Cocktail: Ogden Donkey

My friend Aimee proposed one evening that we make something called a "Moscow Mule" which is a gingery vodka drink. We made some, and they were pretty good, but we agreed that they were a little sweet and needed more bite.

I set to work. To make the Moscow Mule I had to make ginger syrup which you make by boiling 2 cups of water, one cup of sugar, and about a half cup sliced fresh ginger root. Cook until the liquid reduces by half.

When I decided to increase the bite, I added a few lemon slices to the above.

I strained out the chunks and set aside the ginger-lemon syrup. I put the ginger slices and lemon chunks into a one pint mason jar and filled it with vodka, letting it sit until the next evening.

To make the Ogden Donkey (Aimee's coinage) mix like this:

2 oz gingery lemony vodka from the jar
1/2 oz (1 tbsp) ginger-lemon syrup
2 oz sparkling water
Lemon twist
Serve over one giant ice cube

You can re-infuse more vodka with the chunks in the jar at least 5 times; likewise, I suppose you could do one larger batch all at once. However, since the lemon and ginger slices were also soaked in sugar from the syrup- making, you may want to add additional sugar if you infuse a couple quarts of vodka at once. When I re-infused in the one pint jar, I added about 1/4 cup of sugar to ech batch after the first batch. After you add the sugar, shake it really well. Shake again before use.

You can also add the ginger slices to the cocktails as garnish. The hardiest among you may eat the slices after draining the cocktail.

Mornings and Fridays

I don't have much interest in the middle spectrum of life. The nature of the soul interests me and so does what's for breakfast. Everything else is a distraction.

Not meaning to beat the dead horse, but I've mentioned before that we were really spoiled for food in the Adirondacks, so finding suitable substitutes for our provender has been paramount. Dogwood Bakery provided me with coffee and granola every morning, as well as pizza every Friday. We found a replacement for the pizza at Sitara India, where we now order our Friday treat (the Adirondacks does not spoil one with a surfeit of ethnic cuisine...)

Sitara is very affordable and very delicious. The staff is friendly and the take-out service takes awhile. Give yourself 45 minutes. Sometimes, they say 25 or 35 minutes. Call ahead. Give yourself 45 minutes. No matter what, it's worth it. For about twenty bucks, you can feed two adults dinner and lunch the next day.

The other thing I've been trying to track down is my morning bowl of granola. Mass-produced granola invariably has two problems - it tastes funny and it costs too much. It's often very sweet, flavored like fake vanilla, it comes in crusty conglomerates of semi-chewed oats and rice puffs and tastes pumpkin-y or contains any of a number of weird combination of blobs and spices. Granola is what I eat most of the time because I don't feel like cooking oatmeal. When I cook oatmeal it contains: oats, raisins, salt, water. I like my granola about the same - though with less water and maybe some nuts and seeds.

I found a couple of decent bulk-bin granolas around Ogden in one place or another - notably, Smith's has a microscopic-but-satisfying selection of bulk granola.

But last night, shopping at Macey's (because the power had gone out at the Smith's) I found this:

It was on the top shelf in the cereal aisle about 1/3 of the way down on the right if you're facing the front of Macey's. It was 8.99 for three pounds. Clinton's Fruit and Nut Granola contains "Rolled oats, Yellow D Brown Sugar, Soy Bean Oil, Raisins, Cashews, Wheat Bran, Wheat Germ, Unsweetened Coconut, Sesame Seeds, Sea Salt, Vanilla."

It's made down the road from here in Bountiful, UT, and it hits the spot. Get you some.

Grocery Champs

Smith's it is! For general grocery-ness, plus stocking bison and nitrite-free bacon, Smith's wins the where-I-go-shopping-mostly prize. I've never been to a town that has such a wide range of regional and home-grown grocery stores - it's never really mattered much - but Ogden sports an especially healthy grocery ecology (with minor demerits for hard-to-find hippie food).

If you want an amazing bulk-bin experience, shop the Winco: it sports bulk quinoa in multiple colors! If you need 14 pounds of generic chocolate chips, malt flour, or a sock-full of pancake mix, Winco is the spot. Macey's does well in the family grocery category - especially for price, but they're closed on Sunday. I usually have no idea whether I will shop Saturday or Sunday for the week, so Macey's takes a hit from Heisenberg.

I recently learned of a sheep dairy in the area that also sends lambs to a butcher shop in Morgan. After I replace the timing belt in the suburban assault vehicle, I'll check that out.

Trail of Crumbs

When we lived in the Adirondacks, we were terribly spoiled by living near one of the best bakeries in the country - Dogwood Bread Company. Located in Wadhams!, NY, the Dogwood was our last refuge, our source of nourishment, and a place for warm companionship. It had such a magical quality, sequestered in the holler-cum-crossroads of Wadhams!, I expect that if I ever try to go back, the place will have disappeared Brigadoon-wise into a Highland fog, only to reappear in 2107 - or maybe we'd come back to a weathered foundation and the locals would say "hasn't been a bakery here in 50 years - the old one burned down in 1955..." and we will have been sustained by the phantasmic bread of spectral bakers...

Probably neither of those things is true, but I miss the place.

For me, the real joys in life have become pretty simple, and largely gustatory. I need fresh vegetables, kindly-treated meat, good bread, and good beer. I don't want my food to have to travel too much farther than I do to meet me at the market. So I went on the trail of my leavened fix.

