Family Mystery Solved

Cindy's family is of German origin.  I mean like 99.9% German --there might be a Swede or two somewhere in the deep end of the gene pool, but pretty much all German, so one of the family traditions is baking Stollen for Christmas.

After Cindy's mom died, her Dad took up the task of baking the Stollen and Cindy often assisted Lou when we were back in Ft. Wayne for the holidays.  Some years it went well, and othe years they struggled with it and the Stollen turned out kind of dense and flat.

Since Lou has been gone, Cindy has been baking the Stollen and sending it out to the various family members for Christmas.  Last year's batch was voted one of the best ever.

This year we had to hunt for the appropriate fruit cake-type candied fruit, but finally found some at Ralph's, and she started the baking yesterday, after carefully soaking the candied fruit overnight in Southern Comfort, according to her Dad's handwritten notes on the old family recipe.

The yeast was lively and it looked like everything was going well.  Except that it didn't rise.  Hours went by and it still didn't rise.

Cindy couldn't figure it out--the yeast was lively and everything looked good until she added the candied fruit.  Candied fruit soaked in alcohol.  Alcohol that kills bacteria.  Bacteria such as.... yeast.

Finally the lightbulb went on.  The Southern Comfort had killed off most of the yeast that should have caused the dough to rise.  Last year she had forgotten to soak the candied fruit overnight, so it only had a small amount of alcohol and the yeast did its work, and the Stollen was wonderful.

So she salvaged the batch by turning it into Christmas biscotti, and made a hasty trip back to Ralph's for more candied fruit and more yeast to make the Stollen.

Christmas Biscotti, anyone?

Stollen Cooling

"Clean Up On Aisle Three..."

We started our kombucha brewing a couple of weeks ago and put the jars of kombucha in the closet under the stairs to ferment.  Then we decanted it into quart bottles after ten days to develop the effervescence.

We checked it after a couple of days and everything seemed all right.  The kombucha I made with the white coconut tea and added lime and coconut juice had some lime pulp visible around the top, but everything seem fine, so we left it there to continue the fermentation process for a couple more days.

After a few more days we went back to check it and discovered that one of the bottles had exploded.  Fortunately, we had had the foresight to put a tray under the bottles, but even so much of the kombucha had dripped over the edge of the small tray and onto the bins of Christmas decorations, but it was easy enough to clean off the tray.  And the bins.  And the floor.

So I started a new batch on Sunday and checked it yesterday.  Didn't look right.  Cindy confirmed today that it probably shouldn't have green fuzzy stuff growing on top of it.

The joys of fermentation.

Sigh.  

Booch Madness

Cindy's guild in the San Diego County Garden Guild this year is the Food Preservation Guild.  She's always done some form or other of food preservation, but recently she's been interested in experimenting with fermentation.

During her chemo last Spring she couldn't drink wine, so we started drinking kombucha instead.  Kombucha is a fermented tea drink made by combining tea, sugar, water and yeast with a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) and allowing it to ferment.  

I had never heard of it before, but once we had, we started seeing it in all the grocery stores and even on some restaurant menus.  We tried a number of different flavors and liked most of them.  We even found a place not far from where we live that brews the stuff.  

It seemed like a natural step to try brewing our own, so Cindy took a short class a couple of weekends ago at the Living Tea Brewing Company, then we started our culture.  It's been fermenting away in the closet under the stairs for about ten days, so this morning we took the jars out, removed the SCOBYs, added some flavoring to each one and decanted the liquid into bottles.

Cindy's Sour Cherry Kombucha

Cindy used a green tea base to brew her version; she loves sour cherry juice, so that's what she added to flavor hers.

My Coconut Lime Kombucha

My favorite flavor of the commercial varieties we've tried is a coconut lime version, so that's what I added to mine.  I started with a coconut flavored white tea, and thought the stuff tasted pretty good without any additional flavoring, but I had already started juicing the limes, so I added about half a cup of lime juice and half a cup of coconut juice to it.  

