Think Globally, Eat Locally May 13, 2011

I thought I’d take a bit of a detour from telling you about our vacation in France & Spain to share what I’ve been up to since coming home.

Apart from a few days when we had friends visiting, the weather here in Würzburg has been absolutely lovely in the past few weeks. We’ve enjoyed warm, sunshine-filled days with trees, shrubs and flowers bursting into bloom and filling our lounge with the most heavenly summertime smells.

Although in the middle of reading a couple of other books (North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell through a free email subscription service called The Daily Lit and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie), I decided I wanted a third read that’s in tune with the season, so to speak. So I picked out Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life from my library. I have many good books that I bought before the move to Germany and I’ve been saving up.

Kingsolver is my favorite writer. I was introduced to her work on the Tibetan plateau in 1999.

Back in college, I did a three-month long study abroad program in India, Nepal and Tibet. During the course of our three-week camping trip through Tibet, I became ill and had to spend a couple of days in my tent waiting for whatever illness it was to pass. (You don’t exactly find a lot of medical clinics in the remote regions of Tibet.) A friend I made on the program gave me two books to read: The Notebook, by Nicolas Sparks (which I’ll admit to both really enjoying and crying like a baby at its conclusion) and Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. I had never heard of Barbara Kingsolver and had no idea what to expect, but what I discovered was my favorite author and to this day, still my favorite novel. When I learned that Kingsolver was a graduate of my alma mater, DePauw University, I felt an even deeper connection to her and her writing. DePauw is a small, private liberal arts college in a small town in the middle of Indiana. Not that many people have heard of it (no, you’re probably thinking of DePaul in Chicago), and even fewer have attended. So to me, it’s a special connection. From that point forward, I began devouring Kingsolver’s works. She recently wrote The Lacuna, which is also buried in my library waiting for the rainy day when I will pull it out and treat myself. Kingsolver is a brilliant but not terribly prolific writer; I’ve learned that I need to squirrel away her works to tide me over until the next fix.

Anyway, I pulled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life out of my library a couple of weeks ago and decided the time was right to start reading it. The book is, as Kingsolver puts it, “Part memoir, part journalistic investigation…The story of a year in which our family deliberately fed ourselves on products grown close to home, and what we learned from the experience.” I’ve come to this book already knowing in advance what its general themes would be, and embracing the ideology behind it: that the food we consume should primarily come from local sources and not moved long distances. Kingsolver is definitely a locavore, but she also believes in eating food that is produced as naturally and healthily as possible, too.

While the Mr. and I can’t grow all of our food for a year in our shared, small garden here in Germany, I can try to buy as much of my produce as possible from local farms at the farmer’s market. I can try to buy organic produce and humanely raised, organic meat.  And if I’m not shopping at the Farmer’s Market, I can try to be knowledgable about where the produce I’m buying is coming from: Italy, a train ride away, or Argentina, where I’m guessing that however they’re shipping it, it’s using a heck of a lot more fossil fuel to get it here. It’s a small thing, checking a label and choosing something more local, but if we all did it more we could strengthen our communities and reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.

While the book is a compelling read all unto itself, I love the recipe sections at the end of each chapter. The book is written following the calendar year, progressing through each season, and the recipes correspond with what’s in season at that time of year. I’m reading slowly, so I’m still in the late spring/early summer season. Asparagus and strawberries are in season here in Germany at the moment, so we’ve been eating much of both. I decided I would like to try a dessert recipe with rhubarb as it’s also in season. I decided to make this strawberry rhubarb crisp from the book:

3 cups strawberries, halved

3 cups rhubarb, chopped

1/2 cup honey

Mix together thoroughly and place in an 8-by-8 inch ungreased pan

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup brown sugar; or a bit more, to taste (which I now have, thanks to my wonderful friend Fenella!)

