Wurst not Worst

Kasewurst may be the best thing to ever happen to me.

If you ever get the chance to go to Germany, practice this phrase: Ein kasewurst bitte (eye-n case-uh-vurst bee-teh). Then just repeat it to anybody that looks like they're grilling sausages. Over and over.
My sister just spent a semester studying in Freiburg im Breisgau in the southwest corner of Germany.

I decided I needed to go visit.

Freiburg is a fantastic town, and is heralded as one of the greenest cities in Europe. The public transportation is excellent, there are bikes everywhere you look, and the greenest living community in the world is right across from my sister's flat (it actually produces more energy than it consumes). It is located on the fringe of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) and provided some excellent opportunities for hiking.

The Munsterplatz in the center of the town has a farmers market six days a week, year round (including several wurst stands), and is actually reasonably priced, unlike t

he one in Boulder. Freiburg is home to several breweries and lots of great beer (duh, it's Germany). The people are incredibly friendly, even if you don't speak German. It really is a fairytale city.

But the best thing about Freiburg is the Christmas Market.

Now, I was a little skeptical when my sister told me that the Christmas Market was beginning on the Monday before Thanksgiving. I had in my head an image of a crazed mall-lik

e scene with people piling up carts full of crap that will probably break and end up in the trash within a couple of fortnights. I wasn't ready for that yet. Not bef

ore I had some mashed potatoes and gravy at least.

But skeptical as I was, I headed out to meet her and her classmates on opening night.

Let me tell you. The Christmas Market is magical. Instead of crazed shoppers, bright lights, and crappy Christmas music I found merry folk mingling about amongst pine covered booths, drinking warm gluhwein and eating wurst.

Ok, I may have gone a bit overboard there with the "merry folk," but it really did feel like it was a scene out of a really corny Christmas movie.

This was a Monday night. There must have been 1,000 people out in the three small plazas and streets that made up the Christmas market. The order of business was not buying everything in sight, but just to be out enjoying a mug of gluhwein (a delicious hot drink that is somewhere between wine, cider, and glug) with some friends.

This is something I wish happened at home. I wish we had more of a desire to simply gather in a public place, just for the sake of being together and taking a breath at the end of the day. A time to be holly, jolly, and maybe even a bit tipsy with friends and neighbors.

Needless to say, I spent a lot of time at the Christmas Market the rest of the week, eating everything in sight (wurst, waffles, latkes, crepes, more wurst, sauerkraut, spatzle, a few more wursts, this really good cake thing with vanilla and cherries on it, flamkuken, and then another wurst), and just enjoying the all around merriment.

More on Germany to come. And on my trip with Katy down to the Swiss Alps. Until then, merry eating.

Mmmmm boy

If you ever get the choice between heaven and pie-heaven, choose pie-heaven. It may be a trick, but if it's not....mmmmm boy! - Jack Handy

Sometimes it's hard to find motivation to really put effort into knowing where my food comes from. It's so much easier and faster to just not think about it.

Thank goodness I have some good friends to help motivate me.

Last week Dana had the brilliant idea of making a pumpkin pie from a pumpkin.

Our first stop was Peter's Pumpkin Patch.



Pete didn't have any pie pumpkins (thumbs down).

No worries, on to Jay Hill farm, who had a large selection of pie pumpkins. Even better, as we were buying our pumpkins, the woman informed us that their greenhouses are open all winter for online orders to be picked up. It's about a five minute bike away, so I'll have local, fresh vegetable options all winter long.

Back home, we halved the pumpkins, scooped out the seeds for roasting, and steamed the halves.



After they were done steaming (the second or third time we checked), we scooped out the pulp and blended it into what our recipe affectionately called "pumpkin glop."

From there, it was just a crust made by Dana, a basic pumpkin pie recipe, and a long time whipping cream to two delicious pies.



It took awhile, but it wasn't that hard. We have plenty of filling and glop stored in the freezer for two more pies and pumpkin bread.

We only had one minor catastrophe where we forgot one of the halves when it was steaming and started a small fire in the pot (sorry Tony). Other than a smoke filled kitchen, no harm was done.

And the pies were delicious.

Below is the recipe we used (for the crust, filling, and whipped cream), but I'm sure you all have your own family favorites and I'll only be slightly offended if you don't use these.

Happy pie season. It's the most delicious time of the year.

Crust (makes 2):

2 cups sifted flour

1 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup Crisco

1/4 cup water (ice water works best!)

