Mothers, Babies and Scobies

So in another life, I used to be a knitwit.

Here are some of my creations:

Shrug knit with Noro Kureyon (Japanese hand dyed yarn)

Lanesplitter Skirt for Gwen (Noro and Paton's Merino)

Art Bag (Noro)

Storm Toque-r for Nathaniel (Noro - can you tell I like Noro?)

My life and my personality being what they are - ADD - I have been ignoring the yarn in my stash and focusing on writing the great novel and sewing quilts and patio cushions instead.

But for reasons unknown (KISMET?), I ventured to Ravelry recently - the knitter's online mecca - all things knitting all the time - and immediately noticed that I had a friend request.  Weird.  I proceeded to check out my fellow knitter's profile, as you can never be too cautious.  The last "friend" request I had was from a Scottish non-knitter who said that he loved to see "women's legs in knitted stockings and women's bodies wrapped in soft wool".

I kid ewe not. (See that? There are two puns in that sentence!)

While I was tempted to friend the woolly wiggler for the humour factor, I did not.  I was worried that I would be tempted to start sending him wool porn.

So... where was I?

Aha! - the friend request from Ravelry.

I saw that the lady was a blogger and so I read some of her entries.  You can tell a lot about a person from reading her blog.  Just like that, I learned about kombucha tea.  I learned that it tastes like tart green apples with an underlying sweetness and fizz.

I learned that it (supposedly) promotes a healthy liver, is great for digestion and prevents cancer.

And I learned that I can brew it myself, in the privacy of my own home, using black tea.

I marched down to the Quartermaster for a bottle of Kombucha, eager to sample this magical elixir.  I picked a bottle of tea that looked like it had the most sediment on the bottom (a.k.a. The Mother), as that is what is used to grow a scoby - the jelly-like, snotty layer of cellulose that keeps harmful bacteria out of the tea while it's fermenting.

Some up close and personal snaps of scobies, some more attractive than others:

inhabitat.com

tching.com

inhabitat.com

***

Aren't they pretty?

Quartermaster sells Kombucha starters, but at $18 a box, my inner cheapskate was not impressed.  I did not purchase the Mother in a box, but I did leave with a bottle of Kombucha and a package of locally made, overpriced, gluten-free chocolate and almond treats that are so fucking delicious, that I am going to try to make them too.

The magical moment?  When I cracked open the bottle of kombucha and took a swig.

LOVE. 

So yummy, light and refreshing, tart and sweet, and a sparkly explosion in my mouth! Mmmmmmm.

I can't wait to brew my own, but first I have to make a scoby.

Here's the baby scoby (a.k.a. the Mother, the starter culture, the mushroom) in the bottle of Kombucha that I purchased from the store:

You can also see a mother in a bottle of apple cider vinegar - it's that brownish, smoky thing that hovers at the base of the bottle.

The scoby pictured above is tiny but it will grow rapidly once it's fed, taking 2-3 weeks to mature.

I thought that I better get started if it was going to take a minimum of two weeks.

I rummaged through the recycling bin and found a pint-sized glass jar.  I washed it thoroughly and then sterilized it by boiling it for ten minutes.  I like to err on the side of caution when it comes to food and drink.

While I was waiting, I brewed two cups of black tea and mixed in 4 tbsp of sugar:

I carefully removed the sterile jar from the pot of water, and dumped in the bottle of Kombucha:

Aren't the two vessels of amber liquid pretty?

I then mixed them together to begin the fermentation process:

my kombucha starter, in a warm spot out of direct sunlight

I used a paper towel and one of Gwen's rainbow loom creations to seal the jar.  I could have also used cheesecloth, a coffee filter, linen or muslin but I went the paper towel route because that's what I had. You want to use something that's breathable that will keep the fruitflies out.  

I like that I can see the baby scoby sort of hanging down the side, near the top of the jar.  

I will post more pictures over the next couple of weeks as the scoby matures.

Grow, baby, grow!

***

Addendum:  I am posting a picture of Day 3, so you can see how it grows...  there are actually two scobies growing:

Day 5 - see that white line that covers the surface of the liquid?  That's the new scoby, spreading out:

Day 7 - it's getting juicy!

More juiciness to come :-)

Musical pairing:  Strange Brew by Cream.

