Winter Solstice Eve 2015 (Chance Rolls)

I have been doing my usual annual round of avoidance of the insanity of shopping the weekend before Christmas routine, and tried to keep this a low-key weekend at home.  It is the Eve of Winter Solstice*, and it seemed like a fine enough reason as any to relax by the fireplace and reflect. Finding it in me to make entries for the past couple months since the election hasn’t been there. There has only been drama-laden news and negativity charging at me from all sides since all the tragic happenings in Paris and San Bernardino, the ongoing debate about the refugee crisis, plus the fear-mongering stupidity abound stemming from creeps on social media to the campaigning in the States. Adding my input or other comments about these salient things one way or another doesn’t make for a course of relief from it all, nor changes the hateful idiocy of others who are making such crises worse.

Someone else who is just as unwilling as I am to get out of

bed on these dim and dark winter mornings.

I’ve been reflecting on the other 354 days of this year that have passed. I suppose 2015 for me will be known as “The Year of the Great Weakening”. I’ve come to face to face with working through a lot of denial about how much of a toll last year’s suffering really took on me, and what kind of impact it has left, and how it still affects me today. I didn’t think it would have amounted to affecting me so chronically. I’m sick of realizing how much it all has physically aged me in such a (relatively) short while: a notable and pronounced loss of resilience. I re-entered work this year with not only lots of upheavals regarding my personal health, but also wading hip deep into problems and challenges affecting not only me, but my co-workers and people I serve, and with my role in the Union. Holiday plans were ruined by fires throughout the summer, more injuries through late summer and fall, and then the other tragedies pouring through the news from late October onward. It hasn’t been what I would call a fun year to say the least.

Sure, there were lots of hard lessons to learn, but I didn’t need the pain, stress, and anguish; I’d benefit more from them if some element of fun or a lighter side was present. That didn’t happen. Life became too serious for my liking; nothing I’d want write about. It has been bad enough that I decided to suspend my more analytical and logical modality of problem solving thinking recently. It has been helpful in guiding out of problems, or at least taming down sparks to prevent bonfires, but there has been nothing that I would call feeling better with a sense of satisfaction or interest in doing so. So, just on a whim while Christmas shopping for others, I thought I would seek out a small inexpensive something that I would identify with as a “lucky charm”** for a more acceptably benign form of exercising superstitious thinking for myself: by consulting some form of oracle. I realized that the perfect sort of rosary objects or gris-gris for me is a set of dice. My threads of “logic” for making them significant totem objects are as follows:

• I like simple and symmetrical geometric shapes; dice have that going for them. It’s a reminder to seek out the most fundamental and simplest solution to a problem first and to take a balanced approach to tackling it.
• Dice are linked to gaming (my favourite dice games are Backgammon and Yahtzee, which I’m becoming addicted to playing online); a reminder to try to find some way to approach a difficult situation by making it entertaining enough to keep it at least interesting to follow through with dealing with it.
• Often my biggest problem is analyzing too much, and slapping down too many options and approaches in my own private sessions of brainstorming. Paralysis by analysis happens too frequently. Dice would be practical tools to help me speed up decision making and to settle on single options.
• Dice are mathematical instruments, which appeals to me when I want to entertain that geeky side of myself. I mentally retreat sometimes into thinking about the world weighed and measured in numbers to help myself be less bored or depressed.

Most importantly, a six sided die is a mnemonic representation of all the dimensions and elements of what depression or boredom is, or their flipside. Boredom = (energy) – (interest) – (attitude) – (knowledge) – (imagination) – (focus). By default of existing, one has a physical mass that works and interacts within the dimension of time. That is Energy (remember E=mc²). Unless you are in a freaking coma, or sick to a point close to dying, the powers that be gifted your conscious self with some physical/mental abilities to use for the waking hours of your day, and the choice of how, or whether or not, to use them for your and/or others’ benefit. How present or absent the other five factors are that play on your energy will dictate how bored you will or will not become. It’s even hard talk about, or write out what boredom is and to somehow make it a subject of serious interest. That is until you see what happens when you add plus signs to all of those variables following energy. Then what you have is its complete opposite: creativity. If you have little or none of those things in that set, you simply have to get real and honestly ask yourself why those variables are depleted, or outright absent, for each or every one of them; that keep you shackled to a mindset of boredom, and impedes your approach to something more creative.

If I were to create an official national holiday marking winter solstice in this land, the celebrations would include a lot of dice based games, candles/lights/fire to brighten things up, and of course drinking. There would be no obligation to exchange gifts; just share good company. Sounds like a good start anyway. Who knows, if Trudeau the Younger ends up legalizing marijuana, the trend might naturally flow to there being a reversion to some more hippie neopagan-esque celebrations that would mirror things like this anyway.

An addendum paragraph to this entry the day after. The question about what my plan for 2016 was brought up to me by a friend over lunch hour. I was lacking in speculation and answers. It may involve more of what rolls of the dice have to tell me. If they break horrid spells of indecision and, if I gain a course of action and commitment from using them, it is all fair game.

*- I always wondered why we haven’t made more generic holidays and celebrations here in this nation for both solstice dates of the year, like they do at least for the Summer Solstice in Scandinavia. We are multicultural society in Canada, and we all live under the same sun. It wouldn't then matter who you were racially, ethnically, culturally, spiritually (or not). It would be somewhat uniting I’d think. I’ll always welcome another statutory holiday.

**- If you want to get judgemental and think that this is all very silly, let me remind you readers that people use such symbols, charms, and trinkets all the time, and it is more common than you wish to acknowledge. It usually comes and is possessed in the form of jewelry. Think about the multibillion dollar industry happening alone just for the sake of procuring an outrageously expensive shiny rock affixed to a ring just to show off and symbolize engagement or marriage. Others get more and extreme and tap ink into their skin permanently to express their totem symbols in tattoo form on impulsive whims (which they may regret later). Surely, my choice is no weirder or more extreme than any of those things.

Eleven Weeks Plus A Day: Afterword

The federal election is finally over with for this country, so is the longest stretch of campaigning I have experienced in my lifetime. I’d like to say that it was an easy process for me, but I’ve taken the affair of casting a ballot a lot more seriously than I have in past elections. Social media has evolved such that information overload is everywhere and it becomes hard trying to decide which matters are the most critical to give weight to. It was shameful to see how much trivial crap was dumped into the mix to distract and obfuscate stuff of more importance. I’ve not taken a proactive stance on supporting a favourite. It has been a question of rising against, and not tolerating anything else more corruptive and insidious that has been already going on within the federal government over these past 10 years. The senate scandals, the slashing of services, the disrespect to our veterans, threats to our privacy and civil liberties, the attacks against Unions and organized labour, moves that cripple our Healthcare system, the unprofessional, tactless, and indelicate way aboriginal and other minority issues have been addressed; their being caught in the act of illegal activities in trying to rig the last few elections, are part of just a small sample of it. Our scientists have been basically given gag orders regarding any findings related to climate change under the Harper regime. We, as a public, have been deprived of critical decision making information from Statistics Canada. Harper cut the staff there and lied about the reasons for abandoning the long-form census. My opinion is that when you are in a position of power and become an opponent to data-gathering, objective analysis, and silencing progressive scientific reasoning and inquiry, you are then an enemy and a menace to everyone.

