Tag Archives: celebration

Winter Solstice Casserole

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solstice casseroleIt’s hard not to think of Christmas as the granddaddy of December holidays, at least in this part of the world, but allow me to remind you that there’s another, more (literally) astronomical occasion to celebrate this Sunday: the winter solstice. Have you all gotten your Saturnalia costumes dry-cleaned?

People have been celebrating the shortest day of the year ever since…well, since they were able to calculate that it was the shortest day of the year. Some pre-Christian celebrations included Scandinavians burning a Juul log to honor Thor (yep, that’s where the Yule log comes from), Mayans doing a terrifying if-we-don’t-break-our-ankles-this-will-probably-be-good-luck trick called the flying pole dance, and Romans crowning some poor schmuck as Saturnalian king and giving him unrestrained license until they killed him seven days later.

solstice, servedGiven the, erm, vibrancy of some of these festivals, it’s a shame that most solstice celebrations have dwindled to nothing. It’s still an important holiday in the pagan religion, but despite the impact of a phrase like “pagan ritual,” I read through a couple of them, and they seem mostly to involve pretty staid activities, like watching the sun rise or sitting in the dark while mindfully chewing bread.

So how should you commemorate the solstice? Invent your own celebration. I made up this solstice casserole—filled with winter vegetables, spiced with black pepper and nutmeg, and blanketed with a thin layer of snowy white cheese.

Winter Solstice Casserole Continue reading →

LF & SN Forever!

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Good Beer is Born Here

After I took stock of my year’s best beers, I concluded that I am really infatuated with Sierra Nevada. When I admtted to myself what a crush I had on them I did what any mature adult would do and stalked them on the Internet. What follows is a selection of what makes this particular brewery so dreamy.

Sierra Nevada’s business plan is easily compatible with my life philosophy, something I can’t say for many other for-profit institutions. (I’m scared of making money.) For example, they believe in living sustainably and try to run a business that leaves as small a footprint on our planet as possible. Their brewery in Chico, California runs in part on solar energy collected from their land through one of the country’s largest privately-owned solar arrays. They also collect excess energy to reuse through heat recovery devices on brew kettles and boilers and even recycle the CO2 created during the brewing process.

The brewery also knows the importance of community. Though Sierra Nevada is one of the largest breweries still considered “craft,” they maintain a presence in the town of Chico. At their Taproom and Restaurant you can find meals cooked with vegetables from their farm and quaff an Estate Homegrown Ale brewed with the organic hops and barley harvested from their back 40. In 2000 they opened The Big Room, an auditorium that seats 350 live-music lovers. I’m thinking of moving to Chico. Continue reading →

Beers to That! The Drink to Clink

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One happy day my fridge looked like this!

Sitting on the deck, my knuckles scraped, shins bruised, and hair everywhere, the bottle of beer in my hands could have been a flute of Dom Perignon. But it wasn’t; it was better. It was, in fact, an IPA Maximus from Lagunitas, because that is what you drink after a day of moving everything you own and everything your Significant Other owns across town in 90-degree weather. You don’t drink champagne after that.

You don’t drink champagne after your kickball team won its first game ever and you don’t drink it when you’ve lost every one. You don’t drink bubbly after working out in your garden all afternoon. You don’t fall onto the couch after an exhausting day at work and take a long draw from a bottle of champagne. That’s ridiculous, right? But champagne remains known as the beverage of celebrations. I’d like to challenge that assumption.

Beer has a reputation for being the proud drink of the common man, and I feel there’s nothing wrong with that characterization. But I’d like to suggest that beer is also, more than any other beverage, the drink America celebrates with. From the “Champagne of Beers” all the way up to your finest Belgian Double, beer is the drink to clink for every accomplishment, small or large. Because some days, just getting through the last hour of work and making it home to sit in pajamas and eat mac and cheese out of the pan is as much an achievement as getting married or winning the lottery. Beer is everybody’s drink for everyday victories.

When Ben got up off the deck and offered to bring me another IPA, I accepted eagerly, knowing we still had a lot of moving and organizing to do, being relieved to have the big part of the move complete, and feeling so happy to be right there, right then, with that beer.