Meal Plan: Nov. 11

I just finished my master's thesis and have been eating crap food (chips, ice cream and canned soup) for almost the last month, so I decided to start making a meal plan and I'm going to try to stick to it.  I have a pretty small appetite usually, so some of these may stretch farther for me than for others.

Home-made yogurt

I like yogurt a lot, but I discovered you can make it at home for significantly cheaper than it costs usually.  I use 2% because I like it to have some flavor.  I have used anything from the cheapest half gallon I could find to the stuff I get delivered, which is higher quality. 

The yogurt after sitting in the fridge overnight.

In a Jam

So I got a groupon for a box of CSA fruit from a local farm and was inundated with fruit.  There were 4lbs of black grapes, 4lbs of bing cherries, 4lbs of rainier cherries, apriums, apples and dried plums.  SO MUCH FRUIT!  I ate as much fresh as I could, but the grapes started looking sad pretty fast.  I did some quick thinking and popped them all on a cookie sheet in the freezer, intending to make them into jam. 

Don't tell them I semi ruined their grapes... :(

Join me for a tasting?

My kombucha is finished!  I bottled it last Friday in three glass bottles and started another batch with the baby SCOBY.  I wasn't sure how long to let it sit, so I opened one bottle after a day or so and it wasn't fizzy yet.  Then two days later I opened the second bottle, and it was mildly fizzy, so I decided to let it sit for a tiny bit longer.  Today I opened the third bottle and was about to sip it when it made a geyser of foam!  So I think most of the fizz left there because the kombucha remaining is slightly fizzy (that's more than mildly, but less than soda).

Volunteer Park Conservatory

A friend of mine came out to visit last week, which gave me a perfect opportunity to go exploring.  Boyfriend wasn't too interested in looking at plants, so I took my friend to the Volunteer Park Conservatory.  This is a rather large greenhouse with a few different climate rooms.  They have beautiful orchids, hibiscus, bromeliads and cacti as well as a seasonal room that, at the moment, is full of fuchsias.  Here are some of the highlights from my trip.  Enjoy!

Meet the bees!

I am a budding beekeeper!  I was first introduced to bees and beekeeping back in elementary school.  My mom took my brother and I to the local arboretum where they have hives and I got to see the apiarists and bees at work.  A friend of mine from orchestra also kept bees, and most recently I found out that one of schoolmates' roommates were keeping bees in Seattle.  Because I'm always in need of yet another hobby, I took on this one.

When installing bees...you basically just dump them from the package into the hive.  They're very gentle because they have no home to defend yet.

Kombucha in the works

I'm interested in experimenting.  Perhaps it's the scientist in me...I don't know, but I'm always adding new experiments to my collection.  I'll talk about my bees later on, but for now, it's kombucha.

GT's Kombucha, sold in Whole Foods