Fermento or Demento?

There is always a cause and
a way to network for a better
good at the Farmers' Market
which places that big,
 corporate food distributors
just won't allow.

I’m outside this morning, watching the leaves turn yellow, and slurping some coffee before I cycle out to the Farmers’ Market. I go there more for ideas than for the products, and I meet and get to chat with like-minded people. My love for the Farmers’ Market is directly proportional to the hatred I feel going to a giant food store [CFM α DFS, or LFM = k(HFS)]. This will be my last entry about food for a while, I swear. The extra sitting around to purposely stay off my legs/feet is beginning to bore me, so I feel compelled to write something. The only walking and standing that I could handle for the past couple of days was to can some brewed pickles in the kitchen, and to play around with shaping plastics and metal: jury-rigging and custom making a type of airlock system for another experiment I had in mind. I caught myself for a moment, wondering . . . who in the hell else on this Earth would be as interested to tinker around with this sort of thing? More about this in a new paragraph when I return.

I learned that I am eligible to acquire yet another label. I would assume that it is official for me, and has been so for quite some time; I just took on wearing another hat for it as my interests expand into other categories. After that project, I re-read some of Michael Pollan’s book, Cooked, to recall a past caption I saw in it regarding this same situation. I realized that I veer toward belonging to this particular and peculiar group of people who busy themselves over the art and science of fermenting food products. Apparently there is a name for them: they are called fermentos. They are this strange and esoteric subculture of people who openly invite microbial cultures into their homes, and harness those agents of decomposition for enabling some unique and (hopefully) delicious transformations of their kitchen stock. They are the home brewers and vintners, pickle and condiment makers, and the preservers/crafters and masters of all other things made from what is essentially the controlled spoilage of grain, fruits and vegetables, various meat proteins, and milk. I’m not sure if I like that name, but it is what it is. It does portray and represent though a set of people with a grander and purposeful agenda - at least for them. They choose a greater good over convenience. They are more likely to grow (or at least be interested in and appreciate) gardens, and are apt to treat food like it was precious more so than the average sort. They are crazy enough to accept a margin of risk of contamination that may ruin their results. These are people who, for the most part, understand how the flawed current conventional systems of: commercial food production and land (ab)use, marketing, distribution, preservation, and how the obscene amount of toxicity and wastage within all those facets, are doing more harm than good to us and the planet. This is their (our) way of weaning ourselves away, and opting out of that system. Making wine and beer at home, and recycling your own bottles and containers then becomes like a noble form of insurrection. For some of the more radical fermentos, personal economy doesn’t even enter the picture. For instance, it might be cheaper to buy a brick of factory-made mozzarella at a store, but for one to take the time and effort to make it in one’s own kitchen, despite the extra cost, indicates a lot of hubris and a strong urge to rebel*.

To admit that I appear to be one of these so-called fermento beings to some degree, and to say that I’ve invested some time and interest in exploring the ways one can exploit micro-organisms to make things like alcohol and kefir, cure sausage, or preserve and flavour vegetables instead of eradicating them from my kitchen with cleaning chemical warfare may seem weird to some. The effort to do so isn’t that much more complicated or troublesome than what I already do now in terms of having to divide and repackage bulk foods into more manageable portions with living as a single person. So long as time and money aren’t wasted, I don’t care too much about how my hobbies, health measures, and harmless efforts to save a buck might look weird and eccentric to some. However, I do concern myself about getting too wrapped up in the more conventional things, for sake of appearing “normal”, which in actuality will ultimately do real harm to us all. Our current rate and state of food waste is one of those things that I really want to distance myself from and be less involved with. In regards to the paradigm of the food system in place now, both nationally and globally, here is what I think is really ridiculously weird, demented, insane, and shameful to be allowing:

·         It is estimated that up to a third of the food for human consumption is wasted globally. Much of that isn’t even due to actual spoilage or expiration in more affluent nations. Food stores of more developed countries reject or discard a lot of produce just because it doesn’t reach some standard of being “aesthetically pleasing”.

