Autumn Lacto-Fermentation

Last weekend's Kraut & Kimchi class is a favourite that we offer several times a year.  At this time of season the group make an autumn root-veggie inspired lacto-fermented kraut to take home.  We had lots of samples to taste and show the breadth of flavour and texture that can be done with lacto-fermentation.  Then the hands-on work began, at which point many hands made short work of a huge pile of carrots, daikon, beets, cabbage, turnip and more!

Sauerkraut & Kimchi Workshop

We are back into full swing of our workshop schedule with classes taking place most Saturdays until June.  Today's session was on lactic acid fermentation, specifically making sauerkraut and kimchi.  This workshop would be good to offer in late summer just in time to preserve/ferment all the bounty coming out of backyard gardens, local farms and CSA's.  However, in late winter we are also glad to revive our cabbage and root vegetable flavours by fermenting them, while biding our time for the fresh garden veggies that are still a few months to come.  We used organic local produce, including carrots from our favourite CSA (Fertile Ground) that we have stored since the fall buried in a large container of damp sand.  They are still perfectly crisp and juicy!

What is lactic acid fermentation?  Live cultured, probiotic, unpasteurized vegetable and fruit ferments that are health promoting foods packed with beneficial bacteria and enzymes.  The lactic acid creates the sour flavour and preserves the food, preventing spoilage. 

A few key tips:
~ shred -- salt -- submerge
~ use only good quality sea salt, filtered chlorine-free water, whey (from live cultured yogurt)
~ use top quality organic produce
~ keep fermented veggies submerged under brine 
~ salt water brine is made of 2-4 Tbsp sea salt per 1 litre water
~ season and salt to your taste - add spices, herbs, garlic, ginger, green onion, cayenne, chili, etc
~ keep ferments around 18C (65 F) during fermentation
~ check ferments often to taste for flavour and watch for mold, etc
~ when ferments are ready (at desired flavour) store in cold cellar or refrigerator
~ use ceramic crock or glass mason/gallon jars for fermentation
~ eat and enjoy your ferments often!

New Workshops for Spring! Homesteading Skills, Fermented Foods, Permaculture & More...

Our new 2014 Spring Workshop Series is now posted and open for REGISTRATION HERE.

Improve your homesteading kitchen skills with topics such as cultured foods (sourdough, sauerkraut & kimchi, kombucha, and yogurt/kefir making); learn more about how to identify and use wild edible plants; work on a permaculture design for your yard!  We look forward to hosting all these workshops again and hope to see you there.  All workshops are held right here at our little homestead in the city Little City Farm, in Kitchener.

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SAT, MARCH 15 from 1-4 pm - INTRO TO TRADITIONAL SOAP MAKING
Cost: $50 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
With Karin Kliewer, from Little City Farm.
Learn to make beautiful all-natural healing soaps using nourishing oils, organic botanicals, and pure essential oils. During this popular busy hands-on workshop each participant will make their own 2 lb batch of cold process soap from scratch using recipe and ingredients provided. We'll talk about various soap making techniques, where to source ingredients, and the properties that various ingredients such as clays, botanicals, oils and essential oils add to your soap. Participants will need to bring a few simple supplies.

NEW THIS YEAR: Participants have the option to purchase a handcrafted wooden soap mold from Little City Farm in advance. More details about what to bring will be provided upon registration.

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 SAT, MARCH 22 from 1-2:30 pm – CULTURED KITCHEN SERIES: SAUERKRAUT & KIMCHI
Cost: $35 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
Learn about the health benefits of making live-cultured ferments at home. In this practical hands-on workshop we'll be making a batch of sauerkraut and kimchi from scratch. You'll leave with all the knowledge you need to make delicious successful cabbage ferments at home. Take home jar of sauerkraut/kimchi – all supplies, instruction and recipes provided. Please bring an apron, cutting board and knife.