Combine flour and salt. With a pastry blender, (or two

knives) cut in Crisco until uniform. Mixture should be course.

Sprinkle with water. Work dough into a firm ball with your

hands.

Divide the dough into two parts; press into flat circles with

smooth edges on a lightly floured surface. Roll bottom crust

into a circle about 11/2 inches larger than the pie plate.

Ease dough into the plate, trim edges, add filling and top

crust. Pinch edges of top and bottom crust between thumbs

and first fingers!

Pie (makes 2):

1 cup sugar

1.5 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground cloves

1tsp ground allspice

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp salt (optional)

4 large eggs

3 cups pumpkin glop

1 can evaporated milk

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Mix well, and pour into pie crust, leaving about 1/4" from the top

Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and bake for 45-60 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Whipped Cream:

Pour the cream in a bowl. You're going to want at least a pint. Add 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract and powdered sugar to taste.

Now whip it. Into shape.

Shape it up. Get it straight.

It's not to late.

To whip it.

Whip it good.

I recommend watching this while you do.

Seriously though, whip the hell out of it until you can pull your whipping utensil (electric beaters are for wussies - use a whisk) out of the bowl and have the cream form peaks that stay standing. Don't go too far or you'll get butter. Make sure it's the right consistency by dipping your finger in several times and licking it off. If you are serving your pie to mysophobes, you may want to switch fingers during the repetition of this step.

You cannot see the top of a good piece of pie, just the whipped cream covering it.

Let the pie cool a bit before applying the whipped cream, or it will mostly just melt.

Slow down, you move to fast...

I love eating. I love the food. I love the beer or wine that goes with it. But maybe most of all I love the people that are generally associated with eating.

There's just something about a group of friends bustling around the kitchen, sitting around the table, drinking beer, eating food, talking, laughing, and forgetting about all the other crap that they should be doing that revs my engine and soothes my soul all at the same time.

I loved our house in Tacoma - almost every night we would all have tons of homework that we *really, really needed to do*, and almost every night would end in a great dinner and three empty bottles of wine with us laughing around the table, homework still in our backpacks.

We have some fantastic dinner parties in Boulder. Always great people around, some really great food, and the kegerator is a great improvement to any night.

Cooking a good dinner is something that I never mind taking time for. I mean, I gotta eat right? Why not make it something good? Why should I feel bad about feeding myself?

It doesn't always happen - there are plenty of nights when homework, a pile of grading, and god knows what else turns dinner into a quick quesadilla and a glass of milk. But I never feel bad about putting all that crap aside for a few hours to cook, eat, talk, and relax a bit.

There are way too many memorable recipes to share, but this week we had Russian dinner night. We made Armenian spinach and mushroom stuffed potatoes (both delicious) and washed them down with white Russians. And topped it off with a couple hours of laughs.

What happened to family dinners? When did stopping by a drive through window or popping open the microwave become a substitute for a sit-down, home-cooked meal? When did we start stuffing our mouths so quickly that we didn't have time to taste or talk between bites?

When I slow down to eat, I start to think. I think about the food I'm eating: how it tastes, where it came from, what good it is doing me. I think about the people I'm eating with: how they helped with the meal, how they make me laugh, how they are so much more important than my to-do list. But most of all, I think about how I can't wait to do it again.

Eat more chikin

Sorry it's been awhile. School's gotten a bit crazy. And unfortunately that means I haven't really been devoting nearly enough time to knowing where my food came from. But I have had some great conversations about food, have biked to some great breweries, and even started brewing a batch of beer (thanks to Campbell!).

No time to give a worthy update on all of that now, but it will come, I promise.

In the mean time, here's a great visual in regards to my last post about meat. Ironically enough, my roommate found it, who is perhaps the most adamantly anti-vegetarian person I know (not that he doesn't like vegetarians, he just loves meat. And until he found this, Chick-fil-a):



What you're seeing here is not a peppermint milkshake (delicious). It's mechanically separated chicken (disgusting).

From what I can gather, the way we get from this:



to the pink paste you see above is by plucking the feathers and inserting everything that's left (bones, skin, organs, beak and all) into a gigantic press, which comes out looking like the solidified Pepto-bismol.

Unfortunately, it's not safe to eat at this point, so they have to soak it in ammonia for awhile. Now, as you can imagine, people aren't going to buy a chicken nugget that tastes like ammonia, so they have to re-flavor the putrid pink paste artificially.

