Flexistentialism Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Last week we got a solid 24 hours of rain, uncommon for this area. In the middle of the storm, I was putting up cages around the tomato plants (which unfortunately are being attacked by flea beetles – hopefully they survive the assault) when I noticed two medium mushrooms peeking out from the undergrowth near our plot. They looked promising enough that I consulted our Colorado mushroom book when I got home. I had it narrowed down to either Shaggy Parasols or Shaggy Manes by the time I told Sam about it, and suggested he stop by to pluck them if he felt reasonably sure we could eat them without a trip to the ER. (Regular disclaimers apply: mushroom hunting is FULL of risks, you should only pick ones you are certain are edible, & consult professionals as needed!). Sunday, I find him sautéing up a couple slices of the one of the two now humongous mushrooms. Turns out they were indeed Shaggy Parasols – a good one for beginners, since it has some pretty good tests to ensure it is not the most similar poisonous mushroom. These guys, due to the rain and the rich soil we found them in; measured a good 15 cm across, and maybe 8 cm high. We took one to a friends’ BBQ, where it responded well to a mixture of soy sauce and red pepper flakes on the grill. The second one (minus the sample Sam took out, as seen in the picture) we used in one of our favorite dishes: a traditional risotto, based off the one used by Alton Brown. While it’s unlikely you’ll immediately have access to a shaggy parasol of this size, most mushrooms can be used in this recipe.

Shaggy Parasol & Asparagus Risotto
6 cups vegetable broth
1 cup dry white wine
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup finely chopped onion
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 cups Arborio rice
5 ounces Shaggy Parasols, sautéed and coarsely chopped, approximately 3/4 cup
7 ounces asparagus, cooked and cut into 1-inch pieces, approximately 1 1/2 cups
4 ounces cheese (we use a combination of parmesan, sheep’s gouda, and gruyere), approximately 1/2 cup
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest (if you have it)
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

This is a four pan dish, so clear the stove.

PAN #1:
In a medium saucepan with a lid, heat the vegetable broth just to simmering. Keep at a near boil.

PAN #2 (main pan):
In a large 3 to 4-quart heavy saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onions and a pinch of salt and sweat until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the rice and stir. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes or until the grains are translucent around the edges. Be careful not to allow the grains or the onions to brown.

(Pans #3 & #4 are for sautéing the mushrooms and steaming the asparagus, respectively)

Reduce the heat to low. Add the wine and enough vegetable stock just to cover the top of the rice. Stir or move the pan often, until the liquid is completely absorbed into rice. Once absorbed, add another amount of liquid just to cover the rice and continue stirring or moving as before. There should be just enough liquid left to repeat 1 more time. It should take approximately 35 to 40 minutes for all of the liquid to be absorbed. After the last addition of liquid has been mostly absorbed, add the mushrooms and asparagus and stir until risotto is creamy and asparagus is heated through. Remove from the heat and stir in the cheese, lemon zest, and nutmeg. Taste and season, to taste, with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

So let’s say you bought boots: nice Doc Martens, a few years ago. They were great boots – worn to the point that the soles were slick and the heels were cracked. But as good, well-used boots go, they are particularly useful in very dirty and heavily worked situations. So when you volunteer as a fire suppression team member at a bonfire-like event in a part of the country susceptible to wildfires, it’s not surprising that your duties include lugging heavy, water-filled hoses around, keeping the embers from landing on people; and using a pike to knock down too-tall parts of the burning structure. After several hours of this, the boots (and your clothing) are soaked – and aren’t done any favors by being wadded up in your luggage for a flight the next day. And if you’re particularly slow about unpacking all your things – a week in a plastic garbage bag tucked in your duffel won’t do these boots any favors. In fact, they might look like this:

Just a warning, kids: even good boots go bad. The mold won in this case, but Sam gave them a good life before they were consumed.

It’s true…two new mohawks, cut for Memorial Day on our vacation. I wish I had pictures – but alas, didn’t think of it. I’ll try to track some down from the two new mohawk club members. Suffice it to say; both enjoyed a greater self confidence and attractiveness to others following their sleek new haircuts.

