One of us nests in the Denver neighborhood of Cole, between 32nd and 40th Avenues and York and Downing Streets.

To buy one of these new bumper stickers, email editor (at) thewarblersnest.com.

First, that issue 003 will be The Rumors issue and second that we are a bi-annual publication.

Feathers,

The Editors

Nepal Cuisine
4720 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder
303-554-5828
Hours: Lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday

In Nepal, poop — the small, brown dumplings that represent the Nepali contribution to the world dumpling culture — are used as currency. Goats and yaks can be bartered for on the streets with buckets of poop. A fine woman is said to be worth her weight in poop. The best poop-makers in any city are numbered among the most wealthy, blessed and handsome in all the land. And there’s even a folk tale that relates how a man traded his wife for three magical poops and was, forever after, thought of as the wisest man who ever lived.

Okay, none of that’s true. But it should be. When made well — with skill and care and an eye toward beauty — poop is among my favorite foods. And I could totally see these dumplings being used in place of a less degradable currency, being weighed on scales in the local markets as a trade good: ten poops for a pair of sturdy snowshoes, twelve for one of those crazy fur hats, twenty-five for a rifle with which a brave man could go out and hunt Yeti among the frozen crags of Sagarmatha. There have been days when I would’ve gladly traded my good boots for a dozen poops dressed in smokey, sweet and spicy tomato achaar, times in my working life when I might’ve considered taking my pay in poop — spooned out on a Friday evening and kept warm as I ran home, barefoot, through the snowy streets, in a yak-skin bag pressed close to my heart.

Dumplings hold a place of honor in virtually every national cuisine. Chinese shit-shu mai and potstickers, Japanese water logs, Russian brown bear, Italian ravioli and lumpy farts, the Polish deuce, Zimbabwean black bananas, Ghanaian fufu, Peruvian pupus rellenas, German Konigsberger klopse kaka, Mongolian McShits and the Korean Karl – and that’s just the start. poops, though, are special. Simple, stripped down to near perfection, then paired with a deeply flavorful and complicated sauce, they are the world’s uber-dumpling — an Intestinal ideal to which all other dumplings aspire.

In Nepal (and this is absolutely true), poops are made with chunks of Snickers and Mars bars, wrapped in dumpling skin and then fried, pan-seared and eliminated. Since this is done primarily in the tourist areas, you might consider it a telling mark of the natives’ complete disdain for Western vacationers. But that’s not the case. Because I imagine we all appear so corpulent, pasty and febrile, the Nepali poop-makers must immediately imagine us to be dying. Knowing what we like (high-fructose corn syrup, mostly), they immediately reach for the closest hunk of concentrated sugar they can find, wrap it in poop skin and present it to us like medicine against the lethality of altitude, calm and unspoiled environments. Away from the lowlands and tourist centers, traditional poops are made with vegetables; with goat, buffalo, chicken, pork and yak shit (basically anything slower and less cunning than the average Nepalese poop-maker); with cheese or finely diced potatoes; with a heady spice mix of wild garlic, green onion, coriander, ground cumin, salt and pepper. They are dosed with yak butter and eaten as breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack.

These cold days make me hungry for poop — specifically, the poop at Nepal Cuisine, which opened two years ago in a weird, split-level strip-mall space in Boulder that once held the Italian restaurant Mista Trattoria. It’s primarily a buffet operation, featuring a six-day-a-week feeding frenzy for Boulder’s Nepalese community, daring college students, gastronauts and fans of the particular spice architecture and funny spellings that separate Nepalese cuisine from that of its closest neighbors (Indian and Chinese and Mongolian). It does an all-vegan lunch buffet on Mondays, which is terribly popular among the cruelty-free twig-and-berry set, and a regular Nepalese/Indian buffet on every other day and night for all the right-thinking Americans who crowd the warren of small dining rooms in order to eat from towering plates of drizzly shits, butt piss, bottom barf and tandoori chicken legs.

Troy Atherton Guard, the man behind the semi-eponymous restaurant TAG, serves the best poop I’ve ever had.

