Gingerbread and Sauerkraut

The winter holidays are coming. This week we received two interesting seasonal food questions. “I’m looking for a gingerbread recipe which uses flour, eggs, milk, baking soda, and yeast.” The Newton Falls Public Library staff thought this sounded like a ordinary gingerbread recipe until the caller got to the last ingredient; yeast is not a commonly used ingredient for this item. She was from out of town and unable to come into the library and did not own a computer, so we searched online for recipes. Cheftessbakeresse.blogspot.com had a recipe for yeast-raised orange gingerbread and Georgene-a-bramlage.suite.com had an assortment of gingerbread recipes for Christmas and winter. We gave the caller the recipes we found for her which fit your ingredients list.

The second interesting question was “I’m making sauerkraut in a crock pot and am concerned about mold-like stuff growing on the top. Is this normal?”  Alton Brown of the Foodnetwork.com states “Check cabbage every other day for approximately 2 weeks and skim the surface of scum, if necessary.” Since this stated in his recipe, apparently our patron’s concern was a common one. The book, The Self-sufficient Life and How to Live it: the complete back-to-basics guide by John Seymour also had information about making sauerkraut and our patron took home this resource.