·         That 30% doesn’t just represent a waste of the actually food; it also represents the squandering and wastage of water, fuel and fertilizer to cultivate, process, package, and transport it . . . just to have it put in a landfill later! The dumping of all that wasted food is also a major contributor of untapped methane emissions which also lead to greenhouse gases. More detailed stats from the David Suzuki Foundation.

·         It is shameful that we still are destroying and clearing away more natural habitats to grow yet more food for human consumption when we are already wasting the ridiculous amount that currently we do.

·         On the continent of Africa, about 70% of its population is involved with farming and agriculture; yet many of them are starving and reliant on food and aid from the Western world: from places mostly in Western Europe and North America where the numbers of farmers are dwindling down to only about 2% of those populations.**

·         On a monetary level, it is estimated that it would take about 30 billion dollars to end world hunger; another 120 billion or so, if distributed the right way, to end world poverty altogether. The USA alone uses, on average, about 121 billion dollars a year just to dispose of that nation’s food waste. Better food management and a renaissance and rediscovery of the art of home canning and preservation of food; not just in the USA, or North America and Europe, but globally, could help drop that number drastically.

Another thing that we can do to economize and avoid food waste is to just try to make a better effort to be daring and open-minded enough to find alternative ways to make that which we find unappetizing into something more palatable. It involves some creativity. This action is also my chosen experiment for the day. Along with some other stuff for a bigger project, I bought turnips today at the Farmers’ Market. They were really fresh and super-cheap. I wondered how many of them from that vendor's table would be thrown away afterward just because they aren’t seen as a real treat and thence couldn’t be sold. The Hudderites were selling them, so there is some comfort in knowing that their frugal practices wouldn’t allow them to be wasted. However, there was also the dissatisfaction of knowing that these things were just wasting fuel and space on a truck being taken for a ride back to the colony again for no monetary profit, to be later either used by them, or fed to livestock if they were starting to spoil. They were better off not leaving their farm to begin with. Therein was the moment of clarity to devise a challenge for myself, and an opportunity to be innovative.

Ordinarily, my regular relationship with turnips is that of absolute loathing. How they could have ever

IT"S ALIVE!!!! I've become the Dr. Frankenstein
of scary, mutant vegetable preparation.

been willingly chosen as edible garden produce; managing to escape from being classified as some sort of wretched bulbous weed, is a mystery to me. As a kid, I hated the ghastly goddamned stench those things made when they were boiled, and their taste had that indescribably horrid note of vile bitterness that made me want to rip out my own tongue. I never managed to grow out of that disgust for them like I have with other foodstuffs. However, I’m a big enough man to give them one last chance by finding an alternate way to prepare them. The hypothesis of this experiment is this: the foulness of turnips may be erased (or at least reduced) if I try pickling them using a lacto-culture. That is, taking two stinky negative things, and turning them into a positive. I researched and found a recipe on the web posted by a fellow despiser of them, who now claims to be an instant convert to liking them after he discovered a middle-eastern method of pickling them. The recipe is simple called Lebanese pickled turnips. The advantages of their preparation are the following:

·         They are not subjected to any boiling water or steam at all, thus they aren’t exuding that ungodly miasma that stinks up the place.

·         A sharp knife, a clean jar, a lid fitted with an airlock, are all you need for equipment. A leftover piece of raw beet, some coarse salt, some garlic, and spices is all you have to add to them as ingredients.

·         You won’t have to travel to Lebanon, or any other war zone, to try them.***

I won’t go through the trouble of creating a link for it until it’s proven to work out. They are still brewing, and I won’t be able to sample them for a few days yet.

The challenge is also applicable to nose-to-tail eating of animal protein. I do have some ideas for using the less favoured parts and innards of various life stock. Things and recipes that I’m genuinely curious about. I’ll be kind, and spare you all the details and graphics of what’s involved there.

