It's everything & everywhere
The last five months of food. Old microbes feeding new ones.
Five months of memorable food moments all containing a funky element or another. Fermentation is ubiquitous. Everywhere you go, everything you eat, and anywhere you look. What’s funky about your food???
January
New Zealand- mushrooms + walking. I got a mushroom knife for Christmas.
Dinner with a friend. Get the tasting menu. Get the whole bottle. Drink the aperitif. Finish the digestive. Finish all the olives + pickles. Make friends with the servers. Sit and talk till the chefs start to go home.
A sourdough bun with cheese + butter on a cold + sunny morning.
February
A crispy cold walk in the forest 20 minutes out of the city. We found cities of mushrooms that kind of look like human cities. Who copied who?? ((Does anyone know what kind of mushrooms these are??))
The aftermath of a Sunday french roast finished off with funky cheese, something sweet, and a second bottle of red wine (oops).
A quiet and cozy Friday night with a natural red + my books- joyfully missing out on the chaos that is a Friday night in Copenhagen. JOMO is the new FOMO (the Joy Of Missing Out) or maybe that’s just a defense mechanism. Could be both.
March
A dark and moody Cantonese dinner that’s best done at the bar with mom and yes, we do want double portions of the pickles. We want to try the dish that chef is most proud of. And could we please order another bottle of the Beaujolais????
My new job at a bakery. I get to talk about flour, sourdough, and pastry techniques without people looking at me with concern because I’m finally in an environment where people like to talk about those sorts of things.
April
Very large vats of radish kimchi that make me cry. All that onion and garlic. whew
Another evening in the company of a funky white, a fun read, and my SCOBY motel. It was another JOMO night. I have a lot of JOMO time.
The worst and best meal I ate in Tuscany. The worst: salchicha served at a festival in Mensanello. The best thing about it was the bottle of chianti which came straight from the estate’s land. 3/4ths of the bottle had to be consumed in order to eat the salchicha. Which at that point, I no longer cared what I was eating.
The best: Stuffed gnocchi, cashews.
Clams, frites, eggplant, and skin-contact riesling for two. I’m in my skin-contact phase (orange wine). I.e. grapes fermented with their skins intact.
A festival celebrating the nature of nature in the park. Sea buckthorn kombucha. Oysters with rose hip vinegar, fermented rhubarb, and rose petals. Worth the 35 kr in my opinion. All accompanied by talks about the soil degradation, perennial wheat crops, microbial rifts, how cows are amazing but we shouldn’t really have as much, and the public dissection of an alligator (the kids were going feral for this). Just some very light chat best washed down with a bottle of kombucha and/or orange wine.
Peace out peeps
~FIN~