Working Back Through my Travels: London

I have to write at least something about all the great places I've visited in the last two months. Things have been too busy recently, always one thing to the next, and I am afraid if I don't stop and look back at these great experiences, they will get lost in the blur. The amazing moments won't add up to anything if i don't write them down.

On the way back to California for my sister's wedding, I stopped in London. I spent a weekend with my best friend since Kindergarten. He has been living there for over two years now. I had been to London before, but Aaron showed me a completely different side of the city. Here are some of the highlights of the weekend:

1. Saturday morning, Borough Market Jamie Oliver popularized this market, which used to have a grittier, working class feel to it. Now it may be a little touristy or geared towards yuppies, but there's no arguing with the products on offer. Amazing fresh baked goods, cheeses, wines, beers, juices, oysters, sandwiches made from melted Raclette cheese, huge wooden tubs of pestos and olives. Almost anything you could want. Aaron and I grabbed coffee and then walked around. The products were arranged so beautifully and had such vibrant colors that just walking through the place, taking it all in, was a truly satisfying experience. We didn't even need to buy anything.




2. Rock and Roll Dance Party, Saturday Night Aaron described this pub as "The Happiest Bar in London". We had a group of about eight, and we were some of the happiest pub-goers in London that night. They play 60's and 70's rock music, geared towards dancing. Air guitar, leg kicks, faux-vocals, arm swings, more air guitar, anything goes when you're dancing to rock and roll. We didn't dare leave until all our clothes were sweated-through and the DJ stopped playing music.

3. Flea Markets, Sunday Morning We went to two different flea markets, each with a slightly different feel to it, and each with a huge diversity of goods for sale. Cool old sweaters, jackets, coats, scarves, glasses. New merchandise, old merchandise, cameras, records, fridge magnets, bags, ties, suits, almost everything. The second market had a food section, where vendors sold fresh ethnic food. Spanish, Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, and it all looked good. More importantly, people were really gathering in all these places. Diverse cross sections of the city came to purchase goods, to eat, to walk around, to see or be seen. It was impressive to see.



4. Coffee at "Look Mum, No Hands" This bicycle-themed coffee shop eptimizes "cool". They have vintage bikes in the interior, good coffee, microbrews, and barristas with awesome mustaches. This is just a fun place to hang out, read the paper, or do work on your laptop. If I lived in London, I would want to be a regular there. I might even develop a crush on one of the employees and after a few months finally arrive at the perfect moment to ask her out for a drink. It's that kind of a place.




5. Pimm's Cup, Saturday Afternoon Aaron arranged a celebration for both of our birthdays (we were both born at the end of August). He gathered a group of friends and co-workers to meet at a pub with a beautiful garden in the back. Starting the drinking at two in the afternoon can be rough, but the Brits have developed a solution: Pimm's Cup. They serve the refreshing ,herbal spirit called "Pimms" with seven-up, fresh strawberries, oranges, cucumbers, and mint. Truly, it's lovely beverage, and sharing a few pitchers of the stuff with friends is a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Good Things I've Eaten: Entry #1

So, I'm going to try to keep a journal of all the good things I eat. Every once and while I post some of the entries up here in no particular order.

Pliny the Elder IPA August, 2010, Bar/Cheese Shop Napa
For me, this is the beer of beers. You can't ask anything more from a beer than what Pliny gives you. This beer is clean yet fully satisfying. It delivers strong, bitter, yet crisp hop flavors of grapefruit and pine. The bitter, astringent hops are balanced by a round, smooth mouthfeel that finishes clean. Satifsying, refreshing, mouthwatering, perfect with grilled meats or hard cheese, and even better all by itself. Russian River Brewing Company, thank you for giving the world Pliny the Elder.

Carne CrudaJune, 2010, Osteria in Neive, Piemonte
In Piemonte, they like their carne cruda, raw meat, and they do it right. On this day, we hiked from Alba into the hills and before lunch we had climbed two big hills, tasted seven Barbaresco's at a winery along the way, and covered about eight kilometers. Hot, sweaty, hungry, the cool, perfectly season, bright red, raw veal was the perfect thing to eat. The primal yet refined protein fix powered us through the four course lunch, two more bottles of wine, and the eight kilometer walk back into town.



