scoby

The last picture of me and Cherrie and our dearest friend Annie that will be taken for a very long time.

Hullo. It has been a while, yes. If you’ve been following along- I don’t know who you are, but we appreciate you. Please don’t leave.

A lot has happened *coughcoronaviruscough*. We are no longer on three continents. School is online, and so is this friendship. Funnily, that is why we started this blog to begin with.

As I sit down and try to collect my thoughts into something cohesive, I continue to be struck by how strange this past week has felt, how unique this situation feels. The way we can communicate instantly with each other, the speed of news and of institutional changes, how technology has enabled mass hysteria and yet also given us the tools move on with life despite disaster.

But also it’s not unique. Disaster certainly isn’t. And neither are the thoughts in my head, the confusions, anxieties, frustrations, wonders, hopes.

Yet even though I know that, I feel the need to express my thoughts, to tell someone how I feel, to throw in my own two cents. I want to say something too. I want to put my thoughts somewhere because perhaps, deep down, I do think that I have something to add to this great big universe.

For today, however, my thoughts are still quite muddled. So instead of saying anything profound, I have decided to fulfill my identity as a very-extremely-privileged-almost-millenial-bon-appetit-watching-Californian-chemist-woman, and make kombucha.

Do I like to drink kombucha? Not yet. It is kind of weird.
Will kombucha make my stomach happy and clear my skin and mind? Most likely not.
Have I been reading about kombucha for the past hour, including a scientific paper that described making kombucha as “inoculating” tea with bacteria culture in a beaker, and is that kind of exactly what I do in lab, and am I now extremely excited about making my own scoby (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) and will I tell you all about it? YES.

Clockwise from top left corner: (1) This is the store-bought kombucha I chose for my experiment. I chose it because the design was the cutest. (2) Here you can see the miniature scoby growing in the kombucha I bought which will hopefully ensure the growth of my own baby scoby.(3) This is just sweet tea. Not very exciting but I like to pretend I’m a food blogger. (4) My jar of soon to be scoby, protected by a tea towel because cheesecloth apparently does not keep out fruit flies, to be hidden in the dark for a couple of weeks.

I can’t wait for the massage train to all drink kombucha together, and I do apologize if until then this becomes a food blog. On a slightly related note, I have been writing this post while being distracted by the “Don’t Call It Curry” episode of Ugly Delicious and I am now very hungry.

Juliet

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