22 posts tagged “kombucha”

Well, not that I'm going to be on the fast for the whole year, but whatever.  Starting on Monday I am embarking on a weeklong fast of nothing but green juice, kombucha tea, and water.  I'm not following any specific plan, but I'm confident enough that I'll get all the nutrition I need from the green juice.  I'm aiming for five days, but may expand to seven if I can keep it up.  I've had the idea of a green juice fast for quite a while now, but lacked the motivation to go for it.  But my diet for the past few months has not been too kind to my body, so I think now is the perfect time to try it.  First, of course, I've got to eat up the food in my refrigerator that won't last a week, but I think I can take care of that by the end of the day tomorrow.  And, of course, there's this guy:

Just for the hell of it.  After the fast I'm going to make a real effort to get back to a better diet, but tonight I am devouring this enormous lemon-raspberry cupcake.

In my Kombucha jar.  Nesting in my carefully grown and nurtured scoby.... Eating it too, I can only imagine. 
I am FURIOUS.
From now on if I spot a fruit fly in this apartment, I am not just going to swat it.  I am going to MURDER IT.

I was struck by a thought this morning when I was switching on the heating pad that keeps my Kombucha jars warm... I bought that just about a year ago, so apparently I have been brewing KT for a year now.  Well, a little more, since I became interested in it after my trip to Italy in the summer.  But I guess by the time I decided to try it myself and actually succeeded in growing a scoby it was probably closer to Christmas.  I lose track of the passage of time easily, and started to wonder what else I got into a year ago that I'm still doing.  And, all I can think of so far is that I started making monthly payments of $500 on my hospital bill about a year ago, and I'm definitely still doing that!  That's depressing, but not nearly as much as the fact that I'm not close to having paid the whole thing yet.  I think I'm about halfway there, actually.  And, having recently quit my job, I am having a bit of a hard time mustering up any optimism about 2009...  Oh well.  Optimism has rarely gotten me anywhere in the past, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Wow, check it out, I now have three monster scobys lurking in my kitchen cabinet:

Remember this?  I was so energized by my massive success that I went out and bought another KT jar, which will bring my kombucha-producing powers to about 24 bottles a month.  That's almost one every day!  Just think of all the KT I'll be guzzling!  Anyway, since I didn't take the time to produce another scoby, I thought I would simply slice the monster one in half.  I thought it would be the consistency of soft cheese, and imagined that cutting it would be super easy.  It WASN'T.  Ok, so this is how it looked to start:

I started hacking away, and realized that I was making no progress.  The thing just did not want to be cut!  And here's the gross part: as I was manhandling this thing it occured to me that the texture was kind of akin to flesh... almost like raw meat.  I mean, I have very limited experience in that regard, but I have had to deal with it on occasion at my nanny job.  Ugh, it gave me such a chill.  Because, well, the scoby is made of living bacteria... does that make IT alive?  Ok, now I have really succeeded in creeping myself out.  ANYway, the scoby had these sedimentary layers, so my next tactic was to peel it into two halves.  That worked a little better, with some knife help, but the end result was not so pretty:
They were even worse than the photo shows, actually, and I kind of rearranged them into their proper shapes again.  I just hope I didn't traumatize the little bacteria so much that they'll stop making delicious KT for me.  Especially now that I've invested so much cabinet space... Seriously, this KT operaration is slowly taking over my kitchen!
   We'll see how this pans out.  I've got my vinegar-soaked fingers crossed!

I was brewing/bottling kombucha today when I made a discovery... THIS THING:

...growing in the jar of KT I was about to bottle!  You should have seen my face when I took the paper towel off the top of the jar and saw this monster scoby (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast).  My jaw actually dropped, and I may have gasped out loud.  See, when I started that jar a month ago the scoby was 1/4 inch thick at the most, and had a huge hole in the middle.  Actually, you can kind of see the old one stuck to the bottom of the monster scoby:
My scobys have looked kind of anemic for months, which I attribute to the coolness of my apartment.  I have a heating pad to keep the jars warm, but I often forget to turn it on.  Did I just have it on more this past month?  I mean, good lord, just look at the thickness of that thing!  I tasted the kombucha in the jar before bottling it, and it was very tart, meaning that all the sugar in the tea had been consumed by the bacteria.  No surprises there!  Jeez, I can't get over it, I could cut that thing in half and have two very healthy sized scobys.  It was so heavy that it wouldn't even float at the top of the jar when I had refilled it with freshly brewed tea, as you can see.  It floated about 2/3 of the way up for a few seconds, then sank to the bottom of the jar:
I can't wait to see how my other jar is doing, and next month I'll be very eager to see if this beast has spawned another fat scoby.  I may have to add more sugar to the tea, I'll have to wait and see.  Yay for bacteria! 

