Day 3 - Kraut

This summer, my mother decluttered her home, including many family farm relics she could no longer use, not that she ever used them in the way they were intended anyway. My grandmother owned several tin kitchen storage containers marked "FLOUR" etc. but Mom stored plastic bags inside instead. There was another contraption she stored right alongside a giant iron coffee grinder that she used for a doorstop. We weren't sure what it was. I had thought all along it was an apple corer, but upon closer inspection, there was no central core. It looked like a 10-pound mini pizza cutter.
We called a local college with a thriving history museum, and an expert in local antiques came over to pick up the donations. We asked him about the apple corer and, surprisingly, it is a cabbage chopper. I had never heard of one of these, and haven't ever seen one on Ebay, either.
We forgot to give the old crock to the historian. It had been in one or another garage for about 70 years, and was cracked and repaired several times. We ended up throwing it outside by the mailbox with a "FREE" sign, hoping someone would rescue it.
With $1.50 today, I decided to "buy" some salt. Actually, I purchased a huge container of sea salt last week because I needed lots to make sauerkraut. I haven't eaten any of the salt until now. This morning I started a fresh batch of sauerkraut so I can enjoy some during this February challenge and also the Locavore Lite 2010 challenge.
It would have been really fun to make sauerkraut just like grandma probably did, with her cabbage chopper and her large pickling crock. I hope my kraut will be just as good as hers probably was.