Water Kefir...Our New Healthy Treat!

Have you heard of Water Kefir yet??  Have you tried it??  Did you know it has been around for thousands of years??  This was another idea that I heard about over a year ago but I was very hesitant and it took me this long to finally try it.  I am sooooo glad I did!

Water Kefir is a probiotic, fermented drink that is said to aid in digestion and help build up the immune system.  You make it using water kefir grains, which are not actually grains but a combination of yeast and good bacteria.  When these grains are added to sugar water, they eat the sugar and convert it to fructose while producing strains of probiotic bacteria.  They also emit gasses while they work and if you allow your grains to ferment long enough (48-72 hours) you are left with a fizzy alternative to soda.

I bought my first starter kit from Cultures for Health.  It takes a few days to hydrate your grains (they just sit on your counter in sugar water) and I started making our first kefir this past week.  It has been a BIG hit with the family and I am so excited to have a healthy beverage alternative to milk and water :)  Lemonade is our favorite so far (tastes a bit like Country Time Lemonade if you only culture it for 24 hours).  We have also made cranberry and cherry....both tasted like a watered down juice or flat soda.  This week I plan to allow a batch to sit for 48 hours to see what kind of fizz we get and I also plan to make "Cream Soda" (you just add vanilla extract).  Water Kefir is so much easier than sourdough (less than 5 minutes a day), is good for us and will save us LOTS of money in juice. 

Watch this video that Katie from Kitchen Stewardship did and I am sure you will be ordering some grains and making your own water kefir in no time :) 

Little House in the Suburbs....

This year has been an unusual fall.  The second week of October we had temperatures in the 80's and people were water skiing on Columbus Day weekend.  A few weeks later we were hit with a very large snowstorm where local areas got hit with up to 2 feet of snow and this week once again it is warming up and we will be close to 70 degrees!   Throughout this season I have been feeling a lot like a chipmunk preparing for the cold dark winter, even better Ma Ingalls :)  Yes I know that I have so many conveniences that Ma Ingalls (and the Chipmunk for that matter) don't have.  I can run to the supermarket for food, shop online for winter outerwear, turn on the heat with the push of a button and have a much better built home......but despite all this I still have the nesting instinct that the fall brings on.

This fall I have spent many hours canning and dehydrating the beautiful tastes of summer.  I made big vats of homemade tomato and carrot soups to freeze for those cold winter days.  And S and I have been working hard to prepare our home for the cold and critters that are to come.

The pellet stove was a large investment for our family this winter but I am happy to say that we have yet to turn on the heat in our home!  It works very well at heating the entire house, some rooms are much toastier than others (we call them the Island Rooms), and we are so glad that we made this investment.  We were paying about $800 a month in oil during the winter months last year and this year we hope to pay much less.

I have so much respect for the women of yesterday who had to work morning, noon and night to prepare their homes for the harsh winters.  The little I have done has been very hard work and I can't imagine working in the kinds of conditions they had.  I lost a lot of what I had prepared when our generator broke.  I couldn't bring all of the stuff in our freezer so I lost some purees, soups, rolls, muffins and my homemade applesauce.  This was heart breaking for me, all that hard work wasted.  Yet I can go to the store to buy more...those women did not have that option...they were simply amazing.

Tomato Fever

This is my second year canning over here at Raising Z and Lil' C.  Last year I thought I would give it a whirl and canned 40 lbs of tomatoes.  I realized that the savings in doing this was minimal over buying organic canned tomatoes but the product was worth the trouble.  All winter long (until about March) we had one delicious tomato dish a week.  We used them to make soup, sauce and other pasta dishes.  It was so nice to have the fresh taste of summer all winter.

 So for those reasons, I decided to do endure the hot kitchen on a warm September day and try it once again.  I learned a lot from my many mistakes last year so this year went a lot smoother.  I am still only doing the 40 lbs because of our lack of good storage and this year S wanted to try adding salsa to the process.  We have been having so much fun making different types of salsa.  So far we have 10 pint jars and we have a smoky, spicy type and a mild.  S wants to make a bunch more and then make labels for them.  If we can get some beer brewed we will have a nice little Christmas gift :)

 Applesauce is up next but I freeze this and store it in our chest freezer.  I still have one bag from last year that I am saving but now that apple season is upon us, I think it is time to open it up.  The applesauce I made last year tasted like apple pie filling (without the guilt)...so GOOD.  It may be a lot of work to prepare food for the winter but it is the perfect way to brighten up a cold, dreary winter day!