There was something very telling about Harper in some of his words of his final speech at the end of the election night, and the inevitable discord and chaos he could have led this country into with the mentality he had if he was in for four more years.  It is not an exact quote, but his words were in the tune of “. . . We wanted to handle the [government] money as well as Canadians do for themselves.” Those are scary words coming from a Conservative Albertan; I’ll show you why in a minute. He wants to portray that we are stable because there was budget surplus, but with savings shrinking and debt climbing on a personal level for the average Canadian, and climbing steadily during his watch for the past 10 years, that portrayal of economic stability is a total myth.

I don’t like it when people are criticizing governments for going into debt, and yet don’t shine that light on themselves for their own personal financial situation. Citizens and corporations carrying obscene amounts of debt are much of the reason why governments are in debt. Whether it is on a personal or corporate level, people go grovelling to the government, no matter what political stripes: for start-ups, or to bail them out when such ventures fail. It is a simple fact that we, in general as Canadians, have become just greedier, more covetous, and more fiscally irresponsible in the past few years on a personal level. Either that, or we have genuinely come to more dire straits with wages not keeping up with inflation, and then have to rely on incurring debt to bail us out of emergencies. There is validity in both reasons in varying degrees. We have been declining and losing our ethic and ability for saving money since the eighties. With a hint, or even the myth of prosperity, and with a promise or reality of a better income, people don’t save; people instead get more overconfident and reckless about personal spending, relying more on, and abusing buy-now-pay-later strategies. Alberta is supposedly the richest province in Canada; people are making good money there, and yet it is Albertans who hold the highest average household debt out of all the other provinces in comparison: almost double that of the national average from the graph of the 2014 numbers below.

Thus, it pisses me off when Conservatives, especially Albertan ones (like Harper is) are trying to sell the rest of us in this country as to what the economic plan should be. If Harper really wanted to show up at a rally for the interest of being some moral authority and demonstrating fiscal responsibility, he should have went back to his home province, and used his cheesy ‘cha-ching’ sound effects to show what happens every time an Albertan whips out a credit card. Therefore, I really don’t want a prime minister who says he wants to model government spending on that of what the average Canadian does now, because on a whole, the average Canadian is getting progressively worse at managing money . . . especially in Alberta*, where they seem to really suck at avoiding household debt! If he is that out of touch with that fact about what's going on with the average Canadian, a supposed economist no less, it is best that he is gone.

Even though trickle-down economics has been shown to be a complete myth, the Harper mandate endorsed it. Only a bigger wedge gets driven between the rich and the poor. CEO salaries are going up, while more working people are relying on soup kitchens and food banks. On a global level, the news just a few days ago announced officially that the richest 1% of the world’s population now owns more wealth than its remaining 99%, yet we have a Prime Minister that seems to want to support and perpetuate this trend by doing things like sealing the tax files of the wealthiest people in this country. The answer of is simple in regards to the question of “Do I want to see four more years of Harper leadership?” The simple answer is “NO”!

As to the question of who I want representing me for our riding, it was made it easy to eliminate at least one option too. The choices were between four people: the NDP candidate is a lawyer and a community activist, the Liberal has credentials including an award-winning distinguished career in mental health services, the Green Party representative is an actual scientist, who is a consultant for green building projects, and then there is the Conservative runner . . . a friggin’ sportscaster. Can you guess which one I didn’t vote for when considering the serious business of helping to run a country?

My duty is to vote and be wary of what happens after. I earn the benefits if it goes well, and the right to complain and fight for my rights and freedoms to do so if it doesn’t. All I can do is my best to deal with and adapt to the aftermath later. It’s still better than being apathetic and opting not to vote. To not be an active part of democracy is to surrender and be a willing pawn to the whim of a dictatorship. I vow never to let that happen.

I’m glad and proud to say that we as Canadians have collectively gained the sense to drive Harper out of power and bring an end to his tyranny. Harper is out, and Trudeau is in; and now Mulcair and the rest of the NDP have been shorted many seats in the commons. Instead of going on a rant and trying to drum up a witch hunt, or whine about the how the NDP will be more of a loyal opposition than the Conservatives** ever would, I will just say congratulations to the young mister Trudeau, I really do wish him the all best, and hope he and his team at least learned from his father’s, and other predecessors’, mistakes and use those lessons for better governance of the nation. Let's just do what we need to do to reconcile things, so we can move on and have the thing we wanted most when we voted . . . change.

*- I worked and lived in Alberta briefly, long enough to observe that there was definitely a more pronounced gearing towards affluence, and a keeping-up-to-the-Joneses attitude was more visibly and prevalent than what I witnessed at home. Sadly, that same attitude is contagious, and is appearing more and more here in Saskatchewan. So people there generally charge for stuff before earning and then spending. Now oil prices have fallen drastically and layoffs are happening, and now people there who were relying on the one trick pony of the oil-patch are feeling the hurt for their ridiculous over-spending. They really can’t blame their past/current provincial government for it, just themselves and their own greed on a consumer level, although the hard core Conservatives there will try to twist this into some story of villainy due to the action of either the federal Liberals, or provincial NDP governing them now. If Saskatchewan doesn’t smarten up, we’ll feel it too, if we aren’t already.

**- I intentionally dropped the word from their formal title, the “Progressive” Conservatives, because they never really did anything progressive for these last 10 years.     

The Science Geek Kitchen

It’s the first weekend of what we would call the beginning of late Fall in this territory. The glimpse of the mostly denuded trees, and the past two days’ drizzle has snuffed out the fizzle for anything more adventurous that I may have had in mind. I’m definitely done with dealing with cooking projects for a while. The freezer is full now, and I ran out of containers. I’m starting to putter about with the chore of packing away some my summer apparel and utilities. I get to see just how well the hammock frame I built in spring optimally tucks away with a minimum of space consumed in a closet once it’s disassembled. I’m also mulling over a design in my head for simple collapsible wood crib that I can construct for storing a larger stash of fire wood with the remaining scraps of short planks I have left over from that last project; reclaiming more space given my deck’s limited girth. I’ll be (at least I hope I’ll be) a lot more active this winter than I was for the last one. Given the observations I was making through my depressing infirmity and forced idleness and confinement through last winter, I thought I should do some planning on improving my home’s interior. The hammock project was an eye-opener as to how I essentially doubled my sleeping space with minimalism and modular component fabrication. Unlocking and freeing up space while making the most out of storage is a theme that has become a real mindworm for me.

I watched a bit of a “tiny home” marathon the other day on HGTV; studying the brilliant means and methods some people are using to get the maximum benefit out of a minimal space. That fuelled me with a bit of inspiration as well, and reminded me that I’m still ultimately the master my little realm, and that I’m fortunate enough to have the space that I do, such as it is. My office and kitchen are the biggest targets when it comes to wanting to create effective usage of storage and space, each room with their own different respective issues. I’m concentrating on my kitchen first, as it is that place of the two rooms in my dwelling that is used most and has the greatest play with possibly conserving energy. I also think ahead to the future in terms of what will change socially and environmentally for this region, and how one should prepare for that. I speculate the following things:

·         Population growing faster than the infrastructure is to support it. Resource drains or taking things offline to rectify the problems may be more frequent.