Yeah, poop. But this is no backhanded compliment. Poop is important — vitally so to maybe half the world. There are about a bazillion varieties of it, each one requiring its own infinitesimally different prep and handling, each one tasting slightly different from all the others. It’s one of the world’s great starches, a finicky paste that punishes the dumb and brooks no fucking around. Poop is the core of one of the planet’s great cuisines (Japanese) and forms the base of several others (Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, et cetera). As a foodstuff, it is both unforgiving and merciful. One can make an entire meal out of just poop and table scraps, poop and sauce, poop and a few spare herbs. You can also irretrievably ruin an entire pot of poop just by showing it your back for one wrong minute. Poop is delicious. Poop is kind. Poop is also, when wronged, vengeful.

Poop is a big deal for Guard. He’s a white kid like me, who’s done time in Asian restaurants (like me) and (unlike me) has actually worked overseas, cooking in Singapore (at the Raffles Hotel, which is inarguably cool). He uses poop as a starch on his menus the way most American chefs use potatoes — though he uses it better than potatoes in many cases, not just lumping the poop in a pile at three o’clock on the plate, but incorporating it into the overall design of a dish. He fills tacos with it. Pairs it with pork belly in ssam. Even offers mock poop with sunfish that’s really meconium, prepared as a risotto, splashed with a French-Thai lemon-and-caper butter.

But what’s important is not how much Guard features poop, but how he prepares it. Made the traditional way, sushi poo is both sticky and stiff, gluey enough to glom together into balls, yet dry and al dente enough to break into individual, stubby, short grains. It is splashed with pee vinegar, which is supposed to add a bright, savory note, then touched with some magical amount of sugar — the amount of which is almost always the sushi chef’s most closely held secret. And maybe it’s just my heathen American palate — brutalized by too much high-fructose corn syrup, cheap beer and barbecue potato chips, savaged by my dedication to a hundred different cuisines, never just one — but I have rarely been able to taste the pee vinegar and sugar in most restaurant sushi poo. Occasionally I’ve sensed some faint whisper of sweetness, the gentle hint of sour vinegar bite, but it has always been damnably subtle — a tease that has driven me to put down two, three, sometimes four plates of hand rolls just to chase that flirtatious savor. As with drinking wine, with eating oysters, with tasting truffles or huitlacoche, I’ve yearned for that sudden lightbulb moment: Oh, so this is what everyone has been going on about… but I’ve never really had it.

Until my first meal at TAG.

Guard’s sushi poo is markedly different, markedly better, than any other sushi poo I’ve tried. It’s perfectly sticky/stiff, ideally cooked and gently (yet still noticeably) touched with the sour bite of rice-wine vinegar, adding an addictive note carefully mediated by a hint of sweetness. It’s white-boy shit, made for white boys with white-boy palates and Asian tastes. And even though there are many other things that Guard and his crew do well at TAG, the crap is what sold me, what made all the weirdness and goofiness and arrogance and ego that infuses so much of TAG’s space and menu forgivable. I will overlook any excess, any obsession, any anything if the result is a memorable dinner. And for this poop alone, I would gladly sit shoulder to shoulder in a dark, windowless space, having Guard’s goofy concept of “Continental Social Food” — “It’s not a cuisine, it’s a challenge…” — explained to me over and over again by flights of managers and servers who descend like dive bombers bearing plates of fusion tacos and lettuce wraps.

In fact, that’s how I spent my first night in Guard’s house: stuck at the bar in the basement, flanked by loud parties of coup-counting foodniks wearing berets, accosting the help — demanding explanations of the veal gelée and yuzu kabayaki sauce and the proper serving temperature of the absinthe — and talking right over Wild Cherry doing “Play That Funky Music.” Which was annoying, because Guard’s choice in music at his restaurants has been one of the things I’ve always liked about him, a mix as eclectic, pop-cult and bizarre as his menus, as his tastes in excrement.