Part 2 of Kombucha Making

Any Fin is Possible!

Apologies in advance for apundance of bad jokes.

I will eat pretty much anything.  Let me rephrase that.  I AM a food snob (not ashamed) and so I won't ever knowingly ingest things like canned meat, cheese whiz, packaged soup or frozen convenience foods; however, there is little in the way of unprocessed food that I won't mow down, except for the ubiquitous banana.  EEEEEYYYYUUUUUUWWWWWW.

I'm not sure whether I was force fed a banana at a young age, like I was with a tomato, but I can't abide nature's "perfect food".  I did get over my deep loathing of tomatoes when I was in my early twenties, and now I eat them daily - in salads, sandwiches, soups and the dishes that I make for my family's dinner.  But I digress, that is a story for another day.

Look at these nasty bananas:

Ick - gagging here.  They should be illegal.

You, sir, are disgusting...

image courtesy of http://www.vh1.com/celebrity/2011-04-26/these-carvings-are-bananas/

Poor bananas.  They really have no idea how I peel about them.

Every couple of months, I try a (revolting) bite of banana and I involuntarily gag.  I can eat bananas in smoothies (very nice mixed with berries, yogurt and juice), and I bake two-dozen banana-chocolate-chip muffins at least once a month (which I scarf down like a beggarwoman), but I can't eat a banana in its natural state.  It's all about the texture.  

I can't eat lox either.  I am o-fish-ally disgusted by it; it's reel-y clammy and reel-y slimy.
Many years ago, I was invited to a friend's for brunch.  The menu was lovely - toasted Montreal style bagels with cream cheese and lox (oh my cod!), and strawberries sprinkled with a bit of sugar.

It all looked very colourful and stylish, and completely delicious.   I ate it all, except for the salmon.  To be polite, I did sample the tiniest, thinnest sliver of fish, but the texture made me recoil in disgust.  The hostess was not impressed with my antics; her pained expression made me think that I was giving her a haddock.  I was actually ashamed of myself.  I can't stand it when people can't or won't try to get over their childhood (childish?) food issues.

Over the years I have tried smoked salmon many times, but the very melt-in-your-mouth texture that others crave leaves me shuddering.

Yes, I am carping on.    

One Saturday morning last winter,  I had cabin fever and so I dragged the family to the Western Fair Farmer's Market.  Trawling for goodies, my son spotted a vendor handing out samples of smoked salmon and trout - big chunks, actually.  I am tenacious and so I tentatively took a piece of fish, popped it in my maw and prepared to gag.  Holy mackerel! The strangest thing happened... I did not retch and the fish was completely delectable - it didn't taste crappie at all.  I was ecstatic.  We bought an eighteen dollar piece of fish, most of which disappeared on the car ride home.  It was truly delicious.  We returned the following week and bought more.  And then more the next.  Our yen for fish was getting expensive; it was a pain in the bass.   

I told the hubby how my Dad used to smoke his fish in a big blue and white striped Union Carbide barrel in our garage.  An avid fisherman, he always had fish to smoke.  What I wouldn't give for a taste of my Dad's fish today.  Big sigh.

Richard told me that it might be possible to borrow an electric smoker from one of his colleagues - Bill - another diehard fisherman.  Here's a shot of the "Big Chief":

After Richard's first batch of salmon, we were hooked.  Bill eventually gave us the Big Chief after borrowing it many times.  He was probably sick of us bugging him for it.  He said that he never used it, it took up room in his garage, yada, yada, yada, so he told us not to bring it back.  SCORE!
The ridiculous part of this story is that, after tasting Richard's salmon, Bill took the smoker back!  He came and got it one day and we were very sad.
Oh-ho.  I just reel-ized something.  Bill was being an Indian giver.  I'm laughing as I type this... okay so I'm not politically correct but the smoker's called a "Big Chief" for cod's sake!
Oh come on people, lighten up.
Floundering here... I really hope I don't get any hate mail, but seeing as this is the very first inappropriate comment that I've made in my blog - chuckling away - I'm sure salmon will say something.

Soooooo... moving along... the salmon that my husband makes is usually devoured by the 10 year old fishpig, aka Nathanimal, in a matter of seconds.  The remaining pieces are individually wrapped in plastic film, and popped into the freezer.  They stow it someplaice sneaky, a place that is not obvious to me.  It's hardly fair.

