Passenger Side

What happens when four middle aged men load up a truck with food, beer, wine, gin and weapons? OK so the only weapon in question was Cheppe's fly rod but the thing is pretty tough looking when you first see it in its leather case and brass lid. The idea was to road trip down to Bend to catch Wilco, maybe a few trout and in the process eat and drink like like the gluttonites we are. To celebrate the event, we unearthed some serious wines which would be methodically tasted and paired with the meals we were having. There were Barolos, Viader, Leonetti, Ridge, some Bordeaux, Buty and Oregon pinots. Is it wrong to admit that we didn't make it through the wines? After all, we finished all the Tanqueray, Heineken Light and bottled water. Who's keeping score anyway?

Without a boring and tedious travelogue attached let's just say we "whacked some lunkers" at Lava Lake (Lil Antony quote heard ad naseum) with the help of a guide (future posting), saw the Wilco summer tour ender (which after seeing these guys for a decade was still epic), and drove our tired asses back to Seattle on Sunday.

Post show Saturday we ate those lunkers with thyme, slab bacon, shallots, and lemon slices on the BBQ. We had hedged our bets though at the Bend Whole Foods (Wild Oats) and bought sausage to ensure the sausage fest would be alive even without the presence of the nice Rainbows.

It's cleansing to spend time with the boys and Big Jim was our leader and frighteningly goateed catalyst. No topics were safe as usual and I have to say if you haven't spent time with your mates (even if you just eat meat and drink wine or whatever) get off the couch and make it happen...life's too short.

Postscript Deep Thoughts:

• Don't be the first to pass out on the couch
• Know the entire Lennon back catalogue
• Never draw straws for rooms when one "room" may involve a pullout couch in the kitchen
• Don't think your fishing skill is more effective than a worm with a marshmellow
  
  

Impossible Germany

You've got to hand it to the Germans in a few areas: cars, beer, and well...cars. On a recent trip to Bonn, I got to reacquaint myself with German beer IN GERMANY. Very important distinction as some of the imports get a bit swampy or skunked from being warm and cold multiple times before the beer hits your glass. Around the city of Bonn and Cologne (Koln) the regional beer served is called Kolsch.

This delicious, crisp, slightly hoppy light ale is traditionally served in skinny, small glasses. In most restaurants and bars if your glass is empty a new one is brought almost automatically. A German colleague told me the basic idea is that the beer is meant to be fresh, cold and consumed quickly. It's a bit hard to keep track of your consumption however given the tiny glasses. At the end of the evening you may have had twenty glasses. Or maybe that's just me.

The list of beers I sampled is to big to include here but I did want to give the nod to Schneider-Weisse, arguably the best wheat beer in the world. This is what hefeweizen is all about. With its amber-mahogany coloring and streaked with fine top-fermenting yeast, this beer has a fine, persistent head that adheres well to the glass. It is pleasantly spicy with a typical top-fermented smell. An aroma of clove and nutmeg apple tantalizes the nose. On the tongue it is fresh, clean, full-bodied, harmonious and well-balanced. It finishes lightly sparkling with a light and fine bitterness. I feel a beer coming on...

The Tinyness of Shrimp

Is there a food item more overrated than the shrimp? These decapod crustaceans are expensive and often frozen multiple times before you buy them from your fishmonger. My friend Tim is convinced that if they cost about .40 cents/lb. nobody would buy them. I'm not sure that's true since their unearned reputation as a luxury food item has gone unchecked for years. Shrimp farming has become a huge environmental issue in many countries as native reefs and habitat have been destroyed to make room for these "farms".

I remember as a kid on vacation in Florida eating amazing, huge, sweet shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico being sold by fishermen with coolers who had just returned from their day boats. I also remember buying so called "rock shrimp" while I lived in California which were cold water shrimp or maybe they were technically prawns. Either way these items seem to have disappeared.

There is some hope however...Recently a group of shrimp fishermen joined together founded a collective of sorts called Wild American Shrimp. This group claims that 85% of the shrimp on the US market is imported and pond raised. Wild American Shrimp are certified to meet specific criteria which include the environment, size specifications, flavor and texture. I'm not sure certification is really the answer for quality in the shrimp world but raising awareness about the realities of the industry seems to make sense. The missing link of quality though is the constant thawing and re-freezing which ultimately makes the flesh turn into mealy mush.

I've had the chance to taste a few of these certified varieties including the "Royal Red" and "Pink". They were both sweet, had great texture, and worked nicely on the grill or saute pan. Check out the site. http://www.wildamericanshrimp.com/main.html

Clinica del Dolor

Another long one...In 2000, I was down in Tuxtla, Mexico in the state of Chiapas on an important trip to visit some small cooperatives in the Zapatista-ish zone of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, specifically the town of Jaltenango. I'm not sure how much Zapatista activity was there but since we drove past the known conflict area of San Cristobal on the way I'm taking some liberties. On the night before our journey my colleague Andres and I met with some friends to have dinner at a Spanish restaurant I'd been to a few times in Tuxtla. The Casa Asador...it may still be there if it hasn't killed more than a few dozen locals and visitors and if it is still there it can kiss my asador.

