And the morel of the story is...

So after all of this flirting with fancy recipes, I thought I'd try going back to basics. I found this handy website devoted to morels and decided to follow the very simplest recipe on the site, titled appropriately, "Less is More." Basically, just sauté in butter and serve with red meat. Well, Kevin and I aren't exactly fans of red meat. I know most people think that there is no finer treat than a thick, juicy, sautéed-to-perfection steak, but we are not among them, a sad irony since we live in Alberta--the beef capital of North America, where cow is cheaper than just about anything else you might cook for dinner.

Nonetheless, I bought myself a reasonable (though not exceptional) pair of steaks, and pan-fried them with nothing but a bit of butter and some port wine. Then I followed the recipe's instructions quartering my morels and sautéeing them in a cast-iron skillet with gobs of butter. (Again, to quote Julie/Julia from the movie: "The secret to sautéeing mushrooms is to absolutely drown the bastards in butter.") For a vegetable side, I borrowed from another recipe on the site, titled "Morels and Steak," which calls for sautéeing wild leeks in even more butter and a dash of sugar. "It's phenomenal," the author implores. "Trust me." I was skeptical. After all, leeks are just fancy onions. But ohmygod, was he right! I didn't even have wild leeks (or ramps), like he recommended, and they were still phenomenal. (Although a note to my fellow casual chefs: you need to cook store-bought leeks twice as long as the wild ones, and your breath will be killer for about two days afterward no matter how many times you brush your teeth.)

And the morels and steak? The most incredible explosion of flavor. So this is why people by $22/lb for those dirty little mushrooms! The morels and the steak went together like peanut butter and jelly, peaches and cream, white on rice, etc. And the sweet, crunchy carmelized leeks were the perfect complement to the richness of the morels and steak. And a cold, hoppy beer was the thing for washing down all of that heavy food.


So for our final night--and our final store of mushrooms--we decided to go with what we knew worked and fried up a pork rib-eye steak in a butter-and-white-wine sauce and topped it off with chanterelles sautéed in even more butter. I know they say "lightening never strikes twice" and all, but it did for me: a lot like in that movie Ratatouille when the rat/chef gets struck by lightening and discovers that cheese+mushrooms+rosemary+electricity=a flavor explosion. My pork and chanterelles were just about as good as the morels and steak, although I can hardly take credit for the recipe. They were another of the culinary combinations I brought back with me from Germany, where they go by the delightful name of "Pfefferlinge."


Turns out the secret to cooking wild mushrooms to perfection is just gobs and gobs of real butter. Of course, that might be the secret to cooking just about anything. Although I think Julia Child might have already spilled the beans on that little secret. And in case you're curious, we went through a whole pound of butter during our four-day culinary excursion. Now I'm going to go sit on my well-padded derierre and take a break--at least until I can buy more mushrooms at next week's farmers' market.

So how should I cook next week's mushrooms? I promise not to write about it ;)

Cooking Mushrooms with Martha

With all of these fancy fungi in the house, it felt necessary to come up with some suitably fancy ways to eat them, so I turned to my go-to girl for fancy foods: Martha Stewart, or just "Martha" around these parts.

The first recipe I tried was her Morel and Asparagus Sandwiches with Poached Egg, which calls for a few of my favorite things: cheese, eggs, and another tasty in-season delicacy--asparagus. I can still remember my first spring in Germany when the asparagus came into season and all the locals went crazy-in-the head for their fresh, local "spargel." As far as I can tell no self-respecting German would ever eat spargel that had been imported. So for the one month in April that it's in season, they gorge themselves on roasted spargel, grilled spargel, spargel soup, spargel omelettes. I vaguely remember them finding a way to work spargel into their deserts. So what could be better than putting the morels and spargel together, right?


Unfortunately, the meal was a bit of a disappointment. Even though I followed the recipe to the letter--complete with homemade chicken stock and homemade wheat bread, thank you very much--the sauce wasn't as creamy as it needed to be, and the flavor of the cheese totally masked the flavor of the morels. Still, a very satisfying Sunday brunch.

Next up was Martha's "Tortellinis with Morels and Chanterelles." This recipe looked so good on the screen that I just had to give it a try even though it was twice as complicated as the first. Now, I had never attempted homemade pasta of any sort before, nor do I have that special pasta attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer that the recipe calls for, but having recently seen Julie and Julia (and being an early fan of "The Julie/Julia Project", I thought I would give it a try, doing the whole recipe by hand--and all after putting in a long day at the office, just like Julie Powell.


Turns out, making pasta is a cinch, so long as you have the hour-and-a-half to devote to it. And kneading and rolling the dough and folding all those tiny tortellinis was surprisingly relaxing after a stressful work day. The finished product even looked exactly as good as the one in the magazine, but, again, the meal was a bit of a letdown. Everything needed more salt, and all that lemon and tarragon totally overpowered the subtle flavors of the mushrooms. And even though the meal took only an hour-and-a-half to prepare, cleaning up my kitchen afterward took two days. Totally not worth it.

Tune in tomorrow for the final instalment of this story that was so long I had to cut it in two. In the meantime, what are your favorite fungal recipes?

Café Culture

Today, after we took Colin to get his six-month shots, Kevin and I did the unthinkable: We got a seat at a trendy little café, ordered some drinks, and had a conversation that wasn't about babies -- all while Colin sat, wedged between us in the booth, quietly enjoying a teething toy. I would not have thought this possible a few months ago -- even a few weeks ago.

Ever since he was about six weeks old and emerged from that quiet, drowsy, newborn stage, Colin has been way too fussy to take out much in public. Certainly, he has been too fussy to take to a restaurant ... that served drinks ... to adults. Before we had kids, we always thought we would be like those cool parents we saw when we lived in Europe, who would park their impossibly cute and well-behaved youngsters under a café umbrella while they sat down for drinks -- and, quelle horreur!, a cigarette -- in the middle of the afternoon. We were going to be those parents (minus the cigarettes, of course).

But many are the times that we have tried such experiments, only to have to leave, half-way through our entrées, whisking our inconsolable companion out the door before it was slammed behind us. Now I think I can say with some confidence that those days are behind us ... at least until he becomes a toddler. Colin has finally reached the stage where he can sit up, almost without support, and can keep himself occupied with any object that comes within his grasp -- so long as his parents are also within arm's reach, in case he needs a quick cuddle.

