business about how you're only as old as you feel, well, on my actual birthday, after having ridden 150+ miles through 5,000+ feet of Ozark elevation in two days on inadequate training: I didn't feel a day over 114.

My brother graciously hosted. I couldn't think of a restaurant that wouldn't run afoul of my nephew's allergies, my parents' tastes, my upcoming apheresis (I eat a cleanse diet for a few days leading up to the treatment so steakhouses, fried chicken, that sort of thing are out)... Or I'd think of a place and then realize it was louder than a Black Sabbath concert and the last time I ate there I left with an enormous headache. So grilled salmon and mahi mahi, at a house that's only louder than Black Sabbath when my nephew gets excited (his default setting).

Bonus, I got to play with my camera. Didn't do enough really, both my daughters were there and I took a few shots of them but they didn't really come out (my fault, shooting in a home is tricky business because even a bright and airy home is actually dark enough to hid Bin Laden for a year or two.

My nephew is more into posing for the camera than my kiddos anyway. And for some reason he was in costume.

Corinna took my camera from me and started shooting me. She wasn't looking through the viewfinder, and I had the 35mm f1.8 on there—set wide open in aperture priority, my default setting. If you don't look to see where your focal point is, it's just dumb luck whether your subject will be in focus or not because your depth of field is so shallow. So I turned it to automatic, which I don't think I've ever done before, and it spits out these crazy red arrays of autofocus assist beams. I didn't even know the camera could do that.

Dessert was banana cream pie and three flavors of gelato. We would have had paw paw custard as well, Corinna made me a pie of that earlier in the week. And we learned things.

Specifically, we learned that there is a minority of people who don't tolerate paw paws. They taste a lot like bananas, and the custard was very good, but then I needed a seatbelt on the toilet for a couple of days. Yikes. It's not an allergy, apparently, it's a trace chemical that some people, and I'm one of those lucky folks, can't handle. I always thought I had an iron constitution but I'll take a pass on paw paws from now on.

Birthday Soirée

So I've been around the block 47 times. And by block, I mean the sun.

The actual birthday was almost a week ago. My family would have celebrated it with me last weekend except I was pushing my limits. That business about how you're only as old as you feel, well, on my actual birthday, after having ridden 150+ miles through 5,000+ feet of Ozark elevation in two days on inadequate training: I didn't feel a day over 114.

My brother graciously hosted. I couldn't think of a restaurant that wouldn't run afoul of my nephew's allergies, my parents' tastes, my upcoming apheresis (I eat a cleanse diet for a few days leading up to the treatment so steakhouses, fried chicken, that sort of thing are out)... Or I'd think of a place and then realize it was louder than a Black Sabbath concert and the last time I ate there I left with an enormous headache. So grilled salmon and mahi mahi, at a house that's only louder than Black Sabbath when my nephew gets excited (his default setting).

Bonus, I got to play with my camera. Didn't do enough really, both my daughters were there and I took a few shots of them but they didn't really come out (my fault, shooting in a home is tricky business because even a bright and airy home is actually dark enough to hid Bin Laden for a year or two.

My nephew is more into posing for the camera than my kiddos anyway. And for some reason he was in costume.

Corinna took my camera from me and started shooting me. She wasn't looking through the viewfinder, and I had the 35mm f1.8 on there—set wide open in aperture priority, my default setting. If you don't look to see where your focal point is, it's just dumb luck whether your subject will be in focus or not because your depth of field is so shallow. So I turned it to automatic, which I don't think I've ever done before, and it spits out these crazy red arrays of autofocus assist beams. I didn't even know the camera could do that.

Dessert was banana cream pie and three flavors of gelato. We would have had paw paw custard as well, Corinna made me a pie of that earlier in the week. And we learned things.

Specifically, we learned that there is a minority of people who don't tolerate paw paws. They taste a lot like bananas, and the custard was very good, but then I needed a seatbelt on the toilet for a couple of days. Yikes. It's not an allergy, apparently, it's a trace chemical that some people, and I'm one of those lucky folks, can't handle. I always thought I had an iron constitution but I'll take a pass on paw paws from now on.

Whenever Corinna is canning, she'll talk about the 'jewels' she's putting away.

I feel the same way about these ferments, mostly pickled peppers.

We had a little Father's Day brunch at Succotash. If you've never been, it's ridiculously good and reasonably priced, fresh herbs grown by the sidewalk seating for their smoothies, and a mix of old school comfort food and vegan/vegetarian takes on the same.

We ate in the annex this time, I don't know if this is an expansion that has happened since I last ate there or if it's just the first time I happened to be seated in there. I wouldn't say it was exactly quiet, but it wasn't nearly as noisy as the main dining area, so that was a bonus.

Then afterward we went over to the park with the dragon before I took Mo to Finding Dory.

Taste of Shawnee

So we did Taste of Shawnee again this year. My Dad's in Shawnee Rotary, which puts it on. It's a fun little engorgement festival.

The Other J-Pop

I'll leave Japan's awesome pop music scene for another time, this is about Japanese soda.

