Beat the Heat With a Buttermilk Treat - Melkmoes

Like much of the western part of the continent, we are experiencing a bit of a heatwave here in Edmonton and will be for about a week. Suddenly all the baking we've learned or mastered during the pandemic doesn't seem nearly as applicable. Any day where the oven is not used is a victory and even depressing the handle on the toaster brings unease and self-doubt, if not actual scorn and recrimination.

Grilling is the second-most preferable way to prepare meat after Skip the Dishes, and salads of all types have gone from side dishes to meal foundations without skipping a beat. I am grateful that in addition to these strategies, Audrey has another hot weather dish up her sleeve: a Dutch dish called melkmoes (pronounced MELK-moose).

Now, on the face of it, a cold buttermilk soup made with barley does not sound appealing in the least, but hear me out! It is actually quite good, and brilliantly refreshing on hot days such as these. In fact, calling it a soup is not wholly accurate; porridge might be more on the mark.

The base of the dish is cooked barley which can be made the day before and stored in the fridge. Excess barley can even be frozen for use in soups or in future batches of melkmoes (as Audrey did this time around).

The raisins are boiled (usually with the barley) in order to plump them up, and finely chopped green onions are added for flavour.

Once mixed in with the cooked and cooled barley, you add buttermilk (ignore the 1% on the recipe card; that's a typo) to the desired consistency and then chill it for two hours in a covered bowl in the fridge before eating. Audrey and her mum prefer the Beatrice brand of buttermilk and I have to admit that the Lucerne variety does seem to taste a tiny bit saltier, but your mileage may vary.

There are a number of variations in how to prepare and season melkmoes, but I am using Audrey's mum's recipe because it is dead simple. You can find other versions online (sometimes called kruudmoes).that include different seasonings such as turmeric. 

These dishes are typically sweetened to taste by the individual, either with sugar (our go-to), molasses or a Dutch syrup called stroop (like in stroopwafels). 

The sweetness of the sugar cuts out a lot of the intrinsic bitterness of the buttermilk but leaves enough to keep it refreshing on the palate, like the hops in an India Pale Ale. The creamy richness comes through but is not oppressively thick as one might expect. The barley keeps it hearty, the raisins add a little variation to the texture, and there's lunch in a bowl for you.

We typically end up with enough for a day or two of leftovers, although the expanding barley makes keeping back a bit of extra buttermilk a good idea. 

Most importantly, knowing that a light, cool and refreshing lunch is only a ladle away is a true blessing on days when the mercury gets to the far side of 30. 

Peanut Brothers and Jealous

This Fathers Day I am remembering my dad, of course, and thinking of my daughters who are now both in or on their way to northern Manitoba, but I am also thinking of brothers, mothers and peanut butter.

This is years ago - I'm thinking I was perhaps 15 or 16, but it might have been later as Audrey thinks she was there as well - standing in the driveway with an astonishing number of relations that have delightfully converged on our house in Leduc in some kind of impromptu family reunion. Most of Dad's surviving siblings are there: Garry (who passed from cancer six or 7 years later), Ena and Wendell, as well as Uncle Harold's widow Anna and Gramma Irene. Ena's husband Frank and Garry's wife Janice are in attendance too. 

There are stubby brown bottles of beer in most of the men's hands and several of the ladies' as well. Visiting vehicles and Frank's camperized van have cordoned off a section of our long driveway, and although the picnic table is full, hardly anyone is sitting at it, much of the open back yard is empty as well.

 A steady procession of food makes its way from the kitchen to the backyard and driveway. A proper sit-down meal has been foregone in favour of casual bite-sized nibbles - baskets of battered pickerel cooked from the catch that Wendell brought down from Thompson, trays of Janice's pizza buns and platters of sausage, cheese and crackers, as well as pickled eggs, beets and red onions.

Garry, Dad, Ena and Mum

My uncles have always been a gregarious bunch, eager to laugh and share stories - if I have any skill at storytelling is due to hearing it done so marvelously at gatherings like these. And apprenticing here too - when I was 10 or 11 I told jokes I had heard on comedy records to much of this same group in our basement for at least 15-20 minutes. I remember Garry wiping his eyes from laughter and Janice begging me to stop so she could catch her breath. 

