simple life

Jar

 

I live in the country. I grow food, make stuff, strive for self sufficiency and a small ecological footprint. Sounds like a simple life (or some nauseating eco-puritan you probably wouldn't take to the pub.)

You know, I like the idea of it. Slow down. Pare away the unnecessaries. Live simply. 

It's a lovely idea. 

But you know what I love? 

I love a friend sitting on my couch (which is in my kitchen) chatting while I throw flour around and we'll stop every now and then to direct children walking through looking for musical instruments and medical dictionaries (in that order.) I'm cobbling together a Bikkie order, thinking about Tilly's birthday party on Saturday and trying to figure out when to host the visitors who we'd like to have stay. 

There's calls about a meat chicken feed order and the vet about the pig's castration on Thursday. I'm shaking my homemade vanilla extract (more on this soon), feeding my sourdough starter and stirring the fermenting pear vinegar while googling how to get rid of the tiny flies settling all over the top of the cheesecloth. It really doesn't look good when you pick up the jar and a cloud of bugs wafts off to somewhere else in the kitchen. You know, it's a fermenting process, I respect that, but Adam has a bit of a thing about drain flies. They've got to go. 

It's all so simple.

Stage one Pear Vinegar:

Cover slighty old and inedible chopped up pears with filtered water. Cover with cheesecloth and leave on a bench, stirring daily, for about four weeks. Or until your drain fly problem is so dire you have to put the jar in the fridge – which obviously halts the fermenting process – until you figure it out. 

Anyone for the pub?

xxx 

 

 

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