We had another snow last night and this morning the temperature jumped up to the 30s. This created a thick layer of snow fog, about six inches deep, that creeps along the ground, pours over curbs like liquid, and dances in the street like flame.
This is what the grocery store parking lot looks like:
Last week we moved our pickling operations in the direction of a different fruit. Green Beans.
I packed them in with a lot of garlic and dill. More than I used for the cukes. These were also quick pickles. By Friday, they were ready.
If you're used to fresh pack vinegar pickles, the cloudy brine might look a little alarming. It's cloudier than your store bought pickles for two reasons.
One, fresh pack pickles go through the canning process to kill all microbes. I'm creating petri dishes to culture as many lactobacilli as possible. Much of the cloudiness comes from masses of bacteria. Yum.
See the scale in the picture? That's right. 1 micron. Picture an inch. There's 25 thousand microns in an inch. If the lactobacilli were the size of fish oil pills, the green beans would be a two and a half miles long.
Two, I'm using table-grade sea salt for my brines. It has added magnesium chloride. You've seen athletes chalk their hands in magnesium chloride for a better grip in rock climbing, weight lifting, and gymnastics. But not for pool cues. That's silicon and aluminum. Morton started adding it to salt as an anti-caking agent and their famous slogan was born.
In addition to giving little girls something to pour all over the sidewalk, magnesium chloride clouds brine. So there.
The so-called Dilly Beans were super duper. Very garlicky and pickly. I took a jar to poker night where they must have been a hit. I came home with an empty jar.
I also started a second sauerkraut batch. You can see the color change of the first batch at one week in comparison to the new batch.
Also, look at the bubbles. That's the exciting thing about fermenting. It's not so much a jar of vegetables as it is a little wilderness, churning and frothing with living things fighting for survival. At night, when it's quiet, you can lean down, and listen to the gas escaping from the lid. It's like listening to it breathe.
By the second week, the fermenting had stopped in the first batch, so I've moved it to fridge. It came out sour and very, very crunchy. I haven't decided how to eat it yet, but I have it on good authority that sauerkraut soup is pretty much the bees knees.
This weekend, we moved from leaves and fruits to roots.
I'm doing spiced carrots and Korean-style pickled garlic. If you've ever peeled six bunches of garlic by hand, then you know how much fun this was. The carrots will be done in about two weeks. The garlic, however, will take at least six months. So we'll know how those did at the first of August.
Today, the whole house smells like garlic and vinegar.
Also, I've learned that people into fermenting are called fermentos. So, I guess I'm a fermento now. For some reason it sounds slightly less pretentious than birder.
Parting Shot
This weekend's forecast: snowy with a chance of squirrels.
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