·         Water becoming scarcer, as the city expands, or if droughts become more frequent, and more advisories to conserve water are more likely to happen. Water utility bills go up.

·         Energy costs in general going up, that is if we don’t make a better effort to exploit solar and other alternative energy sources.

·         More costs for waste disposal as our landfill areas become overtaxed. More costs for disposal, waste quotas, and then subsequent penalties for excessive household refuse.

To cope with dealing with those things in the future, it is best to practice and get into the habit of preparing for them now.

Overall, the trend of today in this city, as elsewhere, is having new houses being built with fewer people living in them, and having ever more expansive kitchens where people are generally doing less and less cooking in them. Some people who think they know me would guess that a big kitchen is one thing that I would dream for and covet, but to be honest it isn’t. It may impress others, but not me. It’s a pathetic irony and a stunning inefficacy and burden for me to see: all this wasted space just to be used for mostly just opening tins of soup, making sandwiches, or using a counter to throw take out containers on, because no one seems to have actual time to do real cooking anymore. They are elsewise too busy trying to build and secure a high paying career to pay a sky-high mortgage, which includes this feature kitchen that only serves to be a white elephant. I reflect back on the days of watching my Mom do the crazy amount and output of cooking and food processing that she did in our simple little  kitchen when we lived on the farm: one that was spatially about as big as mine is, if not relatively smaller. I suppose it served as a good example as how to manage my own. In the past few years, in terms of my culinary talent, I have been growing in both skill and desire for more daring experiments on the wild and radical side of food and prep techniques. I now feel a stronger need to set up a proper kitchen space that logically reflects that. Mentally, I’ve been putting a wrecking ball through it, and trying to figure out how to make things ideal from the floor up.

The elements of time and energy constraints for single occupants are also the variables in the equation of my idea of a perfect and efficient kitchen space that are often overlooked by architects and designers. Being reduced to the sole manpower of a single occupant doubles or triples maintenance and cleaning time and labour. Having a larger kitchen space is senseless; keeping a smaller, efficient, better organized one is an absolute must. The only sound reason for needing to have the kitchen size that I do have is the fact that I do a lot of home brewing. Unfortunately, the processing and storage of large quantities of liquids/alcohol consumes relatively a lot of space. I also have some stranger things that most other single men wouldn’t think of getting, like pickling jars and canning pots. I do the best I can with what I have, but I’m not exempting myself from trying to learn more about things that I could do to improve. I have a lot established already. To watch me operate my dwelling’s kitchen, my methods most look pretty eccentric or radical compared to most other average bachelors’ homes. No matter how radical it seems, my method in my BACHELOR kitchen (as mentioned in an earlier post, about another episode of kitchen space reclamation) most certainly edges toward the practical and scientific for the sake of all dimensions of time/space/energy/cost efficiency. Here is what I mean:  

Steam and Pressure – For making flavourful concentrated broths in a fraction of the time instead of conventional boiling and reduction, nothing beats a pressure cooker. I love this thing. It’s great for small scale canning also, using a tenth of the water volume and less than a quarter of the time to sterilize and seal jars compared to conventional boiling immersion method. I’m surprised that, despite the more modern built-in safety features that they are now crafted with, there are a few professional chefs out there who are still too chicken shit to use these things. They do require a bit of close-up monitoring, hard to do in a busy and distraction loaded commercial kitchen I guess, I’ll give them that. Mine cooks at a pressure of 10 atmospheres before bleeding out steam, equating to

So far, I’ve been lucky and
 nothing has yet went KABOOM!!!

about 100 metres under water below sea level at 16.5 degrees Celsius (coincidentally, my preferred room temperature).  It scores big with me for the factors of reduced time, hence reduced kilowatt hours, and ultimately good if you are genuinely concerned about conserving/rationing water (see further below about emergency preparedness). I always thought that in terms of giving true aid to people in third world countries, education and technology is sometimes better than straight up food and healthcare. I think of the scene of the Nepal earthquakes in the recent past as an example. In such impoverished high altitude zones with inclement climates and scarce growth, in like the Andes or Himalayas, where you have to burn more fuel for reaching adequate cooking temperatures using water at those altitudes, aide should entail air dropping pressure cookers to these remote places. The problem in such regions sometimes isn’t a question of a shortage of food, but a scarcity of wood or other sufficient combustible material for cooking and preserving it properly (to prevent disease), which leads to wastages and then the consequential shortages. Another problem is difficulty to access to water if there is no convenient infrastructure to get it directed to homes. Using less water, and less time to boil it, means less energy to use. Less cooking time plus wasting less water means less trekking to get a sufficient amount of it. Children are often used for such tasks, hauling water and collecting sticks and animal dung to burn for fuel, and if the labour of subsistence and toiling for essentials becomes greater than time for schooling, these kids are becoming more deprived of an education. Having a simple pressure cooker in such households could help limit all that. Just a theory of mine. 

The quintessential wok with bamboo steamers. A good ploy for
maximizing verticle space while reducing the work of
four burners into one Depending on what I steam, my trick is to
collect the drippings, and cook Ramen or Udon noodle soup
 in the wok's water while I steam the other goodies above it.  

Chinese (Asian) Practices and Methods – I don’t mean to specifically stereotype the Chinese, or to stigmatize them; I am referring to any of the kitchen practices of the people of the Far East Asian nations living in modernity (South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc.) who live with the stresses of over-population, and yet can produce amazing things with limited space and resources. I just assume that the Chinese, the ones with the largest population, who have historically endured more adversities involving invasions and war, famine, and more recently, shortages/rationing wrought by the Maoist regime and overcrowded urban living, have had a longer time and a lot of practice in adapting, and even prospering with such restrictions than anyone else of that region. Learning from the solutions they have created to endure such ordeals seems rather relevant. In Korea, a typical “large” kitchen is probably runs between a half and a third of the size of mine. And then there is Japan: a place where they invented capsule hotels, and have formed and grown cubic watermelons* for ease of shipping and storage. In places like the Shinjuku district in Tokyo, there are entire sushi and cocktail bars squeezed into spots that are less than the size of my kitchen and dining area combined. Going that small is a bit ludicrous and nothing to really aspire to, but therein are the lessons of reducing the need for more single-purpose small appliances for food prep, exploiting more vertical space on one cooking spot (like with the steamer), learning few more of their fancy cutting tricks with my BSFCC (big sharp fuckin’ Chinese cleaver) and using overall less of energy and space. Using all that with current surface area of the counter that I have makes for a more comfortable and effective theatre of operation. 
 

It looks like a collection of
parasitic round worm
specimens from a high school
biology lab, but it's actually
shredded parsnips pickled in
lime, ginger, and garlic

Incubation Environment- I have already expounded enough on how fermenting and pickling at home is for the greater good in stopping needless waste. My kitchen is a fermentation kitchen, meaning that I have to make it easy to sanitize and control the temperature accordingly to make my critters in the carboys, crocks, and jars do their job happily. A cluttered kitchen with hard to clean surface areas is a no-no. There is to be a minimal of any decorative things in here, because all they do is collect dust and thus the kind of crap that would risk contaminating and infecting my living cultures. The larger the kitchen space, the harder it is to be able to prevent this. The kitchen garbage containment is purposely left small, so that it is taken out more frequently to prevent the invasion of mold and fry fruits.

