Preserving the Harvest: Cucumbers

Hooray for cukes! We have made pickles with our cucumbers in the past, using the usual method of vinegar, et all. This time we thought we'd try lacto-fermented pickles. A blog we read had two recipes and we had the ingredients. So we made them. So far, we've only tried one of the two kinds of pickles. The garlic dill spears. They're actually pretty good. There is a different flavor and I need to get some grape leaves to make the pickles crunchy. But we'll make them again.
We have to wait for 1 1/2 more weeks till we can try the bread and butter pickles. But I think that we'll like those as well.

Now to try lacto-fermented baby dills!

Hannah

Preserving the Harvest: Eggplant

Our garden is doing really well and our eggplants have started producing. This is our second batch of eggplant. The first few eggplant we made ratatouille with, it was delicious!
Earlier this week, Momma brought in all the eggplant on the plants. I weighed it, 14 1/2 pounds of eggplant. We decided to make Baba Ghanoush. It was relatively simple. It was a little time-consuming though. We got a total of 9 cups of baba ghanoush and froze it for later.

I used the recipe from the 75th anniversary edition of the Joy of Cooking. Now I need to make soaked whole wheat pitas to eat with the baba ghanoush.

Hannah

Amputate or Agitate: What's the Difference

We're listening to 'The Enemy Below'. Momma and I were by the computer and I overheard 'we had to amputate his fingers', so I asked 'who's fingers?'. After a minute, Carrie said 'A guy's hand was shot and the doctor had to agitate his fingers.' Oh, Carrie, you are so funny!

Love, Hannah

Cultures for Health

In 2007, James had a big yeast infection. He was on, and sometimes still gets, fluconazole, an anti-fungal med. During this time, we kept James on probiotics, in the form of yogurt and some high-quality supplements. Since then, we have come across food blogs that help us in feeding James good food. One of the blogs we follow is offering a giveaway. Culture starters for yogurt, sourdough, milk and water kefir (One of the more common things people use water kefir for is homemade 'soda pop') and kombucha. All of these cultures are good for you and some add probiotics and prebiotics so necessery to our gut health. So I would like to invite you to visit Kelly's blog and enter the giveaway for the cultures.

Hannah