Kefir

A mesh lemon bag is rocking my world!  I just have to share this simple but so totally awesome innovation for anyone else out there culturing kefir.If you put your kefir grains in the mesh sack, then you can just lift them out of the kefir, rinse them off, and put them in the new milk!  No straining or sieving, no fingers involved, and less washing.  It's SO easy.  The whole separating the grains and rinsing was the messy part before, sometimes enough for me to put off using the kefir for a day, or another day....I'm definitely overly rapturous about this, but I've been culturing kefir for at least five years, so after all this time, this ultra-simple revision to the rinsing process is nothing short of a revolution!  Not my original idea- it was suggested to me.New to kefir?It's super easy to DIY, and supposed to be stupendously good for you (really, the health attributes ascribed to kefir get wild).  Basically it's milk that you leave out in a warm place (as counter-intuitive as that may seem), with a few small lumpy "grains" in it that start the culture that changes the milk to a type of yogourt.  You have to always keep the "grains" when you harvest your yogourt, rinsing them and putting them into new milk for the next batch- they are what holds the bacterial life that grows, and they need a bit of coddling.You can make a smoothie out of kefir when it just begins to separate (the yogourt stage), or you can let it keep stewing until it's quite thick, and treat the product like cream cheese, adding herbs and spices, for instance.  You can use different kinds of milk, too.  All you need to start are the grains.  Mine were given to me years ago, so I'm not sure how the product I see in the supermarket works (?), although grains seem to be available for sale online.