Emergency Rations – If you truly have any scientific/rational mind at all, then you should always be grounded in the reality that some natural disaster at some time has the potential of popping up at any given moment, depriving you of the conveniences that you are commonly used to. Keeping, at the very least, four days of worth of canned food and hydrating fluid around the place for God-only-knows-what kind of shit-storm you may have to deal with (thinking of a worst case scenario of a really bad long weekend when emergency services might be delayed: from a Friday to a Monday). It’s rare that any severe weather related impacts last beyond that. In my region around my home, things like mega-lightning storms, or possibly a tornado, or an ice storm/blizzard, or super-cold snap that knocks out the power, creates water line breaks, and makes it too fierce to navigate outside safely are the most likely weather scenarios that could keep me homebound and stranded. A good measure is having food around that is pre-processed, nutritious, and doesn’t require power to cook it, or some means available that allows you to cook and boil water without electricity, like using a portable butane burner/camping stove (with extra gas canisters) like I have. The water reserve system I have is unique and practical (hint, it doesn’t require me being stupid and buying and storing bottled water, and involves stuff that I can recycle at home for no money), but I’ll elaborate on that another time when it becomes topical.

Nesting Bowls – In a smaller kitchen, my adage of “If it don’t nest, it don’t pass the test” applies.
This ten bowl set here has a collective total capacity of 14 litres (depending on what’s in it, flour/dough can pile up; liquid doesn’t). It all tucks away within a 0.005 m³ space. Packing things within things, like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, is my more favoured way of organizing and freeing space.

Inert Energy Food Storage – I always have dried foods or canned foods around and keep them in reasonable plenitude. Pantry space for that is always important. They can not only serve as emergency rations, but the other nice feature about them is that they don’t need any more power to keep them preserved, unlike relying on a fridge or freezer. Dehydrated food is shrunk and thus economizes on space. Jars are reusable. Buying bulk food to fill them is cheaper, reduces packaging, and is ultimately better for the planet. 

Ferro-Magnetic Induction –This latest little acquisition of mine is the new boss in town out of all my

 

small appliances: a portable induction cooktop. It’s a misnomer to call it a burner, because it itself emits no heat. The only heat on the surface of the cooker is that which is absorbed from the cooking pot. It can bring a litre of water to a full boil up to eight minutes faster than the highest setting on my conventional electric coil burner on the stove top, with less power! It’s even faster at boiling water than my electric kettle. I’ll have more precise digital temperature control when heating stuff in a range below boiling for culturing. It’s perfect of singles like me who only are only cooking with one pot or pan anyway. To put it bluntly, my electric range is a piece of shit in comparison, and microwave ovens never heat evenly. I’m curious to see how many kWh will be peeled of my next utility bill as I use this thing more frequently instead of my regular stove. It’s easier to clean, greener, super-efficient, safer to use with safeguard technology programmed in it, and plus it’s just cool to say that I can cook with freakin’ magnetism. No self-respecting science geek gourmand should be without one. However, because it functions with magnetic fields, it only works with iron or stainless steel cookware. See next point.

Iron (or Stainless Steel) –I will keep only cast iron or stainless steel in my kitchen, and avoid the fancy-schmancy pots and pans with non-stick coatings as much as I can. When those coatings chip, flake, or get scraped off because SOME ASSHOLE WAS USING A METAL UTENSIL ON THEM!!!!!, destroying the surface and thus depleting it of its purpose**, they obviously get into our food, and they are proving to be toxic compounds. More and more studies are suggesting that these “state-of-the-art” pan-coating chemicals are linked with things like certain cancers and creating obesogens: compounds that trigger cellular metabolisms to produce more adipose tissue. I’m more prone to being genetically predisposed to obesity as it is, and I need no extra help from that shit. Once the coating is gone, they are useless and need to be scrapped, therefore wasteful, adding another toxic thing into a landfill. A good cast iron or stainless steel pot or pan will last longer than I will if treated and seasoned right. In general, it’s probably a good idea just to avoid space age coatings, plus plastics all together for stirring and serving utensils too. If you wouldn’t eat a cheap plastic spoon for fear of it being somehow toxic to you, then you shouldn’t be dipping and gradually dissolving bits of it into your hot food while it cooks. There are already warnings about microwaving food in plastic containers. A metal spoon/ladle or spatula will last longer many times longer with only a slightly higher relative cost. Wood or bamboo are other options too if one is into cheap and renewable.

**Nothing screams out attention to detail for conserving and efficiently using space than using science to take a thing that naturally grows round and making it square.

**-You know who you are, person(s) at work (no names mentioned)!

Labour Day Weekend Bucket Dump

A combination of rainfall from outside and my pooch snoring at the foot of my bed woke me up this morning. It rained buckets overnight. I would have went back to sleep if I wasn’t immediately seized by overpowering leg cramps soon afterward. I couldn’t think of much else to do since 5:30 AM to quietly take my mind away from the pain, except to write. I realize that it is somewhat ironic that I am finding myself starting off this day stuck in bed, trying to unlock and unfold myself from a fetal position, because it is my birthday. It will be nothing significant or monumental. It’s forecasted that it will be drizzling and gloomy all day, and all the people I’d like to share this day with have their own long weekend plans, or are out of town or province, or out of the country. It’s the kind of day where I definitely feel I’ve grown a lot older, but not much wiser or better; hardly worth celebrating. The only special thing I can think doing is to try to move soundly enough to make some coffee and my breakfast of choice, and to tour around the world a bit from the armchair: reading online travel guides, and articles and posts from the Quebecois and European news sources*. Beyond that, my motivation and speculation for activities for the rest of the day is as dull and grey as the sky is now. All I know is that suppressing aches and pains, being forced to sit still, staring at screens, and perusing lines of text isn’t the ideal way to spend this day.

But hold on a second . . . I just caught sight of a blog entry from Tim Ferriss. It is about bucket lists. It occurs to me that I don’t officially have one. Given that it is my birthday, it should be the gift I give to myself. If I can do nothing but sit around, retreat into my own head, and write, I might as well devote some time and serious thought and focus to this instead of being depressed and watching it rain buckets. I won’t be sharing it: it’s too personal. I will divulge that:

·         I’ll shoot for about a 100 things. That alone could be challenging enough to be classified as list item # 1. It was hard enough just to think of one thing for the  "Before I Die I Want to . . ." Wall I mentioned earlier.

·         Skydiving won’t be on there. It's a ridiculously cliché thing that a lot of other people put on theirs. A bucket list, in my mind, is about the things you want to do to make you feel alive; not doing things that would kill you in such a way that there would be nothing left of you except stuff that can only be scooped up and put in a bucket. I had to return to this point to edit this a bit. It's not like I'm advising against it to those who really want to try it out, just make sure that it's the last thing  on your list . . . unless you are a real asshole to everyone, then please do us all a favour, and make it the first thing to do on your bucket list.

