december projects.

Happy Monday, friends!

Today I thought I’d tell you about my November/December projects. It took pretty much the entire month of October to recover from our Road Trip, and then I was ready to take on two new hobbies: sourdough bread and kombucha.

First, bread.

I baked bread with a sourdough starter several years ago, and have always wanted to get back in the rhythm. Thankfully my friend Beth offered to share her starter and recipe with me.

I love baking bread. There’s something soothing about it. Working with my hands quiets my mind, and homemade bread feels like the most basic and nurturing of comfort foods.

 

 

This recipe is very simple, it just requires a bit of planning. On Sunday morning I take the starter out of the fridge and feed it with hot water, sugar, and potato flakes. It sits on the counter all day, covered with plastic wrap, bubbling happily.

Then, Sunday evening I mix the bread dough in the Kitchenaid, and set it in the oven all night to rise. The recipe I use is equal parts whole wheat flour and bread flour.

Monday morning before school starts, I knead the dough for a bit, then shape it into three loaves, and put them in the oven for a final rise. Just before lunch, I remove them, preheat the oven, then bake them for 30 minutes.

And voila, homemade bread!

 

 

Though as you can see, I’m still working on getting even loaves, the taste improves with each batch. It’s delicious and those warm loaves never fail to make the family happy. I try to make soup on Monday nights, so we can have soup and a fresh-baked loaf of bread.

You may be wondering how this bread works with me being gluten-free and the answer is “not good!” Sadly, I cannot eat my own homemade sourdough bread because it doesn’t make me feel well.

But I’ve decided that the baking of it is still enjoyable for me, and serving it is a way to love my family!

I haven’t been great about avoiding gluten since we adopted Gabe and Noah. I absolutely love to bake . . . bread, pies, cookies, muffins. And it’s terribly hard to expend all that energy baking and then not dive in and eat it! But I’ve felt consistently draggy and achey and my stomach has hurt. So I’ve resolved to be more disciplined, and I’m already feeling much better.

It helps to keep a little stash in the pantry of Aldi hazelnut chocolate bars and almonds and gluten free crackers to stave off the cravings (do any of these things replace the taste of homemade bread? No).

If you want to know about gluten-free baking, the answer is: I’ve tried dozens of recipes. And they just aren’t as good. They taste fine, just not mouth-wateringly delicious, and that’s pretty much what I aim for when I bake. So I’ve decided I’d rather make mouth-wateringly delicious food for the rest of my family than average food for all of us.

 

 

This brings me to my next December project, which is, happily, gluten-free!

Kombucha!

I’ve wanted to do this for years. Sometimes, for me, it just takes seeing a friend or family member successfully do something and I’m ready to give it a try.

My friend Annie makes her own kombucha and offered to give me a SCOBY to get started. Basically, what a sourdough starter is to bread, the SCOBY is to kombucha. SCOBY is an acronym: Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast.

And it looks as scary as it sounds.

 

 

When I brought our first SCOBY home, I told the kids it was a science project. I explained to Noah it’s a living organism that makes tea healthy, and he’d get to help me make kombucha. He was thrilled. So lately when guests walk in the door, he proudly announces to them, “Guess what! We have a SCOBY!”

We’ve gotten several blank stares.

Kombucha is even simpler to make than sourdough bread, but it also involves planning and a good bit of marking of the calendar.

I highly recommend The Big Book of Kombucha, which I’m enjoying so much. It gives very clear instructions, and has answered all my questions so far.

I’ve been doing this for all of a couple of months now, so surely that gives me the credibility to talk about it on a blog, right? Very simply, in order to make kombucha, you combine sweetened black tea with the SCOBY and some of the SCOBY starter liquid, and let it ferment for 15-21 days. Then you strain and bottle it, and let the bottles sit about 3 more days.

After that, your kombucha is ready to be refrigerated and enjoyed.

 

 

The fun thing about brewing kombucha, is that each batch makes another SCOBY. I’ve had 2 one-gallon batches brewing at a time (I staggered the start dates), and found that it makes enough for David and I each to have one glass of kombucha a day. This week I’ll begin doubling that amount, because I’d like to give a small glass to the kids each morning.

As soon as I bottle a gallon’s worth of kombucha, I begin the next batch.

Why kombucha, you may wonder?

It’s not exactly for the taste. Some people love the tangy, cidery, carbonated taste, David and I think it’s fine. Actually, the taste is growing on us. Since kombucha is fermented, it’s full of probiotics and vitamins.

When Noah tasted it for the first time, he said, “It’s good! It tastes like beer.”

 

 

(Noah does not know what beer tastes like).

Other than the cost of my gallon jars and bottles, it’s virtually free to make since I always keep sugar and black tea in my house. And so I brew it as a health supplement.

David drinks his kombucha in the evenings, but I’ve found my new rhythm, which is to drink a glass of cold kombucha first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, while reading my Bible. I then eat a healthy breakfast (2 eggs and fruit), and make a travel mug of decaf coffee at 8:00 when we start school to sip on during the morning. Doing this has helped my stomach feel drastically better (as opposed to starting the day with coffee), and has given me more energy.

Just as with sourdough bread, I learn a little something with each batch of kombucha, and that’s why I enjoy these hobbies. I’m making a new batch this week, and tweaking it by using purified water instead of tap water.

The Big Book of Kombucha is full of recipes to add flavor, and I’m about ready to delve into them.

 

 

So. That’s what I’ve been up to these last couple of months.

If these projects sound stressful to you, don’t worry! You don’t have to try them! I’ve contemplated both for a long time, but I waited until the idea sounded fun and inspiring, not exhausting. And that’s exactly what they’ve been for me.

Sometimes I let the kids help, sometimes I shoo them all out of the kitchen and enjoy these simple tasks all alone for a few minutes.

I realized that just as David needs to look around our yard and feel that it’s a living, growing place, with vegetables and fruit trees and compost and a rain water barrel, I need to look around my kitchen and feel it’s a living, thriving, producing space.

Our kitchen is small, but I realized it’s not the size that matters to me so much as for it to feel functional and inspiring. So this fall I re-organized shelves and cabinets (you know me … re-organizing again), to make room for kombucha and bread-baking, and when I look around and see these things hard at work for me, bubbling and fermenting and working their magic, I’m inspired.