So, in the last blog post, I briefly mentioned gourmet mac and cheese. I did not go on for several paragraphs about how the cheese was handmade, then aged for a full year before being melted over fresh pasta, and what a glorious, savory thing the final result was. I won’t go on for paragraphs about the mac and cheese in this blog post, either, but suffice it to say that it was very good. Very, very good.
Like, make me weak in the knees thinking about it good.
But this post is about the cheese – all of the cheese! Beecher’s Handmade Cheese is exactly as their name advertises – handmade cheese. And you know it’s handmade because the far wall of their shop is nothing but windows, looking in on the work floor. Two giant metal vat await the organic farm-fresh milk to be poured in and mixed. As Layne and I sat on the milk-can stools by the window, enjoying our amazing mac and cheese, we watched that milk curdle, the curds stacked after they’d drained a little, and then the blocks of curds be stacked yet again, letting gravity do most of the work of squeezing the excess whey from the cheese.
If that description of the cheese-making process sounds boring at all to you, let me tell you that it absolutely wasn’t!! We were riveted. Oh, we both are from Saskatchewan, and thus have seen the inside of a milking barn before. Neither of us was ignorant of how the process worked. But to actually watch the milk metamorphose into a vast sheet of rubbery curds was fascinating.
If you are ever lucky enough to find yourself at Beecher’s, please set aside a couple of hours to enjoy watching the process. Oh, and order a bowl or two of the mac and cheese for me, please!!!
In past years, we had no time to tour Seattle after Emerald City Comic Con was over, because I had to rush back to work on Monday morning. This year, however, we had no time constraints, and so decided to make a vacation out of our trip to Seattle. It actually worked out really nicely – Layne had a science conference to attend just a few days after Emerald City, so we spent the intervening days exploring Seattle.
Pike Place Market is one of my new favorite places ever. Aside from seafood so fresh it’s still alive, the best andouille sausage I’ve seen this far north, and a mountain of FRESH GREENS in early March, it is also littered with interesting little food stalls. We killed half of Monday just wandering around, sampling the fare. Any place that you can start with some gourmet mac and cheese, move on to a few fresh Chinese steamed buns, and then top off the meal with fresh-out-of-the-sea raw oysters is A-OK in my books!
Pike Place is, quite simply put, foodie heaven. I am terribly, terribly sad that I’ll have to wait until next year to visit there again.
Guys, guys!! Have you SEEN the Owl Box yet??? Oh, man. I discovered it just after my mega-wildlife-watching trip to Friday Harbor, and I was instantly hooked. Basically, there’s a camera in the nest of a barn owl couple. Man. That sounds boring, but I have been absolutely riveted since I found it. (But then, I am weird like that, especially when it comes to birds of prey… Cute, fuzzy little birds of prey…)
When I first started watching, the eldest chick, Max, had just hatched. Now, a few days later, he’s got a sibling they’ve called Pattison. It’s really cool seeing the two chicks together, because one of them is so obviously bigger and more well-developed that the other! Also – OWL CHICKS!! EEEEE!!!
Sorry. I fear that I will be quite incoherent until they are fledged. Maybe even later…
((Sorry this blog post is a few days behind!!! I was going to write more, but the internet connection out in my cabin was a tad patchy when I posted this one, and I wanted to double-check links! I’m still catching up with a few things after our trip to Seattle, but Moosehead Stew should be back on track come Thursday!))
So, I had the good fortune to be standing in the midst of a crowd of webcomics artists during the course of the Emerald City Comic Expo, and several thoughts crossed my mind. One, that we are a motley and assorted crew of ruffians. And two, that a good deal of them seem to tower over me. Seriously – there are a TON of really tall artists out there. (Or, maybe it’s just me. Actually, scratch that. It’s probably just me. A lot of people are tall when you’re 5’3″…)
However, there are also a ton of awesome artists that are less astoundingly tall!! Most of the female artists I’ve met are actually around the same height as me! This is our secret advantage, because that means that we totally get tons of leg-room during all of those long flights to cons. We. So. Win.
* Jennie wasn’t at Emerald City, but had to be included in the lineup because she’s awesome! Also, her boots are highly recognizable, and make her much taller than she normally draws herself!
I must have driven past the world’s biggest sausage hundreds of time without ever having seen it. Mundare, 70 km east of Edmonton, is a small town, and I never would have stopped there if I hadn’t had that second bottle of iced tea on the trip from Saskatoon. When we turned off the highway, looking for a bathroom, the most glorious sight awaited us – a giant… turd?
Closer inspection showed that this monstrosity was supposed to be a sausage. And, the sign said, it was the biggest concrete sausage in the world!
Now, I’ve seen giant Easter eggs, giant pea plants, and even a giant moose in my time, but few things compare to the sight of a really massive sausage, looming over the landscape!
Ahhh, curling… I think that it’s entirely appropriate that, during Starbuck’s Love Project (http://www.starbucksloveproject.com/), where 156 countries from around the world all submitted clips of their citizens singing “All You Need is Love”, the Canadian entry was filmed in a curling rink. That’s Canada for ya.
And it’s an especially popular sport in Saskatchewan. It’s one of the few winter sports that you can still play when it’s minus a bazillion outside, because, luckily, it’s played indoors. Despite going out of my way to avoid organized sport, I still went curling numerous times while I was going to school, and actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Now, I couldn’t aim a curling rock at the broadside of a barn, but I do like to sweep. It’s neat feeling the pebbles of ice melting under your broom, and I always wanted to slide up and down the slick textured ice like an otter. (Though, of course, that’d probably get me kicked out of the rink pretty fast…. But it’d feel cool…) Curling, in my books, is a pretty awesome sport.
The Arrogant Worms, those wacky Western Canadian songsters, wrote a tribute to the 2010 Winter Olympics, and it should come as no surprise that they chose to sing about curling. Have a listen – it’s pretty hilarious!
So, in the last blog post, I briefly mentioned gourmet mac and cheese. I did not go on for several paragraphs about how the cheese was handmade, then aged for a full year before being melted over fresh pasta, and what a glorious, savory thing the final result was. I won’t go on for paragraphs about the mac and cheese in this blog post, either, but suffice it to say that it was very good. Very, very good. 