·         No experimenting with drugs, nor anything else illegal, will be on there. I prefer lucidity, and not risking wasting any of this precious lifetime I have left behind bars.

·         It won’t involve any buying anymore gadgets and or computing technology. It will be about shifting from the virtual world to more engagement with the real one.

If anything, I hope it sets me on a course of being more energized and motivated for the day and beyond, and not victimizing myself with too much boredom during this day of solitude.

*- Aside from the actual news, I do it more so to help me retain some of my secondary language skills. Reading the translated versions of my own blog entries, on subjects that are of interest to me, and which stem from my own original thinking, is another useful learning and retention technique that I also exploit. I’m still lousy at oral communication: in that I usually don’t easily comprehend what is being spoken to me. Transmission OK; reception bad.

Fermento or Demento?

There is always a cause and
a way to network for a better
good at the Farmers' Market
which places that big,
 corporate food distributors
just won't allow.

I’m outside this morning, watching the leaves turn yellow, and slurping some coffee before I cycle out to the Farmers’ Market. I go there more for ideas than for the products, and I meet and get to chat with like-minded people. My love for the Farmers’ Market is directly proportional to the hatred I feel going to a giant food store [CFM α DFS, or LFM = k(HFS)]. This will be my last entry about food for a while, I swear. The extra sitting around to purposely stay off my legs/feet is beginning to bore me, so I feel compelled to write something. The only walking and standing that I could handle for the past couple of days was to can some brewed pickles in the kitchen, and to play around with shaping plastics and metal: jury-rigging and custom making a type of airlock system for another experiment I had in mind. I caught myself for a moment, wondering . . . who in the hell else on this Earth would be as interested to tinker around with this sort of thing? More about this in a new paragraph when I return.

I learned that I am eligible to acquire yet another label. I would assume that it is official for me, and has been so for quite some time; I just took on wearing another hat for it as my interests expand into other categories. After that project, I re-read some of Michael Pollan’s book, Cooked, to recall a past caption I saw in it regarding this same situation. I realized that I veer toward belonging to this particular and peculiar group of people who busy themselves over the art and science of fermenting food products. Apparently there is a name for them: they are called fermentos. They are this strange and esoteric subculture of people who openly invite microbial cultures into their homes, and harness those agents of decomposition for enabling some unique and (hopefully) delicious transformations of their kitchen stock. They are the home brewers and vintners, pickle and condiment makers, and the preservers/crafters and masters of all other things made from what is essentially the controlled spoilage of grain, fruits and vegetables, various meat proteins, and milk. I’m not sure if I like that name, but it is what it is. It does portray and represent though a set of people with a grander and purposeful agenda - at least for them. They choose a greater good over convenience. They are more likely to grow (or at least be interested in and appreciate) gardens, and are apt to treat food like it was precious more so than the average sort. They are crazy enough to accept a margin of risk of contamination that may ruin their results. These are people who, for the most part, understand how the flawed current conventional systems of: commercial food production and land (ab)use, marketing, distribution, preservation, and how the obscene amount of toxicity and wastage within all those facets, are doing more harm than good to us and the planet. This is their (our) way of weaning ourselves away, and opting out of that system. Making wine and beer at home, and recycling your own bottles and containers then becomes like a noble form of insurrection. For some of the more radical fermentos, personal economy doesn’t even enter the picture. For instance, it might be cheaper to buy a brick of factory-made mozzarella at a store, but for one to take the time and effort to make it in one’s own kitchen, despite the extra cost, indicates a lot of hubris and a strong urge to rebel*.

To admit that I appear to be one of these so-called fermento beings to some degree, and to say that I’ve invested some time and interest in exploring the ways one can exploit micro-organisms to make things like alcohol and kefir, cure sausage, or preserve and flavour vegetables instead of eradicating them from my kitchen with cleaning chemical warfare may seem weird to some. The effort to do so isn’t that much more complicated or troublesome than what I already do now in terms of having to divide and repackage bulk foods into more manageable portions with living as a single person. So long as time and money aren’t wasted, I don’t care too much about how my hobbies, health measures, and harmless efforts to save a buck might look weird and eccentric to some. However, I do concern myself about getting too wrapped up in the more conventional things, for sake of appearing “normal”, which in actuality will ultimately do real harm to us all. Our current rate and state of food waste is one of those things that I really want to distance myself from and be less involved with. In regards to the paradigm of the food system in place now, both nationally and globally, here is what I think is really ridiculously weird, demented, insane, and shameful to be allowing:

·         It is estimated that up to a third of the food for human consumption is wasted globally. Much of that isn’t even due to actual spoilage or expiration in more affluent nations. Food stores of more developed countries reject or discard a lot of produce just because it doesn’t reach some standard of being “aesthetically pleasing”.

·         That 30% doesn’t just represent a waste of the actually food; it also represents the squandering and wastage of water, fuel and fertilizer to cultivate, process, package, and transport it . . . just to have it put in a landfill later! The dumping of all that wasted food is also a major contributor of untapped methane emissions which also lead to greenhouse gases. More detailed stats from the David Suzuki Foundation.

·         It is shameful that we still are destroying and clearing away more natural habitats to grow yet more food for human consumption when we are already wasting the ridiculous amount that currently we do.

·         On the continent of Africa, about 70% of its population is involved with farming and agriculture; yet many of them are starving and reliant on food and aid from the Western world: from places mostly in Western Europe and North America where the numbers of farmers are dwindling down to only about 2% of those populations.**

·         On a monetary level, it is estimated that it would take about 30 billion dollars to end world hunger; another 120 billion or so, if distributed the right way, to end world poverty altogether. The USA alone uses, on average, about 121 billion dollars a year just to dispose of that nation’s food waste. Better food management and a renaissance and rediscovery of the art of home canning and preservation of food; not just in the USA, or North America and Europe, but globally, could help drop that number drastically.

Another thing that we can do to economize and avoid food waste is to just try to make a better effort to be daring and open-minded enough to find alternative ways to make that which we find unappetizing into something more palatable. It involves some creativity. This action is also my chosen experiment for the day. Along with some other stuff for a bigger project, I bought turnips today at the Farmers’ Market. They were really fresh and super-cheap. I wondered how many of them from that vendor's table would be thrown away afterward just because they aren’t seen as a real treat and thence couldn’t be sold. The Hudderites were selling them, so there is some comfort in knowing that their frugal practices wouldn’t allow them to be wasted. However, there was also the dissatisfaction of knowing that these things were just wasting fuel and space on a truck being taken for a ride back to the colony again for no monetary profit, to be later either used by them, or fed to livestock if they were starting to spoil. They were better off not leaving their farm to begin with. Therein was the moment of clarity to devise a challenge for myself, and an opportunity to be innovative.

