Fermenting Careers
On the millennial hobby that is fermenting...
A different post this time. Not because my acting career has stagnated beyond stagnation. No way. Nope. Not at all.
Okay, so I have found myself quiet because I have very little to say about acting or want to say about it. Every few days an idea for a post pops into my head, only to be buried beneath my reluctance to type beyond 3 sentences about it. So, I thought I’d try writing about something else and see where that takes me.
About 98% of my work is done sat on the sofa in our living room next to our tiny kitchen. When I say our kitchen is tiny, I really mean it. If we said the floor space was 2mx2m then that’s me being incredibly generous (and not being entirely sure how long a metre really is). Despite this, my husband and I are committed cooks, only dampened by our constant monologues bemoaning the restrictions of our space that accompany all our culinary endeavours.
To make matters worse, like the impressionable millennials that we are, we’ve got into fermenting foods in a fairly major way. As I look at our kitchen now, I can see a jar of sourdough starter, two jars of kimchi, two jars of fermented wild garlic, a jar of sauerkraut and a jar of kefir. In the fridge we have a pot of ryeso (rye miso) that was moved to the fridge this week after 3 months sat out in the kitchen, kefir, fermented beetroot and heck knows what other concoctions are lurking at the back of the shelves. Somehow, although we insist we don’t have room for a toaster, we do have room for these endless jars of gut biome experiments.
Keeping these little jars alive, feeding them, checking on them and experimenting with them is such a joy, regardless of the space they irritatingly take up. We delight in the pungent smells they release when we peer in and enjoy working out what to play with next. These little projects are a welcome distraction from endless deadlines (him) and uninspiring work (me) and are probably the closest our landlord will allow us to having a pet. The benefits of making things with your hands are well known, you’re firing up the effort-driven reward circuit, it feels a lot more wholesome than doom-scrolling or waiting for a job offer to come in and, ignoring some sourdough failures and fear of the ryeso not working, is wonderfully relaxing.
Some of my sourdough attempts have been pitiful, especially when trying to complete all the necessary stages on a kitchen worktop the size of a small leaflet and trying not to knock endless towers of fermenting vegetables, but it feels good to dedicate some time to a project that my job or ability to pay rent doesn’t rely on. When you put so much into trying to have a successful career and find you’re not getting much back, it is lovely to chuck some flour and water into a jar and watch it grow. There are no egos to worry about, no endless rejections, no overthinking or second-guessing, just a few ingredients coddled together with a bit of hope and salt and away we go.
Sometimes the result is wonderful, sometimes it’s a confusing mess, but hey, aren’t most things anyway? Maybe sometimes careers and aspirations also need to be put away in a jar in a warm dark place with a little muslin hat and just sit quietly for a bit too.