Another step towards my goal of becoming self-sufficient. I got Chris a Beer-Brewing kit for Christmas – we’re waiting on our first batch (already bottled) to try. Just one more week or two… in the mean time, we got some Old Milwaukee returnables from the local liquor store. According to my calculations of how much beer one batch makes, how many beers we’ll drink between batches, and how many beers from each batch we want to save… we’ll probably need to buy another 3 or 4 cases of returnable bottles (oh, and some caps?) just to make sure that we have enough to bottle the current batch. I’m really, really hoping that one of us will find ourselves in a larger city soon – Old Milwaukee isn’t exactly the kind of beer that you get excited about drinking – even if the deposit (cost) is only $1.20 for 24 bottles.

Also, we’ve both become slightly addicted to kombucha recently. You can pick up a bottle at most health food stores now; even Cub Foods has them in their Organic Refrigerated section. Basically, it’s a fermented tea – raw food, loaded with probiotics and other benefitial bacteria and cultures. It’s kind of similar to making sour dough bread: you start with a culture; add black or green tea, sugar, and a few cups of the original beverage; let sit for a while and pour into bottles; separate the “mother” culture from the “baby” culture; make a new batch (or two!) using the culture, part of the kombucha, and new black/green tea.

Also, still – I received a Soy Milk Maker for Christmas! It came with instructions for making tofu! We made oat milk last week, but it was too watery and kind of slimy. The soy milk we just made seemed to come out wonderfuly, but we decided to turn it into tofu instead. Apparently, tofu can be made out of just about any bean: black-eyed peas, black beans, chick peas, mung beans…

I guess the next step is to start roasting our own coffee. Oh yeah – and to buy the land suitable for living on and farming all of the vegetables, grains, and beans that we need to create all these things “from scratch.” Plus, there’s a lot of learning to do – Chris has a “beer recipe” book, but we have no idea how to go from grains to malt to malt extract – yet. But, the beer-brewer can make wine, and if the climate stays on this track, we may just be able to grow coffee beans in our back yard in a couple of years…