| Happy Sunday morning, everyone. I hope your weekend is going great. I hope it will get even better. Today I'm going to talk about a few "silly" ideas I had on my mind. These are half-serious, half-joking thoughts that I've been playing around with. Sous-vide bathing: Any bath connoisseur has had the unpleasant experience of the bath going tepid. You're in there enjoying a hot bath and, through a combination of increased heat tolerance on your part and increased heat dissipation on the bath water's part, eventually the hot bath isn't so hot. At some point, the heat disappears. Oh, so you tinker with the hot water, adding more, but that never quite does the trick because you're up against an entire bathtub full of room-temp water. You might let out some water so that the incoming hot water has more influence, but how much water do you want to use? What if you used a sous-vide stick in the bath to maintain the temperature and save water? Would it work? Could you do it safely without electrocuting yourself? How much water can one of those sticks heat up? Should you wrap yourself in BPA-free plastic before entering the bath, or does that not matter? Fermented milk: I don't get straight raw milk very often, but I happened to have a couple bottles in the fridge. The first I drank over the course of a week. The other one I forgot about. Until about four weeks after its "best by" date. Since I "knew" that raw milk doesn't really have the same tendency to go bad as pasteurized milk, I figured I'd give it a shot. There's even a process called clabbering that consists of leaving raw milk out on the counter to spontaneously ferment. I wasn't worried about safety, but I wasn't sure it would taste good enough to drink. The cap gave an audible *POP* as I removed it. I poured a glass. It was lightly effervescent. I took a sip. It was good! It didn't taste like kefir (didn't have the funk) or like yogurt (wasn't all that tart or sour). It tasted unlike anything I'd ever had. Really quite tasty. I thought I detected a slight tinge of ethanol. And I remembered that the Mongols and other steppe peoples used to (and still do) ferment horse milk into alcohol. Perhaps I'd stumbled onto a lightly alcoholic cow milk. Is there anyone out there who's done this before? Anyone who's actually turned raw milk into a drinkable alcoholic beverage? Let's get the brain trust going on this. Tell me in the comment section of WLL if my ideas are crazy or not. Also, tell me all about any other "silly" thoughts you folks have been having. Take care, be well, and thanks for subscribing! | 