I’ll need to take a few minutes out of my day today to tidy up our screen porch. Thunderstorms are predicted to come Friday night. And the screen porch is our favorite viewing spot. Okay, truth be told it is my favorite spot. Others in the family leave the safety of the porch for better viewing spots. Until the count gets too small, too close. And since it hasn’t rained since June, I’m looking forward to the rain that will hopefully come with it, I might get off of Thunder Porch to enjoy the rain.
Need some pickles? I have four gallons in the fridge and I’m going to put more to ferment this weekend if I don’t sell them all. Maybe I’ll greatly increase the hot peppers and garlic and name the batch “Lightening Pickles”.
I’ve always loved pickles but now I devour them, morning, noon and night. The change? I’ve been making fermented pickles instead of canned for the last two years. Fermented? Yep, think of the way grandma, perhaps great grandma for you Dear Reader, did up her sauerkraut in those cream colored crocks with a blue bird and a number on them. And they are left in the brine in the refrigerator or other cool place for as long as they last, which can be pretty long I hear, I don’t know, we seem to run out of them before they are no longer good.
When you make fermented pickles from vegetables, like kosher dills (the pickles I’m referring to actually), you cultivate lactobacilli, similar to the little buggers in your expensive yogurt you buy because you have a gut ache all the time.
Along with making it a goal to not eat any factory processed foods and greatly reduce refined foods, we are also putting a huge effort into eating some sort of home fermented food at each meal.
The daily bloat is gone. The near daily double-over-gut ache is also gone. To the point where now, when I have a store bought beer (one of the few things we have not yet replaced with our own product,) and it gives me a gut ache, I know, and I know which brand or variety to avoid in the future.
So the Thunder Porch is now only the Thunder Porch because we sit and listen to God’s thunder.
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