Curious Souls

About  one year ago , we moved into our new home in Fort Collins, CO. What has changed since then? Many things! (Details forthcoming.) One of the most visible changes being that the owners painted our house "Forest Service Green" a month ago. Fancy! And, we went from a high of 77 yesterday, to three inches of snow (and still accumulating) tonight! Crazy Colorado weather... Asher loves it! Time to break out the snow boots!

The soy milk experiment was a success!! From 577 grams of soy beans ($2 worth), I made ONE GALLON of delicious milk! Here's what happened today: Turning the beans into a foamy paste: Moderately Easy I drained the soaking beans and put them in the processor with some water. What made this slightly harder than totally easy is that 1) I have a four cup food processor so I had to do it in lots of batches and 2) I didn't process the first couple of batches long enough so I had to repeat the processing. The goal with this is to make it thick and foamy. Boiling the soy bean mixture: Easy But Incredibly Messy I added the thick foamy mixture to some pre-heated water. Even after splitting it into four different pots, it still tried to overflow. Separating the Soy Milk from the Okara: Easy but HOT After 20 minutes, it was time to separate the soy milk from the fibrous bean part, called okara. This is done by pouring the whole mixture into a cotton muslin bag and then squeezi

Jon and I have been eating more vegan than not lately which means more soy milk and tofu. After a conversation with some friends of mine and the discovery of this site , I decided that I wanted to try to make my own soy milk and tofu. This is a many day process so I'm going to blog about it as I go, which means you will get my totally uncensored opinion of how hard or easy it is. Today involved the purchase of the soy beans and the soaking. Buying organic soy beans: Easy I found organic soy beans at the Fort Collins Food Co-op . If you live in a town with a food co-op, you should definitely check it out. We buy all of our bulk items at the coop and recently had to shop at a Whole Foods when we were out of town and wow  is the Whole Foods bulk section ridiculously small (Take that, Whole Foods! Your bulk food section is miniscule !) Anyway, here are the soy beans in all their organic and inexpensive glory: You will notice in the instructions that the recipe calls for one po

Just over a year ago, Ellen and I decided that it was time to escape the oppressive heat wave in Berlin . (This year the high for the upcoming week is a lovely 76. Time to go back?) Ellen had looked up several old friends , including one in Hamburg, Germany. This was our next destination. When we arrived, Anke, our hostess, already had big plans for us. Our first order of business was to travel downtown... by canoe. We learned that Hamburg has an extensive canal network, including more bridges than either Amsterdam or Venice. Vid Link That evening, we were taken to the very swank hotel-top bar: 20up . My favorite part was the view from the restroom... On the way back home we took a stroll through the Reeperbahn past Herbertstraße and learned that you can identify a prostitute by the fanny-pack that they typically wear - not in back - but in front. It's important to keep an eye on the cash. The next day, we decided to learn a bit more about the city and so we jumped o

First the bike camping and now our very first Urban Assault  - we are on a roll with firsts! We participated in this city wide bicycle scavenger hunt last weekend and boy was it fun! One tip if you do attend: there is a prize at the end for "style." There were lots of good contenders this year.      The ride started and ended in the New Belgium Brewing parking lot and, as is to be expected, involved copious amounts of BEER!     Some "activities" at the ride stops: Diving for cans of New Belgium beer: Video Slip and Slide! Video The best ride end ever: a wet bounce house on a hot day! Video Convinced yet that this is a good time? Sign up next year and ride with us!

Guess what we did last weekend? We went bikepacking! Or, perhaps more accurately, we embarked on our very first sub-24 hour overnight bike camping trip, also known as an  S24O . Video We started from our house in north Fort Collins with our bikes loaded up with gear. The 10.5 miles to Lory State Park involved 6.4 miles of lovely separated bike lanes over relatively flat terrain and then 4.1 miles of almost completely uphill roads with no shoulder. We arrived at the park hot and sweaty to find, coincidentally, my Mom and Dad and some much needed ice water. They claimed  they were out looking at houses but we think they were spying on us... :) We pedaled into the park, locked our bikes at the picnic site across from the trailhead and loaded up our packs. Did I mention that we had to backpack in to our campsite?  We started the entire trip kind of late in the day so we had to move pretty fast to hike the four miles in to the backcountry sites before dark. We made it ju