Ogden is a quirky place. It's a town that shows its roots, and home to a divergent population - which is one of its charms and strengths. It's a little shy on earthy undertones, though not totally devoid of them. If I were stirring a city cocktail, I would shake a few more hippies into the mix - you can almost discern the approach of a critical mass of crunchiness that verges on the spontaneous eruption of a co-op or good bakery. The microbews, brew pubs, coffee shops, and crafters have already secured the beachhead...(we even saw a yarn-bombed tree!)

Instead, our search for a good local bakery pointed us to Logan, Utah - home of Crumb Brothers bakery. It's got the look and feel of the kind of local bakery that makes a town truly civilized - but Logan is an hour away. Luckily for us, Crumb Brothers distributes to Ogden in the Harrison Ave Fresh Market. Get there early for your favorite artisan loaf: the bread is delivered fresh daily (except Sunday) but it gets picked over by early afternoon.

Maybe someday if Ogden can rope in a few more hair-farmers, Crumb Brothers can open up an Ogden store and soak up some of those Trustafarian dividends. In the meantime, spread the word to all your ski-bum friends: Ogden has some of the best (locals say THE best) powder in the Rockies right outside of town (think Bozeman : Bridger Bowl :: Missoula : Snowbowl :: Ogden : Snowbasin.)

The dried chilis at Macey's at 37th and Washington

The dried chilis at Macey's at 37th and Washington

Meat Seeking Minivan

We're still on the search for good meat.

We've been trying out different grocery stores. Right down the street from our house is Macey's, which is a sort of family-oriented, stack 'em high sell 'em cheap kind of place. Good selection. Awesome south-of-the-border aisle.

We don't eat much meat, and IMHO, meat should be a little scarcer and a lot better than it is. Good meat costs more. That's OK. We roast whole chickens and eat ground bison, and try to hook up with some happy-face-pig bacon, salted, but uncured (nitrites are something I'd generally prefer to do without). Right now, there is some kind of national bison craze, so what used to be $5 or $6 a pound for ground bison is now as high as $11. It's good, but not that good. I'd rather eat 5 pounds of tofu for that much. I'll sprinkle bison-flavor-flakes on it.

We've been to Winco, Fresh Market (which I think is Albertson's in Utah) and now Harmon's. Harmon's has bison, and if you ask the guys at the meat counter, they can go in the back and get you sliced pork side meat - which is uncured bacon. It is meat of uncertain origin, which is generally sad factory pigs. I bought it anyway.

Other than that, Harmon's is just overpriced for no particular reason, and doesn't really make up for it in selection or service. It is an indistinguishably decent grocery store - though they do have samples, which is good. The employees offering the samples either have a terrifying foreman (like that angry elf with the goatee in the Rudolph stop-action holiday show) or they get some awesome commission on jam and crab salad, because they will cheerfully and relentlessly chase you ten or twenty feet insisting on all the reasons you need to buy the thing you just nibbled RIGHT NOW.

We're going back to Macey's. I have a pound-and-a-half of side meat to last until I can locate a happy-pig farm. Then we can get a shoat for side meat.

We tried to locate some loose leaf tea today, also. We're off to the Fermentation Station to get some.

UPDATE: We found some commercially-available ground bison and nitrite-free bacon at Smith's on Harrison.

The Hippie Food Saga

Before coming to Ogden, we lived in the Champlain Valley of New York State, where we were spoiled by CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture farms) and locally raised meat (shout out to DaCy Meadow and Ben Weaver!) The down side of the area was the general remoteness to everything else you might need in the way of healthy groceries, fresh produce in the off-season, bulk Earl Grey tea and whatnot.

We might travel to Middlebury, Vermont, which had its very posh co-op, which is sort of a member of the now-nationally-recognizable successful co-op trope, with the open HVAC ducts, the earth-tone accents on the architecture, and a penchant for gourmet items. It was an hour away, and the roads weren't the best, even in summer.

I just read that Utah is the most urban of all the western states, with 85% of its population living in urban areas. 80% of the total population lives along the Wasatch Front, stretching from the southern burbs of Salt Lake City to the northern reaches of Ogden and North Ogden and North North Ogden. Past that, there is a mysterious land called the Cache Valley which apparently has some great farms, but I haven't made it up there yet.

I figured with a million or so people living along the 100 mile stretch of Interstate 15 between Provo and Brigham City, one might find a decent co-op for the outdoorsy-hippie-collegey types, but so far efforts have only turned up this disappointment.

On the upside, Ogden has a store called Good Earth Natural Market on Riverdale that scratches some of those itches, and, of course, there is a Whole Foods in Salt Lake City (which probably muscles out the co-op opportunities). We also found Cali's Natural Food Warehouse - which has its own unique brand of awesomeness, but be prepared that it is not like a typical grocery-store experience. It's really pretty much a small warehouse. The woman at the register the day we went was wonderful and helpful, and they have some cool stuff in there.

Unfortunately, we were on the prowl for some grass-fed-living-large-well-loved-died-of-mild-surprise beef, poultry, or bison - which have proved elusive...though I got a hot tip from the Paradise Valley Orchard that the mythical Cache Valley has a farm which might satisfy our meaty desires...