But as great as it is for alliteration, chicken that's the color of cat puke just isn't all that appealing to the average consumer. To finally make it appetizing(?!?!?), they add artificial dyes to remove the pinkish tint.

Hope you enjoy your next six piece happy meal. I'd just hope they didn't mix up the bags of chicken and strawberry shake.

Nice to meat you

It's always interesting to me to think about my seemingly endless desire to find labels for myself. I guess it just makes things so much simpler when talking to people. "I'm a grad student", "I'm liberal", "I'm a math person", "I'm apparently a lazy horse who wants to just follow the butt of the horse in front of me".

I don't know why I feel such a need to fit into a specific box.

This has become particularly problematic recently in regards to my eating. I was a vegetarian for a few years. Not because PETA convinced me, not because I am against the killing and eating of animals, not because I don't like the taste of meat, not because I am a pot smoking hippie.

I became vegetarian because I don't like the way the meat and fishing industries work in this country. I don't like the way cattle, chickens, and pigs are raised on feed lots and I don't like the way the fishing industry depletes the world's oceans of entire populations of fish. If you want the nitty gritty, I'd suggest watching Food Inc. but for now I'll give a few of the gruesome details of the chicken industry.

Chicken are now genetically engineered to have larger breasts because Americans like white meat better than dark meat. This means that most chickens marketed by companies like Perdue and Tyson can't even walk. They can take a few steps and then have to plop down because their chests are so big. Maybe we can engineer them some better sports bras. The birds also don't generally see the daylight. Perdue and Tyson now force their farmers to build chicken houses without windows and with no spare room. The chickens can't walk anyways, why would they need more space right? This is all before the birds even get to the factory.

So I could maybe even get over all this. I mean, a chicken is just an animal right? I should be more concerned with feeding people and providing jobs for the struggling economy. Well, it turns out Perdue and Tyson don't treat people so well either. They have unofficial agreements with government agencies to employ illegal immigrants from Latin America at wages below the Federal minimum wage. They allow border patrol raids every few weeks that send a handful of workers back across the border, who are then quickly replaced with more helpless and underpaid workers. Not exactly what I'd call humanitarian.

This kind of behavior from the meat industry led me to choose to be vegetarian during the last few years of college, as I had no other viable options for eating meat.

But like I said, I don't mind eating meat. I actually love it. I just don't want to put a Tyson or Perdue chicken breast in my system.

Our family is lucky enough to have some land in northern Colorado, enough to raise some cattle on. My aunt and uncle have raised cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys of their own over the last five or ten years. They are animals that I seen raised, killed and processed. It is amazing how much better grass fed beef tastes and how much more healthy and yellow a real egg yolk looks.

So I'm not a vegetarian. Definitely not when I spent a whole day last fall helping to carve up the carcasses of three year old dairy steer, eat steak, bacon, and burgers from Tim and Lee's stock.

But it's not easy to describe myself to people when they ask if I'm still a vegetarian. I always try and explain why I try to eat the way I do, but sometimes it just doesn't come out right.

I think I may have found the word though, a box to constrain myself.

Awaritarian.

I am making a conscious effort to be aware of where my food came from. Not a carnivore, not a vegetarian, not even a pescetarian, but an awaritarian.

On ravens' wings

From Robert Service's Call of the Wild:

...
Have you swept the visioned valley
with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence?
Then for God’s sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
...

This post isn't really about food, but it's about the reason I'm telling this story.

Whenever I leave Moab, I can't help but wonder why the hell I'm leaving. I've had the fortune of visiting Moab twice in the past two weeks. Last weekend I went with my sister and high school friends for a weekend camping trip, and the week before I spent five days canoeing on the Green River with family and friends.

Canoe trips are one of the weeks I look forward to the entire year. The day after I get home from the trip might be the worst day of the year. It is a week of spectacular views, ultimate relaxation, and a reminder of my place in this world.



This is seriously what it's like for five days.

On the river, watching a raven soar along the canyon walls in Still Water Canyon, I can't help but feel small and insignificant. I can't help but think "No matter what we do, this world will be ok. The beauty will survive, whatever we throw at it. Someday we will all be gone, and this place will still be here, still be beautiful, still be alive."

It is the most humbling week of my year to float through the time of millions of years. Hiking over fossils frozen in the Honaker Trail from when an ocean covered present day Utah forces me to think about the epochs that have passed, and those that will, with indifference to my existence. It reminds me that my wants and desires are fleeting, that I am a part of something larger.