Our trial run was Saturday night, when, after a day spent shoe-shopping for the entire family, we stopped for emergency sustenance at the Boston Pizza at the mall. (Oddly enough, I never recall there being such a thing as "Boston Pizza" during the six years I lived in Boston. I also never recall that pizza was one of culinary delights Bostonians were particularly good at.) So far so good.

Then today, after Colin was such a trooper at his vaccinations, and I was through with work at a mere 3:30 in the afternoon, I thought we could all use a treat. So we headed to this upscale strip mall (an oxymoron, I know) that houses Deluxe Burger, a super-trendy burger-bar that we used to frequent back when it was no big deal to wait in line for an hour get a seat at a super-trendy burger-bar. However, in the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday, there was no wait -- and no other customers really -- so we thought we'd give it a try.

Sure enough, Colin was golden. He didn't make a peep and charmed the pants off our waitress with his quiet good looks. "What a great smile and cute dimple!" she said. "I don't normally like babies, but this one sure is cute." (She earned every penny of that 50-percent tip, I tell you.) And in sophisticated, European style, Kevin and I sat there enjoying our Belgian beers, our greasy fries (with mayonnaise, thank you!), and discussing the latest articles we'd read in The New Yorker and the NYTimes magazine. We were too cool for words, so all I have to say is "Merci beaucoup, baby!"

Can-O-Worms

It’s getting pretty earthy over here at the Little Blue House. Last night I finally got around to potting a dozen herb seedlings, which I’d been germinating under the sink for the past few weeks, and then this morning, I potted over 1,000 red wiggler earthworms. You see, for Valentine’s Day this year Kevin received the nifty “Can-O-Worms” composting kit from All Things Organic. (Really, I was the one who wanted the earthworms, but as they say: “The couple that shares together stays together…”)

Why earthworms for Valentine’s? Well, other than the fact that those little red wigglers are pretty sexy, I wanted to have a steady supply of rich compost “tea” in time for Spring planting, which, according to the Farmer’s Almanac, will be sometime in June. So, over the next few months, as the worms digest our kitchen scraps, they’ll produce castings, or worm manure, which is an extremely rich organic fertilizer. And by fussing over my worms a little every day, I hope to satisfy my itching green thumb. When there’s two feet of snow on the ground and the temperature hovers around –15, in-home worm-composting is the only way I can play in the dirt.

Vermiculture was also the next step on my three-step plan to turning the Little Blue House into an experimental city farm. My hope is to create a small, organic – though hardly self-sustaining – life cycle, right in my own back yard. It goes like this: I grow organic vegetables in the backyard for us to eat. I feed the leftover wastes to our worms who produce worm compost, which I use as an organic fertilizer to improve our vegetables. Wash, rinse and repeat! (At some point I’d like to add a couple of chickens to the mix. Chicken pellets are supposedly a gourmet worm fattener, and the occasional worm in a chicken’s diet is supposed to greatly improve the quality of their eggs – but that’s for another post.)

Most of all I’ve just been extremely distressed by the amount of trash we’ve produced since moving to Canada – a 20-gallon bag per week! In Germany, Kevin and I produced less than one 10-liter bag of trash per week, about the size of one of those little bathroom trash bags. Everything else was recycled, including kitchen wastes. Although I bitched and moaned at first about having to separate our trash 20-different ways according to the overly wordy and abstruse German system, once I got the hang of it, it was addictive. It became a little game to see how little trash we could produce each week. Unfortunately, Alberta doesn’t have bio-recycling. (And if my neighbors’ trash is any indication, they don’t recycle much of anything in these parts.)

Since moving here, it’s pained me to watch all those wonderful vegetable scraps going to waste, but now I can use our egg shells, our vegetable peels, our coffee grounds – even those little tufts of cat hair that are starting to accumulate under the bed – and serve up a gourmet meal to our new basement-dwellers. In fact, with 1,000 new mouths to feed – as many as 15,000 after a few years – I may have trouble keeping up. But I guess it's too late to put the lid back on this can-o-worms.

To see how one sets up a basement worm-composting system (with a little help from our friends) check out the slideshow below:

"So this is Christmas ..."

I was sorry that we didn’t stay in Germany for the Christmas holidays. I had long wanted to see how Christmas, or Weihnachten, is celebrated in its country of origin. The Tennenbaum, the Yule log, the Weihnachtsman (a.k.a. Santa Claus), they’re all German inventions, and though Germany has not been unaffected by the American commercialization of Christmas, its Christmas traditions still have that simple, rustic, and almost Dickensian feel.

Christmas in Germany seems to be all about family, High Mass, Lebkuchen (gingerbread) and Gluhwein (mulled wine). My German friends – my contemporaries – tell me of Christmas Eve nights, coming home from Mass to find the Tennenbaum decorated for the very first time, all aglow with little candles and Christmas Eve goose cooling on the table. “God bless us, every one,” you can almost hear the littlest of them say.

Although I didn’t stay for Christmas proper, I saw the next best thing: the famous German Weihnachtsmarkt. From about the first of December right up until Christmas Eve, the market square of every German town is given over to the Christmas markets. Almost over night, dozens of rustic huts sprout up in neat little rows in order to sell candles and baubles, soaps and spices, and other things nobody needs.

At the Weihnachtsmarkt in Stuttgart, the merchants seemed as competitive in decorating their huts as in hawking their wares. Their roofs practically sagged under the weight of all the evergreen, the veritable forests of fir trees, the positive herds of deer. No multi-colored strings of blinking lights or giant inflatable Santa Clauses for these guys. Anything not au naturale would have seemed kitschy, no doubt.

I was enchanted. There is something magical about all the green and red during the coldest, grayest months of the year. December in Germany is particularly depressing. It rains nearly every day, and the sun refuses to make an appearance for weeks on end. But just as I was feeling I might throw myself off the Festung or drown myself in the Main, the city lit up with that warm holiday glow. I got the sense the most of these Christmas traditions arose out of some communal need to combat rampant melancholia.

