Recipe: Kombucha!

I began drinking kombucha as an effort to replace my occasional soda cravings. I never keep soda in the house, but felt free to drink it at restaurants. That way, I was drinking one per week at the most, excepting vacations. That said, in the summer, I sometimes crave the fizz. I had tried it several years ago and found it pleasant, but intense, so I would drink maybe a couple of ounces at a time. Fast forward to six months ago, when I restarted Weight Watchers, and wanted a go-to that was reasonably healthy but did not use fake sugar. Fake sugar always makes me feel off, and it was hard to find sodas that were fizzy but low in sugar. I began buying kombucha from the store, and drinking it more and more. Now, I am drinking about 5 bottles per week, give or take.

Anyone who has purchased kombucha regularly knows that the stuff is PRICEY! Between $3-5 per bottle on sale. I realized that there was absolutely no way I could keep on purchasing it at the rate I had been, and my roommate had asked me before if I had ever looked in to brewing it on my own. I had scoffed at the thought, assuming it would take tons of supplies, money, space, and involvement. That was when I happened to come across two YouTube videos describing kombucha, and how it is made. Kendra explained it in such a simple, direct way and upon seeing it, I realized that it really wasn't difficult or overly time consuming at all, and the supplies are surprisingly basic.

To summarize for anyone who might not know, kombucha is a fizzy drink made from fermented sweetened tea. It is made by introducing a bacteria and yeast culture, known as a scoby, to the sweet tea and letting it ferment. The result is a slightly sweet, sour, fizzy concoction that is easily flavored with fruit, herbs, or juices.

To begin my adventure, I ordered a Kombucha Kit off of Amazon. It came with the vast majority of the supplies Kendra suggested, and I had the few other items at home that I needed.

                      

After that, I made the sweet tea mixture. I steeped the tea in four cups of filtered water. I used their tea and their teabag, but plan to use a metal strainer in the future. I do not think this fabric one is as reusable as they describe. I also have so much loose tea that I have an entire stash I use to cold steep for iced tea, and there are some I do not like iced. I plan to try to use them for kombucha in the future. Waste not, want not!
                                              

The oddest part of doing all of this is handling the scoby, the blob of bacteria and yeast responsible for creating the drink. I got one with my kit, though I know it reproduces and grows in such a way that like sourdough, you can easily pass the excess between friends. The one that came in my box was hockey puck sized, in about a cup of starter liquid.

                                                

I got my setup together, added the water and made sure the temperature wouldn't kill the scoby before putting it in, and covered it with the cloth. I love the temperature gauge taped to the side of the container because it is cheap, easy to see, and easy to monitor.

                                                
Over the course of this process I was convinced I had screwed things up somehow, it couldn't possibly be this easy. Setting up the brew took maybe 20-30 minutes tops. Again, it all just seemed too easy. So I checked my brew many times per day, waiting to see if the scoby would grow or if somehow it would all go wrong. I watched enough different YouTube videos on the process to know that the scoby should grow much bigger, have no mold, have some bubbles, forming near the top, and be whitish gray in color, maybe a bit tan, with strings all over the place. One day, I started seeing the scoby suddenly appear over the entire top of my container! It was very thin, but it was white, and looked healthy.

                                                   

By the end, it was thicker, and clearly visible from the top. I started tasting it at seven days, decided to flavor it on the eighth day. It smelled and tasted somewhat sour and vinegary, as it should, but had some sweetness left. I dislike kombucha that is too sour, so I was worried to let it go very long on my first go.  I had decided already to invest in a second gallon sized glass jar, so I could get a new batch started more quickly while the other flavored. I got one with a spigot so I wouldn't need to handle the scoby each time. The scoby is firm, rubbery almost, and not fragile, but it is still an odd texture.

                                                  

After getting the new batch started, I took the remainder of the old batch and added a few tablespoons of lemon juice and about two cups of cut strawberries to make a strawberry lemon flavor. Recipes seem to call for one cup of fruit, but I was worried it wouldn't end up fruity enough.
                         

Silly me! After letting it sit for maybe 15 hours, it was super sweet and strawberry flavored! Note for next time, crazy amounts of fruit not needed. I put the liquid in bottles using a funnel from home and a ladle, and they are carbonating on my counter as we speak!

                                                       

I let the air escape every 12 hours and pour a sip from one every day. This produced five 18oz bottles. I had left a fairly generous amount of starter liquid for the new brew, because I felt like it was better to be safe than sorry on that! So far we are on two days and it is not ready for the fridge yet, but it turned out very juicy and tasty!