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SAT, APRIL 5 – from 1-3 pm - CULTURED KITCHEN SERIES: YOGURT MAKING
Cost: $35 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
Learn about the benefits of live-cultured foods, including homemade yogurt. In this practical hands-on workshop we'll be making a batch of yogurt, and yogurt cheese. Take home jar of live cultured yogurt and bowl of yogurt cheese! Please bring apron, thick towel, stainless steel bowl and colander. All supplies, instruction and recipes provided.

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SAT, APRIL 12 - from 1-3 pm - CULTURED KITCHEN SERIES: SOURDOUGH STARTERS
Cost: $35 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
Make beautiful healthful sourdough bread from your own starter at home! The sourdough process uses wild yeast and fermentation, and often this type of bread is more digestable than bread made with commercial yeast. Learn how to maintain a sourdough starter, benefits of eating sourdough bread, and other ways to use your starter (e.g. pancakes, muffins). Experience the sourdough bread making process from start to finish, take home your own jar of sourdough starter and taste samples of sourdough bread. All supplies, instruction and recipes provided. Please bring along an apron.

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SAT, APRIL 26 - from 10-11:30 am - FELTED SOAP!
Cost: $25 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
Felted soap combines soap with washcloth, all in one! Learn the art of making beautiful felted soap with natural wool, dyed in colourful shades. In this hands-on workshop participants will learn about wet felting, and each make 2 small bars of felted soap to take home. All supplies and instruction provided. Bring apron or old clothes. Children aged 5+ welcome if accompanied by an adult (if you wish to bring your child please notify us in at time of registering).

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SAT, APRIL 26 - from 1-3 pm - INTRO TO PERMACULTURE
Cost: $25 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
With Tracie Seedhouse of Earthchild Design
Permaculture is a design system that incorporates agriculture, culture and sustainability to create a self-sustaining, life enhancing landscape/lifestyle. In this practical workshop you will be walked through the basic principles of permaculture, look at some examples of permaculture at Little City Farm, and have the opportunity to use these concepts to work on design ideas for your own garden/yard. Supplies, instruction and resources provided. Bring along a pencil/pen/marker and coloured pencils for simple sketching. This is an outdoor workshop, so please dress for the weather (we will move indoors in case of extreme weather)

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SAT, MAY 10 - from 1-3 pm - WILD SPRING EDIBLES
Cost: $25 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
With Jackie McMillan, local wild foods educator.
This popular annual workshop teaches you all about how to find, safely identify, carefully harvest, and prepare wild spring edibles for eating. We'll talk about wild foods such as wild leeks, dandelion, fiddleheads, wood sorrel, violets, burdock root, and many other commonly found edible greens, flowers, roots and herbs. Taste delicious samples as part of this workshop. Please dress for the weather as this is an outdoor workshop.

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SAT, JUNE 15 - from 1-3 pm - CULTURED KITCHEN SERIES: KOMBUCHA
Cost: $35 - Limited space - pre-registration required.
With Jon Spee.

Kombucha is an ancient probiotic tea beverage that is delicious and nourishing.  Luckily it just takes a few ingredients and supplies and can be made at home.  Learn about the art of fermenting Kombucha, taking care of a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), adding flavours, and bottling, as well as a few other naturally fermented beverages that can be made at home.  Workshop will be hands on and attendees will leave with their own batch of Kombucha started and ready to ferment at home.  Instruction, recipes and supplies provided. Please bring an apron.
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Successful Kombucha!

We just bottled and consumed our first successful batch of kombucha - it was our second attempt to make this delicious fermented live culture tea elixir that has a long list of reputed health benefits.  This time we got a large starter "mother" culture (i.e. a gelatinous mass of bacteria and yeast) from a helpful neighbour (thanks Mike!).  It seems that finding this "mother" is the hardest part of making kombucha.   After a week of steeping our tea with the starter culture and mother floating on top, it had turned into what we think to be just as tasty a kombucha as any we've been purchasing from the health food store.  I think we might be hooked.

