errantember

So after drying overnight, this is what's left of the kombucha SCOBY. It resembles very thin bacon. I used 190 degrees F for the drying temperature, and dried it outdoors to prevent being physically assaulted by the vinegary smell.

I had my first little piece with breakfast. It's totally dry to the point of being crispy. The vinegar flavor is still present, though comparatively mild. As reported elsewhere, there is a slight sweetness. This dry, it's a bit hard to chew. However, once in your mouth, it begins to re-hydrate and expand into something more rubbery, which makes it easy to find the parts that are stuck between your teeth.

I feel *slightly* queasy, but at this point I'm guessing it's more from the idea than from the actual "food." After reading Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions recently, I've become convinced that the vast majority of the quality of our health comes from the placebo affect, basically meaning that you *believe* you're going to be healthy. One way to do this is to adopt harmless-or-better rituals that continue to suggest to yourself that they make you healthy. Drinking kombucha is a good example of this kind of ritual. I'll be posting more about this in my upcoming review of that book.

We'll note that when I got tested for food sensitivities, yeast (candida albicans, at least, which is common baker's yeast) was at the top of my reactivity charts. However, the testing method Signet Diagnostics uses actually exposes one's live blood to undigested food, and measure the reaction of the immune system. While having some yeast in one's digestive tract is totally normal, having it inside one's blood stream is not! A strong reaction to an invading fungus inside the blood stream is 100% expected. I'm not sure what this says about the validity of the rest of the results. I definitely felt better after altering my diet to avoid foods that were supposed to be bad for me, and I seem generally to be less vulnerable to allergic reactions than I used to be, but I'm convinced this one result is bunk.

Happy New Year!

One major change this year is that I will only be eating what I grow for one day out of every month. To kick off this new habit, I will be fasting on New Years Day!

While I'm supposedly a "Permaculture Designer", I've really been a dilettante in terms of actually, say *growing* *food*. I've set up several gardens, but I've never really had more than a 20% success rate with anything I've grown, and I sure as Hell am not growing enough to feed myself, much less the other four people who live at my house. By insisting that I starve if I haven't produced anything to eat that month (or stored something from before), I am seizing the issue and smacking it down Front and Center in my life.

*SLAM!*
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I'm going to be trying my first Master Cleanse here in a day or two. Except for the occasional date, now is a good time for me to try it. It also jives with my general program of avoiding allergy-causing foods and saving money on food this week, which was very expensive up-front. I'm going to try for a five-day cleanse the first time. If it works out well, I may make it a regular thing, perhaps every three to six months or so.

I also got two callbacks from resumes I sent out today, and I'll be calling back the first prospect tomorrow. The company actually looks both really cool and like a place where my skills and interests will be appreciated. If I could land a 6-month contract, I could raise enough money to pay for at least a year of living, which would really help my fledgling freelancing work.

Here's the results of the fabulous braised cabbage recipe in The New Best Recipe.

I've also now made the bruschetta bread and the basic pound cake with mixed results. Overall the recipe for bruschetta has produced tasty food, but past-prime and incorrect ingredients have hurt perfection. The pound cake was also quite good, but a bit more cakey and flour-ey than I personally like. I suspect this was due to a failure in execution, as mixing the egg-part with the butter-and-sugar part has to be done with great precision, and I botched it because I couldn't pour precisely enough with the bowl I was using. I actually saw the butter-and-sugar deflate because the egg sat on it too long before being mixed in thoroughly. I also probably need more practice folding in the flour, which is the last ingredient added.