So, despite the freezing rain, I visited the Würzburg Weihnachtsmarkt nearly every day. I’d wander through the stalls, fingering the brightly embroidered linens or gazing into mercury glass balls, not buying any, of course, just soaking up all that color and texture and light. I also soaked up enough hot, tangy Gluhwein and sugared almonds that you could can and preserve me, but that’s another thing altogether. Needless to say, these cheery marketplaces got me through my last weeks in Germany, until I could get home to my own family and our own Christmas traditions.

Remainders: Oktoberfest, Pt. II

One day’s hard at partying at Oktoberfest just wasn’t enough for our intrepid group. At the crack of dawn the very next day, we went back for more, having lost only member of the party. (Jesse decided to leave early for Vienna.) And this time, Oktoberfest greeted us like returning heroes. We were able to waltz right into the Augustiner tent – the most popular tent on the Wiesn – and have our pick of tables. Believe it or not, the Theresienwiese at 9:00 am on the last day of Oktoberfest is a pretty quite place. The throngs of people who threatened to stampede the tents on Saturday were all gone by Sunday. No doubt they were nursing their hangovers or maybe even at church!

We should have been thrilled, but we were feeling a little the worse for wear, I guess. It’s hard to work up much of an appetite for beer first thing in the morning, and they don’t serve breakfast in the beerhalls, even though they do open at nine. Instead, we all ordered the obligatory round of beer and the world-famous Oktoberfest Wiesn-Hendl, or half a roast chicken. (Literally “half” a chicken: Each bird was cut vertically, straight down the middle, as if by a rotary saw.) According to Oktoberfest lore, every year they serve 500,000 chickens and more than 100 whole roast oxen. But we didn’t attempt the oxen, fearing what they might bring to our table.

By noon, though, things finally started picking up. At 11:00, the band struck up the Volkmusik, and the “stars” began crawling out of the woodworks. Rodney Dangerfield sat at the table to our right, and Fabio, with the torso that graced so many check-out counter romance novels, sat at the table on our left – and if not them, then their Doppelgängers. Our waitress even bore a striking resemblance to Kathy Griffith – and was about as charming.

It was exactly as I hope Oktoberfest would be, all Bier and Brezln, Dirndl-clad women and dapper men with extravagant Schnurrbarts (mustaches). There were even a few things I didn’t expect, such as all the little children in Lederhosen, dancing on the tables, and drinking what appeared to be bottles of beer! (Upon closer inspection they proved to be bottles of lemonade.)Before long, every seat in the house was filled, and we were even forced to share our table with a quartet of young people from Oberbayern. I thought the boys might object, but I guess once they saw the buxom blonde Bavarian beauties they would be sharing a table with, they moved over – but not too far over.

We actually had a great time spending the afternoon with the locals. They taught us Bavarian drinking songs, and we got them to join us in a round of “Country Roads.” (I swear, there is just something about Germans and that song!) With every new round of beer, we joined our Maßkrugs together with a loud “Prost!” and cemented our inter-cultural friendship. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to practice my German … at least until the topic turned to politics and the baby-faced Bavarian next to me turned out to be a raging racist. Our conversation went downhill something like this (translated from the German):

Me: What a wonderful day! Isn’t this just wonderful?

Him: Yes, but it’s such a shame. We Germans aren’t allowed to be proud of our heritage.

Me: What do you mean? What could be more German than Oktoberfest, and look around you at how happy and proud all these people are.

Him: You don’t understand. You Americans are allowed to be proud even through you go around the world starting wars and causing all kinds of trouble. But we Germans – we are never allowed to be proud to be German. And do you know why? It’s because we are not “rein.” Do you know what “rein” means?

Me: Yes, I know this word. (It means “clean” or “pure” in English.)

Him: The people living in Germany today – they are not proud to be German because they are not German. They are Turkish or African or Polish, and they are proud to be Turks and Africans and Poles. And so we Germans cannot be proud because we are not “rein.”

The above really requires no comment. Its uncomfortable historic connotations are self-evident. But let me just say that I think such attitudes are really rare here in Germany. This was the only time in my entire year here that I have heard anything remotely like this. However, as a Southern with my own historical cultural baggage, I know that even in societies where racist attitudes have been heavily “reformed” over generations, there are always a few holdouts. At least that’s what I hope this was – a one-off, a throwback—because I’ve really grown to like the Bavarians, and I hate to think of them as holding such poisonous views just as I hate to think of Southerners having them.

Needless to say, after this vitriolic explosion, I kinda lost my taste for Bavarian culture. And anyway, it was getting late. We all had to be on our trains back home by 5:00 pm. So I rounded up my fellow soldiers, and began leading the long march homeward. Unfortunately, we had a little incident on the way back. Without going into details, Dan #2 accidentally broke the sunglasses of a young German fellow who got a little too close during the crush to get out of the Theresienwiese. The offended party and his rather large buddy threatened to cause some serious trouble for us, but by employing deft diplomacy and my hard-won German skills I managed bring about a temporary détente – at least long enough for us to make a break for it and high-tail it onto our various trains.

And so the sun set on our second and final day at Oktoberfest. I left the Paul, Jeff and the Dan’s at the Hauptbahnhof – they were headed to for another week in Prague – and I headed back home, alone. Unlike on recent train trips, there were no revelers headed in the direction of Würzburg, so I could lean back in my seat and finally get some much-needed sleep. I’m glad I went to Oktoberfest. I had a great time hanging out with my friends again, and partying like it was going out of style. But now that I’ve scratched that off my “life list,” I think I agree with my German friends. I don’t feel the need to go back. It was a little too much German culture.


For the others’ version of events, see Jeff’s pictures here and Dan #2’s pictures here.

Remainders: Oktoberfest, Pt. I

I few months back – October to be exact – I finally did what all of my German friends and colleague warned me not to do: I went to the Münchener Oktoberfest. My German school friends who went last year all vowed never to go again. My teacher warned me about the inevitable bar brawls, and a friend who lives in Munich actually witnessed one, broke it up, and handed the culprits over to the police – before vowing never to go again.