This time around I am mostly listening, and there are peals of laughter coming from where Dad is holding court with his brothers. Somehow the words "peanut butter" drift out of this group and fall into Gramma Irene's ear. She is perhaps 80 by this point but still as sharp as a tack and as acerbic as a spoon of lemon juice.

Dad, Mum, Tara and Gramma Irene - 198?

She shoulders her way into the group and says, "What's so funny about peanut butter?"

This prompts another round of laughter from the brothers, but Gramma is unmoved. The brothers' eyes all turn to my father, either because he is the oldest, its his party, or because he was the one who said it and drew Gramma's attention.

Dad grinned at his mother and said, "Oh, we were just laughing at how much of a staple it was for us growing up."

"What's so funny about that?" Gramma demanded. "Lots of people eat peanut butter." This prompted another round of chuckles from the assembled siblings.

"Well, sure, " Dad agreed, "But Mum, I ate so much of it at home, I don't think I had it again until I was maybe 31!"

His brothers laughed in amusement and agreement, but Gramma was not to be outdone. When the chuckling died down, she looked Dad dead in the eye, and said levelly, "Funny that none of you ever got tired of beer."

Glory and Wendell and I in Hudson Bay SK,  2016

Dad's jaw dropped as Garry and Wendell howled with laughter, then he grinned and nodded, conceding the point to Gramma, who, now satisfied at having regained the upper hand, moved back over with the other ladies. From everyone not in earshot you could hear whispers of "What did she say?" or "Was that something about peanut butter?" or "Gramma Irene said what?!" The repartee quickly circulated among the assembly and cemented Gramma's reputation as someone not to be trifled with for at least another decade or so.

This is probably the purest memory of both my father and my extended family that I have, and I don't know why it has taken me this long to write it down.

The Hesitant Residents

With vaccines making their way around, it is tempting to think of things as returning to normal, and in many ways they are. Here in Alberta, more than 60 % of the population has received at least one vaccination, so patio dining and movie theatres have re-opened.  Restrictions on outdoor social gatherings have loosened, and when we reach 70% (less than 2% away!), we should be able to have visitors in our homes again.

And yet, vaccine hesitancy, particularly in outlying areas, has slowed down the take-up of the initial shot to the point where a cash-strapped Conservative government is now spending $3 million on lottery prizes to "incentivize" getting vaccinated. Well, after coughing up $1.3 billion betting on the Keystone XL pipeline, what another $3M, I guess.

While it is easy to point out how much higher the vaccination rates are in cities as opposed to rural areas, the cross-section of people choosing not to receive their vaccine covers all age groups and professions, including, strangely enough, health care workers.

The rationale ranges from the reasonable but unfounded ("I don't trust experimental vaccines"), to the paranoid ("I heard there are reproductive side effects") all the way down to conspiratorial ("You know that vaccine can be traced by satellite, right?") but in the end, the result is the same: people are slow getting the vaccination that will help us reach herd immunity for COVID and its variant cases.

Furthermore, some people resent the vaccinated for getting their shot so willingly. I have a co-worker who has now had multiple interactions with people teasing her, and she is unable to tell how serious they are. Her defusing tactic (which I think is brilliant) is to say, "Well, all the doctors are taking it, and if they all die, I don't know if I want to hang around to see what happens next." This usually generates a mirthful chuckle, or "fair enough!". but the fact that it is even up to debate leaves me a bit slackjawed.

On the plus side, this slowdown in uptake means that early adopters like myself and Audrey can get our second shots ahead of schedule - we are booked for ours this Thursday! 

Most of my 50+ friends will be two weeks in from their second dose by Canada Day - brilliant timing. But as nice as it is to be able to visit a friend's place for a barbecue and a brew, it will only feel normal. We seem to be a long ways off from actually being normal, I'm afraid, and I don't know if we will ever really get there.

