Check out this site all this month for all the latest bundt news.

Tonight I’ll be breaking out the camera to immortalize my own sweetie’s bundt masterpiece. Then I’ll be breaking out the fork. Yum!

“Um…” Think! What haven’t we had lately? What complements the weather? Do I have a hankering for something? How much work will it be to prepare? “… chicken?”

“OK, how about chicken with a buttery-garlicky sauce and spicy mashed potatoes? We can have a salad later. Would that be all right?”

Would that be all right. My sweetie is funny sometimes. So after the anguished seconds it takes me to simply name an animal, she dashes off a complete menu that she pulls from thin air, along with a schedule.

I’m eating well these days.

Or do you find three sentences, one for each of those moments, and let them tell the entire story — a tiny play in three acts:

“Peanut butter banana bread,” she said.

She set the two slices of banana bread — one chocolate, the other peanut butter — in front of me and said, “I really need you to be objective for a minute.”

I laughed and said, “I didn’t think I could love you more than I already did until you said, ‘peanut butter banana bread.’”

**: still searching for just the right word. it seems that airline breakfasts the world over feel obligated to include some sort of hot egg-based food product. The person who finally comes up with a breakfast product that can be reheated in a microwave, includes egg, and is not so laden in fat (in this case cheese, butter, and oil on a croissant-like bread product) that you start to feel shiny just looking at it, will make a mint. The **ness of the modern options is so oppressive that a token mushroom or two will just vanish in the palatal goo.

Accompanying the sandwich was a cup with a foil lid. On the lid it said (something like) “Breyer’s Premium Smooth And Creamy Extra-Rich Low Fat” I wondered if anyone in the hype department at the company noticed that they left off the nature of the product itself in their haste to pile on more superlatives. (It was yogurt, by the way, and exceptionally good yogurt at that.)

After I wolfed down my breakfast I closed the box it came in (per instructions) and there on the top was the quote “All happiness depends a leisurely breakfast” attributed to some guy named John Gunther. Hm… should have read that instead of the thing about enjoying the hot sandwich.

Sure the end users may benefit indirectly from having more awesome small-shop applications to try (modern power-hungry operating systems are packed with features that make creating robust applications simpler) or less pesticides on the food (plants can be modified to fight back agains pests), but for the most part people are not getting much of a perceptible lift.

Sometimes the practices of the big agribusiness companies like Monsanto don’t even help the farmers. They have now created versions of their big-selling products that don’t reproduce. That is to say, a farmer can’t keep some of his crop from one year to use as seed the next. He must go back to the big seed factory each year if he wants to grow crops that have the other benefits that make his farm profitable. (My information on this is actually a few years old; I don’t know what has happened since, so I might be totally wrong. That happens fairly often.)

I promised at the start that I would give you a new source of fear, and I’m a man of my word. Here’s the scenario: Farmers grow crops that can’t be used as seed. Then Something Happens, and the agri-giants are unable to create seed crops, either. It could be something as simple as bankruptcy or a corporate move to manipulate seed prices. It could be some sort of genetically engineered snafu if you want to Fear the Machine while you’re at it. Whatever mechanism you want to invoke, suddenly all these high-tech seeds that the farmers were counting on are not there. In their place – nothing. As winter comes farmers are reaping a record harvest they can’t replant, and they already know that there are not enough seeds for spring. Not nearly enough. Then what?

To make the story scarier, it would be best to wait until the agricultural giants are more entrenched in developing countries as well, but even if it happened now it would be something to worry about. Worrying is one of the things I do best.

Cracker, bunny head, and peep, ready for the microwave

As every red-blooded American knows, marshmallow+chocolate+graham cracker = s'mores. Traditionally smores are eaten around campfires, where one heats the marshmallow over the flames and then wedges it into a sandwich were the hot marshmallow softens the chocolate. We lacked a campfire, and used our trusty microwave oven instead.

Many of you may be aware of what happens to marshmallows in a microwave. With Peeps it's even better. Let me tell all of you now: Drop whatever you are doing, go to the store, buy some peeps, bring them home, and put one in the microwave. Do it! I'll wait...

You're back? Great! Wasn't that the funniest thing you've ever seen? Ever? Unfortunately, my attempts to photograph the peeps while in the microwave failed, so those of you who did not drop everything to put a peep in the microwave will just have to perform the experiment later.

Once the peep and the chocolate were all gooey and yummy we slapped on graham cracker lids and sat in front of the television stuffing our faces with sugar. And that, dear readers, is what Easter's all about.

I’m not sure what The Casserole is, but when the light of my life mentions it I can hear the capital letters.

Kofola boasts some 14 “natural” ingredients, and while the various references agree on the number, I could find no list stating what all of them were. The Wikipedia article (and the dozen other places that quote Wikipedia without citing it) focuses on things like apple extract, while others mention cardamom and licorice. They are proud to have less sugar than Coca-cola (almost certainly beet sugar in Kofola’s case), and essentially the same amount of caffeine as Coke, which is pretty tame by today’s standards.

