Kitchen Living: Its alive!!!

See those 6 vessels?  Yep.  Six.  Count 'em.  Each is home to a thriving colony of micro-organisms destined for my intestines.  As the daughter of a microbiologist, recent studies showing that the human contains more microbial cells than human cells excites me to no end.  As a yoga teacher and healer, the idea of gut health influencing brain chemistry via the seratonin highway of the vegas nerve does likewise.  And as a whole/natural foods lover and advocate, the whole make-things-more-digestable-by-preparing-them-the-way-humans-have-been-for-thousands-of-years co-evolution of digestion and food processing theories make lots of sense.

So, we've gotten on the fermenting train.  By which I mean that I started fermenting things, after some epic failures, and my Darlin'Man has taken beautiful ownership of the whole process.  He eats alot, does my man who works outdoors all day even in the depths of 40 below winters.  And I feel so much better about it if he's eating a quart of lacto-fermented pickles everyday than a box of cereal every day!  So I've been encouraging his love of kraut.

What you see up there is (from left to right) : kombucha jar, crock of ginger carrots, giant kombucha crock, kefir quart, buttermilk quart, Saurkraut crock.
The buttermilk is a new experiment: I bought a pint of it to use in a chocolate cake recipe (delicious by the by), and decided to try to keep a culture going off of the store-bought.  We shall see.  If it works, I forsee many and many buttermilk biscuits.
I'm quite proud of the GIANT kombucha glass vessel - I found it at freds.  I think it was intended to be a cookie jar.

At any rate, I happened to start the carrots going yesterday, but otherwise, this is a piece of kitchen living that my Darlin'Man tends.  Its a bit like a garden: once its set up and going, there's the constant occasional tending : once a day kefir; once a week kombucha; somewhere in between for kraut.  And you get to harvest your fill!  It makes my heart sing, seeing him puttering in the kitchen, tending things.  Taking ownership is the best term I can come up with.  I might do a batch now and then, but they're still his.  I've always been a bit of a kitchen queen, and as we slowly learn to cook together, as he takes projects in the kitchen, I love the sense of partnership that continues to develop.