Once we have the starter we can keep brewing, sort of the way you keep a small portion of live culture yogurt or sourdough from each batch to start the following batch.  We used a wonderful favourite wild blueberry rooibos (called the "Manitoba Blend", a gift from this tea shop in Winnipeg) blended with black tea - here is our method:

Making Kombucha 
1 litre water
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp loose black tea
other herbal blend to flavour (if desired - e.g. blueberry, lemon, ginger, etc)
1/2 cup mature acidic kombucha from last batch

Make tea, steep with sugar for 15 minutes.  Strain, let cool, the pour into large wide-mouth clean glass jar.  Add mature kombucha (save a portion of each batch for the next starter).  Place mother in the liquid with firm side up.  Cover with fine meshed cheese cloth or cotton muslin cloth, let sit in warm room for 7-10 days.  Taste to see when your preferred acidic flavour is ready.  Then store in refrigerator.

Food Swap!

On Sunday we held our first Food Swap here at Little City Farm!  I had been reading about food swaps taking place in cities all across North America, bringing people together to share their harvests, preserves, and love of local food.  Food swaps are opportunities for local food entrepreneurs to showcase their new food products; for local homesteaders and urban gardeners to meet others; for food lovers to share extra preserves in exchange for new varieties; and communities to gather in a unique setting to practice the ancient art of bartering.  Food swaps are part marketplace, part food festival, part community potluck, part gathering.  Very fun indeed!  For our first swap we had 11 participants (plus a gaggle of kids), sharing 32 varieties of food items: everything from kimchi to wood-fired bread; zucchini muffins to strawberry jam; plum wine to freshly harvested honeycomb; herbs to handmade curry paste; granola to freshly squeezed juice; rendered duck fat to pickled diakon radish; yam cranberry loaves to jarred peaches; gorgeous bunches of kale, chard, beets, herbs and lavender bundles to dandelion jelly, etc. 

We estimate that aproximately 150 items were bartered in the span of about 2 hours (no money changes hands at a food swap), everyone going home with boxes and baskets of newly aquired items, fully bellies, and happy smiles on their faces.  Thanks to everyone who came and made this event the success it was!  We'll definitely host this event again - look for it in the spring.

Making kombucha - the "elixir of long life"

This past week we had guests from an urban farm in Ottawa staying with us at our bed and breakfast.  They said for them it was like "coming home", and we too thoroughly enjoyed their company and had long conversations about permaculture, cohousing, land trusts, food co-ops, and lacto-fermenting foods.  They shared their home-brewed kombucha with us and left a bottle so we could get our own batch started!  Kombucha is a wonder drink, known by some as "the elixir of long life" because it is full of antioxidants and probiotics (along the lines of kefir, live culture yogurt, kimchi, etc).  It promotes healthy intestinal flora, stimulates the immune system, boosts energy levels, and has been reputed to heal a long list of health issues by detoxifying and cleansing the blood/body. 

We had been talking about starting kombucha after reading about it in the Wild Fermentation book, so I was extremely pleased to receive this gift!  Hopefully, if all goes well, in several weeks we will have a "mother" mushroom which we can pass on to others who want to start their own brews.

Here's a recipe for making your own kombucha at home.  It's also readily available in various flavours from health food stores.  I have not found information yet about whether kombucha can successfully be made without using refined sugar - this is one down side of this drink, as it does contain a fair amount of sugar sweetener, but the sugar is needed (as in wine making) for the microbes to multiply and assist fermentation.

Kombucha
1) Get some live kombucha (e.g. if you don't have someone to give you a starter culture, they can be purchased online, or you can use 1/2 cup from a kombucha tea you buy at the health food store)
2) Steep 4-8 tea bags (black or green, not herbal) per 4 litres (aprox 1 gallon) water.  Tea can be made with cold filtered water and let tea bags steep until tea is desired strength; or make a hot tea and let it cool before adding starter culture.
3) Add 1-1/2 cups sugar, which helps fuel the kombucha microbes (the more sugar, the stronger the sour flavour will be in your finished kombucha).
4) Add kombucha starter culture, or the 1/2 cup kombucha tea from your last batch or store bought bottle. 
5) Stir well, then cover with cheese cloth - securing cover so flies can't get in, but allowing kombucha to breathe.
6) Let sit for one week (or more) on kitchen counter - if "mushroom" grows it has worked.  Save mushroom ("mother") and use to float in your next batch of kombucha.  In another week or so the mushroom will grow another small mushroom on it, which can be saved and used, or given away!
7) Bottle kombucha (siphon into glass jars) and store in the fridge.  At the point of bottling, you can add various interesting flavour additives such as chopped ginger root, raspberries, or lemon slices, into each bottle.  The finished kombucha will taste like a fizzy carbonated sour-sweet iced tea drink.  Drink 1/2 cup each day for health benefits.

