Yeah, this is turning into one of those blogs

Time for a chicken update people. We butchered one of the three roosters the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and Christina's Granny used it to make homemade chicken and noodles. Very delicious. The offspring of the mother hen have also started laying eggs, and we have been getting 2 or 3 every day instead of just one. On Sunday, there was a total of 5 eggs, which is the current record for eggs in a day. The heaviest egg we had so far weighed 68g. That's officially an extra large egg. But it's not all fun and games. One night, when I went to close up the house, all the chickens, except two, were not in their house, but sitting under a lean-to by our barn on a bale of straw. They were fast asleep and were not going to move for anything. So I had to pick them up one by one and carry them into their house. The two remaining roosters put up a little more resistance and were more awake, but we eventually managed to get them into the house, not without the two of them getting into a fight in the barn. Last night, when we came home from visiting Christina's parents, they were all still inside the barn, awake and lively at least. I half expected this to happen, since it was a dark and rainy day, and I left the light on inside the barn, so they would have a dry and well-lit place for the day. It wasn't too much effort to get them to go into the house that time. On top of that, they have taken a liking to coming up to the house and scratching mulch and rocks from the flower bed onto the lawn, but it's pretty easy to have them follow me back to their designated area by breaking a heel of a bread into little pieces, calling them and feeding them the bread. Now they even come just when I call them, though with more hesitation.

But wait, there's more!

Check this out, we found even more mushrooms right in our yard. There are 15 total, probably weighing almost a pound, but we didn't pick them all yet. These are the three we noticed yesterday, plus three from the pasture, one of them being the biggest we have on our property:

Ice, ice baby.

Do you like ice cream? Well I love it. And Christina loves it. And we have it way too often. Or not often enough, depending on how you look at it. One thing's for sure though, we're living the dream. And that dream just got a whole lot sweeter because we have found ice cream scoop bliss.

When I was a kid, my parents had, and still have I believe, one of those scoops with the mechanical handle, where a piece of metal would release the ice cream from the scoop and into your bowl of waffle. It was nice, but of course the mechanical part is not that easy to operate sometimes, and has the potential of breaking. When we moved to the US, we thought we'd get a nice scoop, and went with Kitchenaid. The scoops they had looked nice and we thought we were getting great quality. It made pretty round scoops too, but to get the ice cream out of the scoop I had to use a teaspoon to help it. And not before long, the shiny chrome-looking coating was nicked and started to come off. Huge letdown. Then Christina got another nice scoop from a company named Wilton, that makes all kinds of great baking tools and accessories. It worked pretty well, but because of it's shape it was really difficult to get into the corners of the ice cream containers and impossible for me to make anything that even resembled a nice round scoop. Might as well have used a simple spoon. We've looked around some more, but none of the ones we saw really looked any better. They either had that chrome coating or a funny shape.

And then we went to the city last weekend, to witness some of the madness and get a few last gifts. And inside the MOMA store, we found a scoop that very much appealed to us: a great shape, made out of aluminum alloy (so even if the ice cream sticks, using a spoon wouldn't hurt it) and made in the USA since 1935. Oh, it also uses a scientific principle to help the ice cream come out, namely a heat-conductive fluid. I assume that your hand warms the fluid in the handle, which then provides heat to the scoop part and melts the ice cream into your bowl or cone. And best of all: It really works! I am amazed by this ice cream scoop and it was well worth the price. Beautiful round scoops that come out of the scooper absolutely effortlessly. Ladies and gentlemen: Zeroll Original Ice Cream Scoop.

Well, that pretty much reads like a comment somebody who's being paid by the scoop's manufacturer would leave on an online shopping site or review page, but I just had to share the great news.

Feed me Seymour.

Not sure if you read this investigative piece in the New York Times, launched by a woman's tragic fate after eating a hamburger. It's so maddening to read the practices of the meat industry and might push Ginger even closer to becoming a vegetarian. I highly recommend reading that article and if you haven't already, also read Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation", which was first published in 2001 but does not seem to have lost any relevance. I mean, think about it, McDonald's advertises their great ingredients so proudly, but when anyone says "100% Beef" on their product, it really has no meaning at all. All those fat trimmings, no matter how much feces they are contaminated with, are considered beef. Oh, and if you're you're a patty-maker and would like to test the stuff other people supply you with, they might just stop supplying you because of that. That's how confident they are in their hygiene practices. So disgusting.
This industrialized process of making food is a serious problem, and I'm sure we'll hear about a push to irradiate our food to kill e.coli, but that would only fight the symptoms, not the cause. To paraphrase Eric Schlosser, irradiating meat might just lead meat manufacturers to be even less rigorous with hygiene standards, as they know they can just zap it afterward. So in the end you would end up with even less good meat, but more irradiated feces on your plate. Enjoy!

