Vaginal cream chocolate bar. Yum.

For readers with small children in the area, this post contains words and pictures which acknowledge the existence of sexual organs, so you might want to make the print really, really small.

The red-haired girl has a job for a few months now.  Up to three times a week you can find her at a local pharmacy picking up prescriptions for delivery to customers in the broader neighbourhood.   She gets eight bucks an hour plus tips, which sometimes can be substantial.  I call her our drug-runner.

Yesterday she came home with a package I’m still puzzling over.  Take a look at this:

What do you first think of when you see a chocoate bar named Vaginetten?  I know what I think.  Ewwwwww……

Especially when the translation of that fine print at lower left sinks in:

White Chocolate, tenderly melting like Vagisan’s Cremolum Myko Kombi.

Uh, now I get it.  The creamy-white anti-yeast-infection cream suppositories they’re pushing melt in your hoo-ha just as smoothly as this creamy white chocolate melts in your mouth.

Only people who graduated in the bottom half of their marketing class could have come up with this.    Seriously, what were they thinking?

“I know!  We’ll package up white chocolate bars to give away at pharmacies.  People will pick them up and wonder who could be dumb enough to market vaginal cream with white chocolate, they’ll take it home, take a photo and throw it up on social media.  Voilà!  Free advertising!”

They’re not so stupid after all.

how to bake bread on one leg

Hobbling around on crutches means you can’t do much of what you usually do, but as long as you have a bit of balance and are organised, you can still pivot on one leg in the kitchen.

The other day I made what around here will forever be known as one-legged bread.  

To make one-legged bread, you first have to rip your quadriceps tendon, get it sown back to your kneecap around three permanently installed screws, spend nearly a week in hospital, and still be a week or so away from being able to walk without crutches or ankle-to-hip leg brace.

If that step sounds like too much hassle, I fully understand.

But since making bread of any kind means going slow, being patient and taking long pauses, your mindset is already there if you’re approaching it on one leg.

And because your muscles are wasting away immobile while the tendon heals, you should be eating a lot of protein – like steak!  That is a tip from my old friend Vreni in Vancouver at Wellness Works.  And I’ve recently discovered an ancient whole grain called Kamut that is not only very tasty, it has more than twice the protein of run-of-the-mill whole grain wheat.  So in this recipe, that’s what I use.  It grinds up well in a grain mill if you have one.  Thanks again, Vreni – for that and your advice on how to best recover from my injury.

The first step is to make a thick, awful-looking batter called a sponge that will serve as the basis of the bread dough. In this recipe you use white flour, kamut flour, dried yeast, honey and lukewarm water.  Ingredient list and details at bottom.

Mix that up with a whisk until it has the consistency of thick pancake batter.

Then mix well together some more white flour, yeast and salt, and pour all that over the sponge.  Cover and let sit on your counter for an hour, then put it in the fridge overnight or up to 24 hours.  Or if winter is still lingering, stick it out on the balcony if it’s not too far below freezing.

When you get up the next morning, the yeast will have bubbled up into the flour mixture and look like this:

You can see how the sponge has bubbled up from below to mix on its own with the flour mixture on top.  This is perfectly OK.

Now get a good wooden spoon and mix it all together, then knead the dough for about 5 minutes.

Then go give your leg – and the bread – a rest!   Stick a bowl over the dough and let it sit for 20 minutes.  That allows the dough to expand a bit, making the rest of the kneading easier.

While you’re letting the bread rest or during one of the risings, maybe you can do an exercise you learned in physio: lie flat on your back, and try to raise the injured knee off the ground by sliding your heel along the floor toward your butt.  I get about this far until it hurts like a bugger and I can raise it no more:

Back to the bread:

Knead it for about 10 minutes more after it rests, then put back in your bowl, cover and set in a warm place to rise.

It should rise about double after about 90 minutes.

Punch it down, fold it over a couple of times – but don’t knead it – then put it back into your bowl to rise a second time.  It won’t take as long this time to rise.

After it’s risen a second time, punch it down again and shape to an elongated form and place in your bread pan.

Leave it uncovered somewhere warm to rise to about an inch or so above the loaf pan rim, then stick in the oven at 240 degrees C or 475 F for 10 minutes, lowering the temperature to 215 C or 425 F and baking for another 25 minutes or so.

Take it out, let it cool on a rack a bit, slice off an end, put on a bit of butter, enjoy!  Then hop off to rest while it all cools.