Beet, Apple, Orange, Ginger Juice August, 2010, Burrough's Market, London
I couldn't pass this up at the farmer's market. Bright majenta in color, the juice tastes sweet, tangy, and slightly earthy from the beets (at least two whole beets go into one juice). The spicy ginger comes on at the end, giving the beverage a fresh, invigorating kick. I wasn't hungover this morning, but this juice would probably be very good for a hangover.

Luca's Mom's Pickled Treviso July, 2010, Bra, Italy
Treviso is the bitter, elongated, purple colored cousin to Radicchio. A special variety of Treviso is especially sought after for pickling. Luca's Mom transforms the bitter, stalky vegetable into something wonderfully sweet, tangy, pleasantly bitter, tender, and slightly chewy. We pulled the stuff out of its jar with a fork and ate it with bread that we had toasted and spread with soft cheese. After eating almost all of it, we ceremoniously divided the last piece of the Treviso like stranded mountaineers splitting up their last chocolate bar. This stuff really is that good.

Back to School!

After more than six weeks of travel, time off, aimless wondering and a few aimless summer afternoons at the pool here in Bra, it feels good to be back at school and to have a (semi) permanent home again. I am looking forward to being (semi) productive and structured again once classes come into full swing.

This time of year always lights a fire under my belly. As the new school year starts I always feel focused, motivated, and determined to make the coming year the best ever. After I graduated from college and started working, this reflex never went away. Once summer moves into autumn, a new energy comes to me. I get excited. I feel creative. I feel like starting new projects, reorganizing my time, reinventing parts of my self.

Coming back to Italy, you can't help but feel this same energy. After the whole town (and the whole country) shuts down in August, once everyone comes back in September, it's like everyone starts over and has a new school year ahead of them. And there is much to look forward to. The harvest is coming. The forested hills just outside of town are surely bursting with young white truffles. The weather has changed. It's not hot anymore and we can finally drink all this wonderful red wine they make all around us. The pear trees sag with fruit and seem to beg to be harvested. Before we know it, the mountains will be covered in snow.

But, as Carlo Petrini told us on the first day, "Slow....slow", one thing at a time. Beer class today and tomorrow, a trip to France all next week. Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto festivals around the corner. While the back to school reflexes tell me to push, to dig, to maximize, get more, do more, truly, looking ahead, it is enough to stay calm and try to be loose and ready for all the experiences in store. Take things as they come. Let the year unfold. One thing at a time. Slow.

Life Cheese

There are certain experiences that one by one make the trip worthwhile. These are the things I came here to do: taste wines made from a single grape variety grown on a single hillside, walk through local farms with an expert on organic agriculture, eat homemade pastries for breakfast and go hiking up a mountain, finally learn how to properly salt the water for pasta. These experiences and lessons are priceless; I came here to get them.

But then, there are also experiences that one by one, make one's life worthwhile. These are rare, few and far between for most people, especially as they get older. Last week I had one though, and I didn't see it coming. We visited a small producer of goat cheese, and I slept the entire bus ride and woke up in the foothills of the mountains. The man in charge of the cheese operation said our bus couldn't take us where he wanted to go.

So they took us in a tractor, a big tractor that pulled the same trailer they used to transport goats and hay. They took us up the mountain, way up the mountain, and we could feel the air quickly change and see the valley stretch out behind us. The road stopped past the tree line at a cabin and a barn where they keep their goats and cows during the spring and summer.

We saw the goats. We saw their cows. We saw their dogs. We breathed the air, took in the view. Then they fed us: cheese, bread, and big jugs of rustic red wine. It was everything we needed.

We Were All Food Poisoned!

Although my trip to Italy, so far, has been fantastic, blog posts about how beautiful everything is, how great the food tastes, and how wonderful the people will get boring very quickly. So, I'm writing about something a little less pleasant.

Throughout the year, we have about seven weeks worth of trips to various regions; they call these trips "stages" (pronounced stahj, its French), and they are intended to be food and culture safaris: the time to eat, drink, experience a new region of Europe, and learn by doing.

Our first trip took place almost two weeks ago, and they took us to Puglia, the heel of the boot that is Italy. The place was beautiful: we walked through ancient groves of olive trees, swam in cool water while gazing out towards a hazy sea, and we drank Prosecco in a hilltop town, sitting in an outdoor cafe with a view of the rolling, golden valley, feeling the warm breeze rush over us. I'll never forget these moments, but I'll also remember the trip as a death-march of cold cuts.