And yet. I am still a part of this world. I still have a role to play. I am still connected.

I am connected to the cryptobiotic soil that holds the desert soil against the powers of erosion that be. I am connected to the lizards that scamper along the layers of rock. I am connected to the ravens that soar along the cliffs, teaching their young to fly. I am connected to the water, always flowing towards the dam, patiently moving each grain of sand from one sand bar to the next, ever carving the canyon a few centimeters deeper.

Somehow, I can feel that my life is connected to the desert's. I can feel the life in me revive during the rain. I can feel the struggle against the heat during the middle of the day. I can feel weight of the wind and water, pushing me on, inevitably, down river.

Somewhere throughout my years I have lost something in the jungle of concrete, the constant buzzing of electric outlets, and the stress of a schedule. And each year I return to the vast desert and string my soul to the flow of the river, the red of the cliff walls, the grit of the sand, the call of the Canyon Wren, and the wings of the ravens.

My challenge now is to bring that lesson home and live with it throughout the year.

Girls just want to have fungi

Anybody out there know what a mycophagist is?

Nor did I until this weekend, but apparently I am one.

According to dictionary.com, a mycophagist is "an epicure whose interest is mushrooms." (I had to look up epicure as well - "a person dedicated to sensual enjoyment")

Last summer, my uncle's girlfriend Heidi, who previously lived with hippies in Oregon (thank God for hippies), discovered that our family's property in Northern Colorado has a propensity for growing wild mushrooms.

Excuse me, what I really mean to say is that our property produces an absolute shit ton of mushrooms.

We can go mushroom hunting for an hour and often return with somewhere around fifteen pounds of edible fungi.

Eating wild mushrooms is a tricky business. There are all sorts of kinds that will mess you up and even kill you. Luckily Heidi knows a couple tricks for identifying the good ones and we also found this gem in our house:



Though we leave our trombones at home, we have found and identified about four types that are edible, delicious, and rampant on our property: Aspen boletes, oysters, giant puffballs and Meadow mushrooms. The title of this post is also a tasty morsel from the book.



We haven't found any puffballs quite as big as the one pictured above (nor can any of us grow such a killer stache), but we have found several slightly larger than a volleyball, and plenty about the size of your average cantaloupe.

For so many years we never knew we were sitting on such a gold mine. Now we can't wait for each summer to run peeking around the base of trees for the orange and red caps of the boletes and always have our eyes peeled for anything round and white popping up out of the trees.

It's like an adult version of a scavenger hunt with an added bonus of a tasty appetizer when you get home. It's perfect for me - I get to see exactly where my food is coming from and I get to feel like a kid again.

Tomehto Tomahto

We live in a townhouse. It's a great size for us, the rent is shockingly low for Boulder, and our landlords are incredible.

But we don't have a yard.

Well, kind of, but it's not ours. There is no fence, and the HOA makes all sorts of rules about it.

While it's nice not to feel so entrenched against a siege by our neighbors (besides, what is a 6 ft. wooden fence really going to do against a trebuchet, flaming arrows, and a battering ram? I intend to find out if I continue to have the misfortune of living in the suburbs for much longer), this lack of yard has two major downsides:

1. No dog.
2. No garden.

As noted in a previous post, we are combating (2) by potting plants on our back porch. Still working on (1).

In our makeshift, back porch Eden, we have four tomato plants (2 Patios and 2 Yellow Taxis), three pots of basil, two pots of oregano, one pot of thyme, sage and some failed cilantro (damn), a pot of chives, and a hanging basket of flowers mostly obtained from the Boulder Farmers' Market.

It doesn't look like much, but the herbs are incredible. I love smelling them as I water them, and it's even better to pick a bunch and crush them up. We've spiced up marinades, pasta sauces, potatoes, pizza dough, and bread with them. Every time we use them brings big smiles and always makes the meal.

AND, we've started getting our first tomatoes, much to the chagrin of both my grandpas and my parents. Granted, we cheated and got our tomato plants from the market where they were started in a greenhouse months ago, but I still plan to rub it in as long as their plants are running dry.

I really can't stand grocery store or restaurant tomatoes. It's hard to imagine how the farm industry could take such a deliciously flavorful fruit and turn it into a tasteless, pinkish mush. I haven't even gotten to make anything with ours because I've been eating them like apples. Actually more like outrageously juicy plums. They are that good.

