Inventory findings and other craziness...

LOL...

   Well...the pantry inventory. There were some things that surprised me more than other things...like all the freaking APPLESAUCE I have !!!! And I have less peaches and almost no tomatoes.   Enough green beans left to get through til the summers harvest. More canned chicken breast and turkey and broth than I thought. I found a bit of older jams and jellies that I am contemplating what to do with, but only 2 jars of peach jam left. The old stuff is mostly blackberry jam, which I'm not crazy about and rarely eat (or open, apparently).  The Irishman likes it... And I have blackberries in the freezer too, so depending on what this years crop looks like, I might take the old stuff and make jelly. Because honestly, the only reason I don't like BB jam is all those damn little seeds.  lol  I have 15 pounds of  assorted rices (Brown, Jasmine, Basmati).  13 pounds of dry beans. 22 pounds of various flours. 19 pounds of quinoa. 4 gallon jars of rolled oats. 

  Are you bored stupid yet???    LOL

The point is...that I have enough food in there to feed us for a while. I know that this year I will not be buying any apples. The ones from our tree are probably going to make cider vinegar and eating apples.  I can look at this list and figure out meals.  You get the idea. It's no longer so much of a mystery to me...

  I have a nice variety of food that we love and can eat.  I have pastas and sprouting seed mixes and oils and peanut butter. I have seaweed and I have polenta and I have pickled beets and kraut.  I have tea bags and some coffee and canned pineapple.   I am pretty darn satisfied with my pantry.

  ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

  Today the Irishman helped me get the kimchi going. I use a very simple recipe from Sharon Astyk's book Independence Days  and after reading up and around the 'net,  I decided to make it from everything BUT the napa cabbage that most recipes call for. I used regular old everyday green cabbage, I used red cabbage, and I used Savoy cabbage. I sent himself out to bring me in a big yellow bowl full of kale (yup--we're still eating kale out of the garden and it's as sweet as ever!!).  We cut that up and put it in. We chopped and sliced carrots, garlic, ginger and daikon radish.  Then we made a batch of brine, 2 tablespoons of kosher salt (pickling salt) to every gallon of water.  I didn't have one bowl big enough for all the ingredients, so we divided it up into 2--my big old cut glass punch bowl and another medium sized bowl.   Here's what it looks like now:

  It will sit in the brine for 24 hours,  after which I will mix up the chili pepper/paprika mixture and put that and a bit of sugar into each of the jars it will go into.  These jars have to be allowed to sit at room temperature so the fermentation process will start, and then can be moved into the refrigerator.  It takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for the kimchi to ferment properly, depending on a few environmental factors. The last time I made it, it took a while, and I never did refrigerate it...just left it all on the counter and ate some almost every day until it was gone.  I really need to buy Sandor Katz' books on fermenting foods...lol

  After it gets jarred tomorrow, I will take some more pics and post them, so you can see how beautiful this stuff is--there are a lot of different ways to make it, and it is said that there are as many recipes for kimchi as there are families in Korea.  The health benefits of fermented foods is well known and I know we feel better eating them...kraut, kefir, kimchi...yum!!

   Alright--that's all for tonight.  I'm heading off to bed so I can get up early and try to work in the garden before it gets too hot.  It was another barn burner today, as they say in the sultry midwest. 

Bon Apetit!