Ordinarily, my regular relationship with turnips is that of absolute loathing. How they could have ever

IT"S ALIVE!!!! I've become the Dr. Frankenstein
of scary, mutant vegetable preparation.

been willingly chosen as edible garden produce; managing to escape from being classified as some sort of wretched bulbous weed, is a mystery to me. As a kid, I hated the ghastly goddamned stench those things made when they were boiled, and their taste had that indescribably horrid note of vile bitterness that made me want to rip out my own tongue. I never managed to grow out of that disgust for them like I have with other foodstuffs. However, I’m a big enough man to give them one last chance by finding an alternate way to prepare them. The hypothesis of this experiment is this: the foulness of turnips may be erased (or at least reduced) if I try pickling them using a lacto-culture. That is, taking two stinky negative things, and turning them into a positive. I researched and found a recipe on the web posted by a fellow despiser of them, who now claims to be an instant convert to liking them after he discovered a middle-eastern method of pickling them. The recipe is simple called Lebanese pickled turnips. The advantages of their preparation are the following:

·         They are not subjected to any boiling water or steam at all, thus they aren’t exuding that ungodly miasma that stinks up the place.

·         A sharp knife, a clean jar, a lid fitted with an airlock, are all you need for equipment. A leftover piece of raw beet, some coarse salt, some garlic, and spices is all you have to add to them as ingredients.

·         You won’t have to travel to Lebanon, or any other war zone, to try them.***

I won’t go through the trouble of creating a link for it until it’s proven to work out. They are still brewing, and I won’t be able to sample them for a few days yet.

The challenge is also applicable to nose-to-tail eating of animal protein. I do have some ideas for using the less favoured parts and innards of various life stock. Things and recipes that I’m genuinely curious about. I’ll be kind, and spare you all the details and graphics of what’s involved there.

*- They are the sorts of people who give genuine credence to the line, “Blessed are the Cheese Makers!” . . . from one of my favourite comedy movies: Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

**-To be fair and accurate, many impoverished third world and sub-tropical nations have opted, or are having their land used (sometimes seized by force) to grow more non-nutritional cash crops to export for the decadent things of first world living, things like: sugar, tobacco, cotton, cacoa beans, tea, coffee, plus those other crops like coca and opium to fund narco-crime syndicates and terrorism. Due to a lack of reliable infrastructures to allow for refrigeration or other preservation methods, and poor logistical systems for food distribution, up to 50% of food produced in countries in such regions ends up being wasted. This could drastically change if people were given more knowledge of how to can or lacto-ferment things in their own homes; but the initial cost and availability of buying and amassing enough things like re-sealable jars and resources like heating fuel and clean water is a stumbling block for many of them in such places. Waste and preventable food and water born disease due to spoilage occurs because of extreme poverty. The freedom and privilege of being able to can one’s own food stock is becoming only accessible to those well off enough to do it.

***- Yeah, I know. . . I’m really scraping at the bottom of the barrel to find positives about this.

Hacking Combinatorial Abundance (and Cheat Days)

The cooler days that are signaling the dwindling down of summer and autumn’s approach are here. There are fewer days are left to enjoy my beverages outside, and to dangle in the hammock to read. I’m dying a little already in knowing that. I’m still healing my legs; so I haven’t done as much running lately. I’ve been cutting back both in frequency and intensity from what my program mandates. Thankfully, there have been fewer cracking and snapping noises coming from my hips and legs since I opted to tune it down. I mustered up the gumption to try for six kilometers last Thursday after a bit of a lapse. My substitute exercise after that has simply been longer walks with the dog. Saturday and Sunday was left for me to build a meal plan as the rain came.

As I said in my last entry, I’ve got a new eating/menu plan going on*, and in an effort to not feel desperately deprived, I’m taking advantage of starting it during this season with its bounty of newly harvested local fresh vegetables. I don’t know what is working better: the actual eating plan and eating things that have their peak nutritional content, or just because the extra heat and stress last week was killing my appetite, but I’ve lost eight pounds of mass without even doing much of anything. Whether it’s loss of actually body fat or from dehydration is debatable. Pounds lie all the time.

One thing that I bring to mind which gives me comfort and confidence for being able to stick to the plan is mathematics: more specifically, being mindful of combinations and permutations. In the same way that I determined that a reckless and unorthodox science geek/recipe buster like me will never make or eat the same kind of homemade soup or pizza twice, I reasoned that I should never feel deprived if take into account of utilizing even a small set of healthy ingredients (and omitting the junk carbs) that conforms to my plan, and by playing with the various combinations of them, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands, of unique recipes. Within all that, there have to be some options in there somewhere that are not only low-carb, high-fibre, high-vitamin, and high in protein, but delicious as well, and . . .  most importantly, will allow me to be less bored and frustrated with eating within these limitations. I should have added a subtitle above: How to diet without going totally f^%!ing insane!

Does that sound impossible to do? No, it really isn’t, is the answer. However, it’s sobering to realize that I’m more of a fixed habitual eater than I care to admit, and I have to learn to think outside the box more than I already do. How do I approach them, these changes I mean? I do the following things, with numerical reckonings by the use of a tool like the Supercook website (www.supercook.com). Simply input all the ingredients you have (or should be eating), and then let the automation take care of generating all the possible/plausible options you have for yourself. I thought my fridge and pantry were almost bare, until I plugged in the items of my inventory, and had over 6000 recipes listed for me with just those things.

Breakfast: The major habit change is early morning. I may not eat most of my carbs in the morning, but the way I eat them (or rather having the absence of them) is a radical change. I don’t fancy pancakes, so they are no loss to me. Neither is hot or cold cereal**. However, no toast for six days of the week though, that is a challenge for me. Bread is my most frequently used vehicle for eating carbohydrates, and to eat eggs without toast or English muffins, without being able to pile them with my eggs and other fixings on this platform, is like some sort of sacrilege of my ritual for me.
The remedy is scrambled eggs or omelettes about three or four times a week. There are countless ways to fill an omelette even with the ingredients and condiments I already have; scrambled eggs are one of those dishes that appear in some form in all international cuisines, each with its own ethnic signature. Lots of healthful options there; so I shouldn’t feel at all lacking in anything***.

Lunch: It’s easier to think of options for this, since it is already largely a part of my lifestyle. Mindful and simple advanced preparation is a bonus about it too. Twenty minutes of prep time at the most is all I need to make about five or six meal portions with my chop/slop/plop/drop-in-a-crockpot method of cooking. Anything with meat, vegetables, beans and lentils in it to poach, braise, or stew is fair game. I have a good stockpile of frozen healthy homemade soups as well. Raw salads, pickles, and fermented vegetables take care of the rest.

Supper: Another difficult phase because I’m at work, and there isn’t the stock of spices or ingredients that I like that I have at home. Lots of processed, trans-fat laden, and preserved food is there. Meals were brought from home instead most of the time at the last go around. I just have to be a little more mindful to check their menu in advance.

Bad Carb Plan: Being not the wasteful sort, I choose to cook and process any remaining “white” carbs and sugars around the kitchen into stuff that can be refrigerated or frozen, and eaten on the

Something I made to throw into the
"bad carb" bank for cheat day:
A Caramel and Apple Cheesecake . . .
to be thawed out for my birthday.

designated “cheat day”. See below.