Still, I don’t think one can live in Bavaria for a year and resist the pull of such a world-famous event. Even far-flung friends of mine succumbed to its draw. Jesse timed his visit to coincide with it. Jeff, Dan #1 and Dan #2 came over from Boston for it. And Paul took the night train over from Prague. (I like to pretend they were all coming to Germany to see me, but I guess I know better.) Anyway, I figured with five strapping lads escorting me to the Theresienwiese, I would be all right. Little did anyone suspect that in the end it would be yours truly who saved the boys from angry mobs. But, I’ll get to that later.

Just getting there nearly proved too much of a challenge for us at first. We had decided to take the 4:00 am train to München – in order to beat the crowds, you see – only to find that we had booked a ride on the Oktoberfest Express. Pimply-faced youths in traditional Dirndls and Lederhosen seemed to have come to the train station straight from the diskos, and they brought the party with them. It was standing room only on our train, and everyone had a case or two of beer, which they emptied over the course of the 5-hour journey while singing folk tunes till they were hoarse. And to think, I brought along a pillow, so that I might catch a few Z’s! Too tired to join in the fun, Jesse, Jeff, Dan #1 and I stared at each other through puffy, sleep-encrusted eyes and cursed the energy of the young.

By the time we reached München, though, even we were raring to go. We met up with Paul and Dan #2 and followed the exodus of people from the train station to the fairgrounds. It was truly a migration of Biblical proportions, but we didn’t need a prophet to show us the way to the Promised Land.

However, the popularity of Oktoberfest is nearly its downfall. There are roller coasters, carnival rides, and games of chance, but the real attractions are the beerhalls, dozens of massive tents run by each of the major Munich breweries: Augustiner, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, etc. Each tent can seat thousands, but as we quickly discovered, they filled up within minutes of opening. We arrived at a quarter past nine and were turned away at every single door. Finally I managed to sweet talk our way into Ochsenbraterei – at last my German skills were useful for something! – but even though we were “in” we couldn’t get a table, and without a table you can’t get served.

Discouraged but not defeated, we moved on to “Oktoberfest Plan B” and headed across town to the original Hofbräuhaus. As I mentioned before, every day is like Oktoberfest at the Hofbräuhaus, with a full Oompah band, steaming Weißwürste, and never-ending rounds of Pilsner, Hefeweißbier and Dunkelweißbier. You could have fooled us that we weren’t at the “real” Oktoberfest – especially after the third or fourth Maß!

Later in the afternoon, we moved the party over to Chinesiches Pagoda in the Englisher Garten for giant pretzels and even more beer. I considered that I was doing my sex proud by matching the boys one-for-one with the five liters of beer we drank that day. Only later Jeff informed me that they hadn’t wanted me to feel like a lightweight, so they had been taking drinks from my glass whenever my back was turned. Everyone except Jesse, that is. Jesse was doing no team proud that day. But what happens at Oktoberfest, stays at Oktoberfest …

At about 6:00 pm we threw in the towel and took the train to Augsburg, where we had rented hotel rooms for the night. Oktoberfest is such a big tourist attraction – some 6.4 million people attended the two-week event this year – that every hotel room in München had been sold out for months, and we were forced to overnight some 100 km away. But we weren’t the only ones, the train to Augsburg was packed full-to-bursting with fellow Oktoberfest revelers.

So, we ended the day much the way we began it: positively swaying under the combined excitement of a couple thousand people. The second-class cabins became so overcrowded that the normally law-abiding Germans ignored the strict seating rules and moved the party into the first-class. The conductors gave up trying to chase us out. And this time, the boys and I were wide awake, partying with the best of them.

Next: Oktoberfest, Part II …

The Fairy Tale Castle

Well, I guess we can go home now: Kevin and I have finally visited Neuschwanstein, the fairytale castle in southern Bavaria, just at the foot of the Alps. It’s apparently Germany’s “most-photographed” castle, hosting about 1.3 million visitors a year – as many as 6,000 per day in the summer. Some Indian friends of ours, also studying here this year on a Humboldt Fellowship, visited Neuschwanstein as soon as they arrived in Germany, and a couple of weeks ago, just before they went home, they visited Neuschwanstein again. So, Kevin and I thought that before we returned to North America we should probably go see Neuschwanstein, too. And last week, we finally did.

Ask any tourist in Germany, and he’ll probably tell you that Neuschwanstein is the most “German” of all German castles. Yet it was actually built in the late 19th century as an idealized version of a medieval German castle and had no parallel in real life. Conceived by the King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, or “Crazy King Ludwig,” as he is often called, it was intended as a refuge from the increasingly tumultuous affairs of state as well as an architectural realization of Wagnerian operas, such as Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde.

Ludwig was extremely fond of Wagner and became his chief patron – or his chief con, as others would have it. At one point, members of Ludwig’s own court had Wagner run out of the country in order to put an end to his money grubbing ways, but Ludwig merely doubled his annual financial support of the composer. Wagner, in return, patronized Ludwig’s artistic aspirations and is said to have called him Parcifal, after the innocent and brave seeker of the Holy Grail, from his opera of the same name.

Ludwig (right) and Parcifal (left).

I recently came across an English version of the Parcifal saga, and Wagner’s analogy was only too apt. The young knight Parcifal, whose innocence bordered on cluelessness, was rent from his mother’s bosom and forced to claim his birthright as the keeper of the Holy Grail; Ludwig himself ascended throne at the tender age of 18, after the sudden death of his father, Maximillian. After many adventures Parcifal finally gets the Grail, thereby redeeming his uncle, who’d been forced to guard the cup as atonement for his sins. Ludwig’s own uncle, the king of Prussia, invaded and conquered Bavaria just two years after Ludwig ascended the throne, and no doubt he thought his uncle had some atoning to do. For the rest of his life, the monarch was nothing more than a vassal of Prussia. Ludwig spent the rest of his life on a quest to retrieve his lost title – the Holy Grail, if you will. Since he never again enjoyed absolute control over his own kingdom, he created a make-believe world instead, and a fairytale castle high up on a hill where he could act out his fantasies as both knight and king.