Ingredients and method:  I have two huge loaf pans, so I multiply by FOUR the recipe listed below.   Splitting the huge mass of dough into two, each loaf should weigh about 1600 grams before you bake it.   I usually cut the loaves in half and freeze what we don’t eat right away.

Putting the sponge mixture overnight in the fridge is not really necessary.  You can mix it up into dough after a couple of hours if you like, but leaving it overnight makes for a more full-flavoured bread.  Just make sure you let it warm up again for an hour or so after taking it out of the cold.

For the sponge:

All-purpose white flour (in Germany 405): 1 cup / 155 grams

Kamut or whole wheat flour: 1/4 c / 36 g

Honey: 1 1/4 tsp

Dry instant yeast: 3/8 tsp  / 1.25 g

water 1 1/3 cups:  / 320g

DO NOT ADD SALT TO THE ABOVE MIXTURE.

Flour mix:

White flour: 1 3/4 cups  / 290g

Dry instant yeast: 1/2 tsp

Salt:  1 1/2 tsp

Enjoy:

This recipe I’ve adapted from The Bread Bible, eliminating all the fancy stuff like throwing in ice cubes into the oven before baking to provide moisture.  She also recommends pre-heating the oven to 475 F ONE HOUR BEFORE BAKING!  I suppose in a universe of infinitely free electricity this might not be such a bad idea, but around here our light bills just jumped another 10 percent, so lady, forget it!

Grinding it out with a grain mill

One of the first things I noticed about my wife K’s kitchen in Hong Kong was this big, blocky wooden thing in the corner near the back door leading out to the terrace.

“What’s THIS?” I asked, flipping a globular wooden knob back and forth.

“It’s a grain mill,” she said.  ”A friend brought it from Germany for me.”

That really floored me.  Her flat was actually quite spacious by the cramped standards of Hong Kong, but the kitchen was little more than a narrow corridor wedged between an oversized living room and the tiny, windowless room we stored stuff in, but was designed as the maid’s bedroom.  We may have been cooking with gas, but you had to be really organised or you’d quickly run out of counter room.  You could stretch your arms across and touch both walls it was so small, so this glorified hunk of wood seems like the last thing you’d need.

But she swore by the results she got by grinding her own whole wheat flour, and I couldn’t much argue after she served up some Kaffee und Küchen for the first time. 

In Hamburg we have a much bigger kitchen, so the mill seems to take up a lot less room on our counters, and after 22 years it still gets used a lot, especially the last couple of years or so that I’ve been baking bread regularly.

It’s a German product, dependable and built to last out of solid beech, but you have to take it apart once in a while to give it a thorough cleaning or it starts to look a little ratty.

On the inside you’ll find a powerful motor and millstones made of a hardened ceramic.  The first time I turned loose all the bolts and separated the parts to clean was after it hadn’t been used in a few months.

There were a few bug skins clinging to the walls of the flour chute and around the grinding face, which was a bit of a YUCK moment, but once it was scrubbed clean, put back together and burnished with linseed oil, it looked good as new.

For grain I head to the organic food store.  I’ve ground a variety of grains over the years, but usually stick to wheat because that’s what the bread recipes I use call for.  The only thing I’ve not tried is corn, because I’ve never found corn kernels that specially say they’re for making corn flour, but what I’d love to do is grind some corn to see if I can make some whole grain polenta from it.

The manufacturer’s website has a variety of mills to choose from, and I like the fact they still make the exact model we own.  Their website gives you a bit of sticker shock, though.  Our model will set you back €454, but they’re guaranteed for 10 years.  Like I said, they’re built to last, so you should have it at least as long as we have with regular care.

If you want to see it running in this video, turn your sound down!  It is a bit of a noisy thing:

The Bread Bible: Mantovana Olive Oil Bread

This post is by special request from Cliff, whose Regensblog is so rich with recipes it could be tweaked to that of a 100% foodie if he and Sarah wanted to.  I make their Dutch Apple pie at least a half-dozen times a year.

I haven’t done a recipe post since my televised pizza fiasco a few years back, but now I’ve got two lined up.

First: the Bread Bible, pictured at left.  I hope the author Rose Levy Berenbaum doesn’t kill me for reproducing her recipe and thereby breaking whatever copyright she has over it.  As compensation she gets free publicity and a raving review from this one very satisfied bread baker whose undying loyalty to her methods will surely …. OK, you get the point.

