Community

Emily had an epiphany two weekends ago.  The "DIY lifestyle" is really about community.  Friends and acquaintances with similar, but different, interests inspire each other to try new ventures.  For example, I toyed with the idea of home brewing for a long time before I bit the bullet, but I vividly remember the moment I knew I better get the proper gear.  I was sitting in the basement TV room of my good friend Paul, watching horn porn.  He offered me a selection of his homebrew, and when he said he had a cider, I jumped on the opportunity to try it.  Cider had always intrigued me.  Brewing beer meant getting malt extract or grains, neither of which can reasonably be produced on your typical city lot.  Cider was interesting because 95% of the raw material could be grown in your backyard or gathered from the hedge rows.  How cool is that?  You can create a high quality alcoholic beverage from stuff that is really pretty easy to gather in your neighborhood.  After that first sip of Paul's cider, I knew I had a new hobby.  It was dry and crisp and ice cold, and it tasted wonderful on that warm summer evening.

The ironic thing about that cider was that I wouldn't describe Paul as a serious cider brewer - a brewer of fine ales, sure, but I think cider is a bit of a sideshow for him.  But I loved it... and learning that homemade could be so much more exciting than store-bought... it was time to do it myself, and I had been inspired through one member of my community.

Emily's epiphany came after a weekend of visiting Paul, his bride, Lisa, and their boy, Wyatt.  We spent a weekend engaging in all sorts of fun with these good friends.  We played with our baby boys, went thrift shopping (the girls did, anyway), made pierogies, ice-fished for trout and burbot, stuffed sausages, and cultured yogurt.  Needless to say, it was a classic HHMM vacation... you need an extra day off as soon as you get back in order to recover in time to go back to work.

So what did we learn from this community?  Let's start with the pierogies.... Apparently you can buy the frozen variety at the store, but why not join the world-wide tradition of fine dumpling making in a more hands-on fashion?  I won't lie... making pierogies is hard work.  Prepping filling, mixing dough, rolling and cutting dough, suffing, boiling, frying.  Paul and I worked on these little babies for two or three hours.  My back and neck were stiff, my feet were sore from standing up all day, but the rewards...  You know how people always say food tastes better when you are camping?  I think it is all perception.    When you work for something, you are going to appreciate it a hell of a lot more.  Setting up a camp kitchen is harder than throwing a frozen burrito in the microwave and pushing +30sec. half a dozen times.  Not only did we make, cook, and enjoy these happy little Polish packages, but we vacuum-sealed and froze 80 percent of them.  Now we can throw a hand-made pierogi in in the fry pan for a quick meal, rather than a machine-made burrito in the microwave.

Let's take this community concept to a generational level.  Did we just make Paul's grandma's pierogi recipe?  If not, Paul was certainly relying on her roadmap to an authentic Polish dumpling.  Paul's grandmother may not have been Polish, but she sure did cook for somebody who was!  Paul made a very tasty and very tangible connection to his heritage.

No, we didn't put Triscuits in the pierogies.

Now let's talk dessert.  If you are going to deliver homemade ice cream to a friend... you are safest to do so while ice fishing.  Our friends John and Cris know that I love banana ice cream.  I would carry on about the stuff on a near-nightly basis in the days when we all lived in Missoula and we would cook almost every dinner of the week together, engorge ourselves, then walk down the alley to the Big Dipper for ice cream.  The Big Dipper would occasionally put forward a banana flavored ice cream, and when they did... I was in heaven.  Paul and I met John on the ice of Canyon Ferry Reservoir on the Saturday of President's Day weekend.  John handed me a plastic grocery sack with a gallon Zip-Lock freezer bag holding a nondescript cylinder of stuff that was the color of a whole-wheat tortilla.  "Is this a burrito?" I asked.  "No, dude, check out the label."  The label said "Matt Scream."  No bells were ringing.  I smelled it... bananas... "is it banana bread dough?" I inquired.  "No, dude, it's homemade banana ice cream!  Nice.  The next evening Paul, Lisa, Emily, and I gladly consumed the treat as the dessert following our meal of braised antelope shanks and homemade pierogies.

So, in one meal, we tapped into Paul's family tradition, we savored the sweet rewards of a successful hunting season, and we gladly accepted the gifts of great memories and greater friends.

Life really is better when you do it (at least some of it) yourself.

P.s.I think we will be making our own yogurt soon.  Lisa's homemade stuff is wonderful.  Lisa learned from Andy... we learned from Lisa.... The community is thriving!