Our vacation was really, really great. Saw old friends, made new ones, had my mind cranked open by some fantastic art and discussing it with the giddy but extremely modest artists, fabulous food, and lots of kind folks from south of here. Wish I hadn’t been bitten by fire ants all over, but hey, you can’t win them all.

One last mention – I found this article from Melbourne, Florida. The zoo there is opening a new Visayan warty pig exhibit in a week, and they are offering free admission to those who attend sporting a mohawk similar to the hairstyle of the pigs. Yet another benefit!

After some cajoling, we both managed to get back to STL for a few days to see friends. Friends who turned out in force! It was a nice present to have friends who let us stay with them and borrow their vehicles (wow, how easy that made it), and of course many friends whom we saw, ate cheap, great food with (oh Mai Lee…how I miss you, and your #126), shopped with, and visited old neighborhoods with.

Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects was that so many of our friends in this city think a great deal about what MAKES a good city, a good neighborhood, a good block. Sam and I are thinking a great deal about this too after reading the majority of a very dense but altogether sensible book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Sitting in at close to 1200 pages, I think we should be forgiven for jumping over a few pages, but by and large, this tome on design of all types and sizes of spaces written in the 1970s has a ton of good ideas that seem common sense but don’t automatically spring to mind. Like, what kinds of neighborhoods inspire the residents to walk instead of drive? Some say they want a jumbomart to get everything in one place, but large numbers of people find a corner grocery to be useful for most of their needs. How big should a town square be in order to be more inviting for a variety of people? How do you even design housing to encourage a diversity of ages, socio-economic class, and family types to move in? These questions are thought about a lot when you don’t consider your own city to be ideal, and the residents of STL certainly are hard on theirs. But many of our friends are improving their city actively through day jobs or weekend projects: from working with local arts and youth organizations to renovating a house in a neighborhood that needs a lot of work, from building a rooftop garden at work to becoming a teacher or building a sculpture for a public event, we’re lucky to know so many people who think so much about how to make their city a better place to be. And stranger still, most of these people flow effortlessly between white collar and blue collar jobs – and mingle with a combination of both in their neighborhoods and friend groups. Few cities in the U.S. really achieve this.

That’s actually two concepts, but I still appreciate both. And it’s exciting for us to see all the things our friends have accomplished since we moved – even if it’s buying a ‘76 camper named a “scamp” or plotting hijinks for their upcoming wedding. In the meantime, we’ll try to improve the city we live in now, even if most of the residents here have a much higher opinion of their city and don’t believe it needs help, change or any more people in it. It takes time, naturally, to tap in to the improvement elements in a city.

My brother and I have a trivia team. We don’t play every week, but we try to keep up an appearance, especially because we find it to be fun, the bar it’s at is a good bar, with great food & drink specials that night, and the trivia is generally a good time. That’s not to say we’re good. In fact, we harass each other regularly to find more people for the team who can excel in these areas: sports, cable TV shows, movie Westerns, serial killers, and the other topics we just don’t have a lot of knowledge about. He can get the top grossing movie questions perfectly, and I can get the chemistry and literature questions just as well, but that doesn’t cover a lot of ground. This week, however, we not only convinced several people to join us, but several rounds went very well for us! You might not expect that I would rock rounds about rap songs as related to graphs (no I’m not kidding) & U.S. state trivia, or that my little brother would know so much about Chuck Norris. Good to know we both have marketable skills!

The other thing that makes trivia fun is that we have a waitress whom is really sweet and very cute, and would make a great gf for said brother. As far as I know, this hasn’t yet happened, but she has come up to him at his place of work, and chatted with him asking why she hadn’t seen him at the bar in a while. In fact, she smiles and grabs our shoulders when we walk in, which are all good signs! I’ve made it very clear he’s my brother, so he just needs to make a move. I’m willing to take the risk that things go sour, and we’re awkward at trivia forever after…but for now, I’ll just take advantage of the pub nachos and enjoy having a brother that can do the chug off when I get all the answers right and we tie with another team. That’s awfully handy.

