Hawaii 2010: Part 2c - Turtle Encounter

On one of our afternoon snorkel/dives Anna & Mom had a visit from a sweet little visitor who was quite interested in the line for their dive flag! He spent some time investigating - and then swam off into the deep blue water. I was never as close as this to a turtle this trip, but I did get to see about 10 on all my snorkels combined - really neat!

I think this might be one of my favorite shots!

Goodbye turtle!

Kombucha!

I've been interested in trying to brew my own Kombucha for awhile now - but I finally got around to starting because my good friend, Joanna, gave me her baby scoby to start my batch!
Joanna got her original scoby and supplies from Lionheart Kombucha, which is a Portland based business.

Here's the basic recipe I used:

3.5ish quarts water
6 green or black teabags (or 3 tsp loose tea. Must be caffeinated)
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 scoby! (+scoby juice - scoby will come in about 8 oz. of liquid)
juice/fruit for extra flavor (optional)

1. Boil the water - add your sugar and tea bags and stir until sugar is dissolved. Let mixture stand until it is at room temperature (this can take hours - don't cheat though! It's really important that the mixture has cooled completely before moving on).
2. Once the mixture has completely cooled remove the teabags and transfer your mixture to a clean 1-gallon glass jar (check to make sure you're using food grade glass so you don't leach something yucky into your drink!).
3. Add your scoby+scoby juice! It will most likely float on top a bit. Cover the mouth of your jar with a dish cloth and rubber band it on. NO LIDS! Your kombucha must be able to breath or it will grow a nasty mold and you won't be able to drink it!
4. Keep in a warm place (70-90 degrees) for 7-14 days and let your mixture ferment. You can periodically test your kombucha to see if it's strong enough - and easy way to do this is to stick a straw under the scoby to draw out some liquid to taste.(My house is about 60 degrees, my culture grew very slowly - i left it in for the full 14 days).
5. Once you're finished brewing carefully remove your scoby + about a cup or so of juice - you will use this for your next batch. Store in a glass container in the fridge until you're ready to brew again.
6. Bottle up your remaining liquid - growlers work great for this! Now is the time to flavor - you can use juice, sliced fruit, ginger, etc. -- Just place these items in the storage container with your kombucha and let the flavors marry!
7. The kombucha will continue to ferment a bit - so remember to release the pressure in your container every so often so you don't have an explosion in your fridge!

For my first batch I used Typhoo tea compliments of my Dad and Summit Tea & Spice!

Cooled tea mixture with bags still in.

My scoby + scoby juice in the glass jar waiting to be poured into my second batch.

Home 'bottling' setup.

Each time you brew a batch of kombucha the scoby 'doubles' - you can pull these 'babies' off and give them to friends to brew their own kombucha - or you can just keep letting the 'mother' scoby get thicker. For my first batch I flavored the kombucha with mango/passionfruit tea - it was a great flavor, but I added to much juice so our kombucha was really sweet. Thor loved it though - he has been drinking it all week at work for lunch!

Hawaii 2010 - Part 2b: MORE Snorkeling & Scuba!

These are pictures from one of the afternoon dive/snorkels we did. It was a little bit rougher this afternoon - but I had a mission to try and go back to where we had dived earlier in the day to see if I could locate the blue-spotted urchin (Astropyga radiata) I had seen on our morning swim (in reading online I've also seen these referred to as Fire Urchins). Of course, on the morning dive I did not have a camera with me - and I saw this crazy urchin that was about 8-10" in diameter and when we got home and identified it in Anna's crustacean & echinoderms book it turned out that it was SUPER rare to see them. Shoot! I swam back with the camera in the afternoon - but of course it was gone. Dang! It was still a lovely snorkel though and I saw plenty of other beautiful fish!

I got this photo of a Blue-Spotted Urchin from the Society of Woman Geographers website. You can see how amazing & unusual it looked!

Taken by Idell Conaway in 2005.

Me at the start of the swim - great shot of the palm trees lining the beach!

Blue box fish! My favorite fish of the trip - he was so cute & square!

Anna blew the picture up a bit for me so I had a better picture of him - check out his spots!

This flounder was so neat! I love how you can see the turquoise paisely-like pattern on his back.

This is one of my favorite pictures from this set - I just love the colors and texture.

Anna took this shot of me at the surface from about 40 feet underwater - I tried to give her a nice silhouette to work with. =)

Mom with the dive flag!

A cushion star!

Potato Planting!

This year I'm going to give a different 'vegetable' a try - potatoes! Thor and I picked up some seed fingerling potatoes at the Portland Nursery this past weekend and we're going to give them a go in our raised beds. The variety we chose is called La Ratte, and they are supposed to be wonderful and creamy in texture with a slightly nutty flavor - great for roasting or boiling. Sounds delicious! Now if I can just manage not to kill them!

Today I sliced up the seed potatoes into pieces so that there was at least one 'eye' on each piece - then I dipped the cut ends in wood ash to help them scab over. I'm going to let them 'cure' overnight and then tomorrow I'll drop them into their little troughs out in the bed. There is a good flyer on the Portland Nursery website that I saved to my google docs on Potato Culture that I will probably need to refer to a number of times to make sure I'm hilling & fertilizing correctly.

Thor's trip to the North Coast

On Saturday Thor and our friend Josh headed out to the North Coast for a nice day of steelhead fishing. Despite Thor mis-setting his alarm and sleeping through picking up Josh at the appointed time of 6:30 a.m. they still managed to get out to the river early enough to beat most other fishermen and get a chance to cast out into some prime pools. Josh is the photographer of the two - so unfortunately there are only pictures of Thor - who hooked two fish, and landed one for a pretty successful day of spring fishing!

Garden 'Monsters'

I realize spiders are good and supposedly a gardener's friend -- but that doesn't mean I like coming across them when I'm on my hand and knees in the dirt! Look at the size of this one - and it's on my SHOVEL, not my trowel!

I looked it up online and I think it was a female trap/folding door spider. I about had a fit when I saw it moving next to my hand. I started screaming for Thor to come over - i'm sure the neighbors thought we were having an emergency (which, from my perspective it kind of WAS an emergency - the dang thing was huge! hah hah) I can't find much information on this type of spider online - but I'm at work anyways, so best not to spend the whole day researching spider species. =)

Sarai in her Sweater!

Awhile back I finished knitting this sweater for my friend, Merriah's, daughter Sarai. I thought I'd lost these pictures of Sarai in her sweater, but I just found them - isn't she sweet!? And you can see how nice and deep the hood is on this sweater - it's perfect for large baby noggins!