In 1885, though, the real world came crashing down around him. The Bavarian royal treasury was thoroughly bankrupt, and foreign creditors threatened to freeze the family’s reamaining assets. Yet the Ludwig continued spending exorbitant sums on the construction of Neuschwanstein and became increasingly withdrawn. (Since 1875 he’d slept during the day and woke only at night.) Finally in 1866, the royal family had him declared insane, stripped him of his crown, and interned him in Berg Palace, southeast of Munich. Three days later, he was found dead in the shallow waters of Lake Starnberg, along with the unlucky psychiatrist who had him committed. No official explanation has ever been given for his death, and poor Ludwig never even got to the finished result. Construction wasn’t completed until 1891. The fairytale was over before the opening credits.

I must confess, though, that I found the castle itself much less interesting than the story of its creation. Its limestone façade lacked any trace of soot or patina – it just looked too new, like some theme park version of a castle. In fact, Neuschwanstein was the model for Cinderella’s castle, the centerpiece of Disney World. I actually wonder how many times Walt Disney visited Neuschwanstein before planning his own fairytale theme park. I imagine him walking through its outlandish interiors and thinking, “Yeah, this is exactly what we need in America,” and then going home to his sketchbook and copying it out brick for brick. There’s this particular hallway in Ludwig’s castle that has been decorated to look like cave of Venus, from the opera Tannhäuser, complete with plaster stalactites, and I swear to God, I’ve toured the same cave at Disney World, only it there it’s the workplace of the Seven Dwarves.

My main complaint, however, was the other tourists: pushy foreigners who don’t speak a word of German, or even English, and have no concept of queuing. Lord, I detest the pleebs! But at least we didn’t have to deal with 6,000 of them, the tourist season having ended a few weeks ago. On the crystal-clear September day we visited, there were only about 3,000 other visitors.

Still, the view from the Schloss was breathtaking, just as Ludwig himself described it in a letter to Wagner:

“[T]he location is one of the most beautiful to be found, holy and unapproachable, a worthy temple for the divine friend who has brought salvation and true blessing to the world. … [T]hey will take revenge, the desecrated gods, and come to live with Us on the lofty heights, breathing the air of heaven.”

I took the above shot from the Marienbrücke, a narrow, wooden bridge that’s suspended several hundred feet above the Pollät Gorge, and I can say that from those “lofty heights” the air was, indeed, crystal clear (although Kevin thought it was going to make him sick). I even thought I saw a few of those “desecrated angles” circling overhead that day, but maybe they were just paragliders.

But my favorite moment all day was the walk down the mountain, along a rocky trail that is avoided by most tourists. The woods were quiet and peaceful, only a smattering of sunlight broke through the tall canopy to reach the leafy carpet below. And I thought how nice it would be if all of Neuschwanstein could be this secluded, even if that meant that tickets would cost thousands of dollars, putting out of reach of all but a rare few – even yours truly. Maybe I’d save up all my money so that Kevin and I could visit it just once in our lives. Ascending the mountain on horseback and touring the castle alone with your lover – now that would be the way to see Neuschwanstein. Only in fairy tales, I guess.


A photochrome print of Neuschwanstein from the 1890s.

Equivalents

From the 1920s to the 1930s, the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz took pictures of clouds compusively. A dozen or so of these images became part of his famous Equivalent series, the culmination of his artistic endeavors and aesthetic ideals. We had several of these prints in the museum where I used to work, and I was surprised to learn that they were some of the most valuable of the museum’s extensive photography collection. Yet shuffling through them, whenever I was working in the “Se-Su” box, I was always completely uninspired. The images were a little grainy, the paper was as thin as tissue paper, and anyway the subject matter seemed cliché and a little embarrassing – like all those inspirational photographs of clouds and sunsets that accompany biblical quotations.

Now suddenly, after several months in Germany, I find myself taking pictures of clouds, compulsively. Fluffy behemoths of cumulonimbus and lost little lambs of altocumulus, mostly. And unlike Stieglitz, I can capture, with my little Leica digital camera, their stunning array of colors: bone china, dove gray, sand dune, rose petal, etc. They’re just not like American clouds at all – at least not the fleecy gray blanket of stratus that forever hangs over Boston. I also wonder if there’s not some scientific explanation – like a difference in weather patterns – that produces qualitatively different clouds on the Continent than in North America.

I feel like I never saw clouds before until I saw European clouds. I know there must have been clouds in my childhood in Arkansas, but I can’t actually remember any. It’s like that retrospective amnesia that Nabokov described in his autobiography Speak, Memory regarding his own famous obsession with Lepidoptera. He remembers with striking detail discovering his first butterfly, a yellow Swallowtail, at the age of seven, but preceding that date, “I fail to make out one wing, one wing beat, one azure flash, one moth-gemmed flower, as if an evil spell had been cast on the Adriatic coast making all its ‘leps’ … invisible.”


I don’t want to take this theme too far, though. I’m not going to switch careers and become a meteorologist. And my photographs of clouds will not be making it into any museums. I’m not trying to make art here, just record a moment in time during my European odyssey when I looked up at the sky and saw something wonderful, something that inspired a particular feeling – but not some a treacly come-to-Jesus moment. I have since discovered that that’s actually what Stieglitz was after. His clouds were meant to be the “equivalent” to a particular feeling, be it a memory of a beloved woman, a childish enthusiasm, or what have you, and he hoped that by using an abstract yet dramatic subject matter, his photographs could convey that exact feeling without setting off a whole bunch on unrelated associations, as they would if they depicted a particular woman or a particular child.

Coincidentally, in researching Stieglitz this morning, I learned that though he is classified as an American photographer, he was actually of German descent and spent more than a decade in Germany during his late teens and early twenties. I now wonder if maybe all those cloud pictures he made toward the end of his life weren’t also some vain attempt to recall the continental clouds of his youth – there being no such American equivalent.

Fall comes to Franconia

Although I harbored doubt all week, today it was unmistakable: Fall is fully here. At first I thought it was merely the start of the commercial Fall, that artificial season heralded in by the changing of the department store windows rather than by the changing of the leaves. But this year the two seem to have synchronized: The stores rolled out their inventories of warm clothing just as one started to think about needing them.

