With change comes some adjustments.

So I changed jobs.  It sort of changed the amount of spare time I have too.  I lost an hour and a half out of my week days with this change.

It's a lame excuse, but it's mine.  Now I don't knit as much as I used to and you know I don't blog as much.  The APB has been canceled.  I'm still here.  Thank goodness for a snow ice day or I may not have had the time to post this.  Have y'all seen the footage of the ice falling off buildings in Plano!?  I work in Plano, why would I want to go park my car there?

I've also been going to yoga classes again so that takes up some of my free time, too.  It's a good thing. 

I've done a little travel this past week.  Jolea came in to town for Thanksgiving and I took her back to Austin on Friday.  As always we had fun as she ran me all over ATX Friday night to meet all her friends at their places of work.  We had great Italian food, good wine and each of her friends felt the need to serve me one of their very own signature drinks.  Eric (one of Jolea's roommates) served up the best Dirty Martini I think I have ever had.  I had two big glasses of water to dilute that one!

At one point we popped into a place don't ask I can't remember the name of the place, we were moving fast and another friend, a very attentive bartender not just to us, but to everyone, he was really good served up what he called a Skinny Jenny.  This place is famous yet not with me in the ATX club scene for signature drinks using natural syrups and flavored elixirs.  The shelves back of the bar were lined not only with the customary bottles of liquor, but also with jugs and bottles of herb and fruit infusions.  This guy combined Citrus vodka, lime, lavender syrup and ginger beer to make the Skinny Jenny, which i think could be one of the most awesome cocktails.  I'm going to have to try to copy this beverage.  Looks like I'll have to get some kind of frosty tin cup to serve it up in also.

Our main plan for the weekend was to zip over to Fredricksburg for a vineyard tour on Saturday.  Which we did after visiting In.gredients a funky, bring your own containers kind of grocery store.  My review: very tiny, limited amount of goods, but I really like the concept.  Jolea asked them for a bottle of water and they said "sure, where's your bottle?"  Yes, I did have my own containers for peanut butter and coffee and as always my own shopping bag to put my purchases in.

We scooped up Jolea's friend Kristy and off we went to Fredricksberg.  More about that later.

These snow days are rough, time for my nap.

Caution! Contents under presure (there's a reason why these bottle have a hinge top.)

Pineapple Coconut

 So I'm still brewing Soda, and Jody's still rolling his eyes at me.  Dawn's still tasting everything I make and she's still not complained of a belly ache so I guess it's all good.

This time I'm using Water Kefir instead of the Ginger Bug.  I thought maybe the taste of the ginger was a bit much and the flavor of the juice would come through better if I used Water Kefir grains.  Unlike the Ginger Bug, you have to order the Kefir grains online, you can't just make them from stuff you have laying around the house (water, ginger and weird sugar.)  The kefir grains come dehydrated and look like really coarse brown sugar, they don't look anything like grain.  They say you can eat them but I kind of needed them to make my 'concoctions'.   The first two batches of sugar water that I made with the kefir grains were not used for soda, they were just poured out. 

Then I started my batch for the soda.  Just like with the Ginger Bug, De-clorinated water (bottled is fine if it says "Ionized") Sucanat and the hydrated grains.
 

I put a little water in the jar and stired the Sucanat to dissolve.

 Dump in the grains.  See... they don't look like grain.  They look like crystals but feel like something kind of rubbery.  I have NO idea what these things are.  Yeah, I'm drinking the residual liquid off them!  

 Top it off with more water.

 Cover it with my specially customized super white flour sack dish towel that's never been used for anything else besides covering weird concoctions.

 Place it on a shelf in the cupboard where it can stay at a moderate temperature out of the light and happy beside the container of chocolate chips.

 So the next day it looks like this... a little lighter in color and not as cloudy.  I tasted a little of it and it was still sweet.  I think one of the mistakes I had been making was that I was letting the kefir set for 48 hours then adding the juice.  It quickly ate up all the sugar in the juice during the fermenting stage leaving the taste of the soda a lot like a seltzer and not sweet like soda.

 This is some Coconut Soda that I made before I figured out not to wait 48 hours.  It was like tonic water, so to sweeten it after the fermentation stage I added Cream de Coco!  When I sweeten, I sweeten, I don't mess around.  Now, take my advice here if you decide to do this, if you have to add a sweetener of any kind after you have fermented your soda, add a tiny bit at a time.  LUCY allert!!!  Don't take a funnel and pour 1/2 a cup of sweetener into the bottle.  You will have a geyser on your hands. It's entertaining to your friends, but just don't do it. 

Look it's got a head on it like beer!  It was really yummy! 

(Another thing I have since done is to use organic sugar, not Sucanant, and add just a 1/4 tsp of molasses.  Sucanant has a really strong taste.)

So last Wednesday I was about to make my juice and I decided to just make a double batch of juice and use 1/2 of it in the water kefir since my batch was ready.  I juiced my fruits and veg like I do everyday.  Remember how the pineapple/orange juice with the Ginger Bug had really created a bubbly effect?  That was fresh juice that  I'd juiced.

Since my juicer is a vertical macerating juicer and not a centrifugal, it lets some pulp through, so I strained it.  (If you ever want to know anything about juicers, just ask, I've gone through 3 different kinds.)

I blended in a couple of beet cubes (I juice a bunch of beets all at one time, and then freeze them and only use one cube per glass of juice.  Too much beet juice leaves your teeth a lovely neon red. 

 I had enough kefir and juice for two bottles of soda and I drank the rest of the juice.