This olive oil bread I’ve now made three times and always as a double batch.   The ingredients are really easy to work with and can be bought at any store.  Don’t go all organic if you don’t want to.  I use normal unbleached white flour – the cheap stuff they call 405 here – mixed in with organic whole wheat.

Here’s the shopping list for a single batch:

Sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds: 28 grams or 3 tablespoons each

Cracked flaxseed: 27 grams or 2.5 tablespoons.  You should toast these seeds a bit in the oven.

White flour: 250 grams or 1 and 2/3 cups.

Whole wheat flour: 88 grams 2/3 cup.  (She says scant 2/3 cups, whatever the heck that means.)

Instant yeast: 2.4 grams or 3/4 teaspoon

Water at room temp: 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons, or 266 ml (grams if weighing)

Extra virgin olive oil: 1/4 cup or 54 grams

Salt: 1 and 1/8 teaspoon, or 7.4 grams.

I do everything by hand.

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and gather to a ball and start kneading for five minutes.  It will be very sticky, but try to resist the urge to add too much extra flour.  You should have a decent dough scraper to work with.

Then let the flour “rest” for 20 minutes under an inverted bowl.  That helps make it less sticky, and easier to work with.

Knead about five more minutes, then set in a covered container big enough to allow to rise, then let it rise for about 90 minutes.

When doubled, pat it down gently but don’t knead the heck out of it.  Just turn it a couple of times and put it back in the bowl to rise again.

When it’s risen a second time, shape your dough into the pan – I butter mine first – and let it rise uncovered.  When the dough has risen about an inch above the rim of the pan, put it in the hot oven – 230C or 450F –  for the first five minutes, then lower it to 200C or 400F for about 40 to 45 minutes.

You don’t even need a pan.  You can prepare a pizza stone and bake it like a country-style round loaf.   I don’t bother to do that because I like even slices.  So boring.

A thing about salt and yeast: they say that salt coming into contact with yeast will kill it.  To be extra sure this doesn’t happen, I always add the salt after the first rising.  You might have other ways to add the salt.

One thing you may have noticed about the measurements given is that the author of the Bread Bible is an incredible exacto-nut.  She has her weights and measures down to the last gram and 1/16th of a teaspoon.  All well and good, but it’s a wee bit too stressful for duffing it in the kitchen like I’m doing.

Still, I try to get the measurements right, and if you’ve already got a decent digital kitchen scale, it pays to use it for baking bread because the volume of one type of flour is going to be different from others.   Weighing your stuff takes out the guesswork.  For really small amounts – like measuring the yeast – I use spoon measures and that works out fine.

Berenbaum also recommends getting see-through containers so that you can gauge exactly when the dough has doubled in volume.  Again, I just give it at least an hour, check it, if it looks like it could go a little more, then give it 15-30 minutes more.  If you have a bread-rising setting in your oven, use it.  Makes a nice, warm place for the dough to do its thing.

If you do get the book she also recommends a slew of things I don’t bother with.  For example, she’ll tell you to pre-heat your oven an hour before putting the bread in.  WTF?  We actually pay electricity bills with bite here in the real world.  I don’t know about you in North-America la-la-land, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to pre-heat an oven five minutes longer than necessary.

She’ll also say to throw in a few ice cubes in the bottom of the oven when you put the bread in.  I guess that’s for some added moisture, but I’ve never done it and never felt my results were lousy.  I’ve nothing to compare with of course, but we’ve been happily eating her breads without the fancy extras, and will keep on doing so.

Anyway, this is what it should look like sliced open:

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a step or there’ll be a question or two, so if you have any, fire away.  Please don’t be bothered if I don’t respond right away, as this bread, native to Tuscany, gives you a broad hint as to where we’ll be over the next couple of weeks.

The blueberry jam backstory

Three humble jars of homemade wild forest blueberry jam sit in the coolness of our apartment thanks to a clash 300km east of here between a bridge construction crew and technology gone wild.

We were staying for the weekend near a lake in a small corner of eastern Germany because an old friend from our Hong Kong days was celebrating his 60th birthday.  It was a huge bash.  He’d invited his whole extended family and everyone he’d known from those days, so there was a good crowd of more than 120 people.  We were all crammed into a discotheque in this tiny town that didn’t seem to have much else going for it aside from being surrounded by wonderful rolling countryside of forests and farms linked by shady roads lined with thick oak trees centuries old.

The party got off well and people danced and sang and talked and drank a bit so that most everyone was well-oiled by the time it was to take our leave.

