Long Time No Taco

As I sat in the CSU/EXPO Mini-Urban Farm one Saturday, attending a free seminar on "raised bed planting", my mind kept picturing this part of my backyard. The event was hosted by a program called "Garden Gateway"  and promised information and free building materials to create my own raised bed for planting a garden. Fast forward a couple of weeks later to The Paul Robeson Community Wellness Center , where I attended their Earth Day event. I thought I would also pick up the materials, but they still hadn't ordered them yet. They did,  however, offer another free seminar. This time the topic was composting, and once again they generously provided free materials. I received a supply of a fruity powder called bokashi . An inoculated bran powder used to help in the fermenting of compost. I had a big 5-gallon bucket to fill, and no space inside my apartment, so I used an old canister for nuts to collect scraps, peels, coffee grinds, and eggshells and the like...

When am I not  brewing beer or cider, right? The last two months, though, I focused on brewing, and in particular, brewing other  things, with plenty of new "firsts", I am excited to share with you, here: Kombucha: IT'S ALIVE! If you have never heard of kombucha, taking a trip to Whole Foods might only confuse you. There are so many radical, juice-spiked concoctions, carrying the trendy probiotic drink's name; some of which taste downright terrible. Traditional kombucha is a lightly fermented black tea, so I focused on making that, without the extra flavors. The off-white pads you see floating in these jars are called "SCOBY", an abbreviation for "symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast". I think that alone would gross out a majority of people from trying it, but obviously not this guy! For my first go, I ended up using some cheap, bottled, unsweetened black tea and adding the recommended amount of sugar to feed the scoby, but long-term, t...