*- They are the sorts of people who give genuine credence to the line, “Blessed are the Cheese Makers!” . . . from one of my favourite comedy movies: Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

**-To be fair and accurate, many impoverished third world and sub-tropical nations have opted, or are having their land used (sometimes seized by force) to grow more non-nutritional cash crops to export for the decadent things of first world living, things like: sugar, tobacco, cotton, cacoa beans, tea, coffee, plus those other crops like coca and opium to fund narco-crime syndicates and terrorism. Due to a lack of reliable infrastructures to allow for refrigeration or other preservation methods, and poor logistical systems for food distribution, up to 50% of food produced in countries in such regions ends up being wasted. This could drastically change if people were given more knowledge of how to can or lacto-ferment things in their own homes; but the initial cost and availability of buying and amassing enough things like re-sealable jars and resources like heating fuel and clean water is a stumbling block for many of them in such places. Waste and preventable food and water born disease due to spoilage occurs because of extreme poverty. The freedom and privilege of being able to can one’s own food stock is becoming only accessible to those well off enough to do it.

***- Yeah, I know. . . I’m really scraping at the bottom of the barrel to find positives about this.

Hacking Combinatorial Abundance (and Cheat Days)

The cooler days that are signaling the dwindling down of summer and autumn’s approach are here. There are fewer days are left to enjoy my beverages outside, and to dangle in the hammock to read. I’m dying a little already in knowing that. I’m still healing my legs; so I haven’t done as much running lately. I’ve been cutting back both in frequency and intensity from what my program mandates. Thankfully, there have been fewer cracking and snapping noises coming from my hips and legs since I opted to tune it down. I mustered up the gumption to try for six kilometers last Thursday after a bit of a lapse. My substitute exercise after that has simply been longer walks with the dog. Saturday and Sunday was left for me to build a meal plan as the rain came.

As I said in my last entry, I’ve got a new eating/menu plan going on*, and in an effort to not feel desperately deprived, I’m taking advantage of starting it during this season with its bounty of newly harvested local fresh vegetables. I don’t know what is working better: the actual eating plan and eating things that have their peak nutritional content, or just because the extra heat and stress last week was killing my appetite, but I’ve lost eight pounds of mass without even doing much of anything. Whether it’s loss of actually body fat or from dehydration is debatable. Pounds lie all the time.

One thing that I bring to mind which gives me comfort and confidence for being able to stick to the plan is mathematics: more specifically, being mindful of combinations and permutations. In the same way that I determined that a reckless and unorthodox science geek/recipe buster like me will never make or eat the same kind of homemade soup or pizza twice, I reasoned that I should never feel deprived if take into account of utilizing even a small set of healthy ingredients (and omitting the junk carbs) that conforms to my plan, and by playing with the various combinations of them, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands, of unique recipes. Within all that, there have to be some options in there somewhere that are not only low-carb, high-fibre, high-vitamin, and high in protein, but delicious as well, and . . .  most importantly, will allow me to be less bored and frustrated with eating within these limitations. I should have added a subtitle above: How to diet without going totally f^%!ing insane!

Does that sound impossible to do? No, it really isn’t, is the answer. However, it’s sobering to realize that I’m more of a fixed habitual eater than I care to admit, and I have to learn to think outside the box more than I already do. How do I approach them, these changes I mean? I do the following things, with numerical reckonings by the use of a tool like the Supercook website (www.supercook.com). Simply input all the ingredients you have (or should be eating), and then let the automation take care of generating all the possible/plausible options you have for yourself. I thought my fridge and pantry were almost bare, until I plugged in the items of my inventory, and had over 6000 recipes listed for me with just those things.

Breakfast: The major habit change is early morning. I may not eat most of my carbs in the morning, but the way I eat them (or rather having the absence of them) is a radical change. I don’t fancy pancakes, so they are no loss to me. Neither is hot or cold cereal**. However, no toast for six days of the week though, that is a challenge for me. Bread is my most frequently used vehicle for eating carbohydrates, and to eat eggs without toast or English muffins, without being able to pile them with my eggs and other fixings on this platform, is like some sort of sacrilege of my ritual for me.
The remedy is scrambled eggs or omelettes about three or four times a week. There are countless ways to fill an omelette even with the ingredients and condiments I already have; scrambled eggs are one of those dishes that appear in some form in all international cuisines, each with its own ethnic signature. Lots of healthful options there; so I shouldn’t feel at all lacking in anything***.