So there is good news and bad news about our new community garden plot. The good news: it is a nice-looking, friendly little garden, and we’ve already met two other gardeners who were extremely nice and seemed about the same level of experienced-amateur gardener that I might consider myself to be. Our garden leaders seem very nice, and should be holding some kind of group meeting soon, which I hope will allow me to really get to know the rest of the gardeners.

The bad news is a little more serious. Our 100 square foot plot sits next to two 30-feet tall blue spruces. That might be OK, except they sit immediately to the south. The. plot. is. shady. all. day.

If you’re not a gardener, you may at this point be saying, “So what? Clearly plants grow in shade, I see them all the time. Grow up!” In part, you’re right: I should grow up, but this is the second time in recent months I’ve had this problem: when we moved into our northwest-bottom-corner apartment and found I couldn’t raise much in pots on the windowsills. The garden was supposed to correct that problem, but as Sam considers, perhaps we are being “hazed” as new members of this exclusive locale. The pure shadiness of the plot means that more than half of the things I planned to grow must be crossed off. So, tomatoes, gladiolas, all peppers, basil, daisies and zinnias are out. LOTS of lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas, collards, and did I mention lettuce? are in. We’ll show them we know how to garden.

The tragedy that keeps me from accepting this and moving on is that I haven’t grown tomatoes for over a year now, and was desperately looking forward to raising the crop that has the most payoff: a freshly grown and plucked tomato, something I could rest assured would grow in Colorado with much the same requirements as in Missouri. While I could quietly slip my brother $50 cash (he’s a certified sawyer) and the trees would suddenly no longer block the sun, I have a feeling I’d be hunted down by an angry mob if I did, since no one else would stand to gain from the trees mysteriously being chopped down.

So, we’ve taken the first steps – meeting a few other gardeners, and amending the soil with high-quality compost and sheep manure while picking out the blue spruce pinecones. This week I’ll probably put down peas and a few kinds of lettuce and spinach. If things work out, we’ll get a lucrative trading system down, offering the rare mid-summer spinach and lettuce when everyone else is drowning in tomatoes and basil. Oh, and next year we’ll request a move to a sunny plot.

In the last month or so, Sam and I have explored and embraced three unique new tastes. In my case, I discovered a love for coarse-ground mustard (especially on a soft pretzel) and that Kalamata olives are actually pretty similar to capers, which I already put on a surprising number of foods. Sam is pushing me to accept green and black olives into my heart, but let’s not go crazy here…black olives simply don’t impress me on pizza, which is where I usually encounter them. And as for green olives, well, this is sounding more and more like a plot to get me to join Sam in his petty crime of stealing one or two olives from grocery stores’ olive bars. Kalamatas, however, I can incorporate into interesting dishes.

Sam, on the other hand, has a different new condiment love. It’d be an exaggeration to say he puts it on everything, but pizza, soup, pasta, bagels, chik patties, and maybe salads at least. It’s called Togarashi, or sometimes Shichimi Togarashi, or sometimes “Japanese 7 Spice”. In short, it’s a spicy powdered mixture that includes chiles, salt and seaweed. We discovered it through its requirement in a ramen-based soup, and since then, it’s dominated Sam’s foods. While it falls within my spice tolerance, I think most foods don’t have to have a delicate combination of chiles and seaweed to finish them off. Hey, to each their own.

Bananas are so tasty. From the time during my sophomore year when a group of friends and I decided to all eat bananas together at dinner to test a (weak) hypothesis that bananas cause weird dreams, I’ve seen them as one of the more interesting of fruits. So it follows that I jumped on the new book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel. It’s a little discomfiting to read about how the banana companies began by ruthlessly ruling Latin American countries, murdering their citizens and leaders and taking over large tracts of land in order to make the banana profitable to sell to Americans for less than an apple. Luckily, the companies are not nearly so ruthless anymore, but the damage is done. More interesting to me than this part of bananas history, though, is the fact that we don’t eat the bananas our grandparents ate. In fact, through the 1950s, Americans ate a BETTER banana: the “Big Mike” or Gros Michel. This banana, by commercial standards, was bigger, sweeter, creamier, kept better, traveled better, and was so well-loved that yes, you WERE in danger of slipping on errant banana peels in big cities in the 1920s and 1930s.

