A fresh spring salad

Springtime is here!  Sort of!  Although the weather has been decidedly un-springlike for the last couple weeks (gray, rainy, and generally yucky), there have been occasional patches of sunshine and happiness and I have tried my best to make the most of them.  A couple of weeks ago it was particularly nice around here so I decided to take a brief trip into the nearby woods on a culinary adventure.  As always, my first thoughts were directed to my readers and their entertainment, so I made sure to document the trip for posterity.  It is with that in mind that I bring to you part two in my "Highlights of Swiss Cooking."

Bear's Garlic Salad

Step 1:

Go to a nearby wooded area.  It doesn't have to be a particularly large place, but it probably has to be in Europe somewhere and it helps it's only lightly wooded so that the underbrush gets direct sunlight.  I chose the small wooded area on the northeast side of EPFL.

Step 2:

Look for a patch of ail des ours -- bear's garlic.  Here is what one looks like:

Fig. 1: A patch of ail des ours near EPFL.  The Sorge creek runs right through campus, and around its banks are some well-kept woods that are great for jogging, walking, and picking ail des ours.

If you chose your wooded area well, you will have absolutely no problem finding this.  It seems to grow almost everywhere you look and even if you aren't looking for it, it's easy to find as the pungent garlic/onion smell makes it instantly recognizable.  The first time I saw it, I was jogging through some woodlands and as I passed a big patch of the stuff, it smelled like someone was cutting onions or something.  Definitely not something you forget.

Step 3:

Collect a whole bunch of bear's garlic.  Wikipedia claims that there are other leafy green plants that look very similar but are actually poisonous, thus one should be careful in attempting to identify bear's garlic.  On the other hand, the smell is so strong and so distinctive that it would really take a concerted lack of effort to accidentally mistake this for something else.

Fig. 2:  A bag of bear's garlic.  I think that the smaller, thinner leaves are more flavorful, but unfortunately they are also harder too pick.  As each single leave has to be picked individually, it is much easier to fill a bag with big, floppy leaves than the smaller more pungent ones.  As always, life is unfair in this regard.

Step 4:

Take the bear's garlic home, clean it up and then go get some other salad like ingredients.  As the bear's garlic will form the base of the salad, you probably don't need to add any onions or garlic to the salad itself.  I decided on going simple: strawberries, parmesan, and a simple balsamic vinaigrette.  I probably would have thrown in some nuts or maybe poppy seeds (my Mom makes a really good poppy seed dressing that would have been perfect), but the cost of these things in this country is absolutely obscene.

Step 5:

Make a salad.

Fig. 3: The finished salad.  Always use your best plastic serving dishes for a salad of this quality -- no sense in getting cheap now.

Still have leftover bear's garlic?  Like, 3/4 of a big bag's worth?  Well, fortunately, it has many other uses.  If you own a food processor, you can make pesto by just substituting it for the basil -- you know, if you have to make substitutions for basil, what with your life currently being a basil-less living death.  Less depressingly, you can slice it up fine and toss it on top of pasta, omelettes, or risotto.  Happy eating!

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Related note: why is it called bear's garlic?  Allegedly, this is due to the European brown bear's well-known love of digging up the bulbs and enjoying them as a post-hibernation snack.  Linguistically speaking, I find this a little odd.  Although I am not an ursine-behavioral expert, my numerous field studies have indicated to me that bears are nothing if not extremely lazy.  By this logic, I am guessing that bears probably eat pretty much anything edible that grows in any abundance anywhere near anywhere that bears live.  So, why aren't there a bunch of other things that are similarly named?  Shouldn't there be bear's berries? bear's peas? bear's lilies? bear's nuts?  Anyway, I did not find this "just-so story" explanation particularly compelling, but I guess it will have to stand until further evidence comes to light.

Along those lines, do yourself a favor and check out this absolutely insanely over-informative article about the plant.  The author agrees with me that the etymology of the name is suspect, but he also notes that the link with bears occurs in almost every European language.  He then goes on some loosely related tangents which you should really read yourself, but here are the highlights:

The [word for bear]  is a euphemism originally signifying just the brown one, being derived from an Proto-Indo-European root bʰer brown ... It appears that the Germanic peoples avoided uttering the true name of the bear, fearing that the invocation of the name might make the dangerous animal appear.

and

The true Proto-Indo-European name of the bear is h₂rtḱos, probably meaning destroyer 

I leave you with that.

A museum to avoid, and other notes

I worry sometimes that this blog is getting off-track, thus, with this post I hope to return it to its original purpose: making fun of weird stuff in Switzerland. That is what the people want, and that is what they shall have.