Lunch: It’s easier to think of options for this, since it is already largely a part of my lifestyle. Mindful and simple advanced preparation is a bonus about it too. Twenty minutes of prep time at the most is all I need to make about five or six meal portions with my chop/slop/plop/drop-in-a-crockpot method of cooking. Anything with meat, vegetables, beans and lentils in it to poach, braise, or stew is fair game. I have a good stockpile of frozen healthy homemade soups as well. Raw salads, pickles, and fermented vegetables take care of the rest.

Supper: Another difficult phase because I’m at work, and there isn’t the stock of spices or ingredients that I like that I have at home. Lots of processed, trans-fat laden, and preserved food is there. Meals were brought from home instead most of the time at the last go around. I just have to be a little more mindful to check their menu in advance.

Bad Carb Plan: Being not the wasteful sort, I choose to cook and process any remaining “white” carbs and sugars around the kitchen into stuff that can be refrigerated or frozen, and eaten on the

Something I made to throw into the
"bad carb" bank for cheat day:
A Caramel and Apple Cheesecake . . .
to be thawed out for my birthday.

designated “cheat day”. See below.

Cheat Day: The holy of holies - a no-holds-barred orgy of gluttony for one day of the week (I choose Saturday). During the week, one banks the cravings. One can note them on a list or use a snapshot to record all the not-so-go-for-you food, and other diet violators into your own personal collection of food porn. It is the day when I could go to any restaurant without guilt, or drink alcohol more liberally if I so choose to. During the cheat day, you may also discover or do these things:

·         At the end of the week, you may notice that most of your craving targets earlier in the week were just passing fancies, and most of the stuff you noted or stuck in an album back then doesn’t turn your crank now. Whatever is left on there that you are just dying for is conveniently there to transfer to a grocery list, or is already cached in your freezer, and with the impulsivity element tamed and taken away, you will also save some time and money.

·         You may realize just how boring white carbs, all by themselves, really are. Just think about it - they are rarely consumed without some other flavouring: bread, potatoes, rice, tortillas, and pasta usually need to be enhanced with fat, sweetness, salt, meat, or zesty/savory/spicy sauces. When it does come to my cheat day, white carbs aren’t really the first things that come to mind when I want to binge on something, it’s the flavouring or seasoning in the sauce or other fixings on that pizza, or in the rice bowl, or on that potato chip, or in that pie shell. Targeting the flavours you crave, but not the carbs, is something to bring to mind for the next shopping trip or the next six days of the week.

·         Learn the easy way – while eating your bad foods, you may discover that you just can’t eat as much as you usually could, because your stomach will have shrank a bit during the first six or so days. You, by default, then are automatically and willingly reducing your own calorie intake, but you at least get enough of a taste of what makes you happy. Or, you may . . .

·        Learn the hard way – that is you up end ignoring your stomach signals, and go out on a full-blown rampage of a barbarous binge fest. The indigestion and the pain and discomfort of a near-bursting gut that you experience afterward from trying to overstuff your shrunken belly is enough to dissuade you from eating like that ever again for a long while, and you may approach the next six days with exercising a lot more self-control and discipline. In comparing people to jackasses: some people just can’t learn to move forward by following the carrot; they need to be beaten with the stick instead.

Eagerly Anticipated Cheat Day Foods (for the next ten Saturdays, at least****): Beer, Toast, Rye Bread, English Muffins, Liver Varenyky, Pho Soup, Homemade Pizza, Homemade Perogies, Piroshky, Spring rolls, Bagels and Cream Cheese, Kvass, Empanadas, Enchiladas, Croissants from Christine’s Bakery, Tacos, Linguini alla Vongoli, Sushi, Potato Pancakes, Battered and Deep Fried Pike, Dim Sum Buns, Cabbage Rolls, Whiskey, Ice Cream, Cheese Cake. But, as I said . . . these cravings too may pass.   

