DIY: Level Up!

We have our first pet, a nice sourdough culture, affectionately named Bobby. When you leave Bobby alone at home in too small of a space he makes a mess all over everything. Bad Bobby!

But then those are those good days where you really get bond with your pet.

Nothing says love like eating 50% of his body mass once a week. Thanks guy!


In other DIY news we are starting to get serious about fermentation.

One of our closets has turned into fermentation cabinet. Wasn't much in it start with and we never did use those cleaning supplies that much….. anyway, back in June I brewed up my first batch of beer. I'm pretty excited about it, always something I wanted to do. Turns out someone I work with has all the gear so he let me borrow it before I committed to buying anything of my own.

Here is the beer before I put it in the bottle. You'll also noticed we made up two more batches of what I now refer to as "Hobo Mead." Lots of reasons to call it that I suppose, mostly the fact that it is pretty ghetto to brew in old plastic juice bottles and use balloons as airlocks. Also the fact that it tastes a bit like paint thinner. But it does the trick.

I bottled the beer 3 weeks ago, it will be ready to drink soon, just to keep the juices flowing last week I started another batch of beer which will be ready to start drinking around the 1 of November.

Keeping a supply of your own beer on hand takes a fair amount of foresight.

Around and About

Its officially winter now, LOOK!

Winter is nice here by the coast, it is chilly, I won't lie, but nothing compared to the midwest. Gotta love being able to go for a walk or drive on a sunday and not worry about ice and snow.

The luckiest sheep in the world.

Met some new friends, learned about 'superman jumps.' You run down the hall and jump into a crowd of people who catch you. Pretty much awesome.


Remember that post about the mead? Here it is, in the bottle. We had a wee nip and it actually tasted good (and no Jim I did not go blind). Here are a few bottles, we'll see how long we can manage to age them.

DIY

Ok so we've always been a bit thrifty and into making things ourselves but we've taken it to another level lately. There are a few key bonuses to making stuff yourself:

1. It is CHEAP and we're back on a student budget
2. Things taste extra DELICIOUS when the flavours have been wafting through the house for an hour.
3. It HEATS YOUR HOUSE. Dunedin weather is never hot and never freezing, just almost always a few degrees too cold. In ultimate efficiency the oven also manages to bring the house up to the comfy zone.
4. It's FUN! We're still making friends around here so that leaves us with some time to kill, which is great because we're actually doing all those random things we never made time for in Madison.

Kate shaking a bottle of honey and yeast to make some mead. This bottle is now aging nicely in the bathroom cupboard next to the warmth of the water heater.

Some delicious creamy lemon curd (by Kate) on a tasty slice of rye bread (by Justin). Oh the blessed domesticity of it all.

We made pizza dough and had a make-your-own pizza party with a couple friends. We put some left over pizza dough in the fridge but apparently it wasn't ready to stop growing. Mutant pizza danger!
I like the kind of DIY where you ignore the instructions. This hideous beast is a dessert pizza. Word of wisdom: don't attempt to bake anything AFTER applying cream cheese frosting. Surprisingly the cream-butter-sugar mixture melts and oozes everywhere. However, it tasted AMAZING, especially the crusty bits where the butter and sugar caramelized on the edges. So delicious I am tempted to do it this way again.



Non-food related DIY and ultimate cheapskate move: we downloaded a picture of a Scrabble board, printed it at work and cut little letter tiles out of card.