Grinding Bones to Make Bread

I suppose anyone who cooks has a fallback recipe or three. Something ground into your bones by sheer repetition, something you don't need to look up in a cookbook, something you could almost make while half asleep. A couple of mine are sunflower seed bread (caveat: in the bread machine), miso soup, roast chicken, and sauerkraut. Homemade sauerkraut is a completely different animal than the tinned stuff I bought at the store all my life. And it's dead simple. All it takes is cabbage, salt, and a bit of time.

I'm upping my lacto-fermentation game a little this month, though, by drowning a bunch of peeled garlic in brine, and seeing what happens to it. Now, I've inherited my family's brined cucumber pickles recipe, which I make now and again, and have finally realized that the primary thing I smell when making it is the garlic fermenting! But a whole jar of garlic is a hell of a lot more powerful than a couple cloves. Though my ferments are kept behind a closed cupboard door, this one still scents the kitchen quite well. I think if I like the results and desire to make it more frequently, I have to figure out a way to do so outdoors. Maybe something like a pie safe....

Also, tonight I upped my game a little by (for the first time ever) roasting a duck. I live in an area blessed with many ethnic supermarkets, and an Asian market a couple miles away has duck for $3/lb. So when a recipe pinged across my Tumblr radar, I purchased one and gave it a go. Success! Hooray. ^_^