Looks like I'll be making sauerkraut over the weekend along with some canned green beans. It helps that I actually enjoy sauerkraut and other cabbage based foods. There's something earthy and basic and delicious about it. It reaches back to some buried Nordic place in my DNA, a thousand years ago. It's a day in the middle of a dark, frozen January in a one room thatched roof stone hut where my stout Nordic wife reaches into a barrel and pulls out a wad of sauerkraut. She squeezes out the brine and drops the mound of saurkraut on a wooden plate with some organ meat sausage or some salted herring or something. There's a crackling fire in there somewhere.
Still not sounding good?
Well, fine then.
Your loss.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Cabbage. So far I've harvested about five heads of cabbage from the garden. I may pull out a couple more come the weekend. That should make a few quarts of the stuff.
I can't help myself. I just like it. Plus I have a fascination with it. It's really pretty amazing how easy it is to make. Guide the natural processes in the right order and you can preserve mass quantities of cabbage all winter with very little effort. It's as though it was meant to be. I eat it raw or cooked, with or without organ meat sausage.
On the downside, making my own sauerkraut has done exactly the same thing for me as making my own bread. Now the store bought stuff tastes funny.
I'll need to make a lot.
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