Pumpkins, On My Honor

Driving home from the cheese market in Huttwil, I had my favorite singer Sandra McCracken turned up loud and my eyes peeled for children, cats, and other animals that are likely to jump out onto tiny country roads without warning. Suddenly I hit the brakes, but it wasn't because something leaped out onto the road. 



Flashes of of orange and green had caught my eye. Pumpkins! What from the side looked like just another old barn showed itself to be a rustic and colorful farm stand, one of the nicest I've ever seen.



Farm stands are nothing unusual in Switzerland - you can hardly go for a drive without passing homemade signs listing the seasonal produce available directly for sale.  Usually it's a table with a few bags of apples and pears and pumpkins, or a refrigerator at the end of a driveway containing eggs and sausages and milk, or occasionally a covered wagon by the side of the road with bushels of vegetables.



The thing I absolutely love about these stands, apart from the satisfaction of buying quality farm-fresh ingredients, is that they all run on the honor system.  A padlocked iron box in the vicinity, labeled "Kasse" and usually taped up with a price list, has a slot for your coins and bills - but there's not a human in sight.  Choose your items, add up the total, drop your money in and drive away.  Nobody will check. Nobody will see.  It's absolutely up to you to do the right thing. Many people, as above, will peel the price sticker off more expensive items and stick it to the box as a tally for the farmer so he has an approximate idea of how much should be inside.

The system works for more than just pumpkins.  Anita has written about how flower-picking works the same way, as does berry-picking.  Train tickets on short stretches are on your honor, and even big chain supermarkets like Coop have caught on with their Passabene system.  From what I've read, there is the occasional theft, but it's not enough to stop vendors from using the system. It's so culturally different from the "everyone is just trying to rip me off" mentality of many other countries, and makes me proud to be Swiss.

Back to the farm stand! A lot of care had obviously been put into setting it up, with decorated wagon wheels, pumpkins carefully sorted and arranged into baskets and troughs, and strings of lights and dried corn.







I had a lot of fun inspecting all the different varieties and practicing my photography, and of course I didn't leave empty handed. In my market bag already brimming with cheese, I somehow still found room for some cute little pumpkins for the dining room table and a couple liters of fresh cider made from Grafensteiner apples.



What experiences have you had with the honor system, both good and bad?

Daring Bakers in October: Boston Creme Doughnuts

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge the Daring Bakers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann, and Epicurious.



After a year and three months, Matt is really starting to get into this whole Daring Bakers thing. On the first of October he actually remembered and asked about the new challenge, and upon hearing "doughnuts" he cocked his head to the side with a thoughtful look. "A good one! I like doughnuts. Boston Creme Doughnuts! But the cream has to be the real vanilla custard kind, not that yucky too-sweet whipped white frosting, and make sure you put a nice chocolate glaze on top too." A demand request for chocolate-and-vanilla was no surprise at all but in the face of such unabashed certainty, what else could I do but laugh and acquiesce?



We were given the choice between two recipes, one yeast-raised and the other a more cake-like buttermilk doughnut.  With Boston Creme in the cards, though, yeast-raised was the only option to create a light, puffy round of dough.



I used Dorie's awesome pastry cream to fill the donuts and a simple chocolate glaze for the topping.  Though deep-frying is my least favorite cooking method because it makes me and the whole apartment smell like grease, sometimes it's absolutely worth it.   On their own, these doughnuts are just barely sweet, but combined with the silky vanilla filling and the chocolate on top, the end result was both heavenly and husband-approved.



You can find a printable version of both Daring Bakers recipes, plus a bonus pumpkin doughnut recipe, here.

A Pair of Fall Festivals, Part 1: Cheesy Affairs

When you think of Swiss cheese, what do you imagine?  If you don't live here, you probably see in your mind's eye something like the enormous hole-y hunk above.  That's because what the Americans and most of the rest of the world call "Swiss" cheese is really only one kind of Swiss cheese, the kind above - Emmentaler (aside: I would really like to know what someone had planned for that 1.5 kg piece). I find it very difficult to not correct poor deli workers when I'm in the States who innocently ask me what cheese I want on my sandwich.

Banish all thoughts of too-touristy Cherry the Cow over in Gruyère - if there was ever a place to get an education on what are really the thousands of kinds of Swiss cheese, the 6th annual....



...Swiss Cheese Market is the place to go.  Huttwil is a small village in the Emmental near Bern - though not worth visiting on a normal day, the weekend of the cheese market set the whole place abuzz as thousands of people poured in to get their cheesy fill.  The two main roads were lined from end-to-end with market stalls, and what seemed like every dairy in the country brought their specialties to display and sell.



Fresh, soft, mild, medium, aged, raw-milk, cow-milk, buffalo-milk, sheep-milk, goat-milk, organic,  mountain-made, crumbled, grated, herbed, spiced, smoked, salted, cured, blue, hemp-wrapped, wineleaf-wrapped, wood-wrapped...the variety was absolutely staggering. The best part? The endless free samples, no question.  But once you tear your fingers away from all those beckoning cubes, you start to notice how fun the names are, too.  Gondelichäs (cable car cheese),  Durchblickkäse (see-through cheese), der kleine Berner (the little Bernese), Sommerhimu (summer sky - a blue cheese), Ämmitaler Müntschi (Emmentaler kiss), Flösserkäse (rafter's cheese) and Füürige Giovanni (fiery Giovanni - with chili) are just a few of the creative and eye-catching cheeses I saw.









Once I got tired of sampling, for lunch there was a choice of... cheese.  A Militärkäseschnitte is a thick slice of whole wheat bread spread with a sticky cheese-herb mixture and then deep fried until the outside forms a crispy crust and the inside cheese is all gooey.  Yes...you read that right.  This was not a low-fat lunch, not even close - nor did I want it to be.  The day was quite chilly so a belly full of hot cheese, a glass of crisp white wine to cut the grease, and a seat at one of the communal tables in the town square with some friendly locals was just the thing to warm me up. 

Alternately, I could have had en Chäsbrätu, which is, well, more cheese on bread. But different! Select your flavor of raclette from the case (chili, herb, garlic, smoked, pepper, bacon, or plain) and watch a slice of it be melted on the spot and poured over the bread, which you then eat with your hands like an open-faced sandwich.  It's always whole wheat - white bread is simply not flavorful or sturdy enough to stand up to a cheese cascade of this magnitude.



Speaking of raclette and fondue, in addition to the classic ingredients and gourmet mixes on sale, there were a couple twists on those two traditional Swiss cheese dishes that I had never seen before.   One stall was selling ingenious fondue bread loaves studded with bacon, the squares already scored and ready to be torn off and dipped in the pot.



Another stand boasted raclette-for-one kits that could be easily snapped together and heated with two tea-light candles - perfect for your melted-cheese cravings on the go.



There were a few hunks of the non-cheese variety as well....



...ahem. Though cheese was obviously the main theme of the market, a secondary focus was on products aus der Region - from the region. A special tent housed local non-dairy craftsmen and producers selling everything from wood carvings and calligraphy to liqueurs, jams, mushrooms, sausages, and sweets.  On a stage set up in the main square, folk-music and -dancing groups entertained the crowds.





There were even some special guests aus der Region accompanied by a demonstration of how their milk is processed to turn it into cheese. The kid's face just cracks me up!



With way too much cheese in both my stomach and my shopping bag, I reluctantly called it a day.  Lasting only a weekend, the pleasure and the pain of festivals like this one is that you have to wait a whole year for them to roll around again.  Luckily, dairies are as common as cows here so I don't have to wait nearly that long for my next taste of scrumptious Swiss cheeses!