I included the $20 bill in the first photo because I had looked for Ramune soda at the Asian market before and looked right past it. I'd bought some Ramune flavored candy there and was curious to try the soda it was based on.

The pictures I'd seen online, well, I guess Japanese people aren't as big as Americans and I had the impression I was looking for something more the size of a pint Coke bottle. It's a very distinctive bottle, but it's only a 6.7 ounce serving. I guess the Japanese haven't gone completely insane on the serving sizes of sugary beverages.

The bottle is fascinating. It's got a marble stopper with a pinched neck and a slot for holding the marble out of the way while you pour the soda.

I gather that the distinctive bottle is associated with summer over there in much the same way Coca-Cola has insinuated its trademark feminine bottle shape in the States.

I love finding stuff like this, things that are absolutely everyday for tens of millions of people that most Americans have never even heard of. In the age of globalization and the internet, it sometimes seems like we've managed to do worldwide, through commerce, what the Chinese government has done to Tibet. And I find homogeneity dull.

You take the plastic tool out of the cap (it's perforated so this is quite easy), then push the marble down into the neck with it. Hold it for a sec while it settles, then decant and drink up.

The 'original' flavor has been described as lemon-lime, but it doesn't taste like Sprite or 7-up. In fact, it doesn't taste like any American soda I can think of. It is a citrus-ish fruity flavor, but you'll have to try it for yourself. The other bottle I got was lychee flavor, another fairly unique fruit flavor, like a blend of melon and berry flavors, with some floral aromatics.

Molly didn't like them, but she's a big fan of Sprite and I think it pissed her off when it didn't taste like her expectations.

Fatsome

Okay, the picture is a non-sequitur sorta, sorry Julie. I don't know how often she checks in here these days, but my dear friend Julie once asked if the text in my posts could have some relationship to the photos. Here's the tie in: what I'm blogging about is nutrition and perceptions of what's desirable in food. The picture is of my bike with its Christmas finery on, outside a store where I bought food. And on the same day, the encounter I wanted to blog about, I had that in the process of riding my bike home from work. See? It's dripping with relationship.

Being a cardiac patient who goes for a fairly exotic treatment for a blood disorder that causes early onset heart disease, I'm far from oblivious on the diet front. But given how much of my problem seems to stem from non-dietary sources, I sometimes wonder if I really gain anything when I grab 0% cottage cheese or yogurt instead of the full fat version. For that matter, when it comes to the desirable fats, like in fish, the healthiest options are supposedly the fattiest, your salmon, tuna, the 'oily' fish. Which is fine by me, I love some salmon nigiri a lot more than I like full fat cottage cheese, and rare tuna steak beats full fat yoghurt any day.

But anyway, today on my commute home I stopped for a beer at the truck stop. It's really just a convenience store in the West Bottoms, but they have diesel pumps and thus was nicknamed the 'truck stop' by some cyclists I know. It's owned by a Pakistani guy who tries to teach me Pashto and lets me bring my bike in the store since he has almost nothing to lock up to outside. I will grab a bomber of Guinness or a sixer of PBR there sometimes on the way home, every once in a while a snack. Anyway, this evening he showed me a video he was really excited about, of his daughter, who went back to Pakistan for a visit, milking a buffalo. There was some back and forth when I asked what he meant by a buffalo, because I didn't think there were bison in Pakistan, there's barely bison here in North America, where they come from. No, a water buffalo. That's allowed in the house, because it's so docile and charming. And makes such great milk. It doesn't get in the water often, but when it does, it's very enthusiastic.

'Very fatsome,' he told me. 'The milk of buffalo is very rich, full of fat.' They drink it, they let it ferment into yoghurt, and they prize it for it's fat content. 'Much better than cow milk.'

Which I guess is a holdover from that old world/third world way of thinking about food. Before you can worry about your arteries clogging up, you have to get clear of worrying about whether you're going to get enough calories to stay the hell alive. For most of human history, that wasn't an easy bar to clear and there are still probably more people on earth who can't be sure of clearing it than can.

Smoker Bread

The oven's broken, but Corinna felt the need to make bread. She combined the last of a mulberry-rhubarb cobbler, a graham cracker crust, some white chocolate chips, coconut cream, high gluten wheat flour from the Amish store, rye flour, and I built a fire in the smoker.

I was a little afraid that it'd have too pronounced a smoke flavor, but it turned out really well. Fine texture, great flavor, not really noticeably smoky. I guess because it's only in there an hour. Try as I might to get the temperature up to 350ºF, I only managed 300ºF. I only used about half the charcoal I would if I was really loading the smoker up, which might have been too much fuel but I was hoping to get it hotter. I didn't have a lot of meat on hand, but I did have a pork loin roast I put on after the bread came off. And I guess not getting it super hot made it easier to seal up and get the temp down closer to 200ºF for the pork.

Fermenticus

So Corinna harvested a wheelbarrow full of carrots, three enormous heads of cabbage and I don't know what all. Oh, and cucumbers, I started the holiday weekend off with the preparation of a two gallon crock full to the rim of kosher dills. By today, they were starting to foam a bit and smell really, really good.

