Kombucha and Sprouts

I’m a city girl, but I relish the country life.  I love making my own–whether it’s growing tomatoes, baking bread, brewing kombucha or sprouting seeds. Using what I have at home to provide for family needs brings a sense of simplicity and independence. It’s satisfying to assemble good ingredients or materials and combine them to create something wholesome and nourishing.

As a kid, I loved going to visit my cousins who lived in a tiny town in Michigan, closer to farm than city. My aunt sewed and canned and gardened. She is my mother’s sister, and the two of them called themselves the Country Mouse and the City Mouse. My mom was a good cook and created a lovely, inviting home, but she was a shopper rather than a do-it-herselfer; she was not a gardener or a seamstress, unless it was to decorate.

One summer when I went to visit my cousins, my mom wanted me to have nice new clothes for my Barbie doll because she knew I would be playing dolls with my cousins–two girls,  one a little older and one a little younger. I arrived proud of the plastic-sealed packages of fashions and accessories for Barbie that I had picked out, and excited to play with my cousins.

My aunt, who had a dry sense of humor, looked at them and teased me about how fancy my city Barbie would be among her country cousins, who wore homemade Barbie clothes made from fabric scraps. I was embarrassed then about my flimsy, trendy doll clothes, feeling as out-of-place as Barbie surely would, the city cousin who didn’t know how to fit into the country life.

My cousins loved the new, fresh additions to the collection, though; they were happy to trade their sturdy but boring practical items for my impractical, exciting ones, at least for a little while.

Their way of life was different and appealing to me. I loved ranging through the small town where my cousins seemed to know everyone, playing outside much of the day. I was fascinated that my aunt would make their milk–using powered milk and water–and everything else from scratch.

I think now that the teasing about being a Country Mouse and a City Mouse may have come from comparisons and insecurities that I didn’t understand as a child; maybe they meant Poor Mouse and Rich Mouse, although it was personality more than actual income driving the differences. More accurate titles might have been Thrifty Mouse and Sophisticated Mouse.

I still feel somewhere between the two, loving the different kinds of simplicity and complexity in both city and country life.

Kombucha and sprouts are two projects that appeal to both the country mouse and the city mouse in me. Kombucha is fermented tea, made by brewing  a gallon of black tea, adding a cup of sugar, and letting it sit for 3 or 4 weeks with a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, a fleshy blob that looks like a slimy mushroom, but grosser)–or “mother”–bubbling away on top. The SCOBY consumes the sugar, turning the sweet tea into a tangy, probiotic drink. People love it or hate it; it tastes like apple cider vinegar.

Sprouts are easy to grow. A few tablespoons of alfalfa or radish seeds in a jar with a mesh lid grows into a jar full of fresh sprouts in a week. They just need to be rinsed twice a day under the faucet to water them and keep them growing. I recently bought an Easy Sprouter to make it even simpler.

I can’t get seem to keep them going, though. I start a batch of kombucha and bottle it, then I either start a new one right away and end up with too much, or I wait and don’t get around to it. There has been a SCOBY floating  in a jar in the back of my fridge for a long time; I just looked it up and found out they can last a year that way, so I still have a little more time.

Sprouts are the same way. I make a batch, bag it and put it the fridge, start a new one, and end up with too many, or I wait until we’ve finished eating one crop and forget to start another, and we run out. Before I know it, time has passed and my seeds aren’t fresh. It’s not as rewarding because only half of them sprout, and my crop is peppered with hard, dead seeds.

When I’m making kombucha and sprouts, I have to keep brewing and rinsing and drinking and eating so I don’t run out and I don’t waste. I can get all the processes humming along for a little while until something distracts me or throws me off–a weekend away, a cold, a good book–and it’s over. It’s not a matter of busyness, because these endeavors only require a few minutes a day, if that. It’s more a matter of concentration, of organization and focus. Maybe it’s a lack of necessity. I don’t have to make them, because it’s easy to go to the grocery store–even the main-stream, non-health-food stores–and buy products that are good.

I love the satisfaction of doing it myself, the independence and thriftiness, but often,  I find that I am my  mother’s daughter after all, and I buy them, content to know that I could make them if I wanted to.