Similarly, the parks along the Main are now empty of their sunbathing lovers, and there are no more naked children splashing around with the geese on the riverbanks near Randersacker. It’s not yet too cold to go in the water, but mentally the time for it has passed. The thermometer hovers between 17 and 20 degrees Celsius (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit), which, by the Boston standard to which I’ve become accustomed, is still positively balmy, but the Franconians are a Southern people, and like Southern people the world over, they bundle up in sweaters and scarves at the first hint of cooler temperatures.

The transformation to the countryside has been a clearer sign that Fall is here, farmers knowing more about the changing of the seasons than anyone else, I guess. In just the last week all the corn has been harvested, the fields tilled, and every last apple has been plucked from the trees. Pumpkins and squash have replaced the Zwetchgen (small, oval-shaped plums) at the roadside produce stands. And in Kleinen Oechsenfurt today, the villagers were already testing out their fireplaces.

There’s something about the smell of burning leaves and pine logs that takes me back to the autumns of my childhood in Warren, Arkansas. I guess it’s because in the years since I’ve never lived someplace where people had fireplaces or where burning leaves in your backyard was allowed. One whiff of that pungent peppery scent and I felt the urge to don a calico dress and harvest something, like in all those make-believe games of “Pioneer” that my friends and I used to play when we were girls and only in the Autumn. And fittingly, I heard a marching band playing today in Winterhausen – a sound that I always associate with Fall and football. I don’t suppose I’ve heard a marching band in a decade or picked up a French horn in as many years. I should.

Fall in the country is just so much more intense than Fall in the city. In Boston I was rarely affected by the change in the seasons. There was so little Nature there to affect, that I rarely even noticed until a heat wave made my apartment uninhabitable or a Nor’easter covered the roads with four feet of snow. When I left Boston last year for Würzburg, I was so worried about all the things in the city that I would miss: museums, concerts, restaurants, shopping. It hadn’t even occurred to me that living in the city, I lacked anything from the country, like brilliant seasons. Likewise, when Kevin and I first found out that we’d be moving to Alberta, I was a little concerned. Although we’d be living in a city, Edmonton is an oasis of civilization in a vast wilderness more rural than anywhere I’ve ever known. However, I’m now beginning to think that it will have its own compensations and it may even grow to be a way of life I prefer.

Bike Riding in Bavaria

I used to have a bike back in Boston. I bought it because I thought it would make my commute to work more enjoyable. After about a month, I realized that cycling in the city is no fun at all: The rush hour exhaust along Harvard Ave. is enough to make you gag and pass out; and the other drivers are so incredibly pushy and self-absorbed that it’s really only a matter of time before one of them knocks you off the road.

Cycling in Europe is a whole other matter, as I’ve already mentioned, but it wasn’t until this summer that I made it part of my own daily routine. Now it’s my passion. A few months ago, Kevin’s boss gave me his wife’s old bike. He was getting her a new one for her birthday and needed someone to take the “old one” off his hands. Turns out, the old bike was a nearly new, purple-violet Conway city bike without a speck of rust on it. It is by far the nicest bike I have ever owned. In part because I wanted to make good use of such a nice gift, and in part because there is nothing to do in Bavaria on Sundays, I started taking long Sunday rides on my new bike. They changed my whole perspective on Sundays and Germany.

Sundays in Bavaria had long been a tedious time for me. By law all shops are closed. Only churches, museums and a few cafés are allowed to stay open. But I don’t go to church here, I’ve seen all the museums a dozen times, and there are only so many hours you can sit in a café sipping espresso before you get a little restless. In retrospect, I’m kinda surprised how long it took me to figure out how to make good use of my “day of rest.”

On previous trips to Corsica and Jamaica, I learned pretty quickly that if you want to get along in a foreign culture, you have to adjust your schedule to fit the local customs. Taking a siesta from 11 to 2 in Corsica, for instance. Or in Jamaica, using the hours between 6 and 9 am for all major activities. Even though you’re on vacation, it’s just too hot to do anything later in the day. This must seems pretty obvious. “When in Rome …” right? But as an American and a young adult, I guess I had one or two things of such clear-eyed cultural understanding. It took six months before I began noticing the Sunday exodus from town to the country of whole families and gangs of retirees (the latter wear matching “team” T-shirts) – an all of them traveling by bike. And another month or so had passed before I finally joined them.

The Main River, which bisects Würzburg, runs almost the width of Bavaria, and boasts some of the prettiest bike paths in all Germany – hundreds of kilometers of them. Vineyards, orchards, wheat- and cornfields, and hundreds of tiny walled villages that only appear on the most detailed maps: Sommerhausen, Winterhausen, Margetshöchheim, Veitschöchheim. Over a number of Sundays I began exploring them all, without a map, just riding the Mainradweg first in one direction and then the other. There’s something so satisfying about finding your way to a new city without a map, and once you’ve “discovered” a place, it becomes part of your permanent lexicon, and you feel a sense of ownership for its church steeples and town squares in a way that you just don’t if you’re plopped into a town by car or train.

Lately, with the help of my friend Sergey, a Russian student from my German class, I’ve been expanding my territory. Sergey is a hard-core cyclist, and within months of his arrival in Germany, he’d already ridden the length of the Main and all along the northwest coast of Germany to see the primeval forests and chalk cliffs of Rügen. A daytrip covering 80 kilometers (or about 50 miles) of mountainous terrain is nothing for Sergey. But I must confess, it was a first for me.

One Sunday in August, we biked South from Würzburg, over the steep mountains and valleys of Höchberg (literally, “the high mountain”), and then through miles and miles of the prettiest little farmlands you’ve ever seen, right up to the old Gothic city of Tauberbischofheim – and then back home again. It was seven hours of back-braking riding, and it took me two or three days to recover. But once I did, it’s like I’d been initiated – or rather infected. I’ve caught the biking bug. No destination seemed too far nor any road too treacherous. I’ve been back to Tauberbischofheim several times since then – by myself – and now I’m planning even farther journeys to Rothenberg ob der Tauber and Bamberg.

