The South-Eastern Manitoba Sausage & Cheese Tour

I got an e-mail this week from a reader:

Dear Dr. Crang

I am considering putting tar on my driveway and I have heard that putting in spiral curves will extend the life of the tar.

Please send me your information about spiral curves.

Well, first of all, I'm not a doctor but I do play one at home. Secondly, in the industry we don't call it tar. We call it "black-topping". Spiral curves would indeed add stability to your driveway if you were black-topping it. They're often used for tightening up the black-top mix. A few people at work thought that using an AST would help even more than spiral curves. I'm not sure there would be much of a benefit though. (AST stands for "A Spiral Tightening".) Perhaps I'll consider doing a story on spiral curves in the future. My e-mail is indicating that there may be a demand for this information after all.

I paid a visit to the south-eastern Manitoba town of Blumenort this week. It's a quiet village just north of Steinbach. While I was there a co-worker told me of the sausage shop the town was famous for. We searched it out and soon found Country Meat and Sausage. We went in to see what they had to offer and were pleasantly surprised by the large selection from frankfurters to farmer's sausage.

I asked the clerk what she had for sale that you couldn't buy in... say... Winnipeg. She pointed out several different meats and we ended up choosing the frankfurters. My co-worker told me that his parents make the trip down there once a month and usually buy the frankfurters. So, I purchased bag of wieners and we were on our way.

As we drove west along PR 311 back to Winnipeg, we saw a large sign directing people to the town of New Bothwell, just to the south. It said something about being the cheese capital of Manitoba. We were tempted but didn't have the time. We could only imagine what treats would've been in store for us there.

As always, send me your suggestions for future columns on crang.com. See you next week.

© September 15, 2000