So today I started in on carrots. I made a brine with filtered water, erring on the side of salinity. It seems like we have more mold problems on some batches than others, and I think that's because I get too conservative with the salt. So where the Joy of Cooking called for a half cup of salt for 8 cups of water, the pickling salt package called for a full cup of salt for the same.

That's pretty salty, but it seems like it takes a lot of salt to actually slow the good bacteria down. I did one batch of dill carrots where I put some fresh dill in the jar, along with some grape leaves to help preserve crispness, some garlic cloves and then sliced the carrots into spears and wedged them in, covering with the brine and a bit more grape leaf. Then I did one where I shredded the carrots, which means you get a lot, lot more carrots in the jar, mixed that with some onion, garlic, dill, and covered with brine and grape leaves. Then I did a non-dill batch where I took some of the yellow carrots and filled in with orange varieties, just making them carrot sticks again and just putting a couple of garlic cloves in, no other herbs or whatever.

Then I thought I was about done, but Corinna wanted me to make sauerkraut out of the last three 'little' heads of cabbage in the garden. By little, she meant two pounders, these were honking huge ass cabbage heads.

One of the things I struggle with in kraut making is how to express as much cabbage juice as possible. You want the liquid to cover, and in my experience adding much brine to kraut is a mistake, you really want the cabbage covered with cabbage juice for the most part. Salt helps extract that but you really have to beat the shit out of the cabbage, too. I was doing my usual half gallon mason jar filled with water as a tamper, but I wasn't getting quite the results I wanted. Then I tried putting some cabbage in the blender, and that was useless. It chopped the cabbage very finely but didn't extract any juice.I ended up using a bit of the brine to rinse the cabbage crums from the blender pitcher.

Then I figured out in the process of trying to jam stuff down in the mason jars I'm fermenting in, that the handle to a meat tenderizer I bought hoping it would be a good krauthammer, well, the handle actually is a pretty good krauthammer. It was skinny enough to get through the mouth of the jar and was pretty efficient at tamping things down, driving out air and extracting liquid.

After getting a full half gallon of straight kraut going I decided to go a little kraut-chi on things. I shredded the last head and a half or so of cabbage but also grated carrots in, maybe 20% of the total, and added a couple cloves of garlic for good measure.

I've lost my copy of Sandor Katz's tract but not my interest in fermented foods. The wins way outnumber the fails, it's a great way to preserve food and keep probiotics going into you. Probiotics and freaking deliciousness, because really, who doesn't love a good kosher dill or some sauerkraut or kimchi?

Onion Braid

I really peaked and burned out on the whole gardening thing the year I had my bypass. I did a lot that year, but it wasn't that fun and ever since most garden chores just seem a burden to me. I still want the produce and all, I just want it to happen with minimal interaction with me.

Luckily, Corinna seemed to pick up the pace about that same time and has even started selling CSA shares and whatnot. She grew a bunch of onions this spring. They'd have gotten bigger if she planted them in the fall, but for when they went in they got plenty big. But they were starting to die in the heat so she harvested them.

And braided a bunch of them in the basement to hang and keep in a cool dry place. Need an onion for the eggs? Go get one off the braid.

Extreme Makeover: Hive Edition

Okay, sorry for the headline there. It was finally time for us to take the separator out of the top bar hive. It keeps the package of bees we installed in spring occupied with the first part of the box so they don't live like college students or create a chaotic honey bee hoarder palace. But then once they've had a chance to get things going, they need some room or they'll swarm.

Which isn't as dramatic as it sounds, though it is a loss if you're trying to keep that colony of bees going. When bees swarm, they don't attach folks or anything like that, they just go set up housekeeping elsewhere. We needed to remove the tin foil barrier so they wouldn't run away from home.

Which is where the headline came in. Back when I had TV, there were a lot of shows on where they remodeled (usually actually rebuilt) people's houses. This might still be a thing, I don't know, but the tradeoff people made to be on the show was make yourself the object of pity for a national TV audience, we'll give you a house you can't afford the taxes on and leave you the financial equivalent of a stoker on a tandem bike going up hill when the captain jumps off and shouts 'have fun!'

If you didn't know, television is full of these little gems, it's why I can't watch the Royals play Minnesota right now, something I'd really like to do actually. Too much poison comes along with the trace of content I care for. We're up 4-1 as I write this, poised to win three in a row against the team we just reclaimed first place in the division from. If the rest of TV didn't suck so hard, I could be watching instead of looking at updates on my phone.

I digress. Holy cow, I need to get to bed anyway, riding to work tomorrow. Patrick came over and it was really a quickie deal, even he seemed impressed at how easy it went. No need to smoke the girls, just lift the lid, pull the divider, put the blank bars back in place, close up. It took about ten minutes tops. Once again the top bar hive seems to be so, so much less hassle than the Langstroth hives I kept umpteen years back. And now the girls have the equivalent of a huge home addition, we just took their two bedroom and made it a six.

It occurred to me the bees might almost be too much of a good thing. The apricot tree has always put on a lot of fruit, but this year it's branches are literally sagging to the ground with the weight.