Ironically enough, tasting good is not how a tomato qualifies for the produce section at the grocery store. Perfectly good tomatoes, and all other kinds of produce, never make it to the consumer because of the way they look. Again, this stems (haha) from the vast disconnect between us and our food. Since we never see the food we eat on the plant, all we have to base our selection off is what we see at the store, and we logically choose the tomatoes that look the best.

But take a trip to a local farm (or even my back porch), and you'll find that not every tomato is perfectly round without any blemishes on the skin. But if you're brave enough to take a bite, you'll also find they taste a helluva lot better than those bland, gelatinous excuses for flavor from aisle 6.

Sorry for the rant. I promise I'm done. I need to go water my tomatoes.

Watermelon sex

Bear with me while I step up on my soapbox for the next couple posts.

I want to provide some background as to how I arrived at my journey.

The first time I ever really gave a sustained amount of thought to where my food came from and what effect it had on the world was my junior year in college, at age 20. I spent 20 years never questioning the idea that the grocery store could provide me with whatever food I wanted, whenever I happened to crave it. Bell peppers in January, chicken without any bones or skin, ripe pineapple and bananas, seedless watermelons, anything at all that I could imagine. And to top it off, all cheap as dirt.

Actually that's incorrect. Dirt might now cost more that many of those items.

This didn't seem odd to me for twenty years.

And then, at the end of my sophomore year, the magic and mystique of food-like-substances began to crumble like one of those cardboard cookies from the snack aisle.

I watched King Corn, I traveled to Antarctica, I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and probably too much Wendell Berry, I watched Food Inc, I talked to family, friends, and professors.

And now I can't walk into a grocery store without wondering where everything came from and how it was grown or processed.

In the society we live in, it is so easy to not think about or question whether or not a bell pepper can be grown in January where we live, or how a seedless watermelon can reproduce (maybe there's a vegetable porn industry out there waiting to be tapped?).

This is a great place to start. Think. Ask questions. Be curious about the growing season for potatoes, about what an asparagus plant looks like, about how a chicken can have boneless wings.

I've found that there are ways to find where my food comes from. I bought eggs from Ralph in Parkland, vegetables on the side of the road in Valmont, and am growing tomatoes on my own back porch. Not everything that I eat is local, or raised in a way that doesn't make my stomach turn. But I like to imagine each batch of pesto from our herb garden as a small little battle won against food-like-substances and the corporate food industry.

I'd like to say a quick thank you to all the professors, family, and friends who've helped and inspired me to reach this point - there have been so many of you. But particularly to Kevin O'Brien, Barbara Temple-Thurston, Chuck Bergman, and most of all Tim and Lee. Happy eating to you all.

Planting the seed

I bought dirt the other day.

It seems funny to me that dirt is something that I needed to buy. I was potting some plants that we had bought at the farmers market, but we needed something to put them in. Something that is all over the place, that is so often considered a nuisance, that we have become entirely disconnected from.

How did we become so far removed from soil, from the earth? And from what it produces?

This blog is part of my attempt to become closer to the earth again, starting with what I eat.

Looking right now at the food in my fridge and cabinets, I have only seen the origins of one thing - the rhubarb from Tim and Lee's garden. I want to be able to know exactly where my food came from, how it was grown or produced, and what is in it.

I am looking for the story of my food.

I want to make three things clear before the story begins:

1) I am not asking anyone to change the way they eat or live. What I am asking, if you read this story, is that you take some time to think about what is in your food, how it got to your mouth, and what effects it had along the way (both on people and the earth). A great place to start is reading the labels - the ingredient list and where is was produced (or shipped from). I would also love to talk with you about what you think - is your food's story similar or completely different? Does it really matter where our food comes from or how it is grown?

2) In regards to my own eating habits, I am not perfect, nor anywhere close to it. I am not looking to eat in a way that is 100% "green" or sustainable, at least not immediately. I know that I cannot be perfect, but I want to make a difference. Even if that difference is as small as our back porch garden, or one local meal a week.

3) We are not alone. There is a food movement happening in this country. Change is coming. I have seen it everywhere from farmers markets to documentaries to the local, grass-fed buffalo burger I found on a menu in Madison last week. There are opportunities every day to be more conscious about what we eat, to be more connected to the earth.

I'll finish with a quote from one of my favorite books, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax:

Unless someone like you
Cares a whole awful lot
Nothing is going to get better,
It's not.

This is the story of my attempt to care a whole awful lot. Here's to a happy ending.