The drive south from St. Paul along the Mississippi River is one of beauty.  Giant river bluffs overlook the wide expanse of water that is Lake Pepin.  Quiet towns cling to the cliffs; bald eagles soar overhead.  If you follow the river for a few hours, take a left at The Pie Company, and head into the unpaved back roads of Wisconsin, you will eventually come across a most unusual place: a pizza farm.  The pizza farm.

There, an eccentric horticulturalist has joined the growing ranks of amateur genetic engineers to create some most amazing plants.  Tomatoes filled with sauce-like jelly and a slight hint of garlic.  Mozzarella grown molecule by molecule from heavily modified Aspergillus niger molds and a secret bacteria with an affinity for producing casein.  A special yeast unique to the area that imparts incredible flavor into the crust.  It still takes a human hand to combine the ingredients, and there is no magic fire bush to cook the pies, but it’s as close as you can come to growing pizzas on trees.

Ok, not really.  The Pizza Farm, actually A-Z Produce & Bakery, is a farm a few miles northwest of Pepin, Wisconsin.  Every Tuesday night, every week of the year, they sell pizzas on the farm.  Every Tuesday night, droves of people show up on this dusty road in the middle of nowhere to buy said pizzas.  Why make the two-hour journey from Minneapolis for a stupid pizza?

In short, the pizzas are amazing.  Flavorful, fresh, creative, cooked on-site in two giant brick wood-fired ovens.  The Pizza Farm does one thing, and one thing only: pizzas.  There is just one size of pie, and there is none of this by-the-slice tomfoolery.  No drinks either, nor plates or even tables.  Just pizzas, taken directly from the oven and served in delivery-style cardboard boxes.  The crowds that turn out bring their lawn chairs, folding tables, and blankets and spread out on the grass for a pizza picnic.  Many bring wine, and some make a stop at the aforementioned Pie Company for a fitting dessert.

The amazing atmosphere and excellent flavor of the pizzas might be enough on their own, but the unbelievable part of the operation is the source of the ingredients: almost everything in the pizza comes from the farm.  That farm.  As in, the one that surrounds you as you’re sitting on the grass munching on a slice.  Vegetables for toppings?  Grown there.  Wheat for the crust?  Grown there.  Milk for the cheese?  Milked there.  Meat for the sausage?  It had been walking around the land oinking not long before.  You can even complete the cycle, if you’re so inclined, by making a “deposit” in the “bran can,” the contents of which are then used to fertilize the non-food crops.

I visited the pizza farm with a group of friends last Tuesday, and I can’t recommend the experience enough.

On the web: A-Z Produce and Bakery, a.k.a. The Pizza Farm.

Two-on-one breakaway.  I come out of my net to aggressively challenge the puck carrier.  Big poke check! The puck ricochets into the corner  …but I lose my stick.  I grab it by the blade and scramble back towards my net.  The offense has passed the puck out to a waiting player at the top of the slot.  He pulls back for a shot.  I slide in, stacking the pads.  He releases the shot, and I reach up with my glove, nabbing it from the air as I’m sliding across the ice on my side!

Save!!! Yay!!!  😀

A few weeks ago, I made a borerline-insane, 38-hour, 2100-mile drive across the country from San Francisco to Minneapolis.  But this post isn’t about the mere 90-minute sleeping stop I made in Wyoming, nor is it about the massive quantities of really horrible truck stop coffee I started consuming around Utah.  No, this is about my quest for more substantial sustinence along the way.  It’s also my way of completely burrying the lede, and a somewhat backwards approach to announcing that I have made said journey.

I generally dislike eating while on road trips, both because of the mess it tends to make in the car and because of the sleepy state it leaves me in.  Not only that, but it’s usually pretty difficult to find appealing food along the way.  What’s not appealing?  Fried, greasy, processed food.  In other words, pretty much everything one would find beside the freeway… except for Subway.

Ah,  Subway.  The bastion of vegetables along the open road.  If a truck stop happens to have a Subway attached to it when I’m hungry, it automatically wins over all neighboring gas stations.  Thanks to good luck, there happen to be a plentiful supply of such stations along most of I-80, so I had some 6″ veggie subs around Nevada and Nebraska.  The price each time? About $2.49, plus perhaps a few cents of tax.  Great.  Fast forward to today.

This afternoon, I was really craving a sandwich, but I was nowhere near home, so I stopped in at Subway for the first time since the drive.  I ordered my usual 6″ veggie sandwich (extra olives, thanks), and was more than a bit surprised to find its price to be $3.00 — about 20% more than it had been.  Making matters worse, the price was the same as many meat-filled options, such as the chicken breast, tuna, turkey, and BLT.  What a rip-off!  An irrational spark of vengence tempted me to order one of the other options — say, the chicken breast — and fling the “free” meat into the trash in front of the employee in some sort of useless protest.

Grrr.  That really irritated me, much more than perhaps it should have.  Maybe it was simply because the same scam is being run on the “$5 footlong” thing — the footlong veggie used to be less than $5, but the price was raised in a sort of subsidy of the meat-filled subs.

What to do?  Well, for the time being, I’m certainly less inclined to patronize Subway.  Now, to find a better on-the-road alternative…

In something that rates pretty high on the “didn’t expect to see that” scale, my neighbor posted this sign today:

Yup, two chickens, miles from the nearest farm.  Given the tasty nature of said birds, it’s a safe bet that they didn’t wander very far.

Part of me suspects that they were pets but became too large.  At least the owners didn’t have snakes or tigers that had crept past the cute stage.

For your reading enjoyment, I bring you three very short stories about my recent trip to Montana.  Advice, drama, awkward layouts — it’s all here!

Yes Virginia, It’s Snowy in the Mountains

“A beautiful area, but it’s under 100 inches of snow right now,” said the ranger, crushing our hopes.  The six of us had been planning to backpack in the Jewel Basin in Flathead National Forest, but we weren’t equipped to deal with so much snow.  Turns out that snow lingers in the northern Rockies well into July.  Late May was a bit early.  The solution: nearby Firefighter Mountain. No snow there; just a confusing network of unmapped forest roads and dense pine forest.  Later, that resulted in a cellphone appeal to a higher-resolution map, which led to two discoveries: Google Maps uses the WGS-84 datum instead of the NAD-27 datum, and Terraserver-USA snaps lat/long coordinates in a way that makes it nearly useless.

Take that, Planet Earth!

The glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting.  At the present rate, they will cease to exist by 2030.  It is then with some irony that I made my trip to Glacier NP by first flying from California to Minnesota and then driving from Minnesota to Montana.  Why?  The RV and my friends were in Minnesota.  The drive revealed something else: Montana is a huuuuge state, and an enormous part of it is empty grazing land.  The upside is that western Montana has plenty of beautiful mountains, and opportunities for solitude abound.  Total distance traveled on the trip: about 5400 miles.

The Woods

Recent fire places an eerie imprint on a forest.  Having found mixed success hiking at Flathead NF and Glacier NP, we set out backpacking in nearby Lewis and Clark NF.  Our path brought us through thick forests, muddy trails, and open meadows.  It also led us through a recently burned stand of pines.  Unlike in Glacier and Flathead, we saw no moose nor bear.  All was quiet.  The trees stood as black limbless spikes.  The undergrowth was replaced by a blanket of short green grass.  The only animal was a large owl, hunting for nonexistent prey.  After crossing Pike Creek, we were greeted with an even stranger sight: endless unburned trees, completely devoid of undergrowth and ground clutter.  In every direction, as far as one could see — nothing but dense, healthy pine trees in a carpet of green grass.  Like something from a horror film.  Spooky, yet strangely calming all the same.