As mentioned in the previous post, the weather here is finally starting to change. A couple of Sundays ago, in fact, it hit the blistering heights of 55 degrees. What could I do but take to the sidewalks of Lausanne and soak in the city. First off, I'll say this for the people of Lausanne: they know how to take advantage of good weather. Morally broken by months of abysmal, depressing, seasonal-affective-disorder-causing weather, they heroically emerge from their caves at the first hint of a sunny day, heavy coats left at home in favor of slightly less heavy coats. And how do they greet the spring? Why, how else?

Fig. 1: As ski season ends, petanque season begins.

Although more of French thing, petanque is fairly popular in Switzerland. Well-maintained petanque courts are located around the city and people of all ages seem to enjoy the activity. Although I was forced to leave my petanque kit at home, what with it weighing like 20 pounds, I am optimistic that I'll talk some of my labmates into playing sometime. One of them must own a set. Notably, there are more petanque courts than basketball courts in Lausanne (as far as I can tell). I think it's safe to say that the Vaudois are not big basketball players.

Nearby the petanque courts pictured above are the ruins of Lousana -- the first Roman settlement in the area. Located in what is now Vidy (a neighborhood of Lausanne), there are still numerous archealogical remains. I am a huge "Roman ruins" buff, so I finally got down to Vidy to see both the ruins and the Musée Romain Lausanne-Vidy, which houses all the artifacts that have been uncovered.

Fig. 2: The ancient city of Lousana. This building (like most of ancient and current Lausanne) probably housed an apartment management company.

Although fairly extensive -- the ruins cover a couple football fields worth of space -- the archealogical remains are not particularly impressive. As with most remains of this style, it's mostly a bunch of low walls and foundations of buildings. Unfortunately, time has not been very kind to Lousana and it's pretty clear that most of the "remains" are, at the minimum, heavily improved with modern morter and stones. Still, there are some nice "viewing spots" where you can look through a little peephole through a painted reconstruction (on glass) projected onto the current remains. The whole site, although not particularly exciting, is still fairly nice and relaxing.

The museum, on the other hand, is hard to enjoy. Currently, they are having an exhibit called T'as trouvé? (You've got it?). Instead of actually showing you interesting artifacts and explanations, they have arranged the museum into a series of rooms, each with its own "historical puzzle." Now, I love history and I love puzzles so going into this, I thought "hey, this is right up my alley!" Oh, how wrong I was.

The basic problem was that there was nothing "historical" or "educational" about the puzzles. Instead of learning something about the objects, or figuring out something about historical trends, the ancient items served as little more than props for your typical back-of-Highlights-magazine type puzzle. For example, the "puzzle" in one room consisted of two sequences of objects and another box with assorted items inside. The idea was to look at the two sequences and determine which objects in the box completed the sequences. What were the sequences? Did they have to do with the evolution of different techniques, i.e. stone age, bronze age, etc? Did they have do do with different historical eras of Roman history? Try to figure them out.

Fig. 3: (part of) The first sequence. All you need to know to solve this is that the first items are needles, the second are handles from amphoras, the third is a bowl, slightly off-camera is a bronze arm of a small statue, and continuing past that are a compass (like for seafaring), a nail, and then a die (like for a game of chance). The "solution" to this puzzle was a set of ancient false teeth. Why?

Fig. 4: The second sequence. I honestly never figured this one out, but I think it has something to do with the materials that each of the pieces are made of. Some of those little things are made of bone, and the piece at the extreme left is made of bronze, I think. Good luck.

Probably my biggest obstacle in this whole thing was my poor French. Many of the puzzles invovled some amount of word play or at the least a fairly extensive vocabulary. By the end, though, my biggest obstacle was the fact that I just didn't care anymore. In theory, you had to solve all of the puzzles in order to prodcue a numeric code which you could use to open the door at the end which led you to ... the entrance, but I found that an equally satisfying solution was to just walk backwards and forget about the whole puzzle nonsense.

Unfortunately, the exhibit will be gone by May 3, so if you were planning on visiting me and you wanted to hit your head against the wall for a couple hours, you'll have to hurry.

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Finally, I went to the supermarket the other day and saw some goofy stuff that inspired me to break out my cellphone and take some pictures. So, in no particular order:

Fig. 5: As a San Diegan, I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert on mexi-american foodstuffs. This is something I have never, ever seen. And, yes, of course I bought some. It tastes pretty much like ketchup.

Fig. 6: This is one of 6 displays of chocolate easter bunnies in the supermarket. Six. That's only counting the displays with bunnies -- there is plenty more chocolate in the store, as well. I think it's safe to say that Swiss people are looking forward to Easter.

Fig. 7: This package of guinea pig (dwarf rabbit, in French) food is just all kinds of awesome. First, the kid. Second, it says "feel cool." Are you supposed to feel cool because you serve this to your guinea pig or is the guinea pig supposed to feel cool? And finally, it looks like the kid is wearing a shirt that says "I love Rat(?)". We can only assume that the full text says "I love Ratt." San Diego, represent!