However, bananas are not an evolutionarily favored plant, for all their benefits. They are clones – which explains the lack of any seeds, and the remarkable uniformity of the ones you see at the grocery store. But in the past, and now again, it means bananas fall easily to any fungus, disease, mite or bacteria that successfully attack a single plant of a banana cultivar. In the 1950s, Big Mike bananas started disappearing due to a fungus traveling easily between plantations. Big Mike bananas are not extinct, but they don’t work in big plantations anymore. How frustrating, then, that our bananas today aren’t as good as back in your grandma’s day. I’m tempted to ask someone of the era what exactly these dream bananas were like…but to be realistic, if someone asked you forty years from your last one what was so great about Pink Lady apples, could you really pin it down?

In the 1950s, the banana companies were forced to realize that they needed a banana replacement for the Big Mike, and they scornfully switched to the “inferior” Cavendish banana you see now. It is more fickle in travel, smaller, less creamy, and generally considered a weak replacement (though consumers, apparently, didn’t mind or didn’t notice the difference slicing it into their cereal). But the Cavendish, as I write, is being attacked by a stronger strain of the same fungus that destroyed most of the Big Mike bananas. And we’re no better at solving the problem. Clones just don’t have the genetic strength of other breeding methods. The best hope currently for keeping our Banana Foster recipes for the next couple generations is to employ transgenic methods to produce a third commercial banana. Wild bananas generally aren’t very appealing, even if hardy, and most bananas eaten by the non-Western World are starchier, closer to a plantain (how many of us would switch happily to a plantain on your peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?). And regular cross-breeding is next to impossible with seedless fruit. It’ll take a lot of trial plants to find something that we picky consumers barely notice is not a Cavendish, but doesn’t die from fungus or the other diseases currently decimating the crops.

Anyway, it was a really good book. If you don’t feel like reading it, you might want to instead check out the NPR Fresh Air interview the author did, complete with singing a banana jingle and a thoughtful explanation why transgenic bananas aren’t worrisome. The author had many opportunities to try bananas you’ll never see in the US, and confidently picks a favorite: the Lacatan. He claims it is sweet and extra creamy, and is beloved by the locals who have access to it. Again, no fair. I am being told that one of my favorite fruits isn’t even the best of it’s kind, with the two better varieties either gone from the market or only sold in and near the Phillipines. I’ll need to find someone to smuggle a Lacatan to me at some point, so I can tell kids years from now how amazing yet another banana they’ll probably never eat was.

No, I’m not moving. But one of the downsides of Boulder right now has been lack of access to a community garden, and that’s about to change. I got the call today that I have a bed in the Fortune Garden, one of the community gardens that I am told is difficult to get into. This is because it is located in one of the oldest, most esteemed and expensive neighborhoods of Boulder – and there is little turnover for both real estate and garden estate. I weighed the benefits of the two nearest gardens (this one’s closer, more intimate, and better protected from wildlife) for a couple months before requesting my top choice. I’m hopeful it’ll be as good as I expect.

It’s not the fairest thing to expect community, friendship, drinking buddies, outdoor activity, grassroots activism and oh yeah, fresh vegetables and herbs from a simple 100 square feet, but my last plot, at a meager 50 square feet did just that. I miss my fellow gardeners from the humble Clemens garden very much, and hope I’ll find interesting gardeners at this new location. It’s a little further away, but that’s all the more reason to become more comfortable on my bike and to prepare seeds for spring. It’s time to read up on what Colorado’s growing season will and won’t let me do (damn the desert climate), and figure out what seeds or seedlings to order.

