Vision Quest

It’s Sunday and I’m out walking in the vineyards. I’m taking some pictures of the grapes. Just walking along, eating the occasional blackberries that I pick off of the bushes that border the vineyard. Yes, all is well with the world.

The sun’s out, but it’s not too hot. I had some bluty hash and eggs several hours ago. Did some cleaning, some laundry, and now I’m out for a leisurely walk. I’m communing with the grapes, and it looks like it may be a good year.

Exiting the vineyards, I amble down into the bucolic town of Hattenheim. I am admiring the half-timbered houses, and the stonework of the walls. I pass by the Weinpunkt, and wave to the Weinfrau inside.

Around the corner is a narrow passageway, barely wide enough for a car. Its eight foot stone walls are in remarkable condition, and the cobblestones under my feet provide a strange comfort to my steps. Yes, all is right in Hattenheim this fine day.

At the intersection, I turn left towards the Rhein. The stone walls are in turn replaced by the concrete abutments of the bridge that leads me under the highway. A child on a bicycle passes me. He’s racing his father through the tunnel. I smile.

Exiting from under the highway, I come up into the riverfront area. It’s a large field, with an occasional table and some benches along the river. There are many people out enjoying the day, some on blankets, some on lawn chairs, others just standing around talking as their dogs roll in the grass. Life is good here on the banks of the Rhein.

I turn to the left and there is a rather large group of people, not unwieldy mind you but significant in size, near the Weinprobierstand. I stroll over to the stand and, after waiting my turn, order a Trocken (dry) Riesling, a pretzel, and a piece of cheese. This particular Riesling comes from the Wisselbrunnen, a celebrated vineyard very close to where I started my little excursion today. I sit down at a bench nearby and begin to eat the warm, soft pretzel. I unwrap the cheese and take a bite. It’s delicious. A sip of the wein and I’m practically delirious in my contentment.

Invigorated from the walk, the cool breeze coming in off the river feels fantastic. There are children playing, pretty girls riding bicycles, elderly people sitting on benches. A glass of wein in one hand, I pet a chocolate Labrador Retriever with the other. Someone is painting a picture near the riverbank. I am feeling downright good, and quite possibly religious. With all that is right with the world, I am ready to believe in some heavenly power. At this very instant I want, more than anything, to believe in the divine majesty of the creator. With all the beauty I am surrounded by, how could anyone … uh … wait just one cotton pickin’ minute.

Just what in the name of all that is holy is that?

Once again, my faith was shattered. When I regained my vision, I slowly walked home a trembling, broken, almost lifeless, shell of a man.

Sunday Bluty Sunday

About a month ago I broke a filling in one of my back teeth. It didn’t hurt, but I knew it was going to at some point. I got the name of a dentist from a guy at work, but never made an appointment. Early this week I break another part of a filling out of the same tooth. The tooth itself is still not painful, but it is scratching the bejesus out of my tongue. So I finally call the dentist.

“I think I need a tooth pulled” I tell the girl.

“Are you having pain?” she asks.

“Not yet” I tell her, “but it’s coming”.

They give me an appointment the next day. The hole feels like it’s the size of my thumb, and I’ve got one on the other side that feels like it’s the size of my index finger. This tooth is coming out. There can’t be anything left to fill. The roots probably aren’t worth a shit anymore either.

I can’t afford a root canal, seeing as how I let the time period slip by when I could’ve got dental insurance. I’ll just tell him to pull it, and I’ll save up for some adamantium screws that they can mount a crown on.

I don’t make any plans for the weekend because I know I’ll be laid up with pain and hopefully pain medication. I wonder if “hillbilly heroin” is legal in Germany? I’m having flashes of a weekend of listening to Bodeco CDs in an OxyContin induced coma that is just exacerbated by copious amounts of hefeweizen. Will I snap out of it in time for college football season or Oktoberfest? These are really my only concerns.

It is with these thoughts swirling in my head that I enter the dentist’s office. I am early so I fill out the new patient paperwork. The girl at the desk is kind of cute. She’s older, probably about my sister’s age, but she’s held up pretty well. I’m getting a strange vibe from her. I think she kind of likes me. Well screw her! Let her get her own OxyContin! I ain’t sharing mine!

I get in to see the dentist, and he tells me that it could be worse.

“Worse how could it be worse?” I ask.

“It could be raining”

Turns out that it’s not quite as bad as I had imagined. I did crack the filling. He removed the loose part, did some superficial drilling, and refilled the tooth. He said the tooth looked fine. There was no decay. He didn’t even give me Novocaine.

