Drinking Frog Spawn and Algae

I've never actually swallowed frog eggs, but now that I've tried kombucha with chia seeds, I'm pretty sure I know what it would be like.  Not bad!  Especially if it's a cherry flavored species.  

A friend of mine recommend that I try the chia kombucha, but I couldn't tell if he was recommending it because he liked it, or if he just wanted to me have the experience of drinking it, so I was a little cautious with the first sip.  It's sort of like trying to drink...well, mucus.  Not in a bad way, but it's slimy like psylium fiber, or okra, and I thought it was sort of fun to try to catch the seeds so I could crunch them with my teeth before they went sliding down my throat.  

I only tried one bottle of kombucha before I started making my own, and I think it was the same brand.  I realize now that my home made kombucha has a much more sour flavor, and is more carbonated that this kind.  My kombucha mother has been neglected the past months and I'm afraid to check on her in case she has died or mutated to form something hideous in the jar.  I'm interested in trying more with chia seeds though, since they are supposed to be super healthy, so maybe this experiment will give me the courage to revive my own.  

I photographed these frog eggs last week, while tramping through a wetland, and I immediately thought of the chia kombucha.  If only I had a straw!  

While I was shopping at the co-op, where I found the chia kombucha, I passed a lady with three small children.  She tossed a small bag in her cart and pointed it out to her kids, "hey guys, look what I got!". All three kids threw up their arms and yelled "Yay!".  So of course I had to see what could get such a glowing recommendation from children, and as soon as they passed I went over to check it out.  Dark chocolate covered hemp seeds.  I never would have imagined that kids, even co-op kids, would get that excited about hemp seeds, but sure enough, these are really good.  The hemp seeds are very crunchy which gives that satisfying crunch of a candy coated m&m, but even better because the chocolate is dark.  I cracked open the chia kombucha and tore into the chocolate hemp seeds while I was still in the parking lot of the store.  A strange snack, I admit, but interesting.  

On my shopping list was spirulina, which is dried algae powder.  I recently read an article about super foods, and was trying to buy as many as I could find.  I brought home nutritional yeast, hemp seeds, cocoa nibs, and spirulina, and mixed us up a glass as soon as I got home.  Brandon was very worried once he got a whiff of the powder, which smells sort of fishy, and the intense blue green color when mixed with water was making him even more worried.  He kept asking "why are we drinking this?" as I stirred.  Because it's a super food, you know, like super man!  It's super nutritious, and super green, and super...uh... just drink it, it's super.   The glass in the photo above has only a teaspoon of the powder.  Like I said, super green.  Fortunately it doesn't taste like much of anything.  That first glass made my heart race and I felt sort of jittery (super powers, maybe?), but I've mixed it in fresh squeezed vegetable juices since, and it hasn't had that effect on me.  

All these super foods much be working, because Brandon nearly finished digging a fifty foot trench for our new water line out at the farm house this weekend.  The trench is two feet deep, and he did it all by hand!   

It wasn't all work though, because family came to visit and we got to picnic and show off our progress.  Believe it or not, but not all of our guests are as excited to walk the entire perimeter of the ten acres with me, through the tall damp weeds and insects as my nephew is, so I'm always glad when he comes for a visit.  

We stopped to examine this giant spider who made a web in the fence line, and compared it to the one that my nephew inadvertently knocked onto his shirt while picking pears earlier.  He was cool as a cucumber while having a spider crawl up his neck, but his mother, who could actually see how big and creepy the spider was, gave the rest of us a good show as she squealed, and pranced, and battled the monster with a paper towel before her son was eaten whole.  My nephew was saved, but I'm pretty sure my sister-in-law, and the spider, will both be having nightmares tonight.