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon allspice (which I didn’t have, so I threw in a pinch of nutmeg)

1/3 cup butter

Mix until crumbly, spread over fruit mixture and bake at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes until golden

I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. It smells heavenly when it’s hot, a little like cotton candy. When we had it on the first night, I found it sometimes tasted a little bitter, depending on the bite. Rhubarb is a very bitter vegetable (it’s actually not a fruit at all), and strawberries can also be quite acidic sometimes, so given the qualities of these two I think it tasted much better on the second day after the honey had soaked in a bit more. When I make it next time, I think I might consider reducing the fruit a little and increasing the crumble bit. But even with the recipe as is, it didn’t last long!

What Goes On January 9, 2011

The path to Käppele

The last couple of weeks have been quiet, enjoyable ones. The Mr. has been resting up before returning to work, and I’ve been gearing up to begin my intensive language course. We had some lovely, long walks around the city and yesterday enjoyed walking up to Käppele, a church that survived the 1945 bombing is now in the care of the Order of the Friars Minor Capuchin. It sits on a hill overlooking the city and is one of Würzburg’s most recognizable landmarks.

We also attempted (sort of) to go sledding one day while the snow was still covering the ground (temperatures only *just* warmed up yesterday melting all the snow. It’s been on the ground since Thanksgiving, I think!) I say “attempted” as we had no proper sled. The Mr. thought perhaps we could fabricate one using an Ikea bag and a yoga block. A nice idea, but sadly it was a colossal fail. If only we had had a lunchroom tray like we used to use back at DePauw….

We also watched (and are still watching) several documentaries. The Mr. picked out “The Story of India” last year as a Christmas gift, and it was a highly enjoyable and enlightening exploration of a fascinating country. I’ve only been to New Delhi (briefly) and Dharamsala (for a month), all the while focussing on Tibetan culture, but I’d enjoy returning at some point to see more of and learn more about India. The documentary also tied in nicely with two novels I’ve been reading, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and Brick Lane by Monica Ali. The other documentary series I’m currently in love with is Simon Reeve’s Tropic of Cancer. Reeve is journeying around the world along the Tropic of Cancer, uncovering “environmental, political and human stories from some of the most remote places on the planet.” It’s fascinating, beautiful and at times heart wrenching. Going about our daily lives, it’s so easy to forget how privileged and lucky we are compared to most, and how we are but a small part of a much larger world.

Apart from the long walks and documentaries, we did make a bit of progress on the flat over the holidays. The Mr. went through some boxes in the office/guest room so we were able to clear a few more of those out, and we’ve ordered a new dishwasher and vacuum cleaner. The cabinets and cooker/oven will have to wait a bit longer, but apart from lacking storage space, it’s not too much of an annoyance. We’ve borrowed a small, portable cooker which makes a world of difference (i.e. I can make pasta again – hurray!)

And this evening I’ve taken the ornaments off the tree, and the Mr. will carry it outside soon where it will be picked up by the city tomorrow morning for composting. Somehow, I never feel quite ready for Christmas to end. I wish there was another big holiday in January after New Year’s Eve (which is so close to Christmas it really can’t count) to make this winter month a little more enjoyable. (January birthday people: your moms were genius for having you in January – it’s never a boring month for you!) But the lack of anything exciting to look forward to in my own life in January has me thinking: what if I were to invent my own holiday? I mean, why not? Who’s to say I can’t, right? It would definitely include good food, family & friends. But what else? What would you add if you “invented” your own holiday?

Hurray for Hollywood April 19, 2010

When I first started college, my declared major was in communications, not anthropology. I loved film and was very interested in working somehow in the industry, although I wasn’t quite sure in what capacity. My very first college application was to Emerson College in Boston, MA, the only college or university in the US dedicated exclusively to communications and the arts in a liberal arts context. I was accepted but my parents had a look at the tuition and financial aid package (or lack thereof) and nearly had heart attacks. They begged me to go to a college or university in Indiana, at least for my freshman year (you get a break in tuition if you study in the state where you are a resident), and then we could revisit the idea of Boston. So after visiting a few institutions in Indiana, I ended up enrolling at DePauw University, largely because of its Media Fellows program.