Lacto-Fermenting Workshop!

We had our friend Jackie back again at Little City Farm this weekend, to lead her popular workshop on lacto-fermenting foods. This is the perfect season to be offering this workshop as we can still plan our gardens accordingly to include foods that are perfect for preserving as pickles by lacto-bacillus fermentation process, such as beans, garlic, carrots, cucumbers. As well, we can begin harvesting foods that are already coming to season, such as grape leaves and asparagus - both of these items were shared in the tasting portion of the workshop and were fantastic! Lacto-fermentation, or "wild fermentation", is a wonderful simple way to capture the texture, flavour and exceptional nutritional value of foods, while preserving them without use of canning, drying, cooking, freezing (all of which degrade the nutritional quality of foods). Lacto-fermented foods also offer healing properties to a wide range of health issues, so should be a staple in our diets (as they were and still are in many diverse cultures around the globe - e.g. kimchi, sourdough, sauerkraut, crock pickles, injera, miso, yogurt, wines, etc).

To learn more, books that were recommended in this workshop included:
Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Katz
Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon (Weston Price Foundation)

Winter Kimchi

I mentioned earlier that I've started another live cultered sauerkraut. It's actually not quite a sauerkraut as it's not just cabbage - it's more of a winter kimchi - a spicy, garlicy, health-tonic made of pickled vegetables. Kimchi can be made in a variety of styles and originates in Korea where it is a national culinary art and passion.

This recipe is loosely based on the one found in Wild Fermentation: The Flavour, Nutrition and Craft of Live-Culture Foods by Sandor Ellix Katz, a fantastic cookbook and cultured food history. This cookbook is always close at hand in our kitchen, as we are trying to work our way through all manner of fermented foods and this wide ranging book covers everything from vegetable ferments (like sauerkraut and pickles); bean ferments (like miso and tempeh); bread ferments (like sourdough and dosas); dairy ferments (like yogurt and savoury cheeses); plus fermented grains, beverages, wines, vinegars and more!

This kimchi is extremely simple to make - the secret is just the right amount of spicing to suit your taste and then allowing enough time to ferment. The recipe is extremely adaptable, just use what vegetables you like or have at hand. Here is an aproximation of what I used:

Winter Kimchi
fresh garlic (3 whole bulbs)
onion (2 large)
ginger (1/2 inch sliced)
dried cayenne peppers (3 large including seeds)
carrots (3 large)
green cabbage (3 heads)
daikon radish (6 inches)
filtered water (14-18 cups)
sea salt (14-18 Tbsp)

First the vegetables are shredded or chopped to a desireable size, then stirred together in a large jar or ceramic crock. The container is then filled with enough brine solution to completely cover the vegetables when weighed down with a large plate and weight - to make the very strong brine solution 1 Tbsp of sea salt added to each cup of filtered water. Then the crock is covered with a clean cloth, and set on the counter to ferment. It can be tasted each day, and any mould is skimmed off. When it achieves desired taste the kimchi can be packed into jars, covered with brine, and refrigerated. True wild lacto-bacilli ferments are never canned or pasteurized, as this kills off the vital healthy bacteria. It can keep almost indefinitely in the fridge, but will likely be eaten in short order! Wild ferments like this are invaluable for building immunity and a healthy digestive system, and should be a regular part of everyone's daily meal routine. Delicious!

Caring for Winter Colds & Flu Naturally...