We had some nice queso fundido con chorizo and champignons, great shrimp paella, and a few dozen Modelos and Herraduras. The food was delicious and lived up to all the bragging I had done earlier. We left at about 11:00 p.m. knowing an early start of 5:00 a.m. was required for us to arrive for our mid-day speeches in Jaltenango. When we arrived back at the Camino-Real that Monday evening, my home squad, the Buffalo Bills were on Monday Night Football at the hotel bar. YES!

Following the game Andres and I retired to a long night of agony. I got the hot stomach followed by gastric distress within a few hours while my friend was doubled over with cramping agony most of the evening. Funny enough when we met for our ridiculously early departure we initially had no idea of our respective suffering. I said simply "how are you brother?" which was met with a very green-faced reply "fuck, dude, not good".

Although I also felt pretty bad, I felt that I could power through it during the five hour drive. Andres however had no such pretension. We loaded into the new but extraordinarily crappy Geo Tracker and crossed our fingers. Up until this trip I really had no idea that my friend spoke spoke much Spanish. It turns out he was was pretty familiar with the words he directed at our driver..."senor, alto, emergencia!" This repeated chorus led to numerous rapid evacuations from the Tracker and extreme retching.

On my side, I was meditating/hallucinating in the front seat, and despite waves of nauseous dementia I thought I was cool. Ten or so stops later we arrived in Jaltenango. Andres was pretty exhausted but stable...I on the other had was catatonic. All the holding it in pretension was over. I was going to detonate. I walked into our hosts offices and proceeded to wretch loudly and strongly. I'm not going to lie: It was loud and scary and the indigenous people wrote a couple apocalyptic folk songs about what they heard.

When I emerged, a few people looked at my pale, bald head and screamed. This happens from time to time so wasn't that freaked out. When I saw a mirror a few hours later I realized the cause of the reaction. My eyelids and eyes were black as the force of my vomiting had caused a full rupture of the blood vessels around my eyes. Picture a goth Shrek and you've got the idea.

The Mexicans we were with were clearly freaked out and being a friendly bunch wanted to help out or at least make sure these two lame, sick gringos didn't die on their watch. Andres and I were dispatched to the rooms of our hotel; a pretty decent place with sinks, toilets, air conditioning and cable (OK HBO and 15 channels of static but whatever). We were visited periodically by concerned citizens. These were colleagues, mamas, cooks and delightfully a "doctor".

The doctor in question was an enourmous piece of humanity, he was no more than five feet tall and weighed in at 350 lbs. easily. He asked us how we felt respectively and said we probably needed some rest and antibiotics. Alberto Einstein in the house, pay attention. The kicker was his prescription/credentials which read: Clinica del Dolor. (The Pain Clinic) Like I'm taking advice/meds from a heart attack waiting to happen in the middle of Chiapas. Good times.

Moral of the story: my sickness ran its course and I was eating sopa de tortilla by nightfall. Andres, well he had to suffer a little bit longer...

The Bottomless Bowl

One of the best and worst things about traveling to a developing country is trying all the odd and occasionally frightening culinary finds and traditions. I had one of these experiences on a trip to Indonesia. This particular trip brought me to the Aceh Province in North Sumatra. The Acehnese are a proud people and take their Islam pretty seriously. As a result, after a hot day of travel over many hours of driving, finding a place for a decent meal accompanied by a cold beer can be challenging.

My traveling colleague, an enormous, sweaty, ill-tempered Dutchman was kind enough to direct our driver to an innocent looking roadside restaurant-gas station-mini mart. It was just past lunchtime and the sun was at its hottest point of the day. We walked into the sweltering dining room-motorbike-repair station-kitchen and I noticed that some of the lunch menu items were proudly displayed in large decorative bowls. The bowls were then placed inside a large glass display cabinet with sliding doors.

We ordered some rice dishes, some chicken curry, and some kind of bonefish curry. Our order was wheeled out a few minutes later on an elaborate cart in those fancy type bowls we had seen earlier. The food was actually pretty good though needed some liberal spicing up with the ubiquitous sambal sauce. We were pretty confident they had no alcohol in the joint but jokingly asked if they had any cold Bintang. By some miracle they did have the beer but it was so hot it could have passed for malt soup.