Cheat Day: The holy of holies - a no-holds-barred orgy of gluttony for one day of the week (I choose Saturday). During the week, one banks the cravings. One can note them on a list or use a snapshot to record all the not-so-go-for-you food, and other diet violators into your own personal collection of food porn. It is the day when I could go to any restaurant without guilt, or drink alcohol more liberally if I so choose to. During the cheat day, you may also discover or do these things:

·         At the end of the week, you may notice that most of your craving targets earlier in the week were just passing fancies, and most of the stuff you noted or stuck in an album back then doesn’t turn your crank now. Whatever is left on there that you are just dying for is conveniently there to transfer to a grocery list, or is already cached in your freezer, and with the impulsivity element tamed and taken away, you will also save some time and money.

·         You may realize just how boring white carbs, all by themselves, really are. Just think about it - they are rarely consumed without some other flavouring: bread, potatoes, rice, tortillas, and pasta usually need to be enhanced with fat, sweetness, salt, meat, or zesty/savory/spicy sauces. When it does come to my cheat day, white carbs aren’t really the first things that come to mind when I want to binge on something, it’s the flavouring or seasoning in the sauce or other fixings on that pizza, or in the rice bowl, or on that potato chip, or in that pie shell. Targeting the flavours you crave, but not the carbs, is something to bring to mind for the next shopping trip or the next six days of the week.

·         Learn the easy way – while eating your bad foods, you may discover that you just can’t eat as much as you usually could, because your stomach will have shrank a bit during the first six or so days. You, by default, then are automatically and willingly reducing your own calorie intake, but you at least get enough of a taste of what makes you happy. Or, you may . . .

·        Learn the hard way – that is you up end ignoring your stomach signals, and go out on a full-blown rampage of a barbarous binge fest. The indigestion and the pain and discomfort of a near-bursting gut that you experience afterward from trying to overstuff your shrunken belly is enough to dissuade you from eating like that ever again for a long while, and you may approach the next six days with exercising a lot more self-control and discipline. In comparing people to jackasses: some people just can’t learn to move forward by following the carrot; they need to be beaten with the stick instead.

Eagerly Anticipated Cheat Day Foods (for the next ten Saturdays, at least****): Beer, Toast, Rye Bread, English Muffins, Liver Varenyky, Pho Soup, Homemade Pizza, Homemade Perogies, Piroshky, Spring rolls, Bagels and Cream Cheese, Kvass, Empanadas, Enchiladas, Croissants from Christine’s Bakery, Tacos, Linguini alla Vongoli, Sushi, Potato Pancakes, Battered and Deep Fried Pike, Dim Sum Buns, Cabbage Rolls, Whiskey, Ice Cream, Cheese Cake. But, as I said . . . these cravings too may pass.   

*- In hopes to peel off some weight to take more pressure and wear off my joints passively. Actually, to be more accurate, I’m redeploying an old plan that was successful for me: The Slow-Carb Diet™, from the book, The 4-Hour Body, by Timothy Ferriss.

**- A little bit of a cheat is eating course milled grain (like steel cut oats) porridge. I only eat it on the mornings when I do a longer course of running/walking. I don’t use milk or sugar though. I may throw in some yogurt after it’s cooked. I make it with a thinner consistency, and it’s flavoured by cooking it my slow cooker over night with cinnamon sticks, nuts, and other sweet spices (cloves, cardamom, poppy or chia seeds, walnuts, almonds, etc.). Enough is made for three running days of the week, which includes Cheat Day Saturday.

***- Around the World in 44 Flavor Combinations on pages 148-149, in The 4 - Hour Chef, by Timothy Ferriss, is an example of different ways to eat eggs with an ethnic flare. Including them with the combinations of ingredients I currently have in my fridge, pantry, and cupboards to add to and make omelettes, I have about 687 different variations to experiment with: more than a couple of years’ worth of breakfasts that are in compliance to this regimen.

****- Hopefully my legs, hips, and feet will be fully healed by then.

Fermentation Experimentation (on Baba's Magic Rocks)

I’ve started this entry after work, by the light of the Blue Moon. I almost feel like howling at it as I sip and sample a rather large glass of the mead that I brewed last year. Tonight marks the beginning of having another stretch of days off before the better part of this summer slips away; ones in which at least the sky won’t be a dull grey haze, and the air won’t be loaded with smoke like the last stretch of time off.

One of the first things that I’ll be indulging in with that time is preparing and eating some decent food. There are enough moments when I’m involved in the Iron Chef challenge at work, but I’m still limited by their menus and the lack of ingredients, or the crap ingredients I find there, so I’m never able to make the stuff that I really want. I have a bit of a reputation in my circles as being a bit of a food rebel (believe it or not). I don’t allow myself to be restricted by recipes very much. Time off means I get to bend the needle into that zone again with ingredients I really want, but then again there are still limits. More on this tomorrow.

Aug 1st, Mid-afternoon

My time off runs into a phase when I’m in the middle of a brewing project. So, I’m sticking around home for the first few days to tend to it before I act on any impulses to leave town. It’s also the time of the year when somehow the rural instinct in me from my early upbringing is aroused, and I become tuned into crafting some preserves, pickles, and doing other folksy kinds of canning projects. I’m also on a kick now to make a mindful effort to eat more (locally grown) vegetables. It’s a good time to do it because now that late summer is approaching, more local fare is available at the Farmer’s Market. As much as I would enjoy my time off by hyper-utilizing my propane grill to barbeque all the meat that I can lay my hands on, the price of it lately has skyrocketed considerably: this drought we are having is the excuse for that. Imported fruit produce is costing more too because of our devalued dollar. I’m also trying to heal my legs again, so my running progress has regressed, and I’m not burning off the same amount of calories as I usually would at this time of year. Eating more veggies and less energy dense food like meat and carbs/fructose may be the remedy. I’m trying not to feel deprived, so I’m preparing my greens and veggies in the ways I like eating them. Eating them raw/marinated, or having pickles or sauerkraut are my favourite ways to intake vegetable matter. So I’m focusing on this.

I got lucky recently after taking a random tour through one of the Asian grocery stores* here in

My new baby, who's ready to get
down to business.

town, and found an amazing fermentation jar: the same kind used by Koreans to make kimchi. This one was the perfect size for my needs. It is enamelled earthenware crockery, and it was dirt cheap too: a real bargain, costing less than a quarter of similar ones I was looking at while browsing online. Other fermentation crocks I’ve spotted in yard sales start at ridiculously high prices too because they are sold as “antiques”. I thought it would be a great investment for experimenting and making my own lacto-fermented pickles and, more importantly, for brewing sauerkraut**. So there I was, excitedly hauling it over to their till: a crackpot with crockpot. I won’t go broke now buying what is considered as delicatessen food at a hyper inflated prices. I can make my own now at will. Nostalgia also was the driver, probably the most pressing one, for me to get this thing. Homemade sauerkraut, like the stuff I was raised on, tastes the best.