*- In hopes to peel off some weight to take more pressure and wear off my joints passively. Actually, to be more accurate, I’m redeploying an old plan that was successful for me: The Slow-Carb Diet™, from the book, The 4-Hour Body, by Timothy Ferriss.

**- A little bit of a cheat is eating course milled grain (like steel cut oats) porridge. I only eat it on the mornings when I do a longer course of running/walking. I don’t use milk or sugar though. I may throw in some yogurt after it’s cooked. I make it with a thinner consistency, and it’s flavoured by cooking it my slow cooker over night with cinnamon sticks, nuts, and other sweet spices (cloves, cardamom, poppy or chia seeds, walnuts, almonds, etc.). Enough is made for three running days of the week, which includes Cheat Day Saturday.

***- Around the World in 44 Flavor Combinations on pages 148-149, in The 4 - Hour Chef, by Timothy Ferriss, is an example of different ways to eat eggs with an ethnic flare. Including them with the combinations of ingredients I currently have in my fridge, pantry, and cupboards to add to and make omelettes, I have about 687 different variations to experiment with: more than a couple of years’ worth of breakfasts that are in compliance to this regimen.

****- Hopefully my legs, hips, and feet will be fully healed by then.

Fermentation Experimentation (on Baba's Magic Rocks)

I’ve started this entry after work, by the light of the Blue Moon. I almost feel like howling at it as I sip and sample a rather large glass of the mead that I brewed last year. Tonight marks the beginning of having another stretch of days off before the better part of this summer slips away; ones in which at least the sky won’t be a dull grey haze, and the air won’t be loaded with smoke like the last stretch of time off.

One of the first things that I’ll be indulging in with that time is preparing and eating some decent food. There are enough moments when I’m involved in the Iron Chef challenge at work, but I’m still limited by their menus and the lack of ingredients, or the crap ingredients I find there, so I’m never able to make the stuff that I really want. I have a bit of a reputation in my circles as being a bit of a food rebel (believe it or not). I don’t allow myself to be restricted by recipes very much. Time off means I get to bend the needle into that zone again with ingredients I really want, but then again there are still limits. More on this tomorrow.

Aug 1st, Mid-afternoon

My time off runs into a phase when I’m in the middle of a brewing project. So, I’m sticking around home for the first few days to tend to it before I act on any impulses to leave town. It’s also the time of the year when somehow the rural instinct in me from my early upbringing is aroused, and I become tuned into crafting some preserves, pickles, and doing other folksy kinds of canning projects. I’m also on a kick now to make a mindful effort to eat more (locally grown) vegetables. It’s a good time to do it because now that late summer is approaching, more local fare is available at the Farmer’s Market. As much as I would enjoy my time off by hyper-utilizing my propane grill to barbeque all the meat that I can lay my hands on, the price of it lately has skyrocketed considerably: this drought we are having is the excuse for that. Imported fruit produce is costing more too because of our devalued dollar. I’m also trying to heal my legs again, so my running progress has regressed, and I’m not burning off the same amount of calories as I usually would at this time of year. Eating more veggies and less energy dense food like meat and carbs/fructose may be the remedy. I’m trying not to feel deprived, so I’m preparing my greens and veggies in the ways I like eating them. Eating them raw/marinated, or having pickles or sauerkraut are my favourite ways to intake vegetable matter. So I’m focusing on this.

I got lucky recently after taking a random tour through one of the Asian grocery stores* here in

My new baby, who's ready to get
down to business.

town, and found an amazing fermentation jar: the same kind used by Koreans to make kimchi. This one was the perfect size for my needs. It is enamelled earthenware crockery, and it was dirt cheap too: a real bargain, costing less than a quarter of similar ones I was looking at while browsing online. Other fermentation crocks I’ve spotted in yard sales start at ridiculously high prices too because they are sold as “antiques”. I thought it would be a great investment for experimenting and making my own lacto-fermented pickles and, more importantly, for brewing sauerkraut**. So there I was, excitedly hauling it over to their till: a crackpot with crockpot. I won’t go broke now buying what is considered as delicatessen food at a hyper inflated prices. I can make my own now at will. Nostalgia also was the driver, probably the most pressing one, for me to get this thing. Homemade sauerkraut, like the stuff I was raised on, tastes the best.