Trainwiches by the Linear Foot

It was beastly hot in Edmonton on Thursday, 30 or 31 degrees, and I lamented that it was a poor day to be roasting a 25-pound turkey.

The workmates I was chatting with online were astonished. "Why would you do that?" asked one. "Dude, there is a reason Thanksgiving is in the fall..." opined another.

"I didn't really have a choice," I explained. "My Safeway is closing and turkeys were 89 cents a pound, and Glory had just mentioned the week before how much she loves the turkey and brie sandwiches I make every time we have turkey leftovers.

"And with her needing food for her 36-hour train trip to Churchill on Sunday..." well, no more really needed to be said at that point.

Three of us head out to Hudson Bay SK tomorrow, my third visit, but the first time dropping someone off. Glory will isolate while helping to prep the Tundra Inn hotel for tourists this summer, and Fenya will join her in two weeks' time. 

So! Road sandwiches are needed for tomorrow and trainwiches for the day after that. The turkey cooked up a treat in the Look bag (juicy and tender in 3.25 hours? fuhgeddaboutit) and I went shopping last night to grab the last few ingredients. There was a bit of bacon leftover from our pancake breakfast this morning so I baked that up and cooked up a bit of instant stuffing as well. All was in readiness to produce 3.25 linear feet of sandwiches.

After slicing the baguettes and laying them out, I butter them and add mayonnaise - regular for half the trainwiches and hickory mayo for the rest. The margarine is there to make the ticker parts of bread more palatable but it also serves as a bit of moisture barrier, since the majority of these sandwiches won't be eaten for another 36 hours or so. I had the chipotle aioli out too but abandoned it when I decided I couldn't be bothered with the labelling this would necessitate.

Next step was adding the lettuce (more moisture barrier and a bit of texture, plus, you know - yay veg) and a bit of bacon. I'm usually too lazy to cook bacon for these purposes, but in the past I have added some prosciutto in the same place.

This was followed by the addition of a touch of whole berry cranberry sauce. In the future I might put this directly on the bread, but I think this is better in terms of bread integrity anyhow. We have also used mango chutney at this stage and it is amazing. I also added stuffing to the roadwich baguette as I believe it adds a savoury note and makes the whole thing more festive, but Glory is not that into stuffing.

Then the turkey! Honestly, I might have liked wider pieces here, but you work with what you've got. I try to mix up the light and dark meat a little, but again, the breast meat is moist enough it works fine on its own. A little bit of smoked salt and fresh cracked black pepper and we are entering the home stretch.

The brie component is due in no small part to a bacon and brie baguette I had in London Heathrow in 2005. It was my first time having brie outside of a cheese plate or combined with anything other than an expensive cracker and it blew my mind. We have used other cheeses as well, but usually only if brie is not available. Double or triple crème is advisable due to its greater height and resulting improvement in bread coverage - once again, Costco to the rescue.

The assembled sandwich is an imposing edifice, but sadly, must be sliced to allow for easier transport and tidier consumption. This can be tricky, and keeping the various components from breaching their carbohydrate casing requires both a compression stage as well as something I call the Cthulhu grip when cutting. Care must be taken with one's fingers splayed across the anterior face of the sandwich, out of line-of-sight but helping to confine slippery pieces of turkey. This focus did prevent me from losing a digit, but did result in my slicing my thumb open like an imbecile while it rested in plain sight.

In most instances, I will remove the dry crusty ends of the baguettes, but this time they were spongy enough and I had allowed enough fillings to reach them that I left them intact. Quartering the sandwiches allows them to fit in a standard-size zippered baggie...with a little bit of additional compression.

And there you have it -  a yard-plus of turkey sandwiches, individually portioned and ready for travel. Five trainwiches go into a knotted grocery bag while a smaller one holds the three roadwiches for tomorrow.

Honestly, it is a bit more forethought and effort than hand food invented by an Earl to keep his fingers dry while gambling should ever require, but this sort of preparation makes road trips just a little bit easier to enjoy. And like I said, when it is a request from the offpsring you won't see for the rest of the summer, it is certainly worth it. And there is another bag of turkey in the freezer so I can do the same thing for Fenya in two weeks' time (and for her boyfriend who has graciously offered to drive her).

