Noelle likes Good Food

Ever since we moved in to our new house (crazy that is has already been six months!), we have wanted to repurpose a dresser into an entertainment center. We finally found one we liked for under $50 on craigslist a couple of weeks ago and went to work.  Unfortunately, I broke the first cardinal rule of furniture repurposing. I didn't take a 'before' picture. You will just have to imagine a brown dresser with gold handle drawer pulls.  We took out all the drawers, took off the drawer pulls, filled the holes with putty, let it dry and sanded everything really well. Then we spray painted white primer on everything.  Then we spray painted a coat of black. We were going to sand everything after we finished painting to give it a distressed look and we thought the black would give us some extra depth.  Chris is the spray paint master! We ran out of black before we got the whole thing painted, but it was alright because the main goa...

The garden is growing! What a wonderful time of year :). A friend gave me a new houseplant. In a jelly mold pan! I believe it is a non-edible type of purslane.  My herbs are overrunning the beds and I have been harvesting lots of dill, basil, parsley and oregano for sauces and zucchini cakes. Next on my list is to make a few big batches of pesto to freeze.  The bees are buzzing around my anise hyssop plant. Yay for friendly pollinators! The cucumbers vines got attacked by a hungry deer. But it looks like they are trying to recover. Hopefully I will still get cucumbers. The deer also got my okra, peppers, and one of my sweet potato plants. Any suggestions for keeping the deer away?  Despite the deer, my zucchini and tomato plants are doing great! Everything is a jumble of green. TOMATOES!  The sweet potato plant that has survived so far. Hopefully the deer will stay away from this one.  A friend...

Today I want to talk about lacto-fermentation. You may or may not know what it is, so let's start there.  The gist is that you take any kind of vegetable and chop it up, add salt and sometimes a little bit of water and let it ferment for anywhere between 3 days-4 weeks. The salt in the recipe kills off the bad bacteria, but there are good gut-friendly lactic acid bacteria that can survive the salt solution. The lactic acid bacteria (LAB's) feed off the sugars in the veggies and produce lactic acid and a whole bunch of probiotics that help to repopulate our gut with beneficial bacteria and sway our gut culture in the right direction :). Also, the process of lacto-fermentation preserves the veggies without having to use any heat (I've had batches of kimchi and sauerkraut last for months in the fridge and it just gets better with age). Also, fermentation makes the nutrients already present in the vegetables more bioavailable. Meaning when we eat fermented veggies our bodi...