Yes...(about powdered eggs). This is information I received via e-mail from Honeyville Grain just the other day.

"As many of you know we have been out of stock on our #10 cans of Powdered Whole Eggs and Egg Whites for about 3 months. This has been as a result of working with the USDA on plant and label approval with new stricter requirements with respect to eggs. We've endured numerous delays and setbacks throughout the process. About a week ago we had received approval to begin Production. We did so and even had product on UPS trailers ready to be picked up. We got a call from the USDA stating that they had put us through the wrong process and we would have to start over again. We had to pull all of the outbound orders and go back into a holding pattern. At this point we are moving through the process but have no idea when we'll be back in business with the canned eggs. It is a frustrating situation with one of our best sellers and we apologize for the delay. Just as soon as we have product ready to ship we will send out an email to all of our great Honeyville Customers. We appreciate your patience."

Kefir - I only use powdered milk products - period. I don't purchase store-bought milk. We use a whey-based milk substitute - Morning Moo's - for drinking and cooking. I store another brand, Country Cream, and use it for my kefir - http://www.grandmascountryfoods.com/. The Country Cream seems to work better than the whey-based product for kefir, unfortunately it's more expensive than Morning Moo's. I've never tried it with store-brand powdered milk. If you do let me know how it works - just out of curiosity. I've made it with fresh goat milk, but I don't have a source for it anymore.

Do you know you can place your grains in a jar of milk and "rest" them in the refrigerator (for 7-10-days, or so)? I usually keep 1/3 to 1/2-cup of grains going, and place mine in 1-cup of milk in a pint jar and rest them for 5-7-days before making kefir. I usually have 4-6 cups of kefir in the refrigerator at any one time, and when I get that much I'll rest my grains until I need to make more.

When I want to use them again I'll remove the grains from the milk and place them in 2 to 2-1/2-cups of milk in a quart jar. You can leave the pint jar of milk the grains were resting in sitting out at room temperature and it will have enough kefir in from the grains to ferment into kefir.

My new favorite... I make kefir using coconut milk. I use coconut milk powder (reconstituted) but you can use canned coconut milk. You might try it when your grains get bigger and you need to divide them and have some extra grains. Once I used them in coconut milk, I store them in coconut milk and only use them with coconut milk. We love it added to pineapple/orange juice smoothie for a great pina colada taste - or just plain instead of yogurt, or topped with homemade granola.

I use kefir as a replacement for buttermilk, and I use it in my bread. I never thought about it rising better because of it. But then, that's what I've always used in my bread recipe ;-)

-Grainlady