So far this season we've been fortunate to have avoided major cold or flu outbreaks in this house. Since the fall we've been taking daily doses of herbal tinctures like echinacea and rosehip to build our immune system, as well as multivitamins and acidophilus (to maintain healthy intestinal bacteria). We eat a diet that is strongly influenced by macrobiotic principles, using whole grains like brown rice, millet and quinoa, tempeh, steamed seasonal vegetables, lots of kale and brassicas, sprouted and fermented foods, pro-biotic yogurt, winter squash, hearty stews, apples or other fruit which we've dried or frozen from the summer months. We try to limit processed foods and refined sugars in our diet as these weaken the body's system, and limit other dairy products which often lead to congestion - difficult to avoid during the holiday season laden with rich festive foods, it's no wonder so many of us come down with colds and other illnesses post-Christmas! Whenever we have a first onset of cold or flu symptoms we brew up strong infusions of ginger-lemon-cayenne tea or miso-garlic soup, and this generally seems to do the trick.

This week our kitchen became a natural health laboratory as I worked at concocting a variety of items to have on hand over the winter months. A new batch of raw cabbage sauerkraut, a super food we should all be consuming every day as it's an excellent source of vitamin C, lactobacilli, and other nutrients that help aid digestion and maintain overall health, and is well known as an immune booster that helps fight colds and other infections. (For anyone looking to learn more about the vast health benefits and how-to of creating fermented foods at home, consider attending our Fermented Foods workshop in April.)

Other herbal remedies completed this week include Astragalus root tincture which is renowed for building the immune system and building bronchial strength (finally ready to strain and bottle this week, after steeping for 12 weeks since October); bath therapy salts that use pure epsom salts, sea salts and essential oils to help with congestion, aches and chills; sage cough syrup made with local honey and garden sage; and a strong herbal "winter flu fighter" blend that incorporate a selection of flu fighting herbs harvested and dried from our garden this summer (including purple and green sage, thyme, rosemary, horehound, fennel, hops and more).

Some of these new winter herbal products will also be listed on our etsy store later this week.
www.homesteadherbal.etsy.com

Pear Sauce and other harvest adventures

This is my favourite time of year - the days are warm and mellow, the garden harvest is at it's peak, fall fruits that I love (pears, plums, apples, local grapes) have come into season, evenings are perfect for bonfires and cozy woolen sweaters, and we've pulled out our warm quilt for sleeping again. This weekend saw all of the above - lots of garden harvest, some canning and preserving, some baking, a toasty fire, cozy clothes, and a few long fall walks...

We canned up the bushel of pears, and will be making pear pie (dutch pear pie) tomorrow with a handful of pears left over. Below is the pear sauce recipe - very easy (it can even be done over two days, making the sauce one day and canning it the next) - and no sugar is added. We eat it with homemade yogurt and granola for breakfast, or as a dessert.

It was also time to pack the crock pickles (mentioned on this blog a few months ago when we started the crock) into jars - the flavours are just perfect and that is the point to put the pickles plus brine into jars in the fridge for longer storage. I have a friend who also just keeps these jars of fermented goodness in a dark cool storage area (non-refrigerated). I may have to try that as our fridge is pretty full these days. Fermenting foods is so simple, and so rewarding (and so healthful)! Like the sourdough starter that I've been experimenting with, it seems difficult to go wrong with it. Today's sourdough starter turned into 7 loaves and a large pan of sourdough cinnamon buns, and a pizza crust - this sourdough recipe is very versatile. Between fermented foods, sprouting indoors, winter kale, and our coldframe/greenhouse salad greens, I plan to get us through the winter months with fresh vitamin-mineral-enzyme rich locally produced food. The foods we've canned or put in the freezer will be a bonus too!

Easy Pear or Apple Sauce

Bushel of pears or apples
7-12 large mason jars, rings and lids

1) Wash, cut and core pears (or apples), but do not need to peel.
2) Slowly simmer pears with a little water in large pot until they are extremely soft (several hours). Remember to stir occasionally.
3) Puree pears into thick sauce and heat sauce, continuing to stir often so it does not burn.
4) Meanwhile prepare canner by heating water and sterilizing jars.
5) When canner of water is boiling, fill hot jars with hot pear sauce to within 1/2 inch from top (i.e. 1/2 inch "headspace"). Wipe rims to remove any stickiness.
6) Heat canning lids according to instructions on package (usually 5 minutes in boiling water to soften the seals). Fasten onto the hot jars tightening slightly ("finger tight").
7) Set jars in hot canner, and when water returns to boiling, boil for 20 minutes (20 minutes for 500 ml jars).
8) Take jars out, let sit for 24 hours to cool. Check to see that all lids have sealed (concave if sealed). Label and store for future use!

