Adventures in Making Stuff: Kefir

A woman on my buy nothing group was giving out kefir grains. Mrguy likes kefir, and I wanted to try it, so I raised my hand and now I'm doing the things!

It's beyond easy. You take the kefir grains (tapioca-like balls, swimming in milk snot), add them to some fresh milk, cover with a semi-permeable barrier (I use a coffee filter) and wait. In one day it's kefir, a fermented milk product that is tasty and super good for you. I have been flavoring mine with some pureed berries and adding a little sugar. 

Here it is getting ready to be kefir. Hiding behind some cat grass that I'm giving away to the people on buy nothing.

And here it is after I've flavored it. 

The whole group of us that she gave grains to are having a good time adding kefir to things (instead of buttermilk in pancakes, for example) and basically geeking out.

Good times! I had heard of making kefir but couldn't quite picture the process until I was gifted the grains.

And now I am one!

Halloween Update

I completely forgot that what I *do* like about Halloween is mrguy's enthusiasm. He enjoys making a scary Jack-O-Lantern and giving candy to kids.

He hit it out of the park on the pumpkin. And I have to say it looks smashing on the blue chair.

The kid part was mixed. We live on a dark, hilly block that nobody comes to. Our neighbors from a few houses down brought their kids over. And a cute duo appeared at our door wearing white outfits with orange pillows taped to their tummies (they were sake nigiri). Mrguy brought in the pumpkin and put the lemons back in their basket on the blue chair. Then about 15 minutes later a crowd appeared, and I heard clamdip at the door saying I'd be home. Much doorbell ringing ensued as I scrambled to find the candy. Clam had brought pretty much all of the neighborhood kids with her. So cute! One of the girls got really excited because we had lemons on our porch and asked if she could take them (that's what they're for). Those lemons made her happier than the candy, I think.

Anyhoo, a few days later I thanked the Jack-O-Lantern for his service and made him into soup. It was definitely a mrsguy kinda soup, featuring what I call "pie". What is pie? Once I had my sister over for dinner and I made a dessert that consisted of a fruity, blended sauce poured over some pound cake. What's in the sauce? Frozen berries and pie. Pie? Yeah, I had a piece of pie in the fridge so I put it in the blender with the other stuff. It was delicious, as pie often is.

In this case, pie was all the good stuff from the freezer. Some frozen leftover red curry pumpkin sauce from the Thai restaurant, homemade chicken stock, and some liquid from an eggplant dish that I made many times in the last few months. And then a little bit of store-bought curry powder.

It tasted fantastic. And now on to the Holidays.

Halloween

Lucky you! I have complicated feelings about Halloween. First, I never had my own ideas about how to dress. As a young kid I was dressed up by my older sister: a bunny (she dressed Chinese), and for kindergarten, I was dressed as a Famous French Painter. Because in 1966 that was going to be easy to explain. I had a friend a few years later who had all the ideas: sea otter, stained glass window -- whatever she came up with I *also* wanted to be, because I had no ideas of my own.

Once, when I was in my twenties, I did a retread of 1965 -- I put on my boyfriend's "coolie" hat and the satin jammies that my granny got in Hong Kong...did eyeliner and put on Opium perfume. Looked in the mirror and went WTF!!! You can't dress as Chinese in 1986! Realizing what I had so easily done without thinking (And hello! I took Asian American Studies in college), I decided to declare that I was dressed as a "Racial Stereotype," explaining for the rest of the night how wrong I was.

Similarly, there was a trend when I was in middle school to dress as a "hobo". It was the easiest and most relaxed outfit. We didn't know about homelessness. Makes me sad when I think about it.

Twenty years ago I landed a job at the home of competitive Halloweening. I don't always get the references, and sometimes the outfits are inspiringly clever, so I just watch.

Then there's the nighttime part of Halloween. The part where you interact with children. The awkward times. I let mrguy do the candy giving because he's better at it. Speaking of awkward, my aunt from Norway was unaware of Halloween customs when she visited us in October of 1973. She answered the doorbell, and brought the little lion who had run the bell into the kitchen. His frightened parents retrieved him a few minutes later.

I think the last straw on Halloween for me was the infamous gig at the brewery. Our bandmate in the Hawaiian band loves Halloween, and doesn't love that we play music in the Hawaiian language (only one of us has a connection to Hawaii). She was quitting the band after we had had periodic conversations about her discomfort with playing Hawaiian music as non-Hawaiians. And I love her but don't love Halloween. She got us what would be our farewell gig at a brewery and at the last minute she asked us to play The Monster Mash and the theme to the Addams Family.

We played the gig at the brewery. We set up our own PA. We played Hawaiian and Monsterian music on the sidewalk of a busy street, next to the Taco Bell drive-thru window. The brewery, which makes beer, did not give us beer or pay us.

This has been "What I Hate About Halloween" by mrsguy. I'm going to try to get over it now. It's no fun to be waiting for Halloween to pass, especially when Halloween is now a season. 

I'd rather go to church.

Jaggery

I'm kinda obsessed with apples right now, which is good. Every other week my mom's caregiver brings the mama to my house, and with her a hoard of apples. They're available for the taking at the dining room at my mom's community. She takes and never eats, and then they come to me.

I started making applesauce with them recently, and decided that I'd use jaggery instead of white sugar. It turned out delicious, and now I'm strung out on that particular recipe. What is jaggery? It's a sugar that is less purified. The jaggery we had in the house was from an Indian IPA recipe mrguy was brewing for a time, and I've been using it over the years for sweetness and funk when cooking. Using it is a labor of love, because it is packaged in hard lumps that have to be grated or even microplaned before you can  measure it. 

The other day I used the last of our 1lb bag. Mrguy ordered some from Whole Foods and it arrived...granulated. It will have a place in our pantry but it smelled more like a granular molasses than the musky, funky and almost savory flavor I've come to love. So today I will go in person to the South Asian grocery and see what they have. Crossing my fingers that they'll have OG jaggery and not this newfangled powdered stuff.

In the meantime, Atlas Obscura has served me this article about a Russian sweet called pastila, which is a labor-intensive apple meringue. I want to make it so badly but today's oath is "No cooking, only eating".