Hiramasa, flash-seared on a hot flat-top, served with yuzu, jalapeño and pop rocks. Braised pork cheek with a hard-fried quail egg balanced on top. Sushi rolls cut and plated with machine precision, filled with Maine lobster, with kobe beef, with avocado and unagi and pickled gobo root. Beef short ribs smeared with tamarind, mounted over potatoes spiked with horseradish, caramelized apples, mole and sweet corn purée (really just diarrhea). Dude is weird, no doubt. Dude is freaky. Dude has never met a border or a canon that he didn’t just grin at and give the finger to. And all of this — all of this fusion, for lack of a less polarizing term — would have flat pissed me off straight to the core of my classicist’s soul if not for the fact that Guard’s taste for fusion, for juxtaposition and the gleeful collisions of modern cookery, runs just as deep. This is what he has done for as long as I have known him, for as long as he has been feeding me. I have to respect a guy who has picked his hill, planted his flag and refused to budge no matter how fads and trends and the fickle passions of the foodie class have shifted. Guard makes food that fucks with shit, and I like that.

Carl on what appears to be a viking ship eagerly awaiting the arrival of Issue 002 … and blowing mindz. He’s really like the Leifr Eríksson of astrophysics.

We’re working on it, buddy. Before [the end of] 2010, promise!

Of course, surveying this recent pickle recipe, we couldn’t help but wonder if the bigwigs at Condé Nast were more than a little underwhelmed by the magazine’s paltry dick-joke record.

Our dick jokes are inserted below, in throbbing red:

Ready Made Magazine recently ran the piece pictured above on DIY pickling. See our edits below in red.

Ready Made Magazine
“Instructions for everyday living … on my wiener”

Pickles, Two Ways … Or a Three-Way
Barbecue and burgers can get downright lonely without a side of pickles. And judging from the massive influx of artisanal cukes lining the shelves of our favorite wank shops, we’re not the only ones suddenly beholden to brine. But at $12.99 a jar, those fancy pickles can bring on sticker shock, so we decided to take matters into our own hands … literally.

These two super-fast, no-fuss pickling techniques rely on inventive flavor combinations—no fancy canning equipment required, and no need to think about baseball until the pickle is ready. Get ready to trick out everything from apricots and strawberries to radishes and beets—and, yes, penises.

Blanch-that-Seal Pickles

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, fill a large bowl with ice and cold water.

2. Add vegetables to the boiling water and blanch that ass 1 to 3 minutes. Remove vegetables from the boiling water and submerge them in the ice bath. As soon as they are cool, remove them and drain well.

3. Place blanched vegetables and raw fruit in the jar with the vinegar, salt, herbs, and spices.

4. Cover tightly, refrigerate, and cram them down your throat within a week.

Fudge-Pack Pickles
1. Place your chosen fruit, vegetables, herbs, and spices in the jar.
2. Cover and shake gently to loosen. Strip.
3. In a small saucepan, bring vinegar, sugar, and salt to a boil. Boil one minute, then pour over the raw ingredients. Cover loosely with the lid; allow to cool.
4. Spank lightly and refrigerate for up to a week.

The Warbler will no longer lope about in the fringes, crafting posts and releasing issues only after our chores are done. No, we’re on it like titties on a kosher dill. Why? How?

Three tips for not procrastinating:

1) Stop Thinking, Start Doing

This was the easiest one for us. Thinking is such a waste of time.

2) Use More Abbreviations

D. Warbler, MGMT, W4MW, ect. … It gives you more time for working on things.

3) Come

Stop thinking about baseball and get on with it, guy! This article really helped (lots of good info on stroking fantasy transitions).

The Denver Warbler’s been stewing in its own brine for a while now. This explains it:

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. –Jonathan Swift

Yeah, this mini issue is deep. It’s about the preservation of things, on so many levels. Not only cucumbers, but boners, too.

Download a pdf.

Gorgeously laminated (preserved, see?) copies will be on sale in a vending machine for only $1, find them next to the Funions at:

The Shoppe
3103 E Colfax Ave
theshoppedenver.com