Chocolate and brisket
Luke’s visit has come to an end, and he’s already safely back in the United States. We really enjoyed having him here, all to ourselves, in the land of no PC computer games to suck up all his time. Luckily, he was here long enough that I converted him to my hiking cult, so hopefully in the future it will be easy to get him to visit as long as there is hiking involved.
For Cass’s birthday, we decided to go eat at Brisket again. It was still good. We got the Grand Slam with extra brisket. They made the mistake of telling me that the Shredded Chicken was made from chicken thighs, so that was a big waste. Cass gave the server a nice tip and mentioned that it was his birthday, so the server showed back up with shots to celebrate the birthday. Luke and I got virgin limoncello and Cass got some kind of whiskey.
For Luke’s last weekend, we decided to go tour the Lindt Home of Chocolate chocolate factory that is very close to where we live. We learned more than we ever wanted to know about cacao trees and their pods, and the Swiss men who perfected all aspects of chocolate making, marketing, and accidentally discovering conching. Apparently, Rodolphe Lindt left the chocolate mixer on over the weekend and came back to smooth velvety chocolate fondant that melts in your mouth. This prolonged mixing is called the “conche.”
After the history lesson, there were 3 chocolate fountains where you could sample white, dark, and milk chocolate. Then there were the machines (the picture of Cass with his audio guide to his ear) that would break off and drop down a piece of flavored chocolate for you to sample and guess the flavor. There were also endless samples of Lindt chocolate truffles, which I had never tried before. The picture of Luke is in front of some of the display assembly lines that have liquid chocolate, molds, scrapers, cooling towers, etc. It was interesting, and the chocolate was tasty. We stocked up on some different products for Luke to take back home to share with the family.
I can’t believe Thanksgiving is next week. It’s not celebrated over here, of course, so Cass doesn’t even get the day off. But I’m going to cook something of a Thanksgiving meal - even though I hear that turkeys are impossible to find here. We’ll either roast a chicken, or if Cass has his way we’ll smoke a brisket. Right after that, we have more visitors! After that, the blog may be sparse for a while. We are down to about 9 hours of sunlight each day, and the temps are solidly in the single digits Celsius (30s Fahrenheit). Not much opportunity for fun activities. Plus, we are headed back to the US in early December and staying until early January. Hopefully, we’ll have some interesting skiing content starting in January!