I am excited for the final product, and have ordered a third glass jar to brew in, two gallons this time. Both my roomie and I drink enough kombucha that we could use a larger supply, and this will leave two jars available to make two separate flavors per batch, and hopefully 10-11 bottles per batch. I am sure we could accommodate more, but I have no idea if I will continue to consume it at this rate in the fall. I ordered more glass jars to accommodate more brewing as well. All of these supplies are completely reusable.

I am planning to let this next batch get a bit more sour. As you could see in my picture of the new batch, the puck of original scoby is still there, but a wider pancake is now also there. I can only assume that this means it will ferment faster. So, I will taste at seven days like I did the first brew, and taste every day after until it gets a little more sour. I am thinking of doing a fruit with mint combination for the flavoring. I used an oolong tea that is more mineral-y tasting than I prefer for hot or iced tea.

Thank you to everyone who actually made it here to the end of this very long, very involved post. I am excited about what kombucha will mean to help me make healthier, happier choices than soda! If you have ever made kombucha, please share any tips/tricks/comments you may have!

Recipe: Butter Chicken

I am the absolute worst at controlling my spending when it comes to ordering Indian food. I love everything about it. Given that I am trying to not throw away all of my money, particularly over this summer, I jumped at the chance to try to make it on my own when I came across what seemed like a really manageable recipe!

Here is the recipe I used (mostly correctly, which is also a surprise when I make anything for the first time): The BEST Butter Chicken

So, the first step involves marinating chicken, and I marinated mine for 24 hours.

 I messed up and added ghee to the marinade because I misunderstood the written recipe, but it didn't hurt anything.

The next day, I just charred the edges of the chicken in a pan with ghee, removed it, and cooked down the tomato as directed.

I tend to have the hardest time being patient and I jump the gun in recipes and they don't turn out quite right but this time, I succeeded at resisting that urge! The tomatoes cooked for probably 25 minutes.

Such buttery goodness. Then, adding heavy cream told me what I always suspected but never REALLY understood: butter chicken is terrible for you. Next time, I would not add the full two cups though, I would try it with a cup and a half to make it a bit more tomato-y.

Once stirred together, the sauce becomes so silky and smooth! I added the chicken and let it simmer as the recipe instructs. It looked SO good and smelled absolutely amazing.

I couldn't find fenugreek leaves at any store around here, and ended up having to make a few changes. I used about a tsp of the ground seed, even though I know the taste is not quite the same, and instead of sugar I used plain maple syrup as the sweetener. At the end, the flavor was a hair flat, so I added another tablespoon of maple syrup and it turned out delicious. That being said, I plan to order fenugreek leaves so I can do this recipe properly soon!

It tasted so completely amazing. Not exactly like my local restaurant (unsurprisingly), but it was definitely as delicious. The flavor was just a bit different. I highly recommend trying this recipe if you love Indian food. I am trying chicken tikka masala next!!

Homemade Chai Update!

I woke up today, saw clouds in the sky and rain in the forecast, and despite it being summer my brain screamed "CHAI!!!!!!!!" and I knew today would be a homemade chai day. I shared a recipe a long time ago, and I still use that, but have made a few alterations to brewing to help things go a bit more smoothly.

As a recap, my ingredients have not changed but I do not measure them anymore. I use a bit of ginger powder (this dissolves quickly in the liquid) because I do not have fresh ginger in the house most of the time, four cinnamon sticks, a teaspoon of cloves, a tablespoon of black peppercorns, and maybe ten pods of green cardamom. Before, I bring about three and a half cups of water to a boil, then turn off the head and steep all of these whole spices for about 20 minutes. Then, I would bring the water back up to a boil and toss in about four tablespoons of loose darjeeling black tea and let it steep for 5 or 6 minutes like I would a strong cup of tea. Then, I would strain the mixture, return the strained liquid to the pot, stir in honey, add about a cup of dairy (anything from fat free milk to half and half, depending on how rich I wanted it to be), and heat it up on low.

A major change in procedure was containing my steeping ingredients in a strainer. I used to just steep them all freely in the pot, then I added the tea loose, and then had to strain my final product into another container and then return it to the original pot so I could reheat it and add the dairy and sweetener. It was messy, it dirtied up another pot, and I am not graceful enough to not pour the hot liquid all over me during the process. 

Since then, I have acquired several teapots that come with their own strainers. I love these not just because I love the pots, but because I often take out the strainers and use them for other things, such as this. This way, I can steep the spices and quickly remove them, refill the strainer with tea while the liquid heats back up, then steep that in the same strainer. Once everything is steeped, I can remove that quickly too. Then I can just put in sweetener, honey is my usual choice, let it dissolve, and add dairy without the extra steps.

