Porter Production

 Joshua and I have been talking about making beer together for awhile and now that school is out we finally had a chance to get started. Eugene has a number of home brewing stores and it was fun to go look around before purchasing what we need. We got a kit with all the ingredients to make porter.

 First, we steeped the grains.

One of the important things to remember is that you should always drink something home fermented when you are making home brew.

After the grains steeped, we discarded them and put the wort in our biggest pot with more water and the malt extract. Then we boiled it for an hour, adding hops and Irish moss at the times specified in the recipe.

After the boil was complete, we removed the hops (which were in cheesecloth bundles) and poured the liquid into our five gallon bucket. We added cold water to make five gallons and put the bucket in an ice bath to cool it down as quickly as possible. Once it cooled to about 80 degrees, we stirred in the yeast and put it in a cool dark place to ferment for two weeks.

This weekend it was time for bottling. First, we cleaned all the bottles and siphoned our beer into a different bucket so we could get rid of the sludge left from fermenting. Then we added sugar water to the beer so it would carbonate in the bottles, filled and capped the bottles, and put on labels. Now it's all done and just needs to age a couple weeks before we can try it. 

Sweet Pickled Beets

I realized this week that we had some large beets in the garden and I needed to get them harvested. So our second canning project of the year was sweet pickled beets. I had never pickled beets before and am looking forward to trying them; for now, they look pretty in the jars.

Curiosities in Paul

I have been reading through the seven Pauline Epistles in roughly the order they were written, looking into some of manuscript and textual issues for each letter and trying to approach them with "fresh eyes," as it were. A few things have stood out as unexpected or previously unnoticed.

1 Thessalonians and Galatians

Paul's Account of Jesus: Paul's Jesus does not appear to be very human. Paul doesn't talk about Jesus as though he was ever walking about on earth. He does not talk about Jesus ever doing anything on earth, and he does not mention him teaching anything to people (other than directly, through visions). Similarly, Paul frequently talks about how Jesus will soon appear, but this is never a second coming, a coming back or return. At the beginning of Galatians, Paul says that he is an apostle from Jesus, but not men or a man. This seems strange if Paul presumably thinks that it is of central importance that Jesus is a human. Paul then goes on to relate how he received the gospel of Jesus Christ. Rather than say that he learned of Jesus' life, as we would expect, he instead stresses that he did not receive the gospel of Jesus Christ from any person and was never taught it. Instead, everything he knows about Jesus, he knows directly from revelation. This all strikes me as strange.

The Origin of the Law: In Galatians 3, Paul is talking about the covenant and the law. The law was a curse from which Christ liberated us, he says. By example, no one annuls a human covenant once it is ratified; likewise, the law does not annul God's original covenant. So the law was given until the child came of age to receive the covenant inheritance. So far so good. Then v19: the law "was ordained by angels through an intermediary." Paul contrasts this intermediary with God, who is one. He then continues the discussion, saying that a child with an inheritance is like a slave to his guardians and trustees until he comes of age. So also, when we were under the law, we were "slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe" (4:3) who gave the law. Then, we were "in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods," but now there is no need to "turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, whose slaves you want to be once more" (4:8-9). This account of where the law came from surprised me.

Garden Update

 I realized that the garden has grown quite a bit since I posted pictures last month, so here are some photos from today. Everything is doing well and enjoying the sunshine. We have been harvesting lettuce, spinach, and cilantro, although the cilantro is now busily going to seed. The beets are starting to get nice and big, so we have eaten a few of those.

These little guys are our next big harvest. The sugar peas are just starting to get ripe and the plants are really loaded. We are planning to have some with dinner tonight. This is the first time in awhile that I have had a large amount of space for a summer garden and we are loving having freshly picked goodies to add to our meals.

Cherry Tree

 

There is a large cherry tree in front of our house and it produced tons of cherries this year. I have been looking forward to this harvest since we moved in last year and thought it was over much too quickly. Last weekend, I picked, pitted, and processed a number of them. Otherwise, we have mostly been enjoying them straight off the tree or with dinner. I love going out to water the garden and eating a few cherries. They taste great, but unfortunately we had a lot of problems with fungus and worms. This is a problem every year, but our landlord said it was worse this year than usual. It seemed like most of the cherries that got fully ripe were no longer good. I ended up picking a number that were not quite ripe yet in order to save more of the fruit. We still got plenty of cherries and enjoyed them a lot, but it was sad to see so many of them go to waste. The season was short too; I picked the last good ones today and they only started getting ripe about a week and a half ago.

This is one of two buckets that I picked last weekend. 

The cherry picker we got was a trooper; we had a mountain of cherries to work through and it made things go much more quickly, and really just made the task possible. Here's what we ended up doing with all the ones we didn't eat right away:

Cherry Shortcake

Lemon Chocolate Cherry Muffins

Brandied Cherries

1 gallon of cherry juice for wine

Morning Harvest

Ten Years

Ten years ago, Joshua and I met for the first time and sat at the same table for breakfast on the first full day of O-week 2005. Many more breakfasts and good times together followed that summer and over the years, and still continue today.

Third Anniversary

 

 We celebrated our third anniversary by trying out a Thai place we hadn't been to yet and eating delicious Pad Thai. It was great.