I’ve heard that exercise can become addictive, that intense physical energy releases adrenalin and endorphins that create a “high,” comparable to drugs or sex; however, I had never thought so myself. Jogging just leaves me with shin splints and a painful stitch in my side. I am completely un-athletic. Last summer I spent a weekend at the New Hampshire lake house of a friend of a friend. When I arrived, the patriarch of the family, a 65-year-old lawyer, asked me, “So, Sarah, what sports do you do?” I had to confess that I didn’t do any sports. This came as a shock and a disappointment. “Well, by the end of this weekend, we’ll having you doing something!” he promised. Every member of that family, from the grandparents to the 30-year-old daughter who’d just had a baby, were fanatic about sport and exercise. In one day alone, I tallied that they’d run 20 miles, bike another 30, and then take a hour-long swim in the lake. Afterwards, they were still as geared up as sports fans on game day. But the enthusiasm wasn’t catching. I spent the weekend in the hot tub.

But now, I understand at least part of the appeal. I still hate running and my swimming is pretty pathetic, but I just can’t get enough of cycling. I don’t know so much if it’s the endorphins or rather that spicy scent of manure and river grass that hits your nostrils as soon as you leave the city limits, but it does feel like a “high.” I now go cycling almost every day, not just on Sundays, and a day without it is a very bad day indeed.

Here are a few photos taken on various bike rides in recent months. Sergey is the tall, lanky fellow posing by the sunflowers.

Food on the Brain

I have food on the brain these days. It’s not that I’m hungry, or that I’m on a cooking binge, it’s really more an imaginary food binge: creating imaginary meals or restaurant menus or kitchen gardens, just thinking about growing and cooking nice food. I must have way too much time on my hands. I blame it on the incessant rain that’s ruining my summer break. But maybe I should blame it on Michael Pollan, who’s got me thinking way too much about food and food politics.

I’ve just finished reading Pollan’s excellent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It’s basically a journalist’s look into what goes into the growing, processing, and cooking of four traditional American meals. The first is a McDonald’s hamburger meal; the second, “industrial organic” chicken and vegetables bought from a Whole Foods outlet; the third, the same meal but bought from a “beyond organic” farmer in the Shenandoah Valley; and the fourth, wild game and fruit hunted and scavenged by the author himself in the Pacific Northwest. Pollan doesn’t just take you into the Iowa corn field or the South Dakota feed lot and to show you what went into that hamburger. He explains how the past hundred years of scientific research, farm subsidy and petrol dependency have radically altered the way we eat -- and not necessarily to our benefit.

Although I’ve long been interested in where my food comes from and how to cook seasonably and locally, this book has me thinking much more seriously about sustainable agriculture. A more holistic approach to food just makes sense, environmentally, humanely, nutritionally – even aesthetically. “Eat Your View” is a popular bumper sticker here in Europe. It means “Eat locally because local farms make life more beautiful.” And it’s true. The German countryside is breathtaking, with rolling patchwork fields of rapes and wheat and vineyards. I’ve never seen countryside like this in America. On the contrary, were I ever to visit a giant American agro-business, I’m sure the view would turn my stomach.

Anyway, I suspect this book will be a huge hit when it’s finally translated into German. The German’s are obsessed with food, the more organic and artisanal the better.(Remember the 8,50-euro organic chicken breasts?) People aren’t afraid to pay the premium for better food. All supermarkets carry a large selection of organic foods – sometimes it’s the only produce you can find. And it’s mostly grown locally, not shipped in from South America or New Zealand. They don’t seem to mind that they can only buy what’s in season: asparagus in May, strawberries in June, plums in July. The farmers’ market here is bustling every other day of the week, 8 months of the year, not just on Saturdays during the summer as in America.

And this attitude isn’t just apparent at the grocery store. The local bookstores stock shelf after shelf of cookbooks, nutritional books, and food picture books (i.e. food porn). They have so many food-related books that they’ve had to divide and subdivide the categories beyond all reason. There’s a meat section, a poultry section, a fish section. There’s a section for Bavarian specialties and another for Franken specialties. (Würzburg is in the heart of Frankonia, which is part of Bavaria.)

Now, I’m no fan of German cuisine – I find it much too fatty and salty, and that’s coming from a Southerner! – but I will give them credit for caring about food. And it’s not just the yuppies and foodies. Here all sorts of people care about food, passionately. Kevin and I are inordinately food of a particular German cooking show called "Das Perfekte Dinner." Every week five new strangers compete for a 3,000-euro prize by taking turns cooking a three-course dinner for each other. Points are given for taste, presentation, originality, even décor. Kevin and I watch it almost every night while eating our own diners, which is rather unfortunate since our pastas and roast chickens always pale in comparison to their elaborate concoctions: palm-heart salad with chicory and fig, shrimp and pumpkin curry, and passion fruit mousse, etc. And these guys aren’t professionals. They’re a policeman from Hamburg, a salesman from Stuttgart, a student from Berlin.

Their knowledge and creativity in the kitchen make me realize how very meager my own skills are. Kevin is a much better cook than I am. He has an innate feel for creating simple, savory meals out of whatever we have on hand. I don’t dare attempt anything without a recipe, a special shopping trip, and at least an hour or two in the kitchen. I’ve spent the last few months just repeating a handful of simple meals until I can do them sans recipe: breaded pork (schnitzel), chicken curry, clam and anchovy spaghetti, coq au vin, etc. but I want to know more, and I want to learn to cook food that is seasonably appropriate, thoughtfully grown, and fresh fresh fresh. So I’m signing up for a series of culinary classes at the community college in Edmonton. I’ve pre-ordered my copy of Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food. And I’m deciding which model of worm composter I’ll get once we have a place of our own.

I’m almost so excited about all the things I’ll try when we get back to North America, that I’m neglecting poor Würzburg and the present. So, rather than sit around on my tush any longer, I’m heading down to the farmer’s market for fresh corn and fennel. And I’ll even fork over the 8,50 euro for the bio chicken breasts, because tonight, I’m making "Lemon Chicken Ballotine with ricotta and Fennel Confit." It’s all perfectly in season.

The Secret Garden

Today I discovered a secret garden. Although it’s probably no secret to anyone but me. Technically it’s part of the elaborate system of public parks that enclose the Altstadt in an emerald ring, where a medieval wall once stood. This particular garden is called the Landesgartenschau Park, and it lies in the shadow of the Festung Marienburg, surrounded by the only remaining section of the old hundred-foot-tall wall. But I live in the shadow of this wall, and until today I never imagines such a garden existed.