However, I have the humbling and disappointing realization that I won’t ever be making the best that there is or ever was, because I will be lacking one especially crucial element for brewing up the perfect sauerkraut. That would be . . . my Baba’s magic rocks. My Ukrainian grandmother’s sauerkraut, in my mind, was the best that there ever was. It wasn't delicious because of any sort of special ingredient she added. Only salt and shredded cabbage were used. It was delicious because of the special rocks she used in the process. Traditionally, or at least as it was in her tradition, rocks were placed on top of the shredded cabbage to keep it submerged and compressed in the brewing vessel in such a way that the bacterial culture that makes this stuff does its job right. The magic power was in those rocks! The more scientific explanation is that the pores in those rocks harboured the lactobacillus microbes, which used whatever mineral matrix that is in those stones to direct their particular course of evolution through natural selection after several generations of replication. The fittest ones that could exploit those minerals, and withstood being immersed in the salt and that specific pH level that a crock full of raw cabbage has, out-competed and out-performed all other strains; and the inferior ones then died off and disappeared. The result is a dominant, unique strain of anaerobic bacteria which was thus optimally mutated for making and imparting that lovely signature flavouring. In essence, that particular kind of rock is a micro-biome, and my grandmother was lucky enough to find the perfect ones to allow this kind of goodness to happen. It's easier just to say that those rocks are magical.

It’s kind of like the same concept of how artisan cheeses from Europe can only be made and found in one special unique place, because of some certain breed of cow eating a specific plant that only grows in some particular valley, which then flavours the milk fat, which then makes the curds that are pressed and then cellared and aged in some cave which has its own unique microbial environment that is found nowhere else on Earth. Replicating stuff like this elsewhere becomes nearly impossible, even in lab conditions. Fermented stuff is special in another way. Such food stuffs are given more of an opportunity than regular food to affix some special cultural identity: e.g. milk is ubiquitous, but things like skyr, an Icelandic cultured dairy product, is something very unique. It’s not really cheese, and not really yogurt because of its unique microbial culture profile. It was probably made entirely by accident during the first part of human settlement there a over thousand years ago, when some microscopic gollywobs native to that island probably shot out from the bowels of the Earth through one of their geysers, and plopped into an open pail of milk, and then someone dared themselves to consume it. It doesn’t get much more elemental than that. It is only cultured and made there, and not readily available anywhere else beyond Scandinavia. Icelanders are probably very proud to call this stuff their own, as it is a part of their culinary tradition and no one else’s. Belgian beer is another example. Rather than conforming to the rigid standards of having antiseptic conditions for brewing within a closed system, the beer in some places in that country is brewed in open vats, and the windows of the brewery are opened to allow the natural wild yeasts, pollens, and other God-only-knows-what particles (like dust falling off from the overhanging cobwebs) to blow in and ferment and flavour the wort. The resulting beer, like it or not, can’t be replicated in a test lab, and can only be made in Belgium. If the technique was tried somewhere else, it would never be exactly that same kind of beer, because nowhere else except that specific area of Belgium has that particular environmental signature. This is what the French call terroir: the characteristic flavourings in wine and other cultured foods and produce that is a direct result of the elements and environment that they were produced in. In the case of Baba’s rocks though, I would imagine and guess that the proper French term could probably be called pierroir*** since the unique culturing conditions stem from a stone.

After my grandmother died, my Mom became the keeper of the sacred magic kraut stones, and she still uses them to make our family’s sauerkraut. It’s a little milder than I remember what Baba’s was, but it is still kick-ass stuff; with that same unique signature aroma and notes of flavour that I can’t describe. Back in the university days, when we received care packages from home, the roommates I had would tie into the jars of my Mom’s sauerkraut, and they gobbled it up like greedy pigs. They agreed that it was the best they ever had. They foolishly thought though that it could just simply replicated if they made it themselves . . . my brothers and I knew better.

As well as for healthful endeavors****, I’m interested in exploring new measures of conservation of

This is trub . . .Horrid looking slop
 . . . but it did its job nicely!

energy and preservation, home economics and frugality, and reduction of waste on all levels. This guy here, who once studied biology and is interested in sustainability, is very curious to see how far cycles of fermentation can be taken within a single system, and how they can be expended and/or expanded by producing stuff with the by-products from a former fermentation cycle. An example of this is rather than discarding the trub (yeast sediment) after brewing beer, I collected it and used it as a sort of sourdough starter and to make some rye bread, which was goddamned delicious by the way! I’m now using that same bread to make kvass (see earlier entry). The lacto-culture from that kvass could be used for making more kvass, or used with fruit and honey to make a sort of healthier sort of pop, or used to ferment other vegetables for pickling. The remaining liquor from 

My resulting rye bread. Not too pretty,
but it tasted great, and will be sacrificed
for my next experiment.

that process could maybe be later used for pickling eggs . . . and so on, und so wieder, et cetera. It could probably last as long as I’m willing to commit to it.

It’s a shame that some of the younger and urban generations of today will never know what some of these homemade fermented products will ever taste like. That’s their loss. I think they have already sadly missed the benefits of such stuff. I don’t have, and never had, any sort of food allergies or intolerances, which seem to be more common with the younger people of today. I strongly suspect that starting off life being raised on things like homemade sauerkraut, unpasteurized milk, homemade cottage cheese, fresh picked unwashed berries, taking a carrot right out of the ground and eating it, and playing in real dirt helped me to develop a more resilient immune system. Having a pantry full of mason jars, and the knowledge to make stuff that fills them makes me feel like a bit of a relic from the past, but at the same time I’m bypassing an industrial system and food culture that seems to do nothing but figure out new ways to put more noxious chemicals and preservatives in the stuff we eat to poison us. There is a bit of a renaissance starting again with home canning and using natural preserving methods that include using probiotics like lactobacillus bacteria. I can only hope it catches on more.

The beginnings of bread kvass: rye bread
+ raisins + spices + yeast + water, and a
little dash of alpha-amylase to accelerate
the mashing process. And yes, I do just
happen to have a stock of refined
biochemical enzymes just lying
around in my kitchen cupboards
. . . I'm kinky that way.

If I don’t ever get to use my Baba’s rocks, it is my hope that either one or both of my nephews would get to, and learn and appreciate how to use them at least one time in their lives, so they can see and enjoy the results that they can procure, and be cognisant of the power of taste and tradition, and what real food is all about.

*- I freakin’ love probing through the merchandise at some Asian and other ethnic market stores. It opens your eyes to a lot of weird and wonderful ways and variations people can express their palette, and some stranger foods that bring people comfort. Discovering something new and tasty, when you’ve thought you’ve already had all that you wanted to try in your life, is a great experience. I do have to be wary though that some of the “medicinal” teas, herbs, spices, and condiments there that you could have tolerated well enough when you were younger can, within half an hour after consumption, make you feel like you were shitting pure battery acid.

**- For you pretentious, snobby foodies out there, I’m talking about choucroute. I know it sounds weird to be sentimental over something that in essence is the result of bacterial putrefaction. There are just some weirdos, like me, out there who love sauerkraut, while others out there would compare sauerkraut as the collecting all the most vile beer farts from everyone at an Oktoberfest, and condensing them into a jar of shredded cabbage. There is no accounting for taste.

***- Terroir is derived from “terre”, meaning land or soil; so it stands to reason that pierroir could be coined as a word derived from “pierre”, meaning rock or stone.

****- Fermented foods make for a healthier gut/digestive system, and are also proven to be useful in detoxification and chelation (removing heavy metals from the body).