The last word from one of my workmates when discussing the sandwiches was "Stephen loves his girls more than I love, well, anybody," 

I know it's not true, but I am flattered that people recognize that important ingredient!

G&G XIV.IX - Fellowship Delayed But Never Denied

Gaming & Guinness, an annual gathering that my good friends and I have been doing since 2006, is not really a mini-convention. I mean, a lot of the trappings are there - the preparations, the scheduling, the swag, the games the socializing, et cetera - but there are typically only eight or nine of us in attendance, and we are not really interested in any sort of expansion (nothing personal! it is just hard enough to find tabletop games that accommodate nine players).

But whatever G&G is, it isn't anything we are willing to give up on, even in the face of a global pandemic. When we held G&G XIV.V last year at this time, we thought for certain we would be playing in person again by now. But late in 2020 we came to a grim acceptance of how unlikely this was to happen, so we postponed G&G XVI until September of 2021 and elected to try yet another weekend of virtual gaming in May to tide us over.

But I can't lie - it was hard to get excited about it.

The event had been on the books since January, but I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for it until maybe three or four days before. But then we got the schedule figured out and knew who would be running which game, and my eagerness returned as I had hoped. 

Unlike a proper convocation where everyone is in for every game, other commitments bobbed up so we only had all nine of us scheduled for two slots, and then an illness took us back down to eight. But Pete cooked up a pot of the amazing chili verde he usually does in-person and then delivered it to the Edmonton contingent. This inspired Jeff to buy a brisket on Friday, get up early to smoke it and (with a little help -cheers Earl!) deliver generous portions of meat across the city.

We did most of our gaming on Steam's Tabletop Simulator while chatting each other up in Google Meets. Pete and I got a game of Space Hulk in before five of us got together to play The Captain is Dead (and a first-time win for us in TTS - after getting wiped out super-quickly in our first game. In the evening we swung into Roll20 and Colin ran us through a brilliant D&D one-shot where we played goblins avenging ourselves on a village full of adventurers.

Wits & Wagers on Saturday afternoon, Circus Maximus that evening, a few games of Trivia Murder Party to fill in the gaps, and then Fortune & Glory to wrap things up Sunday afternoon.

And yeah, it is awkward remembering how to manipulate cards and dice in TTS, and there are always issues with sound or video or some sort of lag, and no, it isn't even a shadow of what we experience in person.

But it was a damn sight better than nothing, which was the only real alternative. 

We still got to roll some dice, just virtual ones. We still got to drink some Guinness Bombs together, just at a distance. But seeing the smiles, hearing the laughs, getting a good jibe in on someone or rolling a natural 20 in a clutch situation and hearing the exultation from friends you have had for decades?

That is a helluva decent way to spend any weekend, whatever you want to call it.

See you in September my brothers!

Back Out at the Outback

The parents of a dear friend of ours have a small sheep farm out east of Innisfail, and last June, they invited us to join them out there for a (physically distanced) weekend. Shari and Dave and their family stayed in their trailer, but Bonar and Sandra put us up in a lovely cabin he built close to their house. They call it The Outback (on account of it being, you know, out back) and it is one of the coziest and most delightful places I have ever stayed in. As we drove away, I regretted not having taken more pictures of it. 

So when they invited us back again for a similarly distanced Victoria Day weekend, I leapt at the opportunity to both get out of the city and to try to document this wonderful place.

The Outback is just behind the house at the Far Side, Bonar and Sandra's farm. The Far Side name came around because many of the structures built by the original owners were neither level nor square, causing Bonar to observe the place was "as crooked as a Far Side cartoon." 

He built the Outback as a place to house guests, and a significant portion of it was built with salvaged, scrounged, recovered or recycled materials. For instance, the siding was simply left over from an enormous 'holiday home' built in Canmore, and Bonar was asked if he might have any use for it as it was going to be thrown out otherwise.

The stones used around the door and fireplace backing were leftover from another building on a property adjacent to their own, and the flooring came from a high school gymnasium that was scheduled to be demolished.