Sickle and Chocolate

Back when I was a kid, there were two Germanies, and we would get packages from friends in the East every once in a while. Just like the packages we sent over there, they would contain various kinds of sweets: cookies, gummy bears and chocolate. Unfortunately for us kids, we much preferred the Western candy to the Socialists' concoctions. There was a strange taste to it, and I especially remember the gummy bears, which tasted unlike any gummy I ever had, and the chocolate, which wasn't entirely unfamiliar. I recall the cookies being alright, but cookies are one of my favorite foods, so who knows how good they really were. Back to the chocolate though, it tasted a lot like some of the very cheap varieties we had on our side of the Iron Curtain. Not so much of that creamy richness and delicious cocoa, but more of an assault of sugar that did not melt smoothly in your mouth but dissolves into what feels like tiny crystals of sugar.
Anyway, years passed, the memory of the Socialist chocolate drifting deeper and deeper into my subconsciousness. Until one day, I took a trip right to the very heart of capitalism and, against my better judgment, partly out of terrible despair, bought a regular little bar of Hershey's chocolate. Maybe it was the fact that it is so widespread and widely loved in the US. Maybe it was just curiosity. But what I know for certain, is that it tasted a lot like what I remember the chocolate from the German East to taste like. Especially with regards to that grainy sugar taste and texture. And just recently I realized the irony in all this. That the system that embraces free markets and enterprise, and believes in their superiority in bringing out the greatest in human endeavors, and the system that stands for the exact opposite of that, that believes that human endeavor is best carefully regulated and controlled for the greater good, both produce the same kind of funny-tasting chocolate.

Buy Buy Buy.

It's been so long that you probably don't remember what this is following up to, but it seems like to every post I write these days, I have to do a short follow-up. So let's keep it short: What are your feelings about juice from a brand named "Looza". Look deep inside of you.

I kinda feel like I keep writing about the same thing, but once again I made some observations while fulfilling my capitalist duties. Now, I like shopping at Walmart as much as the next person, but while I think most negative aspects about shopping there are merely questions of degree, there is one thing that really bothers me above all. It's those edited CDs. They shouldn't even exist, and, at least to me, represent some of the things about the US I'm not particularly fond of. First, there is the hypocrisy of selling plenty of violent movies and games, but a few naughty words, and instead of helping to devise a system similar to movies and video games that restricts the sale of some items to people that are too young, they don't even give you a choice. Instead they think it's much better to censor the artists. And what's up with people leaving their shopping carts in the parking lot? I'm not the only one to notice, but it's becoming an epidemic. In Germany, most supermarkets make you put in a coin to get a cart, which you get back when you return it. And guess what? No carts in the lots in Germany. I'm convinced that 90% of the carts left in lots are left there because people are lazy, not because it was physically impossible or unreasonable for the person to return it. Lazy Americans!

I'm starting to think that maybe my heightened awareness of things related to consumerism is an aftershock of the year we spent in New Zealand. Another thing I became more aware of when we were there are the ingredients in the different kinds of food. The other day we accidentally almost bought no-fat yogurt, and when I looked at the calorie count, I noticed a difference that the absence of fat alone could not explain. And guess what, a regular yogurt has about 15-20 of its total 150-190 calories from fat, yet a no-fat yogurt has almost half the total calories. The REAL difference is not the fat content, as its prominent placement on the cup and lid would have you believe, but the sugar. No-fat yogurt has none. It uses Aspartame (aka NutraSweet aka E951 aka Equal aka Canderel aka ...) instead, which accounts for the more significant difference between the two. Yet, most yogurt makers find it more important to point at the fat content. Sure, it's just clever marketing as health-conscious buyers try to steer clear of artificial sweeteners, but I can't help but feel it's downright misleading and dishonest. It's like selling water as Diet Coke, and calling it Diet Coke Clear, or some better comparison you can make up yourself. I'm multi-tasking today and following College Basketball while writing this. Also, if my math is vaguely right, full-fat yogurt should only have about 20, maybe 40 calories more than low-fat. That is so insignificant, it's not even funny.

In other news, I'm so glad that daylight savings time is just a few short days away is finally here! That's how long it takes me to write posts these days.

Verbraucherinformationen.

Call it a last resort, but I'm gonna have to talk about advertising again. There are actually three instances of stupid commercials I noticed.

The first one is for milk made by Smart Balance, and in it they talk about how horrible regular milk is for you and that Smart Balance's low fat and no-fat milk is so much better. I'm sorry, but if you believe that, you got something wrong with you. Regular 4% milk is not bad for you. Milk that has been engineered in a lab to contain all kinds of things that aren't in it to begin with and to not contain other things, now that doesn't sound wholesome to me at all. No-fat milk? You gotta be kidding! I know I talked about milk on here before, but I just want to point out that the difference in the amount of fat in 2% and 4% is pretty much insignificant. If you're really concerned about your fat intake, get some extra lean hamburger instead of the 80-20 chuck and NO MORE CORN DOGS! That will actually make a difference. While it's not a bad idea to watch what you eat, these types of manufactured foods just can't be good for you.

