KEFFIR, PART 2
I’ve always loved fairy stories; I still do. You know where you are with them: there is always a beginning, a middle and an end; there is a hero and a heroine, and good triumphs despite adversity. (I’m in good company as psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim in his study, The Uses of Enchantment endorsed fairy stories as a way of helping children adjust to the world.)
I have favourites. I especially like the story of the 12 Dancing Princesses who wore their shoes away with secret night-time dancing. The Swan Princes made me sad when the enchantment which had turned them into swans was not quite broken, and one prince for ever after had a wing instead of an arm.
There is usually a moral to these tales. So it is with another of my favourite stories, The Magic Porridge Pot. I don’t think it’s by Andersen or Grimm and something in it makes me believe that its origins are in middle Europe, but I may be wrong. The elevator pitch (fellow writers will know what I’m talking about) is this: a peasant wishes that her porridge pot will never be empty, but she gets more than she bargains for when the porridge pot never stops making porridge, threatening to engulf everything. Moral: be satisfied with what you have.
I’m not sure my story has a moral but it made me think of that tale.
The grains of keffir I sent off for arrived and looked very like 2 teaspoons of tapioca pudding. I followed the instructions and the next day I had about 250 mls of keffir milk. I put the grains into more milk and repeated the process. I have been doing this every day for more than 2 weeks and despite being used, the keffir grains do not decrease, but rather, increase so that now I have about 5 tablespoons of them – it is like magic, like a fairy story.
I have more and more of the milk. We have plenty to drink. I have put some in the freezer but every day there is more. Will we be drowned in probiotic goodness? Where will it end?