No Novocaine means no OxyContin. No OxyContin means the girl at the front will no longer be interested. I was just starting to like her.

When I go to the front to get the bill, I realize that she was never interested. Well that’s OK because she’s starting to look a lot older now. I guess I had OxyGoggles on when I came in.

Actually it went very well, and it was not outrageously expensive. So I went back to the office and made plans with a friend to go to Frankfurt this Saturday. I drove into Wiesbaden and we took the train into Frankfurt. They were having a big Museumfest or something like that. We never actually went into a museum, but we did have some biers, some food, listened to some bands, watched a couple of “Viking Boat” or “Dragon Boat” races, and generally had a pretty good time.






The only real difference between these festivals in Germany and in the States is they have better food and bier here. Look at this grill…



Is that beautiful or what? And that wasn’t even the place we ate! I blew it by not getting pictures there.


Sunday I decided to make an honest to goodness breakfast. So I started it the way all good things start … with onions!



Added some potatoes, salt and pepper …



And then added the blutwurst (blood sausage)!



Let it cook for a while, scraped the pan occasionally (can’t let any scabs form, you know) until all of the flavors were married and the blutwurst was falling apart tender (or was it just falling apart? Is there a difference?).



Scooped it into a bowl, and covered it with some sunny side (down) eggs and hit it with a little Sriracha, and it was ready to serve.



Later I cleaned up the apartment a bit and then went for a walk to commune with the grapes. I’ll post some more pics within a couple of days.

I Am Embarrassed and Somewhat Ashamed

I was out of town last week, for work. Nothing much to report. I spent my days on post, and at night B (a guy from work) and I wandered around looking for restaurants. This should not have been difficult, but the girl at the hotel kept sending us to ones that were closed. Really. We asked her on two separate occasions to recommend a restaurant, and both times the places she mentioned were closed. She started to cover her face when we sauntered into the hotel lobby after work.

I finally made it back Friday, and naturally my truck wasn’t finished. I had dropped it off so they could fix it while I was out of town. I had told the garage that I was going to do this (at least two weeks prior). Well, it still is not finished. So now I’m driving a Ford Focus loaner. The check engine light is on, and the suspension makes funny noises when someone just walks past it. But I paid to fill the tank with gas, so I’m going to drive it into the ground if that’s what it takes.

Saturday, I went to the library, the commissary, &c. I didn’t really feel like doing too much, so after running some errands I just hung out and read a bit. Around the middle of the afternoon I wandered over to the refrigerator. This was the condiment refrigerator, and it’s full of various mustards, chili sauces ... you know … condiments. Well this refrigerator also has some drinks in it that are not allowed to sully the Belgian Room or the Bier and Wein fridge.

On this particular Saturday one of these drinks sort of called out to me.

The people at the bier store have kind of taken a shining to me. I guess they are mentally checking off another one of their kids’ tuition payments every time they see my truck. Well, one time a couple weeks ago, I was there looking for a bier I hadn’t tried yet (yes Jimmy, I was blowing the dust off the cases in the back). The guy who works there starts telling me about some new drinks they had. He starts handing me samples of these new drinks made by Bitburger.

I am, of course, telling him no. I don’t want any of these odd drinks. I insist. He keeps shoving them into my face. He grabs another strange drink and tries to give it to me. I finally relent and take them with me. He gives me four of these grotesquely colored things. GIVES, as in no charge. I, of course, realize he’s just trying to get me hooked. Much like Joe Camel, he’s s relying on my childlike desire for free stuff to make his entrance. When I get them home I banish them to the condiment fridge. Damn that pusher man! Maybe I can give them to the homeless or something.

However, one of these drinks piqued my interest. It was not as grotesque as the neon colors of the Bitburger drinks. It had my interest for about a month before this weekend. Now I was not interested enough to actually open it, mind you. But I was interested in the flavor combination. Much like Pizza and Beer, Chocolate and Peanut Butter, or Asian Lesbians, it was a combination of things that I am fond of.

This particular combination seemed odd at first, and if it hadn’t have been given to me, I don’t know that I would have ever tried it.

Mixing drinks and such is a pretty big business here in Germany. A couple of them I have found reasonably likeable, and some were actually quite good. The apple juice mixed with carbonated water is one I find particularly good. They also mix carbonated water with wine, coke with bier, sprite with bier, and even lemonade with bier. The lemonade idea, though I haven’t tried it yet, sounded refreshing to me. A good lawnmower drink, if you will.

The particular drink that had my interest piqued for going on the month it had been sitting in my refrigerator was a mixture of hefeweizen and grapefruit juice. Well on Saturday I broke down and tried it. And as embarrassed as I am to admit it, it wasn’t bad.