The other benefit to Boulder’s community gardens set-up is that they have made the gardens part of city-owned land, protected from development. My last garden existed at the grace of two, not just one, private property owners, and came under threat of condo development during my time there. While it was inspiring to see how our garden group came together to argue for keeping the garden (successful so far), it’s a lot less stressful to know the city’s got your back. Plus, for a ludicrous sum, I could take a course this summer in bee-keeping, which is awfully cool. I just have to figure out whether it’s hundreds of dollars cool.

It’s true. Two weeks ago, Berg finally agreed to do it! He had been thinking about it for quite a while, but needed some friendly and a little liquid encouragement (hey, being in engineering can make you more fashion-conservative). He’s quite pleased with the end result, though, as am I. And I get the impression he’s getting a great reaction out of his fellow students, too. Perhaps I will be giving other Aerospace Engineering students mohawks soon…

Berg’s hair is irrepressibly curly, which makes for a mohawk that practically stands up (or poofs up) on its own. Sam’s mohawk, while incredibly long (perhaps 6 inches at the apex now), is so straight that it takes 1/2 can of foul-smelling hair spray and an assistant to stand it up. Thus, he rarely stands his up, certainly not for his recent activities, which have included multiple TV appearances. It’s too bad…I think he would be an excellent speaker for his field, whether or not his hair pushes him to 6 feet tall. But he prefers to keep it down except for special occasions, which is why I haven’t posted any pictures of his mohawk on here. Encourage Sam to spike it, and you’ll see some then.

So how have things been? Same as usual, I suppose. I’m repainting my desert shoes – from green to red, and today I’m making root beer from scratch. The recipe will be posted if it’s successful, but there are days of steps before we’ll know. Root beer making is a very interesting project, however – requiring a variety of chipped barks, and created using a mixture of molasses and yeast that both carbonates the beverage and provides a low alcoholic content. Not enough to even qualify it as a wine cooler, but enough that modern companies don’t even try – as we all know, HFCS and compressed carbon dioxide are cheaper and more predictable.

I have a not-so-secret goal in this root beer project. A nearby local restaurant, better known for its well-loved alcoholic brewed products, makes the best root beer I’ve ever had. It’s not super-sweet, but full of flavor (and scent…not the best for a very pregnant friend newly sensitive to strange smells). It’s clear they’re doing something other root beer producers are not, as no bottled products (I’ve tried quite a few in the last couple months) have quite mimicked the combination of flavors. I have some ideas for how to figure out their recipe, but for now it’s the old-fashioned way: make my own, continue to drink theirs, and try to sort out which flavor compounds need tweaking in my own recipe. Failing that, I wonder what kind of offer would convince one of the hip employees to share the original recipe with me?

It’s weird to find a comic artist (author?) with such a similar sense of humor to me and Sam.

I advise you to check out his other work, found here. Also check out his group, “Bears in Ill-Fitting Hats”.

My favorite christmas present this year came and went a couple days early, but was entirely worth it. Three friends from STL (who, humorously, just moved to STL a year ago on our strong encouragement!) planned their drive to San Francisco for Christmas to cross our path in Colorado – and the predicted snowstorm that weekend meant that they would be best off staying put at our place for a day while the blizzard passed over the mountains. As we expected, they were able to spend the snowy day off the roads, hanging out with us, and the next day I-80 was at least driveable in their little Honda Accord.

I was thrilled with the opportunity to show our friends our place, neighborhood and what kind of life we’ve set up since leaving the Midwest six months ago. They were enthusiastic and excited about all of it, and we had a great time mixing with the drunk crowds on Pearl Street, the Christmas shoppers around town, and just relaxing before the rest of their drive out to the West Coast. Had nothing else happened for Christmas, I would have been satisfied. I only hope that the one person driving back in a week or so makes her journey touch down here again – a dose of STL is a welcome break in the snowy Colorado winter.

For Christmas, I got my very own set of clippers and a barber smock in black and white stripes. This allowed me to trim up Sam’s ‘hawk. He had to show his stuff since his little brother Greg is now a proud mohawk club member as well – check it out, he’s clearly not modest about his new do.

