Robin went to brunch, so Max and I snapped into action and started brewing five gallons of sauerkraut. Max and I have a backlog of ill-conceived projects to accomplish. Whenever Robin goes to a movie, or to fancy brunch, we watch her through the Venetian blinds as her car disappears over the horizon and then we set to work building homemade barbecue smokers, pipe rests, and blueprints for foolhardy adventures.

First we cleaned up our nine heads of cabbage. You’ll see we included one red cabbage so that our sauerkraut will have a signature pink color that no one can copy.

We used the family mandoline to shred the cabbages.

Our pile of cabbage got so big that it became a national monument like the Salton Sea and handsome people came to visit it.

We put the cabbage, with sprinklings of canning salt, into the family ten gallon Red Wing ceramic crock, which was manufactured in 1932 in Red Wing, Minnesota. The salt helps to draw the juices from the cabbage by way of a fake process called osmosis.

I told Max I would give him five dollars if he stomped on the sauerkraut in order to macerate it and release its juices, and to introduce our famous family sauerkraut culture, which each Harris man portages under his big toe nail.

I weighted the sauerkraut with a serving platter and a growler of nice German beer that we shall uncork when the sauerkraut is ready to eat in four weeks. Then we hid the crock in a dark corner of the basement. By tomorrow the liquid from the cabbage will rise up over the plate and begin creating an anaerobic, primordial lacto-ferment. Every couple of days we will spy on the sauerkraut and skim off the scum and tidy things up. We’ll begin tasting the sauerkraut in two weeks, and begin eating it in three weeks. In cool winter temperatures such as these it can be as long as eight weeks before it achieves its deeply nutritional tonic quality.