The Media Fellows program is a type of honors program for students planning a career in mass media. My high school was small and didn’t have either a student-run radio or television station, so I had no real hands-on experience in any type of media – just a lot of ambition – when I applied as a high school senior. I was rejected from the program, and I can only guess it was due to my lack of experience because I’m fairly sure my high school GPA was high enough. While I was invited to reapply once I was on campus and had enrolled in communications classes, I felt so angry about the rejection that I decided against enrolling in ANY communications classes my freshman year and took other subjects instead. Second semester of my freshman year, I discovered anthropology and fell in love. I sometimes wonder how differently my life might have turned out if the Media Fellows program had accepted my application….

Anyway, although my plans for a career in film petered out, my love for watching it never has. In the UK, I became a subscriber to Lovefilm DVD service and received an unlimited number of discs per month, two at a time, mailed to me. Unfortunately, the reality was that I paid for a service that wasn’t used all that often. Although the turnover time for receiving new discs was pretty fast (a couple of business days at most), working full-time and needing to use our weekends for cleaning and socializing meant there just wasn’t much time left for watching films. So I rarely watched the DVDs I had paid to rent.

Of course now my situation is very different. I’m unemployed and at the moment, I have oodles of free time on my hands. Luckily, Lovefilm has branched out into other parts of the world and there is a Lovefilm.de here in Germany. I’ve already subscribed and received my first discs.

Here’s the good news: almost any big-budget Hollywood film that I’d like to watch is available to rent, and these all come with the OV “original version” option so I can watch them in English. Here’s the bad news: any film that isn’t originally in English seems to only come in that language and German. I learned this lesson the hard way when I received “Coco Before Chanel” and “Broken Embraces” and could watch neither. My options were French and German, or Spanish and German, respectively. I had to immediately send them both back, and this made me very sad. (Especially since it took a full week for them to arrive in the first place…sigh…) The other frustrating thing is that smaller-budget independent films seem in general more difficult to find.

My other worry once we moved here was that I wouldn’t be able to go to the cinema anymore. The big cinema in Würzburg city center unfortunately doesn’t seem to regularly show English language or “original version” films, but luckily there is a cinema just outside the city limits that does. We went on Sunday of last week to see Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. A bit about the experience:

Firstly, I got a bit of a shock when we got out of the car. The cinema is located in a very rural area and surrounding it is all farmland. A bit like Indiana, and yet…. The windows were cracked as we pulled into the parking lot, and I remarked to the Mr. that I could smell something funny. When I opened the car door it took my breath away: the overwhelming stench of cow manure (we think) just about knocked me off my feet. Now being from central Indiana you might think I’m used to “farming smells,” but this was like nothing I had encountered before. Apparently all the fields are covered in manure and the smell dies down after a while but initially is pretty intense. The Mr. thinks farmers in Indiana must do this, too, but I swear I’ve never smelled anything like it before. It was intense and made me realize that the small towns in Germany the Mr. refers to as “cow villages” really are that because they stink like cows. Huh. Don’t think I could handle living in one and smelling that all the time, to be honest. He found my reaction and gagging hilarious.

Anyway, once we got inside (and the scarf around my nose removed) we discovered a very, very long line to buy tickets. We only had 15 minutes before the film was starting, and I was a bit panicky that the theater would be completely crowded. The interesting thing was that there were maybe six or seven films all starting at 11am, and three of them were OV English language versions. That was a nice surprise as I had thought only Alice in Wonderland was playing that day as the OV film. Luckily, we found the theater itself was almost empty and we got great seats. We also discovered that there were no advertisements or previews before the 11am start time, so we missed the first ten minutes or so of the film. At least we’ll know for next time.

All in all, I’m fairly happy with my film-watching options here in Germany. Now if only I can figure out how to set up a slingbox at my parents’ for more television-viewing options….