The next day I had to be at work at 4 in the afternoon, so we tried to time our departure so that we’d be back in Hamburg with not too much time to spare.

We were using our GPS to find our way through the back roads of the former East, but after a half-hour of driving, we’d run into a problem.  The GPS gizmo was telling us to take a turnoff to a road that was blocked for construction work a little further on.  Unable to take the turnoff, we kept driving straight, but after five minutes of the machine blabbering on about how we really must turn around and plow into that construction crew, we turned the thing off, eased to the side of the road and found crammed in the glove compartment one of those things that in the past always proved useful , even if you could never fold them back up the right way.

A map!

TURN HERE! my wife said almost as soon as we got up to speed again, so I turned sharp right onto a narrow, one-lane road leading into a pine forest.  It was paved, with wide shoulders, so we were making good time, but after a few minutes we came upon a couple of cars parked off to the side, so we slowed down.

There were people off in the forest bent over and looking at the ground.

“Hey, I know what they’re doing,” said my wife.  “They’re picking BLUEBERRIES.”

So we parked the car a bit further along and rummaged around til we found a couple of containers, and got to picking some ourselves.  After an hour we’d had enough – about a pound and a half as it turned out – and headed out on our way again.

The whole time I was telling myself I should stop the berry-picking and go back to the car to get the camera, because the scene was so idyllic.  A forest thick enough for shade but leaving dappled noonday summer light on the carpet of berries, stillness except for the buzz of the occasional bee… to heck with it, I said.  Sometimes you just have to carry on with what you’re doing in the moment you’re doing it.

As we got going again I did take the opportunity to teach my wife a word she’d never heard before.  That’s rare, because her English is very good.

Serendipity: the happy accident that happens when you find something good you weren’t even looking for.

The quick weight-loss biking diet

Starting weight: 77Kg, the stubborn remnant of a two-week trip three months ago back home to British Columbia, during which I made too many visits with mom to White Spot and other fine purveyors of fat.

Achieved goal: 74Kg.

Diet: Two all-natural peanut-butter-and-honey-sandwiches on homemade seed bread, two generous slices of Panforte made from a recipe by David the American pastry chef in Paris, two dozen dates, two slices of dense, home-made apple cake the recipe of which I do not have because my sister-in-law offered them to me and I didn’t ask, two generous handfuls of mixed nuts, or what they call here in Germany: Student Feed.

One 500ml bottle of Weizenbier.

Six litres of water.

12 and a half hours’ worth of fresh air

Biking: Pump your tires to maximum recommended pressure.  Check and oil the chain if need be.  Wear bike shorts!  If you’re setting out to ride 185Km in one day – about three times what you’re used to –  you want your tush to be comfy.

Have a blinking light for the rear to display even during the daytime to turn on for those portions of the trip you’ll be riding along roads with no shoulder and traffic screaming by at 100km/h.

Bring toilet paper.  Beware of stinging nettles.

Get up at daybreak and have a couple cups of coffee, then get going.  You want to arrive before sundown.  It might help to bring a map.

Ride along a set path you’ve studied carefully both online and in various maps from just north of Osnabrück to Buxtehude through farmers’ fields, moorscape, beech forests, pine forests, along narrow paved roads lined with centuries-old oak, past cornfields, tobacco fields, ancient barns, haystacks and wedding announcements made of haystacks.

You’ll also be greeted by great, gagging waves of concentrated, liquified pig manure as you continue through the endless green and over railway tracks, six-lane Autobahn and bridges great and small, get lost a couple of times, curse under your breath at the uselessness of viamichelen.com which recommends you take a right down Doktorstrasse in some Hintertürverkehr town that ends in a cul-de sac blocked by a 150-year-old building, find your way again, get lost again, finally get on the right track and continue through ever-changing landscape dotted with pheasant, deer, hare, birds of prey, herons, dairy cows, sheep, horses, chickens and many, many cats out on the prowl for that elusive rodent.

Give up trying to count the number of wind turbines you pass.

Curse once again viamichelin.com for listing streets you must take, when, in fact, the street either does not exist or is not posted on any sign.

Ask locals for directions.  They are friendly and helpful!

Thank the fact you’re travelling northeast and getting pushed the whole way with prevailing winds, without which the trip would be unthinkable.

Curse yourself for having left your camera’s memory chip in the computer, so all you have is 8Kb of internal memory with which to take a few incredibly crappy photos for this post.

