Make Soda at Home
I think Will and I got into soda-making last year when we read “The Tightwad Gazette” and started thinking about the myriad ways we could save money if we just put some energy into it. Or perhaps it was when we started paying attention to the amount of corn syrup contained in the food we eat and looking for an alternative. Well, mostly I think it just sounded fun. We started with a Mr. Root Beer kit from Bloomington Hardware. I’m not much of a soda drinker but I do enjoy a good root beer and was intrigued by the idea of brewing my own. Alas, that first batch tasted like the fake flabor in root beer hard candies. Yuck. We tried a couple other recipes and had some successes but then got involved in other projects and the soda-making supplies were ignored for awhile.
I decided this weekend I was ready to try again and invited my cousin Lia to come and help out. (Little did she know it was an invitation to do all the work. Mwa ha ha ha.) We decided to make a gallon of ginger beer and a half gallon of root beer. To make any sort of soda, the basic idea is to make a sweet herbal tea or juice mixture and then add a little yeast and let it ferment for a few days to create the carbonation. Technically, the carbonation means that it’s very mildly alcoholic but I think we’re talking something like 0.01%. Once it’s fizzy enough, you put the soda in the fridge to stop the fermentation. Actually, the soda will keep fermenting in the fridge but at a much slower rate. You do have to drink it within a couple of weeks or it’s liable to fizz all over the place.
Our first step for the ginger beer was to cut up a bunch of ginger. (I let Lia do the dirty work). Our recipe said to combine 1.25 oz grated ginger, 1/2 gallon water, 1.75 C sugar, and the juice from half a lemon and to simmer for 25 minutes. The next step was letting it cool so we got started with the root beer. I decided to try using Pappy’s sassafras tea concentrate this time. It’s a greenish brown syrup sold at the grocery store for people who are too lazy to dig up sassafras root. (Actually, there’s some big hooplah about how sassafras contains a carcinogen so there are lots of “safrole-free” products available at grocery stores but I read through the study they did on rats and a person would have to drink hundreds of cups of tea a day to get the same dosage so I don’t worry too much.) We mixed the concentrate with water and sugar and heated it up to dissolve the sugar. Then we had to wait for it to cool too.
For the ginger beer, the next step was to mix our ginger “tea” with half a gallon of cooler water to get the final mix around 75 degrees F to make the yeast happy. We mixed 1/8 teaspoon of yeast with 1/4C of water and let it proof for a few minutes before mixing it all in. The recipe book “Homemade Root Beer, Soda, and Pop” generally calls for ale yeast but the author says you can also use bread yeast, which is what we use. After mixing the ginger beer, we added yeast to the sassafras tea to make root beer. Then we poured each batch into bottles. Will and I have been using two types of bottles. There are four 1-Liter plastic bottles that came from our original Mr. Root Beer Kit. They have special lids with little pressure release vents so if there’s too much pressure, they will fountain rather than explode. The plastic bottles are also nice because you can squeeze them to judge the amount of carbonation (the bottles get firmer as the soda ferments). Our other bottles are 1-pint (I think) brown glass swing-top bottles from Butler Winery, a local supplier of homebrew equipment (and also tasty wine). The swingtops lids also provide emergency pressure venting and the bottles look super cool.
Due to warm August weather, our soda was ready in two days. My verdict? The ginger beer is quite tasty although it definitely has a strong bite. The root beer is a bit disappointing, with a mild sassafras flavor and a very strong yeasty flavor. Maybe I’ll try again using more sassafras concentrate and less yeast or perhaps I’ll go old school and try with real sassafras root. We’ll see if Lia is up for some more hard labor.
My abstract thinking about 
This evening I went over to my friend Bobbi’s house to help her dehydrate some peaches. I am still a novice food preserver but I am really excited to learn more about drying food and Bobbi has been doing it for awhile. Her persimmon leather is particularly tasty but she works seasonally and the fruit-of-the-month is peaches. She buys seconds (the ugly, small, or slightly blemished fruit) from Olde Lane Orchard and dries, freezes, cans, or jams them although her preference is drying.
We started by washing the peaches in a sink full of water. (Kind of makes you want to bob for peaches, doesn’t it?) Eliza, Bobbi’s daughter, had requested that we do a batch without skins so our next step was to drop each peach into boiling water for a few minutes to loosen the skin. This is the same technique used to get the skins of tomatoes for people who like their tomato sauce smooth. Bobbi and I are both of the opinion that it’s easiest and most nutritious to leave the skins on most everything but we were curious to see how it went.
The peeling part wasn’t too bad once we let the peaches cool a little. The clingstone peaches seemed to peel a lot more easily than the freestone peaches, which may explain why they’re still a popular variety even though they’re a pain to cut up. However, skinned peaches are incredibly slippery and I think it was sheer luck that none of them landed on the floor. They also seemed juicier than normal when cut, perhaps because they were partially cooked by the boiling water.
We sliced them into roughly even chunks and put them on the dehydrator trays to dry. In an ideal world, all the pieces should be exactly the same size so they dry at the same rate but in reality some of them get a little drier and some not quite as much and life goes on. Drying at low temperatures preserves a lot more vitamins and nutrients than canning or freezing and if the moisture content is low enough, it can be stored for many months.
Bobbi’s dehydrator is much nicer than mine with adjustable heat and a timer so you can turn it on and set it to magically turn itself off in X number of hours, which is helpful since drying times for fruit tend to be pretty long - say 20 hours. I left just a couple hours after we got the dehydrator loaded so I won’t be able to report back on the results for a few days but I’m sure they will be tasty and probably look like this batch that Bobbi did last week. I’m looking forward to trying out a few recipes from “
My toenails are purple and sparkly. This is somewhat unusual for me since I’m not much of a girly girl and I’m pretty dangerous with fingernail polish but this weekend my aunt Mary threw me a spa-themed wedding shower so I thought I’d go for a little glitz. She did a great job emphasizing eco-friendly naturally beauty tips so we started our relaxation with an oatmeal face mask (complete with free range organic eggs) and homegrown organic cucumber slices on our eyes. Then all my aunts brought out their home foot bath kits and assorted back massagers and we rotated through them all.
My dreams of a new bed have finally been fulfilled. We were a bit overwhelmed by the array of bed choices out there, not to mention the price tags. I must confess, I ruled out all the ultra-natural beds immediately because they are super expensive and there’s no place to try them out in town. I feel a little bad about that decision but… only a little. I’ve been dreaming of a super comfortable bed for months and some how all those descriptions of 
But most of our furniture is hand-me-downs from friends and family. Two dressers, a credenza, a kitchen table, a night stand, five bookshelves, a rug, and I’m sure a few other things have made their way into our homes from the homes of our support network. It’s a little hard to plan for their appearance but it is comforting to me to walk around the house and have each piece of furniture tell me a story and remind me of an old friend.