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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.