Thank that you had the good sense to buy a new mountain bike to replace the one you rode to Bremen in the opposite direction.

Stop and have lunch on a bed of dry, crackling beech leaves looking up at the blanket of foliage blocking out the daylight and marvel that in only a few weeks it will all be gone and the long northern winter you’ve been trying so hard not to think about will surely be upon us.

Ignore pains in the knee and the feeling you might be developing a Charley horse in both thighs.  Breathe deeply.

Call your wife and ask her to take that bottle of beer out of the basement and stick it in the fridge because you want to think about it sitting there waiting as a reward for your day’s efforts.

Don’t tell her your legs hurt.

Ask yourself just how many kilometres getting lost and having to swing around to find the proper route added on to the official total of 185km.  Arrive at a round number of 200km, give or take five.

Ask yourself if cycling so far in one day is that much of a good idea.

Weigh yourself the next morning.  Voilà!  Three Kg. lighter.

This diet is not recommended for anyone over the age of 3 unless accompanied by a desire just to find out if you really can do it.

Picking blackberries in the big city

About five minutes from our place a squad of bulldozers and front-end loaders flattened a whole city block alongside the commuter rail line, leaving a huge pile of bricks at one end and an ugly wasteland on the rest.

Not so unusual, except that there was nothing there in the first place except a vacant lot covered in thick patches of blackberry bush.  Every summer until this one we’d head over every two or three days or so dressed in old shoes and paint-stained jeans, heading home again with scratches on our arms and another load of what my mother used to call wild Himalayan blackberries.   I’ve been picking them since I was old enough to pick up a pail.

There was also a great spot we used to have close to where I work, but last year they ruined half of it by making a park out of one side and putting up a two-metre-high fence around the rest, making it nearly impossible to get to the berries except in the evenings or on weekends, because you now to go through a schoolyard to get to them.

Now that our best places to pick have been obliterated, we’ve been forced to look elsewhere.  It took a few spins on the bike, but I found a patch by a railway bridge and along a lane.

It’s not that Germans don’t know what blackberries are, because I do see people out picking from time to time, but this one patch, so full of berries, was left mostly untouched because it sits on a steep hill and most of the best were well out of reach.

So the other day I set to work getting to those rich, fat, black pieces of fruit that had been hanging there for days just waiting for someone like me to come along with a six-foot stepladder and a determination to make some blackberry pie.

I must have been quite a sight surfing atop the ladder along the upper brambles, because some Turkish kids came by and started throwing sticks at me.  When I turned around to glare at them they scampered away.

When I left the ladder unattended for a couple of minutes at the bottom of the patch a couple of kids from the kindergarten across the street scampered over to grab it for themselves, but a teacher gave them hell for pawing after stuff not their own.

Later on a Turkish lady dressed in that grey, bell-shaped garb you often see floating along the streets stopped and, in the best German she could muster, gave me pointers on where to find the best ones and cautioning that I really should take care not to fall off my perch lest I end up in the thorns.

I’m not used to picking berries in public at all, and avoid being on a stage of any kind if I can help it, but with so little choice left in the area, I’m going to have to get used to it if I want any more before the short season is over.

The results are the same in any case: fresh-baked pie that doesn’t last long.

How to make a strawberry pyramid

You could do it the easy way.

Step 1.  Buy a whole whack of strawberries.

Step 2. Stack ‘em.

But that would be too easy.

Better to take that fruit and jam it.

I jam strawberries, raspberries and blackberries every summer.  My mother used to make jam as well, but hers was a long, complicated process involving paraffin wax to seal the jars, and a bit of voodoo.  I do it the easy way.

1. Clean the berries.

2. Sterilise the jars and lids you’re going to use by boiling about a half-inch of water in a big pot with the lid on.

3.  Take a kilo and a half of berries, add a half-kilo of pectin/sugar mix – the one with the 3:1 ratio so you use less sugar - and throw in a small packet of citric acid.

3b. Pour that stuff in!

4. Joyfully slash the pot with a knife to cut up the berries, then boil the crap out of them for three minutes while stirring and stamping down with a potato masher.

5. Pour the still-boiling mixture into the jars up to the brim.

6. Drop a lid loosely on each jar, then get a towel – because the jars will be super-hot – and tighten the lids as hard as you can.

7. Turn the jars over and let them cool.

8.  Ummm… that’s about it.  It takes me about an hour and a half now that I’m organised.

OH!  Make that strawberry pyramid:

Such an awesome lunch we had at the Squamish White Spot

Seriously awesome.

