Flipping redcurrants.
Of all the fruits Uncle B grows in the garden, the only one that overperforms every year is the red currant bush. One year we got twelve pounds of fruit off that thing. I mean, thanks but…what am I supposed to do with all these currants?
Anyway, I’ve been out picking redcurrants. And Albert has rallied strongly today. I got him some fresh straw and chicken vitamins and let him mope in the run for a day and he seems much stronger this evening.
No picking my chicken for the Dead Pool.
It’s been another astonishing day of watching the Democrat party rattle to pieces. Big donors think Kamala is too whackadoo for their money. BLM opposes her, for some reason. The grassroots are now foaming anti-Jew crazies whom the rest of the party seem terrified to contradict.
She’s snubbing Netanyahu. Amazing.
I’m telling you, the Democratic Convention is going to be lit. I am…uneasy.
July 24, 2024 — 7:02 pm
Comments: 7
It seemed appropriate
All week, I’ve been craving a sloppy joe. It must be subliminal.
I made one. It was awful. You can see from the pic the meat stayed in chunks and never cooked down to a smooth ‘joe’ texture.
And it was godawful sweet. Never doing that with ketchup again. I’ve lost my taste for sweet.
So I put cheese on it.
As of this writing, nobody has heard from Joe Biden since Wednesday the 17th. He stepped down from the race on Twitter yesterday (Sunday) with a posted letter not even on official letterhead. No other sign of life. No pics, no video, no short news conference. Absolutely unprecedented.
There’s a rumor he had some kind of medical emergency last week in Vegas. Naturally followed by a rumor he’s dead. They’ll have a hard time covering their tracks if that’s true.
Oh, look – a letter from his doctor has just been posted to X. Taken his tenth dose of Paxlovid today; vital signs normal; presidenting just fine, thank you.
This has got Barack’s fingerprints all over it. He never understood American history and tradition and didn’t get how wantonly screwing with them is deeply unsettling to most Americans.
July 22, 2024 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 14
Weasel’s rambling adventure
There’s a local farm shop we like to go to – it is actually attached to the farm and the meat lives there. The farmer’s wife makes the best steak and kidney pie ever, so Uncle B tells me. I don’t eat organs. She makes them on Wednesdays, but last week they all sold out before we got there.
So this week he phones up and reserves two pies. Yes, we had pie reservations.
On the way to pick them up, we got stuck in a traffic jam. A rural traffic jam means one of two things: road work or an accident. It was an accident. Trailer jacknife started it, if I had to guess. By the look of it, nobody was hurt, but it was a giant mess.
So we came back the long, long way to miss it. It was a road we haven’t been down for some years. Had we been a couple of weeks earlier, it would have been white with hawthorn and mayflower. It was still a beautiful drive.
We passed a pair of swans on the banks of a stream. Fields of potatoes and wheat. We nearly smacked into a couple of cars ourselves (what is it about twisty backroads that makes locals the world over drive like loonies?).
Last time we were down that road, we found a lamb on the verge of escaping the fence into the road, so we turned up the drive and had a chat with the farmer. This felt quite wicked and subversive, because it was lockdown and we weren’t supposed to talk to strangers. We all had a laugh about it. We weren’t even six feet apart!
Anyway, we made it home with his pies (I got a wickedly expensive piece of cheesecake, for my part). And I hadn’t taken a single picture.
So enjoy this picture from June of 2020. This great rambling thug of a rose is, can you believe it, even bigger this year. The smaller white blossom you see to the upper right is an elder tree, that has now been completely covered in roses. And that was my Wednesday.
June 19, 2024 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 5
I have no sense of scale
I bought one of these. It’s a single serve blender. I had it in my head that that glass on the top was like an eight-ounce tumbler so the machine would be a slim, compact addition to my kitchen gadgets.
It is, in fact, a counter-hogging brute.
Oh, well. It’s a smoothie thing. I think they designed it with gym bros in mind, one of which I emphatically am not. But I am kind of gullible when it comes to supplements.
I’ve taken and subsequently stopped taking scores of things after that one article I read in the Epoch Times (who, by the way, quietly renewed my subscription without me noticing when the three month trial expired).
So far, only two supplements make a measurable, undeniable difference: collagen (which makes my nails and hair stronger) and fish oil (which makes a definite difference to my achy hand joints).
My current smoothie is a spoonful of instant coffee, a cup of fancy Jersey milk, two spoons of collagen + hyaluronic acid + vitamin C, a spoonful of inulin (I don’t remember what this does, but I accidentally bought a big bag of it) and a scoop of protein powder (some sources say old people don’t get enough protein, some say they get more than enough, and some say you should chew your protein not drink it).
I buy my junk from a company that is obviously promoting itself for peak athletic performance. I have often contemplated writing them and saying they should make a separate website and packaging for that other potential customer base: wrinklies desperately clinging on to wellness.
Do you supplement? With what and how?
May 23, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 13
Trust me.
This is a lime Uncle B grew in his own greenhouse. It is – and you’ll have to take my word for it – bright yellow.
That’s perfectly normal. It takes a hit of cooler weather to make limes turn yellow and fall off, a thing they don’t get in the warm places they’re grown commercially.