However, I have the humbling and disappointing realization that I won’t ever be making the best that there is or ever was, because I will be lacking one especially crucial element for brewing up the perfect sauerkraut. That would be . . . my Baba’s magic rocks. My Ukrainian grandmother’s sauerkraut, in my mind, was the best that there ever was. It wasn't delicious because of any sort of special ingredient she added. Only salt and shredded cabbage were used. It was delicious because of the special rocks she used in the process. Traditionally, or at least as it was in her tradition, rocks were placed on top of the shredded cabbage to keep it submerged and compressed in the brewing vessel in such a way that the bacterial culture that makes this stuff does its job right. The magic power was in those rocks! The more scientific explanation is that the pores in those rocks harboured the lactobacillus microbes, which used whatever mineral matrix that is in those stones to direct their particular course of evolution through natural selection after several generations of replication. The fittest ones that could exploit those minerals, and withstood being immersed in the salt and that specific pH level that a crock full of raw cabbage has, out-competed and out-performed all other strains; and the inferior ones then died off and disappeared. The result is a dominant, unique strain of anaerobic bacteria which was thus optimally mutated for making and imparting that lovely signature flavouring. In essence, that particular kind of rock is a micro-biome, and my grandmother was lucky enough to find the perfect ones to allow this kind of goodness to happen. It's easier just to say that those rocks are magical.

It’s kind of like the same concept of how artisan cheeses from Europe can only be made and found in one special unique place, because of some certain breed of cow eating a specific plant that only grows in some particular valley, which then flavours the milk fat, which then makes the curds that are pressed and then cellared and aged in some cave which has its own unique microbial environment that is found nowhere else on Earth. Replicating stuff like this elsewhere becomes nearly impossible, even in lab conditions. Fermented stuff is special in another way. Such food stuffs are given more of an opportunity than regular food to affix some special cultural identity: e.g. milk is ubiquitous, but things like skyr, an Icelandic cultured dairy product, is something very unique. It’s not really cheese, and not really yogurt because of its unique microbial culture profile. It was probably made entirely by accident during the first part of human settlement there a over thousand years ago, when some microscopic gollywobs native to that island probably shot out from the bowels of the Earth through one of their geysers, and plopped into an open pail of milk, and then someone dared themselves to consume it. It doesn’t get much more elemental than that. It is only cultured and made there, and not readily available anywhere else beyond Scandinavia. Icelanders are probably very proud to call this stuff their own, as it is a part of their culinary tradition and no one else’s. Belgian beer is another example. Rather than conforming to the rigid standards of having antiseptic conditions for brewing within a closed system, the beer in some places in that country is brewed in open vats, and the windows of the brewery are opened to allow the natural wild yeasts, pollens, and other God-only-knows-what particles (like dust falling off from the overhanging cobwebs) to blow in and ferment and flavour the wort. The resulting beer, like it or not, can’t be replicated in a test lab, and can only be made in Belgium. If the technique was tried somewhere else, it would never be exactly that same kind of beer, because nowhere else except that specific area of Belgium has that particular environmental signature. This is what the French call terroir: the characteristic flavourings in wine and other cultured foods and produce that is a direct result of the elements and environment that they were produced in. In the case of Baba’s rocks though, I would imagine and guess that the proper French term could probably be called pierroir*** since the unique culturing conditions stem from a stone.

After my grandmother died, my Mom became the keeper of the sacred magic kraut stones, and she still uses them to make our family’s sauerkraut. It’s a little milder than I remember what Baba’s was, but it is still kick-ass stuff; with that same unique signature aroma and notes of flavour that I can’t describe. Back in the university days, when we received care packages from home, the roommates I had would tie into the jars of my Mom’s sauerkraut, and they gobbled it up like greedy pigs. They agreed that it was the best they ever had. They foolishly thought though that it could just simply replicated if they made it themselves . . . my brothers and I knew better.