The beds are homemade as well, using trees that were felled for utility access but never cleaned up. The step on the ladder going to the upper bunk is actually made from the rib-bone of a cow, and the rawhide lashings were likewise made by Bonar himself.

Although there is electricity in the Outback (necessary for CPAP users such as myself), there is no plumbing. There is a portable toilet on a raised platform for nighttime business (not shown, but similar to this), and a basin for washing up, using water dipped from a 5-gallon pail. There is also a kettle for warming the water on wintry days. The view from the bathroom window is delightfully pastoral, no matter which angle you approach it from.

For heat, there is a tidy wood-burning stove in the corner, but they have also added a radiant electric heater which does a marvellous job of warming the space in no time whatsoever. (Which is almost a pity as a wood fire would have made the Outback even cozier during Sunday night's rain!)

Callbacks to agricultural heritage can be found throughout the cabin, from the Calgary Stampede posters on the wall to the recreation of the family brand in the floorboards. 

My favourite farmland element though is probably the hinges made from horseshoes on the Dutch door.

As cool as the Outback is, however, the very best thing about it is not its rusticated charm, nor its secure coziness, nor its recycled moxie; it is the quality of the people in its immediate vicinity, and the privilege of spending a cool but pleasant weekend with them.

Pop Shopping Curiosities

Last Friday, when Glory and I drove out to Leduc, I saw an interesting store pop up on Google Maps - YEG Exotic Pop.

There was no time to go there that night, but on Saturday morning, Audrey, Glory and I tracked down this store after looking in wonder at the array of imported sodas on their website. Having just written about rock & rye a few weeks back, it seemed a natural enough thing to do.

We had a wonderful time but if you want to give them a visit yourself, you should be aware of a few things.

1) It is not a stand-alone store, it exists at the front end of a hemp shop. The store is clean, well lit, and the friendly staff person stayed masked at all times, but don't be surprised (e.g. like we were) at the fact that the majority of Smoking J's Hemp Shop is occupied with bongs, stash boxes and all the things that go with and in them. 

2) Importing sodas is expensive, so most of the single-serve bottles and cans rang up between $3-$4. It makes sense - after all, liquids are heavy, need to be shipped in a pressurized environment, and the majority of products are actually in glass bottles.

3) They don't just sell sodas - they have a decent assortment of exotic junk food as well, such as KFC flavoured potato chips from the U.K. and grilled ham and cheese Cheetos from - you know what, doesn't matter where. We grabbed some Arizona Green Tea fruit chews and a bag of popcorn with Butterfinger drizzle, and both were quite good. I could see this being a dangerous place for an attack of the munchies but perhaps that is just clever planning on their part?

Shopping there was a pretty good time, and there is a tremendous variety of flavours and styles, some common and others -  well, exotic.

We are pacing ourselves on the sodas having drunk only a Key Lime soda with our name on it as well as a Philippines-style coconut mint pop, and both were delicious.

The strangest flavour we procured is undoubtedly this charmingly named Rocket Piss: "bitter butterscotch soda that glows in the dark"! I am both curious and incredibly apprehensive about sampling this one but hold out hopes it might make a good mixer - not too good, because, you know, $4 a bottle... I am also unsure how to achieve the glow-in-the-dark effect before consuming without having the pop become tepid in the process. A flashlight in the icebox perhaps?

There is a strong nostalgia vibe with a lot of the packaging on display, such as this Grape Nehi. I am only familiar with this brand due to it being name-dropped by Radar O'Reilly on M*A*S*H, but they have been around since 1924 like it says on the bottle.

Best labelling goes to the Real Soda Co.'s Leninade though - they grab onto their theme with a tenacity that is stupefying to behold, and pack the bottle with all manner of jokes:

Best of all, every one of our sodas was made with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

Paying more for sodas than I usually do for beer was a neat experience, but probably not one I will repeat very often. Still, it is kind of cool to know there is a funky shop on 156 street that can sort me out if I want to try an old-fashioned cream soda from Brooklyn Bottling or a White Peach Fanta from Japan.