What's going on at the homestead?

We've had hardly any free time to spend on the computer! Now that the weather has finally warmed, everything is ripening quickly in the garden and our more serious harvest has begun. Tomatoes, beans, basil, zucchini...

With harvest also comes preserving. We do a fair share of canning (salsa, jams, peaches, chutney), freezing (corn, zucchini, pesto), as well as drying in our dehydrator. The best canning books I'm using these days involve small batch preserving, so that I can make one canner load (7 jars) at a time - manageable with a toddler underfoot - and it doesn't have to become an all-day process. Books I've been referring to are "Small Batch Preserving", and "The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Foods", as well as a tattered 30 year-old copy of "Putting Food By".

However, in midst of this heat, and considering energy use, I am growing much more interested in fermentation techniques for preserving foods. Fermentation (lactic acid ferment) not only preserves the flavour, but in fact enhances nutrition (whereas by canning you essentially boil off much of the nutrient value). It is simple, quick, does not require stove top energy or heating up the house. Fermentation is an age-old, global practice - well-known foods like miso, tempeh, sauerkraut, beer, sourdoughs, and so on, are all traditionally made with the fermenting process. All you need is a series of large glass jars or ceramic crocks, and you are set. This week I'll be making crock pickles as well as dilly beans. Here is the recipe for dilly beans, which we made back in January as part of the fermentation workshop here at Little City Farm (see earlier blog post). An essential fermentation book is by Sandor Katz, "Wild Fermentation".

Dilly Beans
3 cups organic beans
1 cup garlic scapes
dill blossoms
cayenne
2 Tbsp whey

Add 2 Tbsp sea salt per litre of water, to filtered water, bring to a boil, and cook beans for 5-10 minutes. This denatures the toxic protein called phasin. Sterilize 1 litre jar, and put a dill blossom and a pinch of cayenne in the bottom. Pack in beans densely, with garlic scapes intermingles, then pour cooled cooking water to cover beans to 1 cm. Add 2 Tbsp whey, put on the lids, and leave at room temperature for 8-10 days. Store cool and in the dark.

Farmhouse Meal

Speaking of delectable, even gourmet local foods prepared in simple ways in the home kitchen (see previous post on fermented foods), we felt so lucky to consider our meals of the day. We eat many local grown or prepared foods including many from our own garden, and try hard to eat in season as much as we can. Often we can start to take this for granted, but the day's meals seemed especially wonderful in the context of the earlier fermentation workshop. Here is what we had - no photos were taken as we were simply enjoying the foods as a family.

Brunch with our friend who dropped in from out of town:
- buckwheat flapjacks made with local organic flour (buckwheat and whole wheat) and local free range eggs from our backyard hens
- served with local maple syrup, homemade organic yogurt and strawberry/peach sauce made from organic fruit we harvested and preserved this past summer
- maple glazed tempeh made with locally produced tempeh (produced in a small-scale production facility on the next street over from our house), made with local maple syrup, and cayenne, garlic and herbs from our garden
- herbal tea from our own herb garden
- our baby Maya, who's just started solid foods, ate local pure applesauce we'd canned in the fall for her (made from wild harvested apples, and apples from our own property)

Dinner as a family consisted of this:
- creamy roasted carrot soup with local organic carrots, herbs from our garden
- served with a small dollop of organic yogurt and fresh rosemary (from our greenhouse)
- herbed biscuits made with local organic flour, served with organic goat chevre
- assortment of ferments - stuffed local wild grape leaves and dilly beans made by one friend; the best sauerkraut I've ever had, prepared by another friend; sour cherry wine made by another friend who led a winemaking workshop here last year
- as we were finishing up dinner, the same winemaking friend made a surprise visit with another large carboy of freshly racked local homemade rhubarb wine he wanted to share with us!
- fresh greens are sprouting in the greenhouse and soon we'll harvest our first salad of 2009

We felt well nourished, and so blessed by our incredible array of talented friends who are making such bold and wonderful forrays into local foods!