A friendly staff member showed us to our table and as we settled down to look at the menu, our early twenty-something waiter came by.

“Hi, can I get you anything to drink to start?”

“We’ll all have coffee,” my brother Bruce said, “and my younger brother here will have some water.  He’ll have his coffee after, because he told us the other day that having coffee before a meal other than breakfasts is SO American.”

“Awesome,” said our waiter.  ”I’ll be right back.”

By the time their coffee and my water came, we were ready to order.

“So, can I take your order now?

“Sure,” said Bruce. “I’ll have the Fat-free Triple-O Leanburger with lettuce and tomato, no mayo, please.”

“Awesome.  And for you, Sir?”

“I’ll have the baked potato,” I said.

“Awesome.”

And so it went.  For every statement resulting in the slightest need for a response, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Awesome.”

By the time he was so awesomely fetching our bill I started to imagine what tired, overused, meaningless bit of oral fluff he would be coming out with had we been suddenly slung back to the late sixties, when the land upon which the clean, bright White Spot stood - and in which we were now able to enjoy such an awesome lunch - would still for another 20 years be nothing more than a poorly drained swamp.

“Hi, can I take your order?”

“I’ll have the Triple-O Fatburger with extra cheese, bacon and mayonnaise and a side order fries with gravy, please.”

“Groovy, man!  And for you, ma’am?”

The thing is, I’d always thought Awesome was already passé, flung onto the heap along with the rest of the Neats, the Keens, the Cools, the Far-out-solid-right-on Hippie-dippie Weatherman stuff that so dates the user, even the worst offender avoids the aforementioned and please-just-let-it-stay-dead forever Groovy.

Apparently not.  You have to plunge right back into your home country to find out what people are talking about and how they’re saying it, so that’s what I did.  I vowed from then on to keep my ears open and listen to every waiter, bank teller, kiosk vendor, fast-food order-taker and clerk, taking note of every Awesome I heard in the short two weeks I’d be there.  I thought it might be fun to do a final tally, plotting the utterances onto an Awesomes per Hour chart.

But it was like going on a car ride as a kid back in the day before backseat Blu-Ray players, Playstations and Smartphones, when passing the time meant counting the cars coming the other direction.  After a few hundred or so, you just got tired of it.

Three things from Canada

Three things we brought home from Canada last summer have been keeping us going right into this beautiful spring.

1.  The Bread Bible.

I must confess to a new hobby these past couple of years: baking bread.  I kind of stumbled into it, but now I’m hooked.

At a bookstore in West Vancouver I found The Bread Bible and thought: I don’t care if it weighs a tonne and we’re already at our limit, I’m going to buy it.   This book gets into the science of baking and introduces refined techniques I’d never heard of before.  Most importantly, all measurements are laid out both by volume and weight in metric down to the last gram – perhaps unique in an American cookbook.   I love it.

About that photo: At left is an old-style metal bread container often seen in German kitchens.  At right is a grain mill into which I pour the raw wheat just before mixing the dough.  It’s nearly 20 years old and in perfect shape.  That bread beside it is my latest variation on a Bread Bible recipe.

2. The Ortofon OM30 stylus.

If the Bread Bible triggered overweight baggage alarms at the check-in desk and a quick bag re-shuffle, at a few micrograms worth of retro technology the Ortofon OM30 stylus tucked away in my hand luggage would almost have gone un-noticed had I not been sitting in glorious anticipation of countless hours of vinyl enjoyment to come.

Hanging at the end of my tonearm since the day we got back, it’s been digging out tones from my record grooves I never knew existed.  Right away I noticed the difference from my old stylus, an OM20.  Designed and made in neighbouring Denmark, why did I wait to buy the upgrade in Canada?  Because hunting around before leaving I discovered that in Canada you can pick it up in a store for less than you can find it online in Germany.  Why that is, I haven’t bothered to look into, so busy I’ve been enjoying my record collection anew.  If you love the rich, textured feel of the sound spilling from your speakers that only vinyl can give you, or are looking to join the growing movement away from CDs and MP3s and back to vinyl,  the best advice I can offer is to start with a decent turntable, then get the best stylus you can afford.  It makes such a difference.

3. Six litres of maple syrup.

It’s only been nine months, and we’re on our last bottle already.  Damn.  That’s the real reason I’m headed back in June, you know.