Every day I get a little closer to meat
Santa was good to me this year. Normally I'm a bitch and a half to shop for, mostly because I suck at putting together a whish list, but this year badthumper put together a wish list for me and forwarded it to my family, with excellent results. I got a nice camera that I'd never in a million years have asked for lest I seem greedy, a few shirts that fit and look good, and a whole bunch of homebrewing toys from Ms. Thumper and Mr. Chaos.

The homebrewing toys are especially exciting: I've got enough capacity to keep a few batches going at once now — which means I have room to experiment. The current safe bet is five gallons of altbier from one of Midwest's kits; it's in secondary already and smelled fantastic when I siphoned it over, so I've got high hopes for it. The current experiment is a small batch of hot pepper wine. Most of the recipes I've found online call for jalapeños, but I don't much like jalapeños, so I'm using the ancho–mulato–pasilla combination from mole poblano and we'll see what happens. Oh, and I started a ginger bug, so there may be homemade soda in our future.

Finally, thanks to some successful thrift-store scavenging, I'm also the proud owner of a demon pickle crock. For some reason, it's got an inverted pentacle on the side with the number three written in the middle, all in a lovely pale blue glaze, and I'm eagerly looking forward to making pickled demon in it as soon as I can find a good recipe.