Every meal was a big occasion: multiple courses of meats, cheeses, pasta, more meat. Often, lunch looked the same: cured meat, cheese, bread, wine, and lardo (cured pork fat). One night, we ate seafood: fish salad, raw fish, fish with homemade pasta, fried fish, and then fruit and dessert. The next night: appetizers of fried dough, focaccia with greens, frittata, cured meats, two kinds of homemade pasta, stewed horse, boiled octopus, and then fruit and dessert. And the whole time, the wine kept coming.

Halfway through the trip, we all felt like our systems couldn't keep up with this much food and wine. We ate prunes and yogurt for breakfast. Some sought out fresh fruit; I bought myself some tomatoes. It didn't seem to be working. We all felt slow, lethargic; I imagined myself to be getting gout.



Something had to give. The center could not hold. On the last day we broke down. Two of the girls got sick early in the morning: they looked pale, droopy, and very unhappy. In two hours they fell into vomiting, and we altered course. Our trip leader, Alessandra, took us to a beachtown, set us free to wander for the afternoon, and got these poor girls a hotel room.

I fell victim next. Thinking I was just a little hungover, I decided to go for a swim, which usually helps me feel better. I swam for a while and then sprawled out on the beach to sunbathe. It must have been funny to the friends I was with, because it looked like I was having a great time, and all of a sudden, on the walk back into town, I bent over the railing of the staircase and barfed my guts out into the creek below. After my second puke, Alessandra took me to the hotel room with the other girls, and I took my place with the fallen.

Over the course of the next two days, at least a quarter of us became acutely ill; and almost everyone got queasy stomaches, headaches, and a general malaise. The weekend we got back, everyone hibernated in their rooms. Some fasted, others caught up on fruits and vegetables. For a day and a half, all I could keep down was white rice and gatorade.

But now we're all better, and the next stage starts on Monday. Studying food is intense.

Wine Doesn't Smell Like Wine

Not long ago, I did some tasting with some good friends. We were discussing the smells and the tastes in the wines, nothing too serious or over the top. One of my friends, a free-thinker, stopped us, and suggested that the wine just smells like wine. No one had an answer for him, until now.
Just last week we had a two day sensory analysis unit here at Cheese School. Our professor had prepared twenty six "standard" aromas that we all had to identify. These standards were compounds mixed into a base wine, or simply the smelly thing itself, like chunks of butter, caramel, or bubble gum. It didn't take long for us to figure out what all this stuff was: asparagus juice, black pepper, nutmeg, olive, honey, lemon, raspberry, etc...
Trying to guess smells can dislodge lots of memories. You have to close your eyes, picture what the smell reminds you of, and then unpack the memory to isolate what it is you smelled and are now remembering. It's a fun way to make your brain work. After smelling a standard for "artificial fruit flavor", I couldn't guess what the smell was supposed to be, but got stuck on images of drinking juice boxes and eating popsicles as a kid. After smelling soy sauce mixed with base wine, I could distinctly remember drinking red wine that smelled just like this, but I had never identified the aroma. I drove myself crazy trying to name the smell and never figured out that it was soy.




After identifying the standards, we were asked to analyze real wines. Four whites on the first day and four reds on the next. Lo and behold, some of the wines smelled exactly like the standards we had identified. One white was a dead ringer for asparagus, another had distinctive bell pepper and green bean aromas. The reds were a little harder to pinpoint, but the descriptors we used showed consistent trends. One red had vanilla and caramel while others had fresh berry and spice or soy sauce and leather.
The lesson learned: the aromas in wine are a real thing. Volatile compounds exist in wine that create specific smells. Winemakers can use sensory analysis to adjust their winemaking techniques to avoid making wines that smell like green beans and olives. More importantly, smelling wine all day is a very, very good use of time.

ps. Thanks to Raymond for his pictures!

Cicliturismo!

Bit by bit, I am doing everything I came to Italy to do. Yesterday I bought a bike, and it's beautiful: an old, blue Colnago in absolutely perfect shape. It has a steel frame, yellow handlebars, and Campagnolo components. It is exactly the bike I imagined myself riding here.

I couldn't imagine how perfect Piemonte is for cycling. We are surrounded by rolling hills that are packed with vineyards and Hazelnut groves and studded with hilltop villages. On a bike, you could spend all day exploring, visiting dozens of towns and wine DOC's without riding more than 25 miles from the home base. I am determined to see it all.