Fire In the Street

Dear Food Diary,


Congratulations!  Your ill-conceived and comically dangerous experiments have succeeded -- you've traveled back in time 19 days.  And with only minor damage to the very fabric of reality!  Well done.


Tonight, Christian and I went to see The New Pornographers at First Avenue.  It was the full eight-piece lineup (supplemented by a multi-instrumentalist dude with the wickedest cello-face I've ever seen.  He's like the Jonny Lang of classical string instruments).


I saw them open (as a six-piece) for Belle & Sebastian in 2006 and wasn't especially impressed as they chugged, all business, through songs off of Twin Cinema.  This time around I was struck by the band's professionalism and attention to detail.  With the exception of Dan, who only occasionally emerged from backstage just long enough to give an animated mutter through one of his tunes and down a beer, the group displayed both a workmanlike "we keep our heads down and plow through" approach to performing and a new (to me, at least) flair for the dramatic.  They delivered the most minor instrumental details from their two more recent albums and even managed roll out a intensity/emotionally-textured setlist.  Here are some pictures of them doing that.

  
After the show, we played some midnight tennis and went to the traditional place for a very early breakfast.

 "You know you've come from someplace filthy when you go into a Flameburger bathroom to wash your hands."

I can smell a pig from a mile away.

Madison does have at least one other point of interest (oh right -- aside from the two lakes, UW, and all the hippies/culture):  The finest pork shoulder sandwich I've ever eaten.

Yes, those are sugar-fried biscuits as my (2nd) side.  Four of them.  

How good is this plate?  So good I diverted a business trip to Chicago (with my boss) to stop at Smokey Jon's.  So good that Sarah and I drove there, on this particular day, during a tornado warning.  

It's good. 

s'good,

Matt

Spotted Cow

So what else do they have in Madison, aside from cows, statues of cows, and affectionate/thieving animals?  Not much, so we took a day trip to New Glarus to visit their Swissish atmosphere and ultra-fancy new brewery. 


The "top of the hill" New Glarus brewery was just finished a year ago, and it's obvious they put a ton of thought into it.  Firstly, it's kinda beautiful.  It's also a study in efficiency:  enormous copper brew kettles get their own shrine, while a dozen fermentation tanks are tucked away in an adjacent, secured, room.  Across from fermentation is a yeast-culture room, where they collect and reculture their yeasts.  Just down the hall there are brite tanks and, finally, an enormous Skynet bottler.  Every cord and cable in the building is tucked safely away amongst the rafters, and warmly decorated, cavernous, production rooms allow for expansion and easy cleaning.


Actually, it's more than just kinda beautiful.  

New Glarus has the capacity to brew a lot of beer.  A lot of pretty excellent beer, actually.  So why haven't you heard of it, Food Diary?  Because its entire capacity (100,000 barrels per year -- 3.1 million gallons) is consumed in meeting the demand from Wisconsinites.  3.1 million gallons.  And that's besides all the Miller they make, drink, throw up, and drink in that state.

Wisconsin is like a black hole of beer; the sheer volume of beer created/consumed in the state creates a kind of drunk gravity so strong that no beer can escape.

We were lucky to get out with those commemorative glasses.  

Seein' things that I may never see again.

So what do they have in Madison, aside from cows?


Statues of cows.

Odes to badger motherhood.

Odes to carnival food, pot-bellies, or possibly French imperialism.

At the Henry Vilas Zoo, they've got super-chill grizzly bears.

"Sup?"

Confused, displaced Antarctic penguins

Tiny prairie-dog pups

Banana-stealing chipmunks (this one was under our picnic table)

Animal love.

All this action was only half of one day in old MadTown, Food Diary.  There's more to tell, but I'll let you digest that (as it were) for now.  

For All the Cows

Dear Food Diary,
First off -- yes, we did end up making sandwiches with our leftover prime rib.  We had an excellent two days of beef: grilled/smoked prime rib with grilled toast and giantsalad, followed by thin-sliced steak on ciabatta rolls with homemade horseradish, caramelized onions, and mushrooms.

  
Yes sir/diary, it was a beef party in my mouth.  Sarah and I have a longstanding love of the cow meat, and with rarely any qualms about it.


This weekend we went to Madison for many reasons.  Among them, we went to celebrate our anniversaries (dating and wedding) and stomp around our old stomping grounds.


Did you know this weekend was an event called "Cows on the Concourse" at the Madison Farmers' Market?

Cows are adorable, and now I feel kinda bad about loving to eat them so much.  Or loving so much to eat them.  Both I guess.  Sorry, cows.