Let your taste buds tingle - fermented foods workshop!

What an incredible weekend of fine local food flavours! On Saturday we hosted a workshop here on lactic acid ferments - a category that includes delicious and health-promoting foods like sauerkrauts, pickles, miso, kimchi, tempeh, sourdough, yogurt, beers and wines. The two hour workshop did not feel long enough, as our facilitator covered a wide range of information including history, astounding stories of the health benefits, cultural traditions, "how-to" of fermented foods, and of course a tasting of many of her homemade ferments. We were priviledged to try her brined garlic, carrots/daikon/burdock, dilly beans, last spring's asparagus, wild harvested brined grape leaves, and year-old sauerkraut made into a rich salad dressing. Mmmmmm. Yes, our taste and olfactory senses were tingling alright!

Her basic recipe for salt water brine is simple - 1 litre distilled water (as chlorine or other chemicals can destroy the living bacterias which are needed for fermentation) at a ratio to 2 Tbsp sea salt. She also suggests adding 2 Tbsp of whey (skimmed off her homemade yogurt) to each jar to help activate and speed up the fermentation process. Here is one of the recipes she shared, which we made together as a group - a colourful winter slaw made with locally grown root vegetables, cabbage, garlic, kale and more. Just seeing this gorgeous raw "salad" shredded into a huge bowl on the table was enough to make us all salivate. Everyone took home a sample jar, and after watching these wonderful colours bubble and meld, and tasting the changes to our jars over the next days and weeks we will all be hooked on fermentation.

Colourful Winter Slaw
3 1/4 cups peeled & chopped roots
3 1/4 cups chopped onions or leeks
several garlic cloves, peeled
1 large bunch kale, chopped
add other spices as desired (bay leaf, horseradish, ginger, mustard seeds, dill, tarragon, clove)
Salt water (2 Tbsp sea salt: 1 litre water)

Mix all ingredients except the salt water. Crush slightly by hand to start breaking down vegetables making them more susceptible to absorbing the brine. Pack into sterlized jars up to 3-4 cm from the lip. If using metal canning lid, consider layering a piece of waxed paper inbetween so the vegetables don't react with the metal. Add 2 Tbsp whey and fill the jar to cove the vegetables by 1 cm with the salt water. Store at room temperature for 10 days, then in a cool dark place. When desired level of fermentation has been achieved the jars can be stored in the fridge.

An excellent book that covers a wide range of fermentation lore is Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. It's just worth reading on it's own, regardless of whether you plan to ferment or not, as he is such an engaging writer drawing the reader into this tradition of foods. He describes fermentation as a form of activism! Fermentation is unpredictabile, unique, strongly influence by local conditions, and engages the eater directly in the process of its preparation (often for years before the ferment is "ready" - e.g. 10-year old miso, cheese or wine that improves and changes flavour with age). This in opposition to mass produced consumer culture food that is denuded of nutrition, uniform to the extreme, and controlled by corporations leaving the eater powerless. He describes a society without "culture" (i.e. fermented food traditions) as having lost its culture, and encourages us to find ways to engage in our food and food histories again - be it growing, cooking, baking, fermenting...

Thanks to everyone who came - what a great group of food enthusiasts! We could have used another hour after the workshop just to get to know each other and share more recipes and ideas. We plan to offer this fermentation workshop again in the fall, at harvest time when we are all thinking of best ways to put food away for the winter. Not all of us have root cellars or solar dehydrators, not all want to use loads of electricity for canning or freezing foods, but fermented foods are simple, require no electricity, and retain optimum nutrition (in fact, nutrition is enhanced by the fermentation process). Stay posted on our website for updates on the next fermentation workshop date.