The Living Kitchen

Wish I could explain away my lengthy absence by saying that I flew away to South America to plant trees in an Amazon reforestation project for Earth Day and have only just returned today but, well, I didn’t. Along with the delay caused by a wonky WordPress glitch, (grrrUMBLE!…) (WordPress is the best! I’m all fixed now! It seems that clearing the Cookies from one’s system is the answer to most every problem, hmmm…how appropriate, yes? I LOVE this world! : )

So, I’ve merely been occupied by life, people, plain-n-simple. Hoo well… Amidst all this, I did manage to produce my first successful batch of homemade sauerkraut, and I must say I am rather excited about it. It’s tricky, here in the tropics where the median temperature is always just right for all the wrong bacteria. But I had Faith that Courage would see me through and low and behold:

Just look at this gorgeous bowl of hot pink and orange sauerkraut vibrating off the screen with pro-biotic action and vital life force! See those little black balls nestled in all cozy betwixt the tart and juicy strands of cabbage and carrot? Those, my friends, are Juniper Berries and they are DIVINE in the BRINE, I must say! What a surprise to me! My neighbor just happens to be German and so I asked her for some roots info on sauerkraut and she said: juniper berries. They were my favorite part! I am going to put in many more on the next batch. I should look them up to make sure I don’t unwittingly dose myself in some crazy way, but I’m pretty certain it’s fine. I’ll update on that too, when they finally let me put up my photos! ***Updated here.

I sliced red and green cabbage super fine with my knife ( I have a mandoline but as I only made a small trial batch - a precaution I chose to take after wasting tons of cabbage in the past when I couldn’t get it right - and I want to practice my knife skills, I hand sliced it all paper thin, including a few huge, sweet carrots. I massaged it with a very tiny bit of Celtic salt and a bit of lemon juice, (which I’ll leave out next time - it’s unnecessary) and let it sit for a while to get juicy, giving it another few squeezes every so often over the course of about an hour to really generate as much liquid as possible. Then I sprinkled it with a large pinch of probiotic powder, tossed in the juniper berries, and gave it a good stir. It went into a quart sized mason jar, topped with a clean, inner leaf of cabbage. I was afraid that, even washed, an outer leaf might pollute the batch with mold spores. Then I pushed down hard to try to get the juices to come to the top and weighed it down with a crazy contraption that kept the juices raised. (I used a tiny juice glass pressed ontop of the cabbage leaf which just fit inside the rim.) It was covered with a clean dish towel, sealed with a rubber band and left on the counter top for about 4 days.

About 1/2 an inch on the top turned greeny/grey from oxidation, with very little mold and that only on the upper most layer. I’ve heard that is normal and fine, because you scrape it off. So I scraped that off with a bit of the healthy part as well, (in case there was any mycelial mold action), when I could wait no longer and gave it a taste test. It was delicious, if just a tiny bit overly tart from the lemon juice, which was definitely superfluous. I mean, it’s sauerkraut right? No extra sourness needed.

This sauerkraut was just what my body needed and I can’t wait to try some other combinations, including Kimchi style. Another fun note was that my hale was being re-roofed while this was going on and the roofer guy was, by pure chance, newly raw! He’d just completed an Arise and Shine cleanse with juicing and looked spectacularly terrible from the detox, haha! He had lost a lot of weight (which is all the toxic stuff his body dumped and he’ll regain fresh, wholesome weight soon) from the last time I’d seen him, but was doing just great and commited to 80/10/10. How wonderful. Of course, I just had to offer him a bowl of sauerkraut to share and that was the well-spent end of that first batch. A great success all around, I’m happy to say.