This year being my first year of doing mohawks, I’m just getting started. Expect more mohawks by m. for 2008.

There are several stories from the past week, but we’ll start with the one involving trouble.

Sam’s family has and loves two beagles. The older of the two, Baxter, is now blind and has decreased smelling abilities, so he causes relatively little trouble, if you can find it in your heart to overlook his copious but unconscious drooling. The younger beagle, Maddy, however, has a nose sharper than a top-ranked sommelier, and no qualms about eating ANYTHING within barest reach that might qualify as food. Families with beagles (like Sam’s) tend to be aware of this instinct, and hide all food well away from countertop edges, in containers with rocks on them, or take other extreme measures to ensure they don’t come home to a swollen-stomached dog and tipped over food containers.

Sam and I don’t live with a beagle. This was made evident when we thought our precautions with the two bars of 85% rich, dark chocolate we received for Christmas were sufficient. They were tucked in a paper bag full of other presents in a room with the door closed for our time at his family’s house, but on the day after Christmas, one of us must have left the door open. About an hour later, Maddy appeared very guilty, licking her chops, and retracing her steps revealed two carefully opened dark chocolate wrappers dragged outside, with no remaining chocolate. Sigh.

We all know chocolate is bad for dogs, and that this particular dog had done a ruthless, very bad thing, but we didn’t notice any problems right away, and left it at massive scolding and a sharper sweep of the house for other edibles she might be able to reach. A few hours later, Maddy had the appearance of an espresso junkie with a fresh dose of caffeine, unable to sit still, whining and drinking lots of water, but otherwise as goofy as usual. Perhaps a stomachache, we thought. Nothing serious. Everyone went to bed, while I stayed up to do some writing. Her demeanor changed sometime after 11pm. She started trembling all over and her eyes became very bloodshot. She didn’t respond to her name quickly, and would lean against me with her whole body shaking. Concerned, I checked a few sources online. This one in particular gave me the scary facts – she had eaten 7 ounces of very dark chocolate, double the toxic dose for her body weight; and was showing more than half of the symptoms. I counted myself lucky she was not yet experiencing seizures or coma, and woke up Sam. We tried the family vet first, where the answering service promised to leave a message for the vet on call, who’d get back to us in 30 minutes. 35 minutes passed with no call, so we called back the answering service, who basically shrugged and said they’d tried. Luckily, FC is known for its top tier vet school and accompanying small and large animal hospital, complete with emergency services. A call to them and some quick math on their end meant that we should bring the shaking dog right away. Bundling up for the cold, we headed out, disturbed that even the sight of the harness and leash didn’t raise Maddy’s spirits. This was bad.

The drive to the vet hospital was unpleasant, to say the least. Maddy apparently hates cars, and was very vocal about it. We got there and found the hospital empty of patients, where a young, kind vet quickly scooped her up and took her back. From that point, things got better – from the info we could share about how much she had eaten and when, they decided to make her vomit (the vet’s words were, “She puked up a LOT of chocolate. It smelled nice at first…like hot chocolate. But also like dog vomit”), coat her stomach with activated charcoal, and keep her overnight with IV fluids to dilute the damage. He assured us we had done the right thing by bringing her in, and that he gets a LOT of calls this time of year with the same problem. Their knowledge means they can do some calculations on the phone, like they had with us, and give a good estimation of whether the dog should come in or not. In this case, Maddy had eaten an awful lot of quite dark chocolate containing large amounts of theobromide and caffeine, and the puking helped her from getting worse. The vet was friendly, gave us regular updates through the night, and after taking a down payment sent us home around 2am, saying we could pick up the very naughty and now empty-stomached Maddy in the morning.

In the morning, Sam’s dad (everyone had been briefed by this point) offered to pick her up. She came back overjoyed to be both out of the hospital and the car, but having learned nothing. It is remarkable that such an unpleasant experience had no effect on her. How many humans can’t remember the last time they puked their guts out and why?!? Thank your ancestors…it’s an evolutionary advantage not shared by most other mammals, and probably responsible for our survival through thousands of ecosystems. I suppose the silver lining is that she has no memory to blame me or Sam for taking her to the puking-place, but it was shocking how little time it took before she was performing acrobatics to (unsuccessfully) slide another chocolate bar from its high perch on a bookcase. Beagles!

