Who pickles?
Pickles? Saurkraut? Kimchi? Chutney? Anyone make their own kefir? (Is it gross? I’ve never tried it). Any hints’n’tips?
I’m really susceptible to hippie trendy foodie crap. Gullible. Gullible is the word I’m looking for. I’m not ashamed. Sometimes stuff turns out to be a good idea, and sometimes it doesn’t. Meanwhile, I get to do Weasel Science.
Fermentation is the trendy thing at the moment. Though, to my mind, fermentation means yeast and sugar. Putting stuff in brine for ten days is pickling. But. Whatever.
Supposedly, brined food is stuffed full of natural probiotics. And if you haven’t been reading all the interesting stuff about probiotics and gut flora floating around t’internet lately, you haven’t been paying attention.
Lucky for me, I like my snackies sour/salty/savory rather than sweet, so I’m expecting to like the outcome regardless. Unless I culture something really horrific and explode at both ends.
Nobody say “elderberry cordial” please.
BRB. Going to cut up carrots.
June 29, 2015 — 9:27 pm
Comments: 18
cabbage head
I don’t remember much Tennessee High School French, but I do believe “tête de chou” was a deadly insult, wasn’t it? Anyhow, look at this sucker. Look at it!
I really should have photographed it next to something. I reckon those outer leaves are, like, a yard across. It’s HUGE. Uncle B growed that for me.
Anybody want slaw?
Speaking of food, I was browsing the news and saw The Nine Worst Chain Restaurant Meals. I was surprised to see Red Lobster top the list. That place was my mother’s favorite dinner treat, rest her downmarket soul. The food wasn’t too bad.
Then I saw it was as rated by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the penny dropped. The CSPI are the extreme left whackadoodle pretend scientists who first came to public attention fighting against the obscene deliciousness of movie theater popcorn. May they rot in hell.
What they did was, Red Lobster apparently has a “Create Your Own Combination” special, CSPI put theirs together out of the most fattening things on offer and discovered that the resulting plate was really, really fattening. Red Lobster spokesperson said there are, like, five hundred different possible combinations, *eyeroll*.
That’s it. It’s Friday. The weather here is finally turning nice. Have a good one!
Oh, one more thing. Reader Wandering Neurons has started a blog. Visit him at wandering neurons dot org.
June 5, 2015 — 9:16 pm
Comments: 24
It’s Spam appreciation week!
Spam Appreciation Week, I say! I’m sure Hormel sponsors this with the purest of motives.
If nothing else, you must listen to the Spam jingle from 1963. Scrub to 2:37 to hear the theme, words and all. Dude with a cut-glass accent teases it 4EVA.
My mama told me Spam was just made from the bits they had to trim off to fit Danish ham in those cans. It’s not true, but it’s nothing nasty. It’s just pork that’s been cooked in the can, like soup and dogfood. They’re cooked in the can, I mean. Not pork. We don’t feed cats and dogs pork and we don’t make pork soup, though I’m damned if I know why.
Anyhoo! Sliced thin, fried until crispy, covered in melted cheese on a toasted bagel half with mayo. How do you take your spam?
WARNING – WARNING – WARNING…geez, that Spam song is an earworm. Uncle B and I are rolling around on the floor clutching our heads like something out of a Star Trek episode and it Will Not Go Away.
March 2, 2015 — 8:36 pm
Comments: 34
The high price of food nostalgia
We did our weekly shop at Tesco this afternoon (we did our weekly shop, and unusually it was at Tesco. We don’t shop at Tesco weekly. We dasn’t like Tesco, nasty hobitssesss). They had a display of genu-wine Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
I come from deep in the heart of Krispy Kreme territory, you may recall. The appeal of our local KK was less the doughnuts than the fact it was the only thing open on 21st Avenue at two in the morning, and the whole back of the shop was glass. Doughnuts in various stages of doneness bobbled down conveyor belts being dunked, filled, baked, packaged and otherwise given birth to.
To the stoned, it was magic.
When I went to art school in Providence, I worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts for a couple of years. Which I liked very much. I like menial jobs, which probably doesn’t do me much credit. By and large, I preferred the doughnuts, too — except nothing really replaces a klassik Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut.
So, get this — the ones on display in the South of England today were (working from memory here) £1.40 ($2.24) for one, £4.20 ($6.72) for three and £8.80 ($14.08) for a dozen. Holy shit! I know my doughnut days are in the distant past, but is it just us? How the hell much does a box of doughnuts cost over there now?
Yes, I bought three. They were awesome.
February 18, 2015 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 36
Happy Pancake Day!
So there was this one day I had a terrible craving for pancakes. You know how it is. We went to a Little Chef (a better than average side-of-the-highway fast food chain) and I ordered some. Imagine my surprise when — expecting a big, fat stack of flapjacks, dripping with butter and syrup — placed before me was one thin crêpe, folded over, with a squeeze of lemon. A perfectly good crêpe, I have to say, but not what I meant, yo.
This is what Brits call a pancake. I’ve since seen them sold as fairground food at village fêtes — very large ones, cooked to order on portable griddles and topped with a variety of things. They’re nice. And when I want a stack of flapjacks, they’re dead easy to make.
Anyway, it’s Pancake Day AKA Shrove Tuesday. British Pancake Day traditions go back hundreds and hundreds of years, the main one being a footrace. Women (and sometimes men dressed as women — a thing British men will do at the drop of a chapeau) run with a pancake in a skillet. Sadly, they don’t have to flip the pancake the whole way, but they do have to give it a couple of turns.