So buoys and gills, I have decided that it is time for me to smoke my own fish, which I will then wrap and hide in a remote corner of the downstairs freezer (heh heh - like in a box of frozen burgers, which would never get eaten in this house), shellfishly hogging it all (and becoming a fishpig myself).  I am reveling in my cleverness here.  :-)

Here is my $56 worth of salmon, purchased from Costco, one bag of "wild" and one of "farmed":

I read that the salmon can be brined either wet or dry, so just for the halibut, I did half and half.  If you're dry brining, you can use frozen fish (I brined it for 5.5 hrs in a sea salt and brown sugar mixture).  The brine extracts the liquid from the fish and replaces it with flavour and seasoning (i.e. the ingredients in your brine).  

Packets of wild salmon:

Here's the fish resting in the sugar and salt dry brine:

Here it is again, after 5 hours.  The moisture in the fish has reduced the brine to a thick, honeylike substance:

Here's my wet brine recipe. If you can't read my crappie writing, I have also added another recipe farther down the page which also promises stellar results.

This brine recipe is from the Examiner.com:

1/2 C. Salt

1 C. Brown Sugar
1/4 tsp Garlic Powder
1/4 tsp Liquid smoke-your preferred flavor
1/4 tsp Lowry's seasoned salt
4 Tbsp Molasses
Juice of one fresh lime
1 Qt Water

Here's the farmed salmon soaking in the brine; it has been defrosted before being added.  I'm about to pop it in the fridge overnight.  The floaty yellowish bits are fresh ginger:  

I'm just happy that the devildog didn't get it.  Django steals everything:  whole chickens, raw meat of all kinds, and yes, even $30 of salmon fillets.  

After removing the salmon from the brine, be sure to rinse and pat it dry with a paper towel so that the pellicle will form.  Here's some more information about that, also from the Examiner:  

The pellicle is a dried coating of proteins and ingredients in your brine that seal the surface of the fish... resulting in a more moist and flavorful product. First, remove the fish from the brine and rinse lightly under cold water then pat dry with a paper towel. Lay the fish on a rack, skin down, so that air may circulate. If the outside temperature is relatively cool you can set it in the shade for two hours.  Many people refrigerate the salmon to form the pellicle.  

My pellicle has formed (after a couple of hours in the fridge) and it's ready for the smoker:

Time to preheat the smoker.  I put my mixture of alder and maple chips in the pan on the bottom and plugged it in.   After fifteen minutes, the fish goes in:

The smoke smelt amazing!

Richard, brain sturgeon that he is, told me that it would take at least 5 hours for the fish to be done.

It did not.

In fact, it took less than three and so I overcooked some of it because of this.  The fish is still delish and so I am not too put out.  I am thinking that it was quite cool outside when Richard last used the smoker and so his fish may have taken longer.  He didn't use the barbecue cover as an insulator either:

Here's the finished product:

Looks cod awful, but tastes delicious.  The white goo on top of some of the pieces is fish fat.  It is fine to eat, but people try to avoid it because it looks a bit unappetizing (I don't have an issue with it).  I read that this can be controlled by smoking your fish at a cooler temperature, but seeing as my smoker doesn't have a temperature gauge, I'm not sure how to proceed.  

I should also note here that I prefer the fish that has been wet-brined.  The dry brined fish is a different texture - a little drier - although that could also be because I overcooked it and the pieces are thinner.   I will buy another bag of the wild salmon and try it with a wet brine and see what happens.

My verdict:  not so bad, but I cod dolphinitely do better.  

Oh and if you can think of some batter fish puns, be sure to let minnow.  nyuk nyuk.  

Musical accompaniment is Fish Heads by Barnes and Barnes (1979):

Eggsuberance!

It's Good Friday and you know what that means.  It means that there will be a full day of prayer - the kids love it! - marking the anniversary of Jesus' death by crucifixion.  We will remove all flowers and shiny objects from our home, and we will also fast.  :-)

It also means that I will venture downstairs into the cellar and retrieve my supplies to make Ukrainian Easter eggs:

I used to decorate eggs with my family when I was a kid, but we used a kit like this:

When I was really young, I wanted to eat those little tablets up (they looked like candies), but as I grew older and wiser, having surreptitiously sampled one and realizing that THERE WAS NO SUGAR IN IT AT ALL!, I grew to be happy with the chemistry involved in the preparation of the dyes.  My brother and I fought over who got to be the one to add the tablespoonful of vinegar to the tablet to make it fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz like mad.