However, using the strainer meant that my favorite ingredient, cinnamon, wouldn't be totally submerged. I knew I could probably stick those in the water outside the strainer and get them out with a fork, they are bigger and easier to fish out, but in a flash of g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶  basic logic, I realized that putting all of them in a plastic baggie and pounding them down would not only make them all smaller, but would open the spices and intensify the flavors! I used the base of a bottle of strained tomatoes as my mallet, but any firm jar will do, you don't need to hit any of it hard.

If you have a spare strainer, and a plastic baggie, take that extra step. It is SO much easier to clean and contain! 

Additional pro tip that normal people wouldn't need to be told: don't try to just dump your mixture from your pot to a mug, because you will spill everywhere. I have literally two years of experience attempting this. Just use a ladle. Easy peasy, no mess. Yes, it took me two years to have that flash of g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶ basic logic as well. 

Better late than never, right?

Swimming Day!

So, a friend came to visit this weekend and I promised them a trip to Lake Anna. I went a couple of times last year and it was a really fun place!

Alas, upon arrival, they were turning cards away because the parking lot was full. We were heartbroken, neither of us have been swimming yet this year. Luckily I remembered there was a little beach area along the Rappahannock, but I really didn't know if it was a swimming area or a wading area.

Luckily, turns out, it is deep enough to do some good swimming! Free, not as far from home as Lake Anna, and free to park. We couldn't get a space in any of those lots either, but we got creative and found a place to park and had an awesome afternoon. Thank you Falmouth Beach!

This is what summer is all about!

Tea Setup

One of the best parts about this move and moving in with my roommate is discovering a new option for storing my tea and other hot drink stuff. She is a primarily coffee girl who loves tea, I am a primarily tea girl who now also loves coffee, so we balance. She had this amazing cart that I just knew would make an amazing drink station!

Behold! I feel so grown up.

Now, it has taken this over a year to get this awesome. The cart and the way it is organized was one of the first things we set up in the new place, before we even had a couch for our living room. We always envisioned having shelving to display teaware and coffee items, but only had one smaller bookshelf that didn't really "go" with the color of the cart. In a stroke of luck, earlier this spring, some people were moving out of their apartment and put these two heavy duty bookshelves by our dumpster! My roommate and I ran out in the beginning of a hail storm to get the first one and when we saw the movers with the second, we directed them straight to our place. Given the age of my building and how most of my furniture is hand me downs, the old school shelves fit right in!

We still use the little kitchen cart, mostly to store my steeper on so it doesn't mess up the wood of the other cart if it drips, and our honey stash. I LOVE lavender honey and rose honey!

We use the lower shelves as a hodgepodge. I store the teas I am reaching for most often to ice, as I am trying to mostly whittle my collection down to near nothing before I rebuild with less old teas. I also store coffee filters, empty tea canisters of teas I plan to replenish in the fall (hello chai!), and we store coffee, the occasional coffee travel mug, and random teapots that don't really "fit" on our more nicely curated shelves.

We have a Chinese themed shelf, with a lot of red tones, and a brown/black coffee shelf with our most loved coffee preparing devices. A red stovetop espresso maker was in use at the time of this picture, but it usually lives here.

The top of the cart includes my mug of the day, the tea I am brewing, cups, Keurig, kettle, sugar, and the teas I am working on at the moment to finish. The cups are adorable, but really are so small I never personally use them. I have used them when we have guests who all want tea at once.

The bottom of the rack holds 95% of the tea in these baskets. The upper right hand basket holds scales mostly, and a few teabag teas I save to use at school. The middle top shelf are my absolute favorite teas, most of which I am working on finishing because they are getting old, and the companies no longer exist. The teas on the upper and lower left have not been tasted yet. The teas on the bottom right are teas I have tried before and enjoy, the basket in the middle contains tea I have designated as iced.

Ultimately, I would like to reduce the tea to one row, so I can keep extra containers and such on the bottom, and just have higher tea turnover.

These are my favorite shelves. A blue/purple focus, and a green/yellow/aqua focus. These items are a combination of mine and my roommate's. Temporarily, there are also green and yellow tea tins that will ultimately go live in my bedroom once I drink all the tea inside!

These shelves are the remainder of the bunch. Leftover tea tins, tea brewing supplies, my roommate's stash of teabags, as most of the tea she drinks is in teabag form, and our handful of cookbooks.

Overall, I love our setup. I love the teaware being decor, I love having a dedicated brewing space, and storage that for the first time ever actually works for me! The kitchen cart was from IKEA back in the day. They have a similar cart, but it is not the exact same. The new version is a bit slimmer and shorter. That being said, if my roomie moved out tomorrow, the first thing I would do is go buy it! It looks great, fits baskets super well, and is a great size!