This afternoon after work, Bob started brewing a batch of beer. It’s his second. It’s a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone. It’s taken over our entire kitchen. When the time for thinking about dinner rolled around, there was a giant kettle of beer waddling in the sink with a hose from outside snaking in the window and through a coil of copper tubing to cool it. A carboy is on a small table in the middle of the room (the table seems to have been specially placed for that purpose), and a 6 1/2 gallon bucket full of cleaning solution is sitting next to it. Every available surface is either covered in sterilized pieces to the process, or with things that were moved to make room for the sterilized stuff. We talk about dinner, and Bob decides to have some steak. He looks at me for a moment, then suggests “and baked beans? You can have some.” They’re cooked in bacon, so that’s out (and he skips the beans as well — it’s about 85 out still). I ended up eating a couple cucumber sandwiches from some fresh cucumber from Canticle Farms. There’s something so wonderful about cukes. A cucumber plant reminds me of a pack of lazy basset hounds, sleeping away the day. That might be, in part, because there’s a mini pack of basset hounds that live a few houses down, and I swear, those adorable snausages are just the cutest…but I digress. For one thing, they’re actually fruit. For another, they don’t grow anywhere in the midwest…except in Utah. The cuke hails from India – perhaps not so surprising, considering the wonderful cucumber sauces they make, and didn’t come to North America until the colonies were really getting going. Early cultivation began in Western Asia and Eastern Europe. They’re mostly water, so they’re not going to be nutritionally complete by themselves.

Anyway, after my post-dinner research, I find that I’m actually mid-dinner. While Bob is eating his steak (and the beer is safely ensconced in the basement), I had best find something a bit better balanced to eat.