Since then, there seems to be a residual sense of danger averted – she has carefully singled out each family member for licking and insistent whining, as if to reassure herself that no love was lost from her actions. It’s lucky she lived through it all. Having gone through this and being thankfully human, I learned that you should get a clear idea of how much and what kind of chocolate a dog eats, and see a vet if they have any symptoms as seen in the links above. Also, vets are totally underpaid for inducing and cleaning up dog vomit. That part of the bill was less than $30.

For a long time, I’ve enjoyed learning about where our food comes from and which ways of obtaining it are good for us, and good for the environment. I really dislike taking single words like “organic”, “natural”, or even “fresh” at face value to reassure my choices and dismiss my responsibility to know what I’m eating. (An unfortunately popular technique especially in this city). Usually there are few or confusing regulations on using these words, so I find that keeping up on current research and reading full labels and ingredient lists gives me a more accurate picture of what’s the better choice. (Some of the most fascinating stuff if you’re interested comes from Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dillema and this blog on nutrition and individual foods: http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/)

Side note: actually, that blog is even more broad. It’s also about cooking, news from the FDA and USDA, and other changes in the American nutritional scene. I suggest everyone check it out, as the blogger has much experience with the study of nutrition, and before that, a career in engineering. The writing covers a lot of territory without it being too dense. I don’t always agree, but it certainly allows one to make better informed decisions about food.

All of this leads up to what I did this weekend. My family has a long standing tradition of giving away food for the holiday. Nothing strange about that, across the country people give cookies, pastries, cheeses, wine and a number of other foods to friends and neighbors at this time of year. What’s weird is the effort my parents have put into producing a food item that they can give an entire story to and even now take great pride in the process, repeating the story at the drop of a hat. For all their effort, they give an American food standard: wheat bread.

It’s uncommon to know the full path of a single food product, and even here I can’t tell you backstory about the honey, yeast or salt in the bread. I can tell you, however, exactly the origin of the main ingredient, wheat flour.

One of my uncles is a farmer whose primary crop is wheat (by volume…it’s very difficult to make a profit on wheat without being an industrial sized farm, so heifers are the more necessary ‘crop’). Most every year, my dad goes down to help him bring in the winter wheat crop, and brings back a big box of unprocessed wheat grain. Once back at my parents house, he grinds the wheat in his own hand-turned grinder. My mom takes the wheat and turns it into bread, which is then delivered hot and fragrant one weekend in December to friends and neighbors.

This year, I’m nearby, so I was quickly recruited for this year’s process. My mom has a problem with her arm currently that makes it pretty painful to complete manual labor like kneading. Therefore, the bread making became a two person process – she combined ingredients in the mixer, and turned it out into a bigger pile of flour in a bowl where I took over kneading the bread. After letting the bread rise, I rolled each batch out, separated it into quarters, and rolled each up into pretty loaves to rise again and bake to a golden surface.

There are a few inconsistencies here. Those who know me are probably suspicious at this point that I would spend any time, much less a full day involving 8 batches or 32 loaves of bread-making in the kitchen. WHY would I be so involved in this process? OK, I admit, the first reason was guilt. It’s been years since I helped with this, and there is nothing wrong with my arms, so why wouldn’t I help with the labor intensive parts? Secondly, though, it’s important to walk the talk. I don’t know where every food I eat comes from, but helping others to have a relatively healthy food item that we do know a lot about is a good thing. Thirdly, now’s a good of a time as any to learn the techniques inherent in making homemade bread. It certainly wasn’t explicit in the recipe, so hands-on learning helped me create muscle and sensory memory of what the bread feels/smells/looks like at each stage if done right. And fourthly, it made me more popular with both family for helping out and neighbors for delivering two of the loaves that warm up a snowy winter night.