Then we bottled both versions and put them back under the stairs to continue fermenting.

Still Fermenting

We'll let them develop some effervescence for a few days, and then see what we've got.   

Blue-Eyed Darner

I was at a friend's house last Saturday looking at some shrubs, when another friend said, "Is that real?"  She was pointing to a large blue dragonfly hanging on one of the bushes.

Blue-Eyed Darner Dragonfly

It was indeed a real dragonfly, a Blue-Eyed Darner (Rhionaeschna multicolor), just sort of hanging out in the shrubbery.

Side View

The dragonfly didn't seem to mind having us take its picture.  I was amazed at how big it was--its body was about three inches long--and how elaborate and beautiful the markings on its body were.  The wings were so delicate they were barely visible.  

I felt very fortunate to have been able to see it so closely; I usually only see them in flight and it's difficult to see any detail as they fly.

The War With The Rats

Or maybe it's field mice or possibly one of several of the genus Neotoma, commonly known as Pack Rats or Trading Rats.  Some varmint has been building nests inside the engine compartments of both of our cars.

The cars sit next to the wall that runs along the side of our driveway.  On the other side of the wall are the neighbors' Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo), olive tree, and Pyracantha bushes, all of which drop fruit during the year on both sides of the driveway wall.  We usually clean the fruits out of the driveway, but with the distraction of the chemo treatments, we just didn't get around to it this year.  Then we noticed that the cars were running roughly, to the point where they felt unsafe to drive.  Our auto mechanics, for whom we are a constant source of entertainment, found an enormous rodent nest of leaves and sticks and partially eaten strawberry fruit inside the air intake valve in one of the cars and that the rodents had also chewed up the insulation on the wiring on both cars.

With all the rain we've had this winter, we think that some of the pyracantha berries and strawberry fruit had fermented and the critters had holed up in the nice warm engine compartments of our cars to consume their fermented berry hooch and sample the taste of electrical wiring insulation.  I have to admit that it's the ideal location for them since it's protected from the elements and safe from the hawks, owls, foxes, coyotes and other predators that live in our canyon.

We know there are Pack Rats here because for years there was a huge midden on the other side of our driveway wall.  The midden grew over the years as the Pack Rats added on to it, incorporating sticks and twigs and even a paintbrush we had left on the driveway wall.  The neighbors tore the midden out when they renovated that part of their garden a couple of years ago.

Cindy also found one of the Pack Rats in our compost bin a few years ago; it had evidently crawled or fallen in and become trapped in the bin when it couldn't climb out.  We called him "Mickey" because of his huge ears.  She opened the collection door at the bottom of the bin, left the area and when she came back, Mickey had taken to his heels and vanished.

However, our amusement at Mickey and his fellows turned to annoyance when we discovered the cost of replacing the various damaged engine components.

So now the cars are repaired, the driveway is cleaned up and we've tried various rodent repellants inside the wheel wells of the cars.  The rodents do not seem to have been deterred at all by the smell of Irish Spring soap recommended by our mechanics, but they do seem to have moved on since we deprived them of most of their food and fermented berries.

We're just hoping they haven't discovered the bird seed stored in the garage and moved in there.

Dormant Garden

Both the garden and the gardener have been pretty much dormant this winter; the garden is dormant because it's, well, winter, and the gardener is dormant because she's undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer.  She's been told to take it easy on the gardening because the chemo is disrupting her white blood cell count and she's supposed to avoid sources of bacterial, viral and fungal infection.  Soil is a major source of bacterial and fungal microbes, of course.  I'm just afraid she's going to develop a case of Black Spot or Powdery Mildew.

However, that hasn't stopped her from doing occasional maintenance of the garden, including harvesting lettuces, and planning the spring planting of the vegetable garden.

Isn't This Lettuce Gorgeous?

I'm not sure what the implications are for the tomato crop this year, but I know she'll work something out.