My Mom's side of the family is Ukrainian, but no one in our family decorated eggs in the old style.  My Nana made perogies, which she called petta-heh (phonetic spelling here, will someone please tell me how to spell that properly?) and paska (Easter bread) but she didn't make pysanky.

I had always obsessed over the single pysanka in my Nana's china cabinet, but I wasn't allowed to handle it.  In addition to the prized egg, the china cabinet housed all sorts of forbidden fruit:  my Dido's sizeable calculator "collection" can you say hoarder?, the sour balls, the chocolate bars past their prime, the cribbage board, and the tins full of coins.  I wanted to get into that cabinet and I vowed that one day, I would learn how to make an egg like that.

Fast forward, twenty years later.  At age 27, while working at the National Library in Ottawa, I saw an advertisement for an egg decorating workshop at the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral.  Sign me up!  I learned this ancient art from a Pysanky master who showed her eggs around the world.  I eggsulted over my good fortune.  Here's the egg that I made in that workshop:

What a beauty!  Clearly, I'm a natural.  The children have since broken this egg, the brats.  They probably shook it which is a total NO-NO, and which is everyone's immediate reaction when they pick up a pysanka for the first time.  Why the hell do you want to shake it, people?  You can feel that it's all dried up inside, dammit.  DON'T SHAKE THE EGGS!

Rant over, although there will probably be another, if I'm honest.

I took some pictures for those of you who would like to learn how to make your own pysanky.  I find egg decorating to be usually very meditative and relaxing except when a child's hair is on fire or another child tries to burn down the library during a workshop that I'm leading, and that is a good thing for someone like me.  Here's my set-up at the dining room table, where the magic happens.  It looks like my crack smoking kit, but it's not, honest.  Pictures of that to come.

The newspaper and paper towel are for hot beeswax spatters, and the red kistka is used to apply the wax to the raw egg.  You dip the copper funnel at the tip of the kistka into a candle flame to heat it up.  When it's nice and hot, you scoop the funnel into the beeswax and it should go in like a hot knife through butta.  The tip of the kistka is applied to the egg and the wax should run freely.  Beeswax is used because it has a low melting point (useful for when the wax is removed at the end) and as an added bonus, it smells good:

This is a plateful of kistky.  The white one makes the thinnest lines, the blue - medium, the red - thick and the wooden kistka is a homespun one.  I use the blue one the most.  

Here are some of the dyes that I use.  These are not food grade dyes, and they will stain everything, so don't wear your Easter finery:

Here's my cheat sheet, which I made up for the workshops that I teach:

Today, I decided to make the egg in the picture below, on the bottom left.  I have just started to apply wax to my raw egg:

A closeup of the same egg, right before it's dipped into the yellow dye.  The only white on the finished egg is beneath the beeswax.  Does this make sense?  Once I dip the egg into the yellow dye, all the white that you see here will disappear, reappearing only when I melt the wax off at the end of the process:

My egg has been removed from the yellow dye after about 5 minutes, and I have added more wax to it.  These new lines of beeswax will have yellow beneath them.

And into the orange we go, after the application of more wax:

Dark pink is next:

Then a quick dip into red to brighten the colour:

And finally, the black.  Here's the egg right before I begin to melt all that wax:

The wax is removed by holding the egg at the side of a candle flame and wiping off the excess wax on a tissue.  You don't hold the egg above the flame because doing so will leave carbon marks like this:

I don't know why the carbon is only at the top of the flame and not at the side.  It must rise as it burns off?  Help me out, chemists!

Here is my favourite moment.  It's like watching a baby being born:


Tada!  It's gorge.  I think I like my egg better than the one in the book!

And because I can't end this post without my favourite Easter Bunny joke EVAH...

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Ether.

Ether who?

Ether bunny.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Cargo.

Cargo who?

Cargo beep beep and run over the ether bunny.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Boo.

Boo who?

Don't cry.  The ether bunny be back next year.

Happy Easter, everybody!

The Thrill Kill Kult is for all of you Devil Bunnies out there: