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We barely got any of the rain from the high pressure front that passed through last night. I guess anything is better than nothing, but we've missed out on the rain for several months now, and it's really dry around here. Further west and up near the big cities they did okay. That's the way it seems to go sometime. The brown grass seems to make it hotter than it really is, but temperatures in the high nineties is plenty hot.
The weather seems to have sapped all my energy for writing today. I stepped outside to the second floor deck to give myself a haircut. The sun was already getting high enough in the sky to tan my hide. When I finished cutting my hair I went ahead and laid out for a while to make sure I got plenty of vitamin D. I'm getting tan enough now so that I can lay out for as long as I want. I still limit it to 20-30 minutes.
Laying out in the sun when the temperatures are this hot already tempts the monkey to get on my back. That's what we called having a heat stroke when I was a kid working in the tobacco fields. More technically it's called heat prostration, and it can kill you. I've had it so bad in the past that I got unconscious. If I hadn't been found and drug outta the sun I would have died. It would have been an easy way to go.
My kefir obsession seems to be going pretty good. The water kefir I make is very tasty. It's a little effervescent from the fermentation, and the ginger root powder I put in it to give it a snappy taste. I'm drinking about two cups or more a day. The milk kefir is more of a problem because the heat makes it ferment real fast.
It's getting tarter or more sour than I really like it before I strain out the mother culture and put resultant kefir in the fridge. Straining out the kefir grains really slows down the fermentation process, and sticking it in the refrigerator also nips the process in the bud even further. It's after that happens that the "second fermentation" occurs. You can mix in various fruits and flavors to offset the tangy taste of fermented milk.
Making a kefir smoothie is my next project. Commercial kefir smoothies by LifeWay is what set the standard for how I like for kefir to taste. Accordingly, I went to the store and bought some fresh blueberries. When the milk kefir ferments to just the right tartness, I'm gonna make the two into One, drink it, and immediately become an immortal.
I might add a little sugar or maple syrup to sweeten the pot. Why should I suffer if what I'm after by making my own kefir is cheap thrills. Okay, so I'm "after" more than that. Kefir grains is the best source of friendly gut bacteria available to the minds of men. Well? That's the hype. You don't think I'm gonna jump through this raps' hoops without believing the dogma, do you? At least for a little while.
I really believe the probiotics rap. It's the most incredibly inane non-sense I've ever been attracted to. What I've grown to believe in the last year or so is that whether I'm healthy, wealthy, and wise depends on the balance in my belly of a bunch of gut bacteria. They ARE my immune system.
I've been led to believe that a body is always gonna have some of the friendly and the unfriendly kinds of gut bacteria in their intestines at all times, no matter what. It all comes down to which gut bacteria you feed, and which ones you ignore. Philosophically, that's pretty much the accepted way with abstract thoughts too. "What miracles more are needed?"
So, that's the direction this new obsession seems to be taking me. The only decisions I have to make in this regard is what to feed the friendly gut bacteria in order for them to at least prevail... mostly.
They were not able to prevail against the side effects of a rotten tooth. They couldn't save me from dying due to a direct frontal attack on my immune system. They couldn't survive the dentist's frontal attack on all my gut bacteria with the antibiotics he prescribed. I had to go along with the man who knew he was saving my life.
I'm still replacing the murdered gut bacteria with as many friendly ones as I can force down my gullet. I didn't trust the probiotic capsules to do what needed to be done. The commercial kefir was better. Both of these sources of consumer products were sterilized or homogenized by an act of law. They're not self-propagating. They don't reproduce themselves according to the needs of your actual habitat like live cultures do.
This new obsession is full of stuff to goof on. Last night I was watching a travel show on PBS featuring the writer/chef Burt Wolf. He is a great presenter, but I'm equally impressed by his cooking credentials. This particular show was about San Francisco.
Eventually, he got around to talking about the famous San Francisco sourdough bread. It has a taste there, when eaten in San Francisco, he claimed, that could not be acquired any other place in the world. Whereupon, to my great surprise, he explained why.
It's the wild yeast that grow there, he said, and even if you were to buy some of the ingredients and the same yeast there, when you took it somewhere else to make sourdough bread, that the wild yeast where you took it to bake would cause the sourdough bread to taste a little different than what you ate in San Francisco.
I don't know nothing about no "wild yeast", but from all the odd things I've observed in the last decade it sorta makes sense. A friend likes to grow his own mushrooms. He has piles of stacked logs that have been doctored with portabella strains. Most impressive for me though was the extremes he had to go to in order to grow the common button type mushrooms in a terrarium.
It was like sterilizing an operating room. He steamed everything. Used distilled water. Otherwise he said, the microbes floating in the air would infect the mushrooms he was trying to grow, and contaminate them. Sounds like "wild yeast" to me.
This has to be why the experienced pundits who know kefir from a long time back, and have their own goats and cows to make sure they use only raw milk, say that their kefir grains they give away will produce a different kefir than their kefir because there are different "wild yeast" in your kitchen than in their kitchen.
Purportedly these kefir mother culture grains will attract the local bacterial "wild yeast" to help them keep you healthy in order for them to continue to survive themselves, at least until you croak. Some say you get brownie points if you give their babies to your friends and family to spread the wealth.
Have I been duped into raising and eating... aliens... to aid and abet them taking over the Earth? Oh, why the hell not? Nobody knows. '-)
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