Also, have you seen the latest Hallmark Hannah Montana Recordable Valentine's Day Card commercial? It features some elementary school girls at lunch, and the first two show the Valentine's Day gifts their moms, possibly with lots of painstaking effort and love, have made for them at home. It's something like a heart-shaped sandwich and something red. The idea of mothers giving something to their daughters for Valentine's Day strikes me as Hallmark wishful thinking already, but okay, if they can make up holidays, they can make up the rules too, that's only fair. The third girl in the ad is much luckier than the first two. Rather than spending time thinking of and making something unique for her, her mom went to the store and bought a Hallmark Hannah Montana card, recorded her voice saying "I love you, sugar" on it (or something to that effect), put it in the envelope and BAM! all done. Now you see why the first two girls are jealous of the third one. It's really not fair of mom #3 to put her daughter in a position that is sure to generate copious amounts of jealousy and envy.

And finally, do you want to know who I think is a real prick? The french fries on McDonald's dollar menu. If you've seen the commercials you know what I'm talking about. What is your deal? First dissing the cheeseburger, then that lame joke about the apple pies. Nobody wants to be your friend, $1 french fries.

I got one more thing, unrelated to commercials, but related to shopping, so it's not completely unrelated since commercials are supposed to influence your shopping habits. We go to this grocery store that belongs to a chain called Stop & Shop, and last time we went there they had this new drink, or at least it was the first time I noticed it, that's one of those generic store brand items. I'm not entirely sure what it's imitating, but I think it's those "flavored water" types, that are still clear, but have a hint of some fruit flavor. Not my thing, but anyway, they call the drink "Zazz". Which is funny if you watch Metalocalypse. Well, it is to me anyway.

Got Rooney?

No, this is not a soccer post. Because on this blog, we're too good for English players. Way too good. I saw this on 60 Minutes today, and even though it's from 2005, it seems to speak right from the bottom of my heart. The problem as Mr Rooney describes it still persists, too: I challenge you to go to a grocery store and find plain old milk. The closest you'll get it Vitamin D milk, which I grudgingly accept since Vitamin D isn't all that bad for you. I just saw something on TV explaining how the Vitamin D in milk isn't having a huge impact on your overall vitamin household though. Yoghurt is even worse in this country. It's all low-fat and no-fat and diet and eat-me-and-you'll-poop-like-a-champ white goo with either loads of sugar or artificial sweetener (don't even get me started on that one). But where's regular old yoghurt? It's hard enough to find plain and the "greek-style" ones seem to be a little better, but I haven't sampled them extensively due to their no-bargain price tag. I just settle for low-fat ones and try to feel smug. The other day we saw some no-fat processed cheese slices that weren't actually called cheese anymore but food substitute. How can consumers be demanding this? Buttermilk's another good one. What happened to buttermilk? It's popular with eco-fanatics and alternative types all over Germany, but over here, all they have is low-fat buttermilk. That to me is an oxymoron to begin with. I also noticed that school cafeterias and government-sponsored diet advice promotes 2% milk. But you know what I'm really wondering? What the heck happens with all the fat they remove from dairy products. I'm imagining gigantic underground lakes of dairy fat or mountains of the stuff, covered with equally enormous tarps and sold back to the people as fancy bouncing castles. Or smaller versions marketed as insoles containing only 100% natural materials.

New York state of mind...

With all the amazing things happening in our enviable lives you're probably wondering why I find it necessary to even mention this, but I got a job in New York City. I've been applying all over, since we didn't really care that much where we'd end up, and got an offer for a job in Manhattan, which I accepted. Now I'm just waiting for the visa stuff to happen, and then we'll be moving up there. I will have to go back to Germany first to get the visa, but I knew that was coming. Now New York wasn't exactly our number one choice on the list of places to live, but I think it'll be pretty exciting and, if nothing else, a good experience. Anyway, I'm not really in a writing mood, vegetable soup is calling my name (even though it has a slight speech impediment which makes us laugh every time), and there is a football game on. Do I like football? Well, it's alright I guess, and beats the Andy Griffith show any day of the week.

Thanksgiving!

As some of you may or may not know, England is pretty much Germany's archenemy in soccer. Followed right by the Netherlands, and after the last World Cup, Italy ranks high on that list as well. But it's nothing compared to the rivalry we have with the Brits. Anyway, in the spirit of this tasty holiday I would like to thank the pilgrims and Indians for making this happen. I will spare you my detailed analysis, but it's time the world realized that David Beckham just isn't any good. At all. And he does not deserve his fame, nor qualifying for anything. He does, however, deserve his wife.

In a related note, check out the EPA's Green car guide.

Prösterchen!

Hey tough guys! Yeah, you know who you are. Don't think we are intimidated, cause we're extra-tough ourselves. But you already knew that. Anyway, we're in Germany, just enjoying Bier and Bratwurst and other such delicacies. Like Brötchen. And Nutella. And yummy Yoghurt. And chocolate. And cake. And lumps of dirt. Ohhh, got you on that one. We're not really eating lumps of dirt, silly. Well, I don't really know what else to say at the moment, plus I only started writing this post because we were waiting on some data to be transferred to our portable harddrive before we continue picking the cream of the crop of our NZ pictures. For your viewing pleasure. What else. Why? Because we love you.