Big doin’s in the Reingau

Friday was the start of the Wilhelmstrassefest in Wiesbaden. I went down to it and met up with my boss, his wife and a couple of DoDDS (Dept of Defense Dependant Schools) teachers. Had a good time and met some nice folks. I think I kind of scared a few of them off when I started talking about killing dogs.

Now before you start to roll your eyes, allow me to say that I was not talking about killing dogs for pleasure. Or as a business that I run on the side. One of the couples have a small dog that is deaf and blind. From some of the conversation, I’m guessing that it is also quite incontinent. Now the woman was saying, because the dog cannot tell them how it feels they won’t be able to know when it is “The Time”. I just looked at her and said, “It’s time.” Her husband agreed with me, but apparently he didn’t have the huevos to actually say it.

Then another woman was saying how she was left with a dog that is in the same condition. She is taking care of this dog for the summer, while its owners are in the US. Apparently most of the DoDDS teachers go back to the States over the summer. She was staying in Germany so they cornered her, asked her to watch the dog, and headed out of town. She was talking about what a pain the constant care for this thing is, and how she was planning on taking some trips with her son. I just asked if she was really going to allow her summer to be ruined by a blind and deaf dog. Then I clarified it to, “someone else’s deaf and blind dog”.

I don’t think I alienated everyone at the table, but if I’d been given another hour or so, I’m pretty sure someone there would have had me brought up on charges. All in all it was a lot of fun, and I bought a back scrubbing brush from the brush guy’s booth. Drank some decent wine and had some Flammkuche. This is a super-thin crusted pizza-like thing, with bits of salty ham or bacon and quark. Quark is an unripe cheese that is sort of like cream cheese with sour cream. It’s sort of tangy, but in a really nice, mild kind of way. It was very good. I think it’s originally from the Alsace-Lorraine area.

Saturday while doing a little grocery shopping I came upon this little section of the store that had these jars of …wait … what the hell is that? … it looks sort of … like a jar of … pickled … fish? So I bought some. Haven’t tried it yet, but I will give you a report.

Saturday afternoon I went out for a walk. They were having some type of festival in Hattenheim somewhere, but I wasn’t sure what or where it was. So I walked down by the riverfront and got a glass of wine at the Weinprobierstand (which is a kiosk down by the river that sells wine). Different wineries from the town sell their products there for about two weeks at a time. This time it was the Barth Weingut, in a week or so it will be someone else. It’s really pretty nice.

Wine in hand, I headed up river toward Erbach. Stopped and spoke to a couple of guys fishing for catfish. They said it was a pretty good area for catfish. As I walked a little further upstream, I passed the sewage treatment plant. Then I thought about eating the fish caught downstream of it and the sky began to darken. No really, it did begin to darken, the wind kicked up and it looked like it was going to rain at any minute. So I quickened my pace a bit. I was hoping to get to the town of Erbach and maybe duck into a restaurant before the rain hit. As I came out of the tunnel under the highway I got a picture of the church tower and the foreboding sky.



I managed to get into a restaurant about two minutes before the rain hit. I had a glass of Riesling and ordered the small carnivore plate. It was really called Tartar mit Ei. Out came a plate of raw ground beef, with some chopped onions and capers on the side, and a raw egg yolk lovingly placed in the center of the pile of beef. I seasoned it with a little salt and black pepper, ordered another glass of wine, and went to work on it. It was very good. The rain had stopped while I was eating, so I left and walked up into the vineyards, and it wasn’t until I looked back that I saw…



I took some more pictures in the vineyards, and met this girl who was walking her dog. No it wasn’t blind or deaf, and I did not even bring up the idea of killing it. She told me a little about the Burgfest, so I walked on down in that direction toward the music. I never found the actual Burgfest, but I did go to a little place outside of it that was having a little fest of their own. I met some really nice people there, and ended up drinking too much wine. But it was fun.

As I am feeling a little foggy today, I’m not cooking anything. So I’ll leave you with a picture of the chicken I roasted on Wednesday.



I rinsed it, dried it really well (inside and out), stuffed it with some fresh tarragon and two lemon quarters, trussed it up, hit it with a little salt and pepper, put it in a 425-degree oven for about 50 minutes, and wooohooo! Made a little gravy, and chowed down. The thing got a little heat blister on it’s belly that I broke when I took it from the oven. But aside from looking kind of like me after my hernia operation, I think it turned out pretty well.



Maybe some chicken bones are what those two little dogs need…