Iceland!

I've just bought the plane tickets to go to Iceland in late December! I'm pretty excited about it.

Here is my current understanding of what the place will look like.

I've just started one of my favorite parts about going to a strange land: buying the travel guide and learning everything I can. A much more ambitious goal is to learn some Icelandic. The pronunciation is really different from anything I've played with before, so it's a challenge. Icelandic seems to share the unpleasant habit of English vowels being randomly long and short just because. There's a couple new letters, plus a bunch of accented letters. For example "hello" is "góðan dag". It kind of resembles "guten tag" I suppose. Just learning enough about it to say the place names in a taxi is going to take some work.

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Iceland fun fact: Iceland was invaded by Britain then occupied by the US during WWII to keep it from the Germans.

Pleasant Hill Shakers

The day after the chicken fest we took a different, country road way home. It was a really pleasant drive. I haven't quite put my finger on it, but I like the feel of the countryside in Kentucky much more than that of Illinois. Illinois is so intensely agricultural that the color green is only visible for a few months of the year. The corn and beans turn an ugly yellow when it's time for harvest, and after that the fields are muddy graveyards full of the remains of plants chopped apart by machines. Here there was much more forest and more much nice green grass to be seen from the roads. The tiny bit of yellow that we did see was the random little tobacco field. We stopped off at various places on our way back to Louisville where we were going to spend the night. The coolest place was Pleasant Hill. 

The northernmost blue dot there is where Pleasant Hill is located. Just south of that is Danville, where the recent Vice Presidential Debate was held. They had signs up advertising the upcoming event. That was kind of neat and noteworthy.

Pleasant Hill is the site of a defunct religious community called the Shakers. The most notable thing about this group is that men and women are mostly kept apart, there is no marriage, and there are no children born. New converts and adopted orphans were the community's only source of new members. Turns out that's bad for business.

The Shakers put a big emphasis on craftsmanship, similar to the renowned woodworking skills of the Amish. Here you can see the peg rails running along both walls. They had these cool little candle holders that fit onto the pegs to light a room.

This was probably the most interesting food I tried on the whole trip. It came on my mom's sandwich. It was funny because I asked our waitress what it was and she didn't know, and I don't think it was even on the menu. It turned out to be pickled watermelon rind. I don't think I've had a sweet thing pickled before. The sweetness of the fruit and the salty pickle brine combined to make something out of the ordinary.

These bee's wax candles smelled really good.

One thing that stuck with me was some ladies were making apple butter in a big cauldron over a fire. I've had apple butter before, but I guess I didn't realize it was so simple to make. We made pear butter back in St. Louis a few days ago that was delicious. I wonder what other fruits taste better when you put them in a crock pot for 10 hours?

Here a horse was being used to power a sorghum press. Squeezing the sugar cane-like plants produces a sweet liquid.

One of the vendors was selling items made from alpaca fur. I'd never touched one before. They were super soft. It was a quality petting zoo experience. I saw some of these guys running around Machu Picchu, but at the time I was trying to avoid rabies and/or ancient Incan curses.

We stayed our last night in Louisville. We walked around a bit downtown, but I don't feel like there's an awful lot to see just wandering around. St. Louis is much more fun!

Kentucky Fried Road Trip

I took my mom on a little road trip from Friday, September 28th to October 1st. Our primary mission was to attend the World Fried Chicken Festival in London Kentucky. It made sense because my mom lives on a strict school-lunch diet of tacos, pizza, and fried chicken, and Kentucky is much easier to drive to than Mexico or Italy.

The Chicken Festival was definitely cool, but it wasn't quite what I had been expecting. In St. Louis there are barbecue festivals, and in Springfield they have chili festivals, and what both of those things mean is a bunch of people who are good at making those things compete at who is the best. And I like it because then I get to try food made by professionals from all over the place. I figured that's what the Chicken Festival was going to be like. Going from booth to booth, stuffing my face with awesome fried chicken. Well, it wasn't quite like that. It was more of a county fair type of atmosphere. There were the usual booths all over with people selling stuff, and political groups. There was the section with the carnival rides, and there was a stage for little shows. There was a country singing girl on stage for a while who was really good. Country on the radio makes me want to wretch, but she was playing Johnny Cash, and led me to discover Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight". I've listened to that song in the car about a hundred times since then. Tangent alert.



