Kefir Madness

I know you're all dying to hear how the great kefir experiment is faring. So far: pretty well. I put the kefir grains (see above) into a jar of milk this morning and set it out on the counter. By dinnertime I had what looked like a few cottage cheese curds forming, and I'm assuming by morning we'll have more. Whether what we have will be edible still remains to be seen.

In other kitchen news, bread won out over bagels because, well, it was easier. When you're cooking sick, sometimes you have to take the path of least resistance. (Which I also did by making dumplings instead of noodles--because dropping the dough into the soup and calling it done is so much easier than rolling it out and cutting it up and drying it.) This bread is the only recipe I've ever used which gave me great, predictable results with 100% whole-wheat flour. I'm guessing it's probably because of the gluten. Whatever it is, it has successfully brought to a close my frustrations with wheat loaves that were too dense, too dry, too bitter, too wet, etc. It's just very simple bread with very basic ingredients, and I really love it.

Once the bread was made, it was onto meatier things. Literally. Making chicken soup today, I was struck with the feeling I always get when we break down and decide to cook with meat: it's a lot of work. Both the cooking and the cleanup just feel more time-consuming to me, and this is from somebody who started with a cooked rotisserie chicken. The nice thing about cooking with mainly vegetables and grains is that there are few potential hazards to undercooking them (a definite bonus if you're as impatient as I am; a few minutes under the broiler to melt the cheese is my idea of fully cooked) and there's no elaborate voodoo to the hygiene of preparation and cleanup. We use the same cutting board for carrots and potatoes and bread and...it doesn't matter what was raw or not, or whether there are a few shreds of vegetable clinging to the Cuisinart blade when we put it away. (Not that there would be, mind you.) If we seem ambitious in the kitchen, maybe it's only because we gravitate toward foods that make it easy on us.

That said, the soup and dumplings (an easy, cheap, and delicious way to make soup into a stick-to-your-ribs supper, if I do say so myself) were very good. I just don't think they were better than a pot of vegetable soup with dumplings would have been, and it would have been for at least half the cost and effort. Well, now we know. Again. But, our brief foray into poultry isn't quite over; before I made the chicken into soup I shredded most of the breast meat to put into chicken enchiladas, which we'll probably have tomorrow or the next day.

After that, though, I think it's back to lentils and kefir and beans (oh, my!).