Now I am not in love with it, so I will not be turning in my penis just yet, but it was not bad. I can’t see myself buying a case of it anytime soon. But if I ever get put on a chain gang a la Cool Hand Luke, I think that I would be happy to have one of these.

It might even taste good after a hard day shopping for new shoes and handbags ...

Liberatoribus Americanis Populus Belgicus Memor

This past weekend a friend and I went to Belgium. We started out Saturday at about 0830 and arrived in Houffalize by 1130. There is a little town near there called Achouffe, which is also the name of a brewery there. We didn’t go to the brewery, but a restaurant across the road had their beers. After we ate lunch, and drank a couple of beers, we headed down the road about 15 miles to Bastogne. While in Bastogne we checked out the memorial to the American Troops that liberated Belgium. We also went to a local WWII museum where the main emphasis was the Battle of the Bulge.

Being as I am now the kinder, gentler. Tony, I didn’t even raise a stink when they charged us full admission. And even though it wasn’t the greatest of museums, I didn’t ask for my money back either. After the museum we wandered over to the memorial, which was very nice.



Took a few pictures from on top of it.



Belgium is a beautiful country, and is very rural. You are not very far outside of the cities before you start seeing farms. There are a lot of cows here, and the majority of them seemed to be lying down (lazy bastards!)



We headed north to Namur because a book I have said it was a good place to start exploring Belgian beers. It recommended a certain pub which was closed down. We ended up going to a restaurant in town and met up with a couple of British guys who were in town for the motocross championships (who knew?). We ate and then went next door to meet them for a couple of (or more) beers. They were a good crew.

The one guy was laughing at everything I said. I asked him what was so funny, and he said it was my accent. My accent? I explained to him that, being as how I am from Pennsylvania, I don’t have an accent. He was having none of it though.

Sunday we took the long way around getting back to Wiesbaden, but it was a nice day and we stopped a couple of times. So it was a good trip. We put in over 500 miles this weekend, so I was glad to be able to get back to work and rest.

Or so I thought. I had a bunch of work dumped on me on Monday, and I’m out of town next week. So I’m working overtime this week trying to get everything done. Sorry that I couldn’t go into the excruciating details that I had promised, but this update will have to be good enough for the next week or so.

The good news is I now have a Belgium Room…

... there are still some gaps in there, but it's a start!

And yes Jimmy, they do have other beers. I thought about you when I saw a six pack of Corona!

My Sunday Project…

My Sunday project actually started on Saturday evening. I unpacked my stuff from the METRO store. Can you guess what was lurking at the bottom of my bag? That’s correct; it was 1.505 Kilos of pork skin-on belly-fat...



“This is going to require some wine” I thought. So I chose a bottle from my landlord’s brother’s Weingut. A nice Spätburgunder should do the trick...



First I cut the fat into strips...



Then I cut the strips into cubes and put them into a brine to soak in overnight in the refrigerator...



In the morning I drained off the brine, rinsed the cubes in a colander, and placed them in a dutch oven with 1½ cups of water...



I set the heat on low, and decided it was time for some brefax. I took two slices of Blutwurst about 1 cm thick...



I dredged them in some flour and tossed them into a dry skllet...



Flipped them a few times, and fried up some eggs in a separate skillet. This is not really a good picture of it, but you can see the Blutwurst has turned almost black (no, it’s not burned). It gets really dark when it is heated. I guess that is why the Brits sometimes refer to blood sausage as black pudding. It has a similar texture to scrapple, which may be off putting to some. I however, love it. And while it does seem to taste a little “bloodier” it is a very nice way to prepare it.



I let this baby simmer for over 12 hours, stirring it only occasionally. During this time it went from this…



to this…



Toward the end I stained it into the only container I could find that would hold it. I used to have a bunch of empty glass jars just for purposes such as this one, but I threw them out before I left the States. So with almost a quart of hot schmaltz on my hands, I improvised. And for those of you who are wondering, I do have another coffee pot. This one is about the third or fourth string pot.



I rinsed and scraped the dutch oven. And if anyone ever asks you how to season a cast iron pot or pan, just tell them to render about 3 lbs of pork fat in it. Fixes it right up!



Monday morning I pulled it out of the fridge and was delighted to find this…



Ain’t she beautiful? I think I’m going to fry up some onion and apple in some of it and make some griebenschmalz with the cracklin’s that are left.

I wanted to make some kimchi at the same time, but couldn’t find all the ingredients on Sunday. Maybe another time I’ll post some kimchi making.