Well, I've been bombing my strep bacteria with penicillin for a few days now, and I feel much better.  So much that, unlike the previous couple of days, I've done more than just lie in bed staring out the window (or at the TV) without my glasses on.  I managed to get some laundry done today, as well as some closet-cleaning-out, which is necessary if my suitcase is ever going to fit back in there again.  My apartment is still not really up to the level of cleanliness I'd like, but considering I haven't left it very much in the past few days I guess it's not so bad.  What else... oh, I made a salad, and also started a new batch of Kombucha tea.  Just to stick it to Western Medicine.  Although I have to admit that both the pharmacist at Walgreens and the Nurse Practitioner at the clinic recommended eating some yogurt while I'm taking the penicillin to ward off a possible yeast infection.  I'm sticking to KT, but my mom was very impressed that they had a clue at all, since probiotics has not really been included in western medicine much.  Hm.  Oh, and it seems that I've already infected someone, my ex-boyfriend who I (perhaps unwisely?) hung out with on Wednesday.  I just hope that the little girl I babysat on Tuesday is okay (yikes!).  

I did another batch of Kombucha yesterday, which is starting to be more routine since I have done it so many times now.  Funny that the first few times I made it I had to anxiously check the recipe every few minutes, and now I hardly think about it as I'm doing it.  Yesterday, however, I had to improvise a bit when I discovered that I was completely out of sugar (I'm sure I made a mental note to buy more the last time I brewed and used it all up, but apparently that note didn't make it out of my brain in time).  I decided instead of running to the store quickly (hey, I was still in my jammies) to use brown sugar, which was just sitting there in the cabinet wasting away.  I'm sure the recipe will still work, as I read on a KT website that any sweetened beverage can be used to brew Kombucha, but I'm a little nervous about the flavor in the end result.  Will just have to wait and see...

Although I haven't been online lately, I have been up to my usual pursuits.  That is, brewing kombucha tea and photographing my silly cat.  My latest KT venture was to add frozen cranberries before letting the bottles sit in the refrigerator, and the result was a gorgeous red.  They taste good, too, without being overwhelmingly fruity.  The first photo was taken on the day of bottling:

And then after five days of settling in the fridge:
Pretty. 
Gion pretty much hid from my family when they visited my apartment, but managed to show her sweet side when my mom came alone.  I don't think she hates my brother and sister, she just prefers a small group.  Like, two people or so. 
Her latest hobby has been to track the moths that get stuck in between the apartment windows and partial screens outside.  She waits patiently for a victim:
When a moth stumbles foolishly into her trap she pounces:
...only to be stymied by the fact that a pane of glass separates her from the moth:
Which all leads, inevitably, to embarrassment:
Poor thing.  If only I lived in one of those apartments with a view of the Telegraph Hill parrots!!!  I don't know if she could handle the excitement...

A couple of months ago I caught the beginning of Pee-wee's Big Adventure on TV, but didn't get to watch the whole thing (I was babysitting and the parents came home).  Anyway, I found it a lot funnier than I did when I saw it the first time, and I thought about buying it but eventually forgot all about it.  Then the other night I had the irresistible urge to watch it again, but the one copy at the book store was maddeningly nowhere to be found.  SO today I finally broke down and sought it out at another store.  Yay!!  While I was watching it I remembered that I used to own a talking Pee-Wee doll (gawd I wish I still had that thing!), and even managed to dig up an old photo:
(btw this looks a little weird because I don't own a scanner, so I had to take a digital photo)

While I was looking through old photos I happened upon one that my grandma took of Gion back before she had entered my life, when she was still a Chicago girl.  She had had a litter of kittens shortly before my grandma adopted her from an animal shelter (aged about one year old), and judging from her huge teats in this photo I think it must have been taken right around that time:
Also, the date on the photo is incorrect, I think it must have been taken around 2000 or '01.  And I don't know whatever happened to Gion's kittens, but it would be nice to think that they are out there somewhere. 
Oh, and I thought this was pretty, a bottle of Kombucha tea with blueberries and spirulina:
Of course, before I drank it I shook it a little to unsettle the spirulina, and it all turned blackish green.  Not so attractive, but supremely tasty!