Once bottled, the bottles of soda were tucked into the pantry with their friends.  Waiting to created some kind of sparkling drink.

 Jump ahead 2 days,  I forgot that the soda was in the pantry.  I pulled out a bottle to test the bubbly-ness.  That's not a real word... yet. 

 There's always a little sediment on the bottom of the bottle so you just turn it over one time.  WOAH Bubbly-ness!

LUCY ALERT!!!!

 Word of warning.... if you make soda, before opening the bottle, put it in the sink which I did and cover it with a wet dish cloth which I didn't!  Ya see that don't ya!  It exploded! 

 All over my kitchen!

 And I mean all OVER the kitchen.  I was happy though, I still had my hair wrapped in a towel after I'd washed it earlier or I would have had to rewash my hair.

I was wearing my white robe and it was now neon red splattered, not just on the front but also on the back!  But I didn't get any on the ceiling!!! That's because I put my hand over the bottle and it all squirted out to the side.  FUN!

Jody walked in just after I'd rewashed all the dishes in the dish drainer, and wiped down the cabinet doors, the counter tops, the stove and fridge.  The cat was in the living room taking a bath... The floor was still covered and I was walking tip-toe between the spots on the floor, trying not to slip or spread them any worse.   I froze in my tip-toe tracks and met him with a 'deer in the headlights' look.  In this sort of situation, you have to start cleaning from the top down.

He took one look at my magenta splattered body and just shook his head and went to the garage.  He didn't even ask what had happened.  What's he doing home at 10 in the morning anyway?  He's not supposed to be here during Lucy time.

The results... from my official critic, "nice color, earthy... like a beet with a hint of carrot." Dawn, Water Kefir Soda taster.  She took a bottle home last night.

I made a batch of coconut soda Friday and we tasted it last night too.... YUM.  I'll start making that to dilute with some Cruzan Rum, forget all those other flavors. Dawn took a bottle of it home too.

Too bad summer is almost over.  But wait, I'm not living on a summer schedule anymore.  I'm back in the real world! 
I am back to work tomorrow with a whole new life new job!!  I'll try to see what kind of Lucy channeling I can come up with for next weekend.

Y'all have a great week.

Are you thirsty yet?

Wow,  July is almost over!  I guess it doesn't really feel like our normal summer because we've not had 100+ temps for 50 some odd days in a row.  It's been so weird with these cool fronts that we end up having severe thunderstorms just like during Tornado season normally has.  It was 70 when I went out on the deck this morning.  Unheard of for us! 

With summer comes the drinking season.  Not that kind of drinking that kind of drinking has no season!  I'm talking about what you'd call Soda.

That is if you live in any other part of the US other than Texas.  In Texas you may be asked the simple question "you want a Coke?" to which you might say "sure!"  Then we'd say "what kind?"  It's a loaded question...  Yeah we could be talking about Diet Coke, Coke Zero, or any of those Coke varieties.  But more likely we're asking if you want ANY kind of bubbly beverage in the soda range!  Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Root Beer, Pepsi although who drinks that? Gahhhh!   So when in Texas, beat us to it and designate your choice, or see if you are being hosted by a REAL Texan and go for the questions.

Over 20 years ago I gave up drinking Cokes I actually drank ONLY Coke, nothing else, for medical reasons.  They were hurting me internally.  It didn't help that I drank them like water all day long.  That didn't mean I quit craving that bubbly stuff in the summer.

So I got my stuff together and grew myself some Ginger Bug, easy enough.  Just fresh ginger, De-clorinated water and brown sugar.

With my ginger bug I made these bottles of SODA!  The darker ones are grape and the orange is orange/pineapple.  Since the grape was store bought, organic, all natural, no sugar added, it didn't fizz too well.  But the flavor was really yummy, grapey and gingery and just a tiny bit fizzy.  You can't guzzle it like a Grape NeHi Soda, but it was pretty good, the ginger gives it a bite.  The ginger bug makes it's carbonation from the sugar it 'feeds' on.  It's alive!  Like a bug!  So it NEEDS sugar, and no sugar added doesn't work well.  (So I added about a tablespoon of raw sugar to each bottle.)  Once it's fizzy there isn't much sugar left.

Now the orange/pineapple pop, that's a different story.  I juiced 3 oranges and 1/2 a pineapple in my lovely Omega juicer.  This made a huge difference. No sugar needed!  Can you see the difference in the bubbles in the bottles?

Let me tell you, when I popped the top of one of those bottles of the orange the fizz blew my bangs up off my forehead!  The flavor was great.  Dawn and I mixed it with rum the next weekend!  Isn't the purpose of making healthy drinks so that you can have healthy drinks?

I continued to make Ginger Bug Soda for a few weeks, the ginger just kept getting higher and higher in the jar because you just keep adding ginger and sugar everyday.  Just pour the liquid off on the 5th day and add more de-clorinated water and start adding ginger and sugar daily.  Reminded me of that Amish Muffin stuff.  Pretty soon it would run us out of the house.  So I just put it in the fridge to rest a bit.  Meanwhile I ran across Water Kefir.   More on that in the next post.

 Now for a word from our sponsor:

Check out this garlic I grew!  It's almost as big as my foot!

 The second one was about as big as my hand!  Each clove is equal to two regular size cloves.  

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that I buried the pulp from my juicer in the flower bed?

Now back to our scheduled program:

I forgot to show you the cute outfit that Nita bought while she was here!

 Now she's as in love with my favorite store as I am.