First Post!

Welcome to our blog. We are a pair of musicians and artists from Austin, Texas, who, initially inspired by reading Sandor Ellix Katz' Wild Fermentation, have spent the last 6 months or so making batch after batch of kimchi and assorted fermented pickles at home. In part, this obsession has been fueled by weekly boxes of vegetables from local CSA farm Johnson's Backyard Garden, and the accompanying need to continuously find new and creative ways to use each week's batch, hopefully before the next arrives.

This constant influx of new and sometimes unfamiliar vegetables has led to constant experimentation with what goes into the pickle jar. Neither of us had ever seen pattypan squash pickles in the store before, but they turned out to be delicious! One area of constant experimentation has been in the realm of kimchi. A friend pointed us to David Lebovitz' excellent blog, where he posted a great basic kimchi recipe that we have used as a jumping-off point for our own experiments, using a variety of vegetables: cabbage, assorted greens, beets, carrots, and turnips have all produced fine results so far.

What we are planning to do in this blog is document our experiments in pickling, providing detailed notes and photographs of ingredients used and techniques. Each week or so a new batch will be started, and tasting notes and photographs of previous batches will also be presented. We intend to be bold and audacious in our experimentation, looking for new and exciting combinations and focusing on seasonally-available ingredients, whatever they may be.

We are not experts, but are not afraid to make this stuff up as we go along. In fact, we like it better that way. We're also not particularly afraid of mold and getting food poisoning. Months of consuming wild-fermented pickles have convinced us that we're probably not going to get sick from whatever microbes are floating around the air in our kitchen (if anything, we both feel healthier than ever before). We will share our successes and failures with you here, in this blog, so that we can all learn from them together. Comments and suggestions are encouraged!

And so, with that in mind, coming up next.... how about making some kimchi with okra, sweet potato greens and Creole seasonings?