Of Cabbages and Kings

Having a yen for sauerkraut, I'd purchased a head of purple cabbage at the farmers' market to attempt that as my next lactofermentation project. Last night I pulled out Tart and Sweet and the big glass jar (I do not have a proper fermentation crock; they're expensive) and proceeded to shred the cabbage. The recipe calls for five pounds of cabbage and three tablespoons of kosher salt. Since the head I used was three pounds, I used just a little under two tablespoons salt, mixed well, and squooshed it all down.

The recipe says that the salt is supposed to cause the cabbage to release water and thus create its own brine to ferment in.

The recipe, it lies.

So this morning I followed the "in case your cabbage does not release enough moisture" (in this case, any at all) addendum and boiled a quart of water and 1.5 tablespoons of salt to make brine, let it cool, and then poured it in the jar, weighing down the cabbage with a ziploc filled with water and draping a towel over the top to keep dust, insects, and cats out.

Theoretically, in three weeks I will have sauerkraut.

I Think I Need My Brain, Not Eyes, Checked

It's the little things. Like misreading my own (perfectly legible, actually) handwriting of "cancellation" as "cannibalism."

Or the Wikipedia announcement that "Tomas Tranströmer becomes the 108th winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature." Surely I can't be the only one who initially thought his surname was, well, "Transformer"?

Then there's "yaki onigiri" becoming "yak onigiri"....

I may need to be getting more sleep.

Cheapskate

My little sister moved up to the Seattle area about a year ago and is happily building her life there, having a career, buying a house, etc. In the last week she's upgraded her still very new sedan to a extremely new Jeep. Which is all well and good; it snows there sometimes, and she drives over to Spokane sometimes to visit her best friend, and it definitely snows in Spokane. So it's probably a better vehicle for her needs in that respect.

This, however, renews the bug in the ears of the rest of the family (ie, our parents and my husband) that I should have a new car. I started driving nineteen years ago and am only on my second vehicle ever (neither of which was new when I bought them). It's a 15-year-old 2-door Civic. It's dented and dinged in various places and the headliner is starting to go and currently has a mysterious oil leak that my uncle the mechanic doesn't seem to (yet) be able to fix. The headliner I know I need to replace, and plan to do so by the end of the year. The dents and dings I got priced, and repairs will be around 2K. I could maybe make a claim on our insurance for that and only have to pay the $500 deductible, but I don't like thinking about what that will do to our insurance rates. But that's merely cosmetic and I can live with cosmetic flaws. I've plenty of them myself.

The thing is, though, a new car costs $18-20K. Even a moderately used one is pretty close to that range. And we just bought expensive windows and have gaping holes in the master bathroom. (I'm also not keen on the fact that current vehicle designs mean I can't see the end of the hood.)

All of which boils down to the fact that I am politically liberal and financially conservative. And while I suspect there's something dark buried in my psychology which says you don't get to have nice things, I still don't like feeling pressured to trade up. Even if it's by family. Not for things I don't really need.