Sydney Oland

Recently I've been getting into fermentation, which even as I type this seems like a weird thing to be 'into'.  Two weeks ago I started a batch of Mexican pineapple vinegar, from Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, I tasted it on Sunday and it's almost got a vinegary taste.  It needs another week or so of fermenting on the counter I think.

When I was last home to Toronto for a visit with my Omi I told her about my experiment with making vinegar, she laughed at me and told me that this was how they made vinegar when she was a child.  She's eastern European, so they didn't use pineapple but other kinds of fruit.

It's funny to me that my Grandmother moved to Canada more then 50 years ago to give her family a better life, and a generation later I'm making vinegar the same way she did on a rural family farm in the 1930's.

I'm not sure what that says about me that I feel the need to try and make my own vinegar instead of spending 1$ on a bottle at the store, but it certainly felt nice to give my Omi a good chuckle.

I've been spending a lot of time with offal and meat in general because of my new project www.eatingnosetotail.com.  Right now I'm making a tongue and I'm going to serve it with Fergus Henderson's green sauce.  The recipe for this sauce called for half and quarter bunches of various herbs.  So now I have a surplus of beautiful herbs in my kitchen.

I decided to make risotto for dinner tonight, and having no stock in the freezer I decided to make a vegetable stock with some of the herbs, the top of a giant leek, the peelings from two carrots, a few cloves of garlic and some extra already chopped onion.  For good measure I threw in some peppercorns and a few fresh bird chili's.  My apartment smells heavenly right now. 

Thank god it's summer, because I'm being reminded how much I love vegetables.  And with my latest project making my life fairly meaty it was really good to be reminded how wonderful a meal from the garden can be.

I did not throw up on the podium.  Awesome.

I actually really enjoyed my panel, the other two papers were really interesting.  I was the second of three papers, and although the tips of my fingers were tingling all through the first paper when it was my turn I actually felt pretty good.  The first few paragraphs were a little shaky, but once I found my stride at about page three it was pretty smooth sailing.

Alice Julier, who mentored me through this paper was there to watch, and my good friend Lilly (www.consuminglilly.com) was also in attendance.  There were about thirteen people total who watched me give my paper, any more and I think I would have been way more nervous.  The paper itself needs a little bit of tweaking to make it ready to be published in a journal, the possibility of which is incredibly exciting!

The rest of the conference was really interesting, there was a ton of really fascinating research, as well as a few flops.  All the people I met were wonderful and I find myself back in Boston ready to get my thesis done.  There are some very important questions I need to answer surrounding my thesis, like how long it's going to be as well as how long I am going to take to to write it.  The timeline question being really important becasue of my immigration status.  I need to answer these questions by the end of the week.

Looking forward to going to next year's conference in Indiana.