Anyway, so there were chicken signs everywhere, and I got this pretty rad paper chicken hat, but the only edible chicken was being made by a church group. I feel like there must be something going on when there's only one group selling chicken at the World Fried Chicken Festival. Seemed very monopolistic to me. 

And when you've only got one group making chicken at a damn chicken festival you get: one massive line.

To be fair, it was really really good. And they had this cool world's largest skillet thing that made watching the frying process pretty amusing. There was a guy walking around with a garden rake pulling the chicken in that had floated out of arms reach while frying.

Next we took a quick drive to Cumberland Falls, located in Daniel Boone National Forest. The leaves were just starting to change colors. It was very nice.

Apparently there is an actual thing called a moonbow, created when the moonlight hits the mist from the falls. It sounds pretty awesome.

I like to try local stuff, so of course I had a Diet Ale 8. Once I drank it I realized it had caffeine in it. What sort of a monster puts caffeine in a ginger ale? Why not start putting codeine in there as well? Sneaky soda pharmacists.

The final sight seen for the day was Corbin, Kentucky, home of Harland Sanders' original restaurant.

The place used to be a roadside restaurant and motel. I think the story was that they were going to move the highway which would kill Sanders' business. So he went and sold his secret recipe on the road.

I thought the story here was pretty cool. The sign said that the lady of the house would always check out the rooms at a motel before a family would agree to stay the night. So to smooth out this barrier Sanders made the restaurants bathrooms accessible only through replica of the rooms. Pretty good marketing I thought.

All of this Colonel Sanders fun times reminded me of how he rolls in Japan. Read about how he is dressed up by season and confused with Santa Clause here. Then, read about how the Colonel put a curse on Japanese professional baseball's Hanshin Tigers here.

Way Down in the Hole

Today we went to the Missouri History Museum to see Wendell Pierce give a presentation on food deserts. I had hoped for a presentation on food desserts.

Wendell is an actor who featured in my favorite show of all time: The Wire. These days he's in HBO's Treme which is pretty solid as well.

Acorns For Dinner

I was strolling around Soulard last night when I had the tragic idea that it would be cool to try to cook some large acorns hanging from an old nearby oak tree. I had just recently seen a painting of Andrew Jackson heroically sharing his acorn dinner with one of his soldiers on some war campaign. In my book the only two criteria for becoming a badass mountain-man are a dislike of shaving (check) and the ability to just eat whatever is growing within arms reach.

So I picked a handful of them, making sure not to get any with visible holes in them, which would indicate bugs.

While consulting a couple of online articles I found on the subject, I hit the acorns with a hammer to split them and remove the shells. That turned out be the easy part.

The thing with acorns is they contain an apparently weapons grade level of tannins in them. The same substance makes wine taste dry. It is also used to tan animal hide into leather. One online source warned that íf I just ate the acorns raw I wouldn't die but may wish I had with: a mouth that tastes and feels like felt, nausea, and a multiple day long case of constipation.

So, not eating them raw. The easiest way was to leach the acorn meat of the substance by putting them in a pot of water and bringing it to a boil. The instructions said to keep them at a boil for 15 minutes, dump the water, and then repeat the process. Each time the water would turn a brownish color, which was kind of cool because it was clear that something was happening. It was a little less cool the second time. After about an hour of moving the acorn meat between two continuously boiling pots of water, the process was decidedly uncool. The water just kept getting dark brown with evil tannins. At this point I was ready to eat them and face the consequences.

I put them in the oven and just baked them as is. They came out looking not bad, and some of the smaller pieces had become satisfyingly crunchy. While all of that boiling had failed to completely remove the tannin taste, it had successfully removed any other taste the acorns may have originally had. Adding salt really just made them taste like salty batteries.

Tannins are the damn devil and I hate them. The End.