There are also street football games some places. I get the impression street football games aren’t so much games with rules and winners and people keeping score as, just, a mob of people in the street kicking a ball around. Whatevs. I don’t do sprot.
Pancake Day is always a small surprise. I think of Britain as being so secular — and I think of Lent as being Catholic — but the CofE is closer to Catholicism than I’d realized, and they do have pancake ingredient displays in the supermarkets beforehand. No fasting tomorrow though.
Me? I’m having pizza tonight.
February 17, 2015 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 21
Peppercorns, bitchez!
500 grams of Rye Spice Co’s finest Piper nigrum. This is what chemical dependency looks like, folks.
It takes me a couple of years to blast through one of these babies. This will be the third I’ve bought since I moved here. (FYI, the first was around £5, the second was £6-something, and this one was £8-something). My favorite peppermill was actually sold in a Turkish shop as a coffee mill — one of those cylindrical brass things — and it makes the coarsest pepper I’ve ever seen.
Pepper all the things!
February 5, 2015 — 11:18 pm
Comments: 38
Awww, yisss!
Received notice this morning that the McRib was back in town (why, yes, I’m on McDonald’s mailing list; aren’t you?) and Uncle B drove me right out to get one. Not a huge fan, it just tickles me to see ancient artifacts from my home planet.
We’re spending New Year’s Eve with the neighbors. We’ll be running along shortly. Thing is, our neighbors are mostly elderly sheep farmers. Early to bed, early to rise and all that. Their heads will gently bow to their chests and soft snoring noises will come from them, beginning around ten. Oh, such fun!
See y’all back here Friday: New Dead Pool. 6 WBT. Be here, or be somewhere else!
p.s. oh, yeah — HAPPY NEW YEAR!
December 31, 2014 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 22
Have videogames gone too far?
So, Steam informs me I can get early access to this today. Um, yay?
If you watch the videos, it’s not all that far outside the bounds for a video game: slice of bread and its desperate quest to become toast. You oonch your way along one corner at a time trying to find ways to immolate yourself.
For six quid, I…no. Not really my thing. Not enough blood.
December 3, 2014 — 8:31 pm
Comments: 16
Vindication!
Another day, another article about saturated fats and how, ummm…maybe they aren’t so awful for you after all.
Disclaimer: I’m one who thrived on Atkins’ low carb ideas and I’m still sore about the absolute shit way he and his ideas were treated in his lifetime. I want those people to feel his vindication. Good and hard.
But long before I knew Atkins, my mother (who was a nurse) told me to be careful cutting fat, because fats contribute satiety. And if you’re not sure how important feeling full and satisfied to a dieter, reflect: if they get hungry enough, human beings have been known to murder and eat their children. ‘Kay? You can’t guilt people for giving in to the most powerful biological force known to all living organisms.
What we’ve done for the past forty years is tell fat people to cut the fats and eat lots of carbs — a diet guaranteed to make them crazy-eat-their-young hungry — and then wondered how so many of them went from merely obese to sideshow fat. Honestly, somebody needs to swing for this.
So, read any good fat articles lately? Do share. I won’t rest until lard is properly recognized as the life-giving superfood we all know it to be.
December 1, 2014 — 10:19 pm
Comments: 15
…and then there’s this…
Today was a misty, mizzly, miserable sort of day. It precipitated: something more than fog but something less than rain. We did our weekly shop then set out in search of lunch.
I’ll be honest with you, we stopped Mickey D’s first. But the school holidays are on so the place was chock full of screaming children. Um, no.
So we went on to an old pub not far away. We’ve been in this one many times, but we’re not regulars and we heard it’s under new management. When we walked in, honest to god it was like a Hammer film. You know the scene, where strangers walk into a country pub and all conversation stops and grizzly old men squint at them over pints of beer? That one.
Being the smooth social operator that I am, I gibbered, “Oh my gawd, this is like a Hammer film, where strangers walk into a country pub…”
Turns out, it’s not new management, it’s old management. The man who owns the place and has rented it to a series of wannabes has taken it on again to build the business back up. He came and sat by the fire (see crappy cellphone photo of fire) and all the old boys told us spooky stories about the pub.
He told us about a wounded smuggler being brought in to have his injuries dressed (this was — and is — a *big time* smuggling area, beginning in the 18th C. Before that, it was piracy). And a notorious and probably fictional murder on a bridge nearby. We’d heard of that one.
More recently, there was the neighbor up the hill who had 17 children. All their water came from a big rainwater butt. One day, the man next door disappeared. Three days later, they find him drowned in the water butt with his pockets full of nuts and bolts. Suicide by fresh water supply. Pretty unneighborly, if you ask me.
And the bloke who tried to kill himself with a humane killer. My advice, don’t Google it. It’s a sort of gun barrel with one round in it. Put it against an animal’s head and hit it with a hammer, bang. So he put it against his own forehead, swung, missed and smacked himself in the eye with the hammer. A sort of happy ending. Well, we laughed.
There was the inevitable pub ghost. All it did was move a chair and smell like rotten eggs, though, so I wasn’t impressed.
Also, the food wasn’t bad and the beer was excellent. All in all, a most convivial way to spend an English afternoon.
October 29, 2014 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 24