Happy Holidays and Baby Horsies!

A real baby horse was born at the farm yesterday. I promise to take a picture and post it soon :)

For your consumption

I thought this would be cooler than it is. However, I am still very fond of the idea.

Tipo Roja or Hop To It

Shea and I have brewed our first beer. The idea being that, by brewing our own, we can add a little American-style hop to our beer-drinking routine. We went ambitious on our first try and did an all-grain batch. (Read: the beer will probably be flawed due to the increased opportunities for contamination). This means that we started with the malted barley, ground it ourselves:



(Goodness... I look like a f*&#ing hippy, don't I?) mashed it ourselves:



etc:



I had spent the day making Paneer and Ghee because I was craving Indian food (vegetarian, of course) which we ate while we crafted Christmas cards and waited for the mash to wart (or something like that.)


all to the soundtrack of Nina Simone and The FIRST Mariah Carey Christmas Album.

In short, I should probably move to the Pacific Northwest... but then, that would just make me a cliché, wouldn't it?

An afternoon ride

I'm fresh off the heels of a terrible bout of the stomach flu but I won't disgust you with the details of that episode.

Last Saturday Shea and I scouted a bike trail for a trip that LAT42's going to guide with a company called Sacred Rides out of Canada. Going in to this, i knew I was signing up for 12 to 13 miles of biking. I also knew that mountain biking would probably be more difficult than road biking so, I set my brain to challenging mode, all the while comforting myself in knowing that, though the path may be a bit rocky, it was relatively flat and skirted a pretty river. Right.

Anyhoo, as an illustrative point, I present you with some pictures of Shea riding bikes:





And then let's remember what happens to me and my accessories when I engage in downhill sports:



So, keeping all this in mind, I'll now tell you that the first half of the ride was beautiful and very nearly flat featuring waterfalls, wide meandering rivers, horses running free and the occasional families of sheep and cows.

The first time I fell I got up like a champ: laughed it off and patted myself on the back for attempting to follow Shea who had bunny-jumped over a log in the middle of the trail.

About a half-hour after later the trail started to get hilly. Then I fell into a pile of shit/mud and could hear it squirting in my shoes. At one point we got lost and went down (and up) two large and rocky hills we didn't need to. It was cold, I was sweaty and Pissy Princess made an appearance. Shea handled things as best he could: waiting at the top of every hill with a cookie extended in my direction and helping me get my bike across the bigger stream clearings. He was noticeably wary of the looks I was cutting him and fell into startled silence when, upon turning another corner that revealed another hill, an admittedly terrifying scream of anger gurgled out of me. (The cookies were his saving grace.) Luckily, my extreme frustration and tantrum only lasted about a twenty minutes and we popped out of the park at a Parilla where i was fed mountains of sizzling meat and all was well. (Until I got some sort of Giardia from the shit/mud puddle episode and was laid up in bed for three days cursing my fate!)

So, that was that. Did you have fun laughing at me? Here's a nice shot of a battle wound on my thigh... a week later:



On that note, I'll leave you with some food porn:






my sourdough skillz are getting pretty legit btdubs.

Stay tuned for the brew blog.

CMC

Thanksgiving

Check it out here.

yucka yucka

A few moments of forgotten comedy: 1) buying a cerveza casero from the refugero at Lago Natacion and listening to, over pleasant conversation and a refreshing brew, the soundtrack of a barn cat crunching through the skeleton of the "raton" it had presented us with a few minutes earlier. Neither shock nor embarrassment showed the faintest glimmer of registration on the faces of our host (of a PUBLIC DINING establishment) or my hiking partner. I handled the situation by pouring myself another. 2) helping Shea take a couple of clients rappelling down a 60 meter (about 180 ft) cliff. The clients were two buxom, Argentine, 20-somethings with long flowing manes and a shadowing cloud of perfume two-feet thick. The comedy here is that perfume attracts bugs and December is the season of the horse-fly: a nasty and persistent, not-so-little bug that swarms around your face and rings in your ears until it doesn't anymore... (at which point, you can be certain the sucker has landed on you and is biting you through your clothes.) Needless to say, our ladies had a tough time of things. The bugs wouldn't leave them alone and the second they started to rappel down the big mountain, they forgot everything we had taught them on the baby bolder. One smashed her hand in to a rock and the other rappelled directly in to a tree at the bottom of the drop. They wined, giggled and smoked their cigarettes for the rest of the hike down. I'm pretty sure they were actually proud of their battle scars in the end and no one was sued or yelled at. phew.