According to the boys at Kofola, they are every bit as popular as the American invaders, but in my personal experience I don’t see how that could be true. Maybe it’s a city-country thing. More likely it’s a generational divide, and the people who drink Kofola were the ones who learned to like soda when the western options were limited. Among the people I know, however, Kofola drinkers are rare enough that in my years here I had never tasted Kofola. I decided this was one of the things I had to do before my return to the US.

I went to the corner store to buy a small bottle of the stuff. While I stood scanning the soft drink choices I noticed that the 2-liter bottle was the same price as the 1/2-liter bottle. Hm… I paid my money and hauled the big boy home. After all, if I liked the stuff, I wouldn’t want to regret not getting more for the same price.

I held my anticipation in check, deciding that my first taste of the stuff should be chilled. I wedged the bottle in the freezer next to the carp and waited. Before long I felt tired so I moved the drink from freezer to fridge and went to sleep.

The next morning I was up at the crack of midmorning and ready to try Kofola. I poured a glass, sniffed, swigged. As you might recall from the title of this episode, Kofola isn’t very good. I can also say that it defies description. Anyone who buys into Dr. Pepper’s claim as the most original soft drink in the world has not had Kofola. Perhaps if the communists had asked a kitchen to develop the syrup rather than a chemistry lab things might be different. Perhaps. Perhaps the recipe is “the fourteen things they had a surplus of in 1960.”

Now I have in my refrigerator most of two liters of Kofola (I had a second glass of the stuff to see if it might be one of those flavors that grows on you), and two carp. In the spirit of Communist Czechoslovakia, perhaps I should find a recipe that combines the ingredients I have a surplus of. CArp au Kofola, anyone?

It was cold today, but a friendly, dry cold. Ice in patches, but no snow. Sunshine. M2&L&m picked me up at the bus stop where I waited, my hands getting cold as they held my book. I was early to get there and they were not. They have an infant. Time works differently.

Lunch was at a restaurant in a Vietnamese market and was quite yummy. The smallest of my hosts, the one only half a year old, watched me with a cool detachment. I’m told she smiles at almost everyone. Almost. Conversation centered around the child. Not surprisingly, she is above average. The parents (one of whom is Chinese) will happliy pay extra for toys not manufactured in China. Baby-therm struck them as a brilliant idea that they would happily pay for. I really should do something with that.

After lunch we drove back to the flat they are borrowing, and while the the parents were dealing with the logistics of getting child and critical groceries purchased and up the stairs I repaired to a humble bar near their place. Surprisingly this humble hospoda is a WiFi Free establishment. Just need a password. Probably won’t ask.

***

Another good day of talking over beers. When speaking with M2 politics is inevitable, and illuminating. Our biggest disagreement: he doesn’t like any politician willing to raise taxes. I would rather pay the taxes now than borrow (stealing liquidity from the market, by the way — there’s a bit of a problem there right now). M2 said it was easier for a politician to spend tax money than borrowed money, but as I ponder this now, I realize that the exact opposite it true. It is much easier to spend borrowed money, where the accounting comes later, than tax revenue, where people feel the hurt now. When you tax, people might say no. Borrow-and-spend, the Republican approach to finance, is cowardly. Wish I’d managed to articulate it better tonight. But enough of that.

At the bar there was a really cool dog, mostly German Shepherd, but big for the breed (still a puppy) and with long silvery hairs accenting his coat. He was all right. We got along great. I’m pretty sure the pup agreed with my views of fiscal policy.

Today’s kickoff was easy; I was invited to a family dinner. Historical trivia: “Good King Winceslas” is not a Christmas carol, but a boxing day song. The 26th of December is St. Stephen’s day. While there were no Vaclav’s (rhymes with Winceslas, who was Bohemian) at the dinner, it was still a festive (and belly-busting) affair. Mmmm… duck and knedliky (potato dumplings). Homemade cookies. No carp. One bit of bad planning: I wore my “nice” blue jeans. They’re nice because I don’t wear them much. I don’t wear them much because they’re a bit on the snug side. Not the right outfit for gluttony. Whatever the reason, I was a little concerned when I declined more duck that I might hurt my host’s feelings. I was stuffed.

It was a relaxed and pleasant dinner, some conversation in English and some in Czech, and then it was home to take a nap. (One topic of discussion as dinner wound down: the amount of time different animal species spend sleeping. It’s good to be a lion.)

So day one of Twelve Days of Social is a success! I really don’t know how I’m going to pull all of them off. New Year’s Eve I’ll be going down to the center of town, which I’m told is completely crazy. You know all those warnings on fireworks? They will be disregarded. “Wear eye protection” is a common piece of advice. Not really my kind of thing, but worth seeing once. (At this point it’s such pyrotechnic madness in my imagination that I’m probably heading for disappointment.) Anyway, anyone who reads this is welcome to join me. We can meet at the statue of Winceslas. (Did you see how I brought that back around to where I started? Not bad, huh?)