After we finished eating our rice and picking gingerly at the chicken and bony fish curries, the cart returned and the waiter-mechanic-head chef cleared our plates. What unfolded next was truly horrifying. The big bowls returned with the cart and our leftovers were scraped back into their respective bowls. I sort of thought maybe they didn't want to mix the food types because they would feed them to the local cats or maybe their goat or something. When we walked out we saw what really happened to our leftovers. They went back into the display cabinet and into their original bowls. No wonder there was not meat on that chicken. I was probably the fourth person to gnaw on that chicken leg that day.

Epoisses, Vacheron Mont d'Or and Boone

During my exile in Lausanne I enjoyed doing all the typical things American expats do living among the Swiss. These hobbies included unintentionally breaking the thousands of inane rules which define the Swiss social contract, mispronouncing French words, jaywalking, dissing the overpriced chasselas-based white wines, asking why all the stores are closed on Sunday, declaring the superiority of America, etc. While I'm quick to dismiss a culture who's highest achievements are cuckoo clocks and fondue, the Swiss do know their cheese and most cheesemongers carry a vast selection of Swiss, French, and other types from around the EU.

I'm a self professed fromage-o-phile and if I had to pick a general style of cheese to spend the rest of my life with it would be the soft, washed rind, aromatically offensive, runny varieties. You know the ones, they melt into a pile of goo on the cheese plate when they hit room temperature, smell like a strange mixture of feet, musk and barn and stink up the refrigerator within minutes of storage. They also get more ripe with a bit of age. A friend of mine who is an Epoisses fanatic claims that they aren't worth eating until a deep inhale of the cheese wakes up the nostrils like smelling salts.

But as usual, I digress from the point of the story. One night in Lausanne my fellow glutton CJ was preparing a cheese plate with some of the amazing finds we'd had earlier in the day at the market. Some of these outdoor markets have incredible cheese vans; essentially an enormous mobile cheese counter which sells their products like a roach coach would here in the states. We'd purchased a nice assortment and were looking forward to pairing the plate with a 2000 Ridge York Creek, Late Harvest Zin.

CJ had always been fond of our dog, Boone, a black Poodle. This particular evening Boone wouldn't stop following CJ around and at one point his affection turned to licking. This wasn't just the gentle peck or nuzzle, the dog was getting after him and it was starting to get a little embarrassing. He started to focus his licking on my friends jeans, specifically near his inner thigh and had no interest in stopping. I'm not sure if you've ever experienced one of these annoying crotch sniffing dogs who won't take the hint to knock it off but that's not Boone's gig.

We eventually realized that the source of the lust for CJ's groin was not some sort of gay tendency coming from the Poodle but rather the unintentional dribbling of the Vacheron Mont D'or which began on CJ's waist and ran down his pant leg. Mystery solved.

Postscript: despite the fact that Poodles have a European ancestry, their digestive systems are still not refined enough to process a fine French cheese of this magnitude. The next day he looked like a dog with a hangover...his ass was dragging. Quite literally. Enough said...

The Dog Diatribe

There is something to be said for the simple albeit lowly food and drink item that is classically part of our culture and inspires fierce loyalty, dialog and occaisionally some mild violence. I submit the humble hot dog as evidence. Let me explain a few things here.

1.My Uncle is a fourth generation meat packer in Buffalo. He is the owner of Sahlen's Meats, a 125 year old company making hot dogs, polish sausage, and hams. His company and many others like his embrace the European tradition of quality hot dog production. The dogs are slightly smokey, packed in natural casing, have complex flavor and slightly sweet aftertaste. Despite the fact that Uncle Joe never gave me a damn free dog in his life, I still brag being related to him becase of the quality of his hot dogs.

2.No respectable human being should ever eat a tofu dog. I like tofu plenty but it doesn't belong in any shape resembling a hot dog or other meat form. You gave up the rights to eating hot dogs when you became a vegan.

3.The words "beef" or "rendered beef" should also be omitted from any hot dog ingredient list. Beef belongs in a steak, rib, chop, tenderloin, strip, hanger or burger...not a hot dog. The quantity of labels boasting the 100% pure beef is horrifying.

4.Real hot dogs, or the ancestral wurst or wiener are made from PORK with perhaps a tiny percentage of veal or beef. Not chicken or turkey or salmon or any other mystery filling. Put whatever you want in a sausage I don't really care but let's stop calling every unworthy shit stick in a bun in this country a hot dog.

5.Hot dogs should be cooked on a grill preferably with charcoal. You need to see grill marks and have the dog actually blister and split while cooking to know you're on the right path. It's a thing of beauty. Try this with an Oscar Meyer or Hebrew National fake hot dog and watch them shrivel flaccidly with fear on the grill. Don't even get me started on boiled or steamed dogs.

I hope this has been helpful and by the way don't let me catch you with any ketchup on a hot dog or I'll be forced to smack it out of your hands. I said this topic may lead to mild violence...