As well as for healthful endeavors****, I’m interested in exploring new measures of conservation of

This is trub . . .Horrid looking slop
 . . . but it did its job nicely!

energy and preservation, home economics and frugality, and reduction of waste on all levels. This guy here, who once studied biology and is interested in sustainability, is very curious to see how far cycles of fermentation can be taken within a single system, and how they can be expended and/or expanded by producing stuff with the by-products from a former fermentation cycle. An example of this is rather than discarding the trub (yeast sediment) after brewing beer, I collected it and used it as a sort of sourdough starter and to make some rye bread, which was goddamned delicious by the way! I’m now using that same bread to make kvass (see earlier entry). The lacto-culture from that kvass could be used for making more kvass, or used with fruit and honey to make a sort of healthier sort of pop, or used to ferment other vegetables for pickling. The remaining liquor from 

My resulting rye bread. Not too pretty,
but it tasted great, and will be sacrificed
for my next experiment.

that process could maybe be later used for pickling eggs . . . and so on, und so wieder, et cetera. It could probably last as long as I’m willing to commit to it.

It’s a shame that some of the younger and urban generations of today will never know what some of these homemade fermented products will ever taste like. That’s their loss. I think they have already sadly missed the benefits of such stuff. I don’t have, and never had, any sort of food allergies or intolerances, which seem to be more common with the younger people of today. I strongly suspect that starting off life being raised on things like homemade sauerkraut, unpasteurized milk, homemade cottage cheese, fresh picked unwashed berries, taking a carrot right out of the ground and eating it, and playing in real dirt helped me to develop a more resilient immune system. Having a pantry full of mason jars, and the knowledge to make stuff that fills them makes me feel like a bit of a relic from the past, but at the same time I’m bypassing an industrial system and food culture that seems to do nothing but figure out new ways to put more noxious chemicals and preservatives in the stuff we eat to poison us. There is a bit of a renaissance starting again with home canning and using natural preserving methods that include using probiotics like lactobacillus bacteria. I can only hope it catches on more.

The beginnings of bread kvass: rye bread
+ raisins + spices + yeast + water, and a
little dash of alpha-amylase to accelerate
the mashing process. And yes, I do just
happen to have a stock of refined
biochemical enzymes just lying
around in my kitchen cupboards
. . . I'm kinky that way.

If I don’t ever get to use my Baba’s rocks, it is my hope that either one or both of my nephews would get to, and learn and appreciate how to use them at least one time in their lives, so they can see and enjoy the results that they can procure, and be cognisant of the power of taste and tradition, and what real food is all about.

*- I freakin’ love probing through the merchandise at some Asian and other ethnic market stores. It opens your eyes to a lot of weird and wonderful ways and variations people can express their palette, and some stranger foods that bring people comfort. Discovering something new and tasty, when you’ve thought you’ve already had all that you wanted to try in your life, is a great experience. I do have to be wary though that some of the “medicinal” teas, herbs, spices, and condiments there that you could have tolerated well enough when you were younger can, within half an hour after consumption, make you feel like you were shitting pure battery acid.

**- For you pretentious, snobby foodies out there, I’m talking about choucroute. I know it sounds weird to be sentimental over something that in essence is the result of bacterial putrefaction. There are just some weirdos, like me, out there who love sauerkraut, while others out there would compare sauerkraut as the collecting all the most vile beer farts from everyone at an Oktoberfest, and condensing them into a jar of shredded cabbage. There is no accounting for taste.

***- Terroir is derived from “terre”, meaning land or soil; so it stands to reason that pierroir could be coined as a word derived from “pierre”, meaning rock or stone.

****- Fermented foods make for a healthier gut/digestive system, and are also proven to be useful in detoxification and chelation (removing heavy metals from the body).