Before, whenever I stood on my balcony and looked up the hill, all I could see was the red and white castle standing sentinel over the city and a thick canopy of trees cascading down the side of its ramparts. I thought I knew this area fairly well. Now that the weather is nice and the sun stays out until 9 pm, Kevin and I walk up its winding paths nearly every evening. We inspect the progress of the grapes in the vineyards to the south and the community garden plots to the west, where garden gnomes breed like rabbits. There’s even a forest path, where enormous red-brown slugs weave silver webs over the mossy gray stones. But today we chose a different direction, and that path led us to the Landesgartenschau and the secret garden that lies at the heart of it.

The first clue that you’re off the beaten path is the small Swiss chalet that greets you as you round a wooded corner. Complete with half-timber walls and a real thatched roof, it looks like something straight out of the pages of a fairytale. To further disorient your sense of time and place, around the next corner lies a real log cabin surrounded by sycamores and red oak and dogwood. Further a field, there’s a traditional Scottish dry stone wall – straight off the highlands – and a Japanese garden filled with bonsai and koi and mock Shinto temples. It turns out these gardens are the source of the name Landesgartenschau, or exhibition garden, and they were built by Würzburg’s sister cities, Caen, France; Faribault, Minnesota; Dundee, Scotland; and Otsu, Japan, back in 1990, when the city played host to the Bavarian Garden Show. Although these gardens must once have been visited by thousands of Würzburgers and international guests, on the evening of our discovery, we were the only two souls exploring its secrets.

At the center of this curious menagerie is Würzburg’s own contribution: a walled rose garden, the likes of which I’d never seen. Roses of every variety were in high bloom and their perfume was a little dizzying. Enormous bumblebees were busy at work in one corner of the immense garden, and in another corner a well-fed tabby was keeping watch over a mossy fountain. And in the center, aviaries of brightly painted parrots and lovebirds where chirping away over a dinner of apples and Johannisbeeren. Stepping inside I couldn’t help feeling like Mary Lennox, entering her secret garden at the height of its season.

We stayed as long as the sun allowed and then walked the hundred yards back to our apartment. It’s hard to believe that all this time such a little Eden has been right in my own backyard. On earlier trips to far more grand cities like Heidelberg or Munich, I found myself wishing we lived there instead, where we could stroll down the Philosopher’s Way or through the park at Nymphenburg whenever we wanted. But even though this garden is much smaller, it’s all the better, precisely because it feels like a well-kept secret. I’ve plan to go back every evening for the remainder of my time here in Würzburg, even after the bloom has faded from the roses and the parrots return to their winter abode, wherever that may be. I’m not sure that there will be anything in Edmonton half so lovely. However, I should always remember that a secret garden could be waiting behind any turn.

In praise of old houses

On a recent lazy Sunday, while reading the paper and sipping a giant Milchkaffee in one of Heidelberg’s old tiled-lined bakeries, I came across an article on the Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen. His collection "Domestic Landscapes" consists of 250 photographs of the interiors of old homes throughout Europe and Japan, which document an ancient way of life that is quickly being wiped out by modernization. His photographs have often been compared to the paintings of Dutch masters like Vermeer for capturing that atmospheric quality produced by natural light coming from one window in one room. “It’s an old, antique light, the kind you rarely see anymore,” he told the New York Times. They also contain a range of color, from rich velvets to brilliant gemstones, that make this amateur photographer’s mouth water.

Teunissen’s childhood has played a central role in his work. Growing up in the Netherlands, he lived in an old house much like the ones he now photographs, but when he was seven, it was demolished to make way for a new construction. Upon entering the new house for the first time, he was suddenly struck by its lack of magic, and as a photographer, he’s been chasing after that lost magic ever since.

But Teunissen insists that it’s not just nostalgia of his childhood home that he’s after. “It also became clear that this had to do with a way of living, a way of building, a way of using the house, that I understood was disappearing,” he told the Times. He estimates that 90 percent of the homes he photographed over the past ten years have now been demolished. Now his goal is to photograph as many of these interiors as possible before they disappear for good.


It’s easy to dismiss Teunissen as a hopeless Romantic, pining for a picturesque, if rudimentary, way of life that in reality is no longer practical and that the residents themselves are often eager to cast off. One might also peg him as just another backward-looking European, tilting at windmills in the futile fight against globalization. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it’s not just that these interiors are aesthetically beautiful; their beauty is merely a by-product of a well-thought out design that works in harmony with its natural setting, instead of against it. It’s a form of “green living” that’s thoroughly modern.

Sitting in that Heidelberg bakery, I began to notice the brilliance of the blueprint: The overhead lights were kept off; the large east-facing windows provided full sun all morning long, the only time of day the store was open. Back at my hotel, the several-hundred-year-old Pension Jeske, I noticed how the thick stone floors and walls kept my room a pleasant 70 degrees, even though the mercury was pushing 100 outside. And of course that special quality of light was everywhere.


To me, these Old World houses are not only an aesthetic ideal but an ecological one, and I’m often frustrated by shoddy craftsmanship and poor design of modern American houses. Looking over my housing options in Alberta for next year has thrown me in the depths of despair: I see only institutional-looking high-rises and soulless suburban duplexes for rent. Having lived in hundred-year-old houses my entire life, I’m not sure how to find inspiration in these modern monstrosities. I have to stop myself from repeating that insufferable refrain: “Why can’t North America just be more like Europe?”

But of course, European homes are hundreds of years old – Würzburg celebrated its 1300th anniversary last year – so they were no more designed with this modern ideal in mind than North American homes were designed with an eye toward banality. I suspect that by inhabiting the same spaces for several centuries, Europeans have slowly refined a way of living both beautifully and sensibly. It’s like Darwin’s theory of evolution meets Better Homes and Gardens. I can only hope that in a few hundred years, we’ll get there, too, and then more American homes will be well-designed and will contain that special quality of light. In the meantime, I suppose I can always turn to Teunissen’s photographs when I need a little inspiration.

Check out Teunissen’s Web site to see his complete collection of photographs. And here are a few, much less beautiful, photographs of old European interiors that I’ve collected in the past few months: