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.