My newest culinary adventure :)

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I posted that I was excited about finally getting my kefir grains ?    Well, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing with them.   Well, except for last week, I didn’t use them last week at all, just kept them parked in the fridge 🙂

I started out slow, just using the kefir in smoothies, here are some of our favorite combinations…..

Tropical Wonders Smoothie

3 cups kefir, 2/3 of a large can of crushed pineapple with juice, 1 whole banana, 1/2 tsp. stevia drops, 1/2 cup unsweetened coconut and enough ice to fill up the rest of the blender container.  It was DELICIOUS!

Fruity Berry Smoothie

3 cups kefir, 1 whole banana, 10 oz. frozen strawberries, 1/3 of a large can of pineapple pieces or crushed, and 1/2 of an orange.   Blend for about 2 minutes or until the orange membranes are very well pureed.

Pleasantly Purple Smoothie

3 cups kefir, 1 pouch acai juice (frozen), 8 oz. frozen blueberries, 1/2 tsp. stevia drops.  NUMMMMYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Do you like the names I came up with? 🙂 )

One of my other experiments was to use the kefir in place of buttermilk in my favorite blender batter waffle recipe  (I use different grains each time….this last time I used all long grain brown rice).   That worked out fantastically!  But I suspect that by cooking it, I lost all of the benefits of using kefir (BUT I didn’t have to spend money on buttermilk!).

This week, I made blueberry muffins, my recipe calls for yogurt, so I used kefir, and once again, it worked great!

The latest thing though, was yesterday, I realized that I was almost out of ranch salad dressing, and I knew I would need some for dinner (we were babysitting and the two little girls that were here LOVE ranch dressing), so I used the kefir to make an adaptation of my friend Momma Of Many’s recipe  Here’s what I did…..

1 1/4 cups mayonnaise

1 cup kefir

1 tsp. garlic powder (the kids thought that it was too garlicky, but I liked it….next time I’ll cut it back slightly)

3/4 tsp. onion powder

1/2 tsp. freeze dried chives

2 small pinches (probably about 1/8 tsp) dried dill weed

several grinds of freshly ground black pepper (probably 1/4-1/2 tsp)

1 tsp. dried parsley

1/2 tsp. salt (it was too salty, next time I’ll leave the salt out altogether)

It does seem thin when you first blend it, but once you get it into a jar into the refrigerator and let it stand for a couple of hours it does thicken up a bit.

Since Momma of Many had  requested that I post pictures, here’s a picture of my grains that I took this morning after straining the kefir and starting a new batch.    It is the only picture that I have of my kefir adventures.

I have now successfully kept my kefir going for over 2 weeks!  Wooohooo!   I don’t know why, but in the past, I’ve not been very successful with keeping kefir going.  But with some encouragement from Momma of Many  (she’s not only a bloggy friend, but also a personal real life, lives close by, friend 🙂 )  I gave it another try, and am so thankful that I have!   So two of the big culinary adventures that I had wanted to “conquer” are under my belt….sourdough (my bread customers LOVE my sourdough, so do many friends and family that have gotten some of those lovely loves of deliciousness, I just wish my starter were more sour!) and kefir.   Now I need to get back into sprouting and get my little kitchen garden (it will be small, but right outside my front/kitchen door) going, and I’ll be good!  🙂