I also imagine it’s easier to store and sell if lemons and limes look different. Fully matured, yellow limes are supposedly sweeter, too – although there are also varietal differences in color.
When I start poaching gardening photos from Uncle B’s Google, it’s a sure sign I have nothing to say for myself. That cold I had a few weeks back is still kicking my ass.
March 25, 2024 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 8
Physics, help me out here
This is the can we pour fat into before throwing it out. As far as I recall it’s a layer of lard followed by a layer of runoff from a roast chicken and capped with another layer of lard. Yesterday, it was level with the top of the can.
Today it looks like a big gross greasy lipstick. It’s a little warmer today. All I can think is the chicken grease expanded and pushed the lard out. I got his exact effect putting a can of refried beans over a candle once.
Yes, lard. Sadly, I no longer have a jar of bacon grease on the stove to use for cooking. British bacon doesn’t leak grease. In fact, I have to add lard to the skillet to make it cook evenly.
I don’t touch the stuff myself.
February 7, 2024 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 7
Ew.
Absolutely disgusting. We did an Aldi run this afternoon and I was looking for a lunch that was the culinary opposite of Christmas dinner. I figured pot noodles was it.
I haven’t had pot noodles in twenty years. I remember them being junk but tasty. Huh.
Back to work tomorrow and bummed about it. It looks like I will be biking into the teeth of a storm in the morning, too. Way to shake out the last of the Christmas spirit.
December 27, 2023 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 4
Smells really nice, actually
This past Sunday was Stir-Up Sunday, the last one before Advent. So named for the day’s scripture from the Book of Common Prayer: “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people…”
It is the day British housewives cook their Christmas cakes and puddings. Or, in our case, British badgers do so.
Not being a religious sort of mustelid, though, he waited until today to start his Christmas cake. It smells lovely and spicy, to be honest, but I don’t touch the stuff. I’m not fond of dried fruit and I really, really hate booze in food. Brits make it five weeks before Christmas so there’s plenty of time to feed it dollops of brandy every few days.
You’re not supposed to drive after eating a big wodge of the stuff.
If you’d like to see it big and in color, here you go. I understand he has meticulously documented every step of the process. If you’re into cake porn, I’m sure he’d be more than willing to share the recipe.
November 28, 2023 — 7:42 pm
Comments: 6
I have promoted a falsehood
Kind of. Maxwell House coffee was named after the Maxwell House hotel in Nashville. The hotel was started just before the outbreak of the Civil War and was taken over and used, unfinished, as a barracks for the Union Army.
Finished, it was the biggest hotel in Nashville. Nathan Bedford Forrest was inducted into the KKK in Maxwell House, and the first national meeting was held there.
According to Wikipedia: “Its Christmas dinner featuring calf’s head, black bear, and opossum, and other unusual delicacies became famous.”
For the record, I have eaten black bear and it was gross. I have not eaten possum and I would nonetheless object on principle to calling possum a delicacy.
The hotel burned down Christmas 1961.
Maxwell House coffee was served there, but it was called that because the man who blended it, Joel Cheek, swore he’d name it after his first big sale and the hotel agreed. I doubt it tastes today very much like it tasted then.
The Cheeks were an interesting old Nashville family (I mean, as old as anything is in Nashville). Joel gave most of his money away and his cousins were the Cheeks who built Cheekwood, family mansion turned art museum.
Every year, Cheekwood hosts the Swan Ball, a giant showoffy charity fundraiser for Middle Tennessee’s rich bastards. There are some astonishingly rich bastards in Middle Tennessee, and it ain’t country music money. Old plantation money filtered down and the like. My folks went to the ball a couple of times, though sadly not quite of that ilk.
Anyway, back to the falsehood – but it wasn’t mine. Teddy Roosevelt did not declare Maxwell House coffee to be “good to the last drop” – but the company claimed he did for a long time. Which is why my sainted mother told me. They later confessed the trademark was invented by Clifford Spiller, the president of General Foods.
What Roosevelt actually said about the coffee was – and this is so much cooler than “good to the last drop” – “This is the kind of stuff I like to drink, by George, when I hunt bears.” (Forgive me, Durnedyankee, I thought you were kidding).
p.s. I don’t think I can accept Robert Card as a Deadpool win. We’ll never know when he actually died.
November 2, 2023 — 6:53 pm
Comments: 1
Tense moment
So I’m using my thrusters to float down a corridor coated in pulsating orange biomass while carrying a power cell (those blobby things eat power) and I’m just getting to the part where you have to make a hard right or get a faceplate full of lethal alien goo annnnnnd…the power goes.
Not long. Just long enough to shut everything down. I love Lone Echo, but there’s no manual save and I’m not sure how much of that I’ll have to redo. Am pissy.
Counterpart to yesterday’s Tabasco post, this guy experiments with making Sriracha. Fermented chilis, just like Tabasco, plus garlic (which you will know if you eat Sriracha) but also brown sugar.
I wasn’t aware of the taste of sugar, but then I rarely it it directly. A squirt into a mess of soup does the trick.
October 26, 2023 — 6:31 pm
Comments: 5