Grounded Grub Weeklies! 03.10.2020
Hello Grounded Grub Community!
Every week we’re sent amazing articles, books, podcasts and other content from our community. We love hearing from everyone and having these resources, so we decided to start pooling together these recommendations, as well as some of our favorites, and sharing them once a week on Tuesdays. We hope you enjoy and feel inspired to share with us if you see/hear/try something that inspires you in the future!
Today: March 3, 2020
What happened on Grounded Grub last week:
We featured a new article by a new contributor, Paige Wagar! The article explores Paige’s life long fascination with gardens, and features a guide on how to start your own in your apartment or other small spaces! Read “Kitchen Gardening: Growing Large in Small Spaces“ by following this link!
Ben explored what he calls the 8th wonder of the world: the dish that is equal parts sweet, savory, and spicy, Thai Coconut Curry! Try it for yourself with our latest recipe!
Coming up on Grounded Grub…
This week we have another piece by a contributor! Jenna writes about her life and personal experiences in relation to healthcare and food’s ability to be used as medicine in our daily lives.
We spotlight a restaurant native to Ben’s hometown! In the article, we look at the mission(s) of both the restaurant (Good Choice Kitchen) and its chef/owner, Laurie Gershgorn, and learn about Laurie’s journey through a lifetime of sustainable-eating practices.
Have any other ideas for things we should cover? Reach out on Instagram, Facebook or email. We love hearing from you and some of our best articles have been from community suggestions.
Media articles of the week:
If I Can Eat in Chinatown, So Can You. Wilson Tang, Bon Appetit. This piece explores the impact that news and fear surrounding the Corona virus has had on many Chinese-owned restaurants, the prevalence of xenophobia and exoticism, and the resilience and internal-support of many of these Chinese communities in the wake of this news-cycle. Read this awesome piece here.
Why Germany Calls this Vegetable ‘White Gold’. Emily Cataneo. Food 52. Emily discusses the popularity and allure of Spargel, a variety of white asparagus, who’s ‘season’ in Germany garners nation-wide excitement and holds huge cultural significance. Learn more about the history and significance of this beloved food here.
Book of the week:
This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth - Jedediah Purdy
“It's written by a person who used to live in the Durham, NC area (where I currently live). It takes a frank look at our current relationship to land with more of an environmental and political perspective than an agricultural perspective…A lot of his experiences are taken from his childhood as the son of back-to-the-land parents. A conversation about land and climate change and commonwealth are inherently intertwined with agriculture, food, and our consumer choices.” Thank you to Emma Volk for the recommendation and synopsis! Buy it for yourself here!
Podcast of the week:
Crazy for Beans: Salads, Stews, Ceviche and Pies; Joe Yonan Goes Nuts Over Beans - Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio
“The Washington Post’s Joe Yonan takes us on a tour of the world’s best and most creative bean recipes, from navy bean pie to bean ceviche. Plus, we try to find out if somebody actually paid $99,900 for a gorilla-shaped Cheeto; we make Palestinian Upside-Down Chicken and Rice; and Dr. Aaron Carroll asks: Is diet soda bad for us?” Check it out here!
Personal Project of the Week:
I (Ben) have been working on brewing my first batch of Kombucha since last month and it’s finally coming to fruition! Experimenting with fermentation projects has always been something “I’ve been meaning to get to” and I finally took the leap! Last month I ordered a 5-quart glass container (to hold the primary brew), an auto-syphon (to easily transfer large amount of liquid to and from the main vessel), a SCOBY starter, and some fermentation-grade bottles. I hoped to not have to buy the SCOBY (you can actually give pieces of yours to other people and those pieces will grow into full-sized SCOBYs!), but I couldn’t find anyone with any to spare and I was determined to finally get this project going!
With a new SCOBY (SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast), the first phase of fermentation can take up to 5 weeks, so as my first fermentation project, this lengthy first step was so nerve-racking! Did I do something wrong? How will I know when it’s ready? What if I made a mistake early on and I’m wasting my time waiting for something that's never going to happen? Nevertheless, I patiently waited, taking a taste of the brew every few days to check on it. Being a kombucha fanatic, I did have a sense of the taste I was looking for. The sweet tea you initially add is unmistakably different from the final product, so I was searching every few days for the transformation of that sweet tea to something more acidic, more ~funky~, less sweet, and more complex! Finally, this past weekend, I made the executive decision that it was ready! Was I right? Did it need more time? Did I let it go too long? The answer is: who’s to say. The art of fermentation, is just that, an art. There is no exact, there is no perfect, there is only effort, preference, and action.
I prepared my fruit juices, pure pomegranate juice for 2 of the 6, a mix of pomegranate juice and lemon+ginger juice for 1, and lemon+ginger juice for the final 3. I portioned my juices in their bottles, filled the bottles to the neck with my kombucha, sealed them off and labeled them, and now, I wait again. The second step of fermentation is where kombucha gets its famous fizz. Sealed in an air-tight bottle, the yeast inside the kombucha eats away at the sugars in the juice, creating carbon dioxide. I admittedly had a full nerd-out moment, as I saw that the bottles with the more aggressive juices (the fibrous nature of the ginger+lemon juice makes the yeast more active) had cap-stoppers that were being flattened by the larger amount of carbon dioxide being created from the hyper-active yeast. It was happening! I could actually observe to some level of clarity the mechanisms that were taking place in my fermentation experiment and it made sense! We’ll see how these bad-boys taste (and if they have that signature fizz) in a few days, but until them, I’m enjoying these little victories!
(I plan to write a full article on this journey and process, let us know if you’d be interested!)
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