Projects I did today

This is different from the daily journal because I've been standing up non-stop for the last six hours and don't want that to affect my future's self ability to write. Also, I'm not talking about what I did generally, just the cool interesting projecty things I did today, and my plans for tomorrow.

First, I cut 12 limes into small circular slices and put them in the dehydrator to be crispy dry. I'll use the dried slices of lime to put in my water, garnish drinks and potentially powder them and use the lime powder in conjunction with other projects. Because of two slices of dehydrated lime, I have drunk six more glasses of water than I would otherwise. There seems to be some effect where the dehydrated lime releases its flavor slowly and more intensely than fresh lime, something to research on for all you boffins out there.

Then I cut half of all the hot chillies I brought and dehydrated them. Not sure what I'm going to do with the dehydrated jalepenos, the problem with those is they have a waxy skin so they don't get crispy dry but are leathery instead. And 'leathery' s a texture you don't want to be reminded of when you're eating or drinking something. Regardless, I'm sure I'll find some good use of it.

Finally, for the cutting part of the day, I cleaned peeled and sliced four pounds of ginger. Yup, four pounds of ginger. I took a photo of it which I sent to my family and close friends and it looked like  a large heap of potatoes, as if there was going to me a large meal for which potato was to be the entree for twenty people. Put a quarter of that, maybe a third, into the dehydrator. It's fun to see how quickly ginger crisps up and absolutely gets crushed into a thousand little shards when you so much as touch it.

The rest of ginger, I boiled with lime juice and sugar, and a very little salt. Did the 'sugar inversion' process where if you boil sugar water with lime or something acidic, the sucrose turns into sucrose and glucose and apparently its sweeter and other fundamental properties are changed. The ginger syrup I filtered a couple of times and put it in the fridge. I intend to use that as a flavoring for my kombucha, that's the original reason I boiled the ginger in the first place. Inverting sugar is fun too!

Was going to throw away the chunks of ginger that I extracted the juice out of. Learned that you can candy it. Boiled it with some of the syrup, concentrated it, added more sugar and lime, drained everything. Dehydrated the candied ginger, when it was just sticky enough, dumped in a tonne of sugar and salt. It really looks like soft candy now!

For tomorrow I'm making kimchi, banana syrup, banana bread or related items from the use banana solid, and chilli water, for adding in savory items and also as kombucha flavoring for later.