✨ Happy New Year ✨

Musings, a wily beaver, a recipe list, and a gift for new subscribers

Good morning, or good afternoon, or evening, whatever the case may be as you read this letter written on a frosty morning on the last day of 2025. It is quiet this morning, save for the sloshing of the washing machine and light snoring of our dog. It could be by the time you read this, is it 2026. In which case, Happy New Year to you. Thank you for being part of this community.

In the wee hours, 2:30 am, I took to the icy roads with our youngest son and only daughter, and left them at the airport to return to their lives. You know the emoji with the puddle of tears pooling in its eyes. I feel like that emoji, a small puddle of sadness ready to spill out and down my cheeks at any moment. But it isn’t true sadness. I am heart-filled and happy from the beautiful visit and blue that it is over. And, I have to admit, since I was a child, the last day of the year has filled me with a bit of melancholy.

We homeschooled our children. Christopher worked remotely already in the late 1990’s, and so when he wasn’t gone for a couple of weeks at a time, he was here. Our nuclear family spent more hours together than the average family. For nearly two decades, it was all six of us. Not quite a decade later, they had all left, finding their own paths in the world. Our empty nest felt novel and exciting. This new normal has now added up to a decade. Now it becomes years, filling the space in between the times when all six of us are in one place. Not from lack of desire, but modern life’s distances and obligations.

Okay, enough melancholy.

One highlight of the visit, which included a lot of sibling humor and laughter, was when their older brother invited us to a site in the mountains where he has been trying to remove a beaver couple from a hydroelectric power station pond. They have been evicted, but she is holding her ground. Our oldest son, who runs a beaver non-profit that has a small beaver relocation program, caught her mate, who is waiting, sadly, I might add, in a halfway house for her. They are going to be relocated to a beautiful area on a willow-thick creek (read lots of good food). By comparison, the pond they have been at is a food desert. But she needs to be caught first.

She has evaded 10 traps, and this was an attempt to gently remove her from her bank lodge while she slept. When we first arrived, she was there. My son located her with a heat-sensing camera, but by the time we got there with nets, she’d snuck out. Since we hadn’t seen her slip off, the next two hours were spent trying to roust her, but she was gone.

In a final attempt, when we thought the den might be empty, our son looked through the vent hole and then through the entrance of the bank lodge. No beaver.

We set up the traps with even more apples. The next morning, he got a call; no beaver but a chagrined fox was in one of the traps. (The fox was fine and darted off when released. It had eaten a significant quantity of apples, so who knows about the state of its microbiome.) The score must be: 🦫 🔟 Humans 0️⃣.

✨ Happy New Year ✨

I want to pause here to say I hope your 2026 brings hope, light, and good company.

What’s next?

Over the last two weeks, often during the quiet moments of cooking to feed and nourish, these two children I rarely see, I thought a lot about what this Substack might look like in the next year. I have a lot of ideas, as usual, too many, but two have bubbled to the top of my list. Challenges to support eating more fermented foods and a help desk.

My biggest takeaway of the year is that eating fermented foods is more important to our overall health than we have previously understood.

In light of this, I am leaning toward adding more support for those of you who want to incorporate these foods into your daily habits. Let me know in comments if that is of interest, or what is of interest to you.

A few months ago, Christopher joined this stack with a science corner called Ferment Nerds, and I want to add a Dear Fermentista column. Think of it as a fermentation help desk. I used to do this on our website Ferment.works, which came out of a fun time we had on a book tour road trip. We were traveling with active ferments. As we drove, our ferments were bubbling and farting their CO2 odors through the car. To entertain ourselves, we invented Ben, a loveless fermenter.

I am starting to think that it is going to keep me single, as I have noticed when I am parked along a street people wrinkle their noses when they walk past my car. My mother is less polite. “Ben,” she says, “you are not going to find yourself a nice girl with that smell.” ~ Ben

I think we could have a lot of fun with this column. I envision the practical questions that come with DIY fermentation, but am hoping some of you will also send fun questions like Ben’s, and ones that you are “asking for a friend.” Truly, let’s have fun with this, life is serious enough.

Make a ferment

Part of eating more fermented foods may include making some yourself, though, not necessary. I opened up some previously paywalled posts so everyone could be inspired to make a ferment. I chose recipes that are easy, even if you’ve never fermented.

• How about homemade mustard? This is one of the easiest ferments I know of. This post includes three recipes for home with a video demo.

• Three recipes for fermented cranberries.

• Daikon are beautiful anytime of year as they are both a winter crop and a summer crop. If you have never fermented start here with two recipes: Radish Kimchi and Rosemary Daikon Spirals.

• East some kale. Here is a post about why kale with a fun recipe for a winter kale salad using a beet ferment

• Don’t forget you can find previous posts and recipes here.

Bonus for Subscibers

For the next week, ending Janurary 7, I will give every new subscriber paying for the full year or coaching level subscription free access to this 30-day Fermentation Challenge. I created a few years ago. It is a mix of making your own ferments and using them. Content is dripped out daily for 30 days. You can access daily or work at your own pace. If you are trying to eat more ferments this might be the start you need.

Already a subscriber, I am gifting this to you too. Watch your email for a code to access this course.

Parting Shot

In case you are wondering where I am coming to you from…

The arrow points to a tiny triangle of meadow cleared out of the forest. This is the top of our homeplace. We went on a hike in the mountains that surround us a few days ago. It is always humbling to get a different perspective on one’s surroundings.

With love,

Kirsten