We ate here today
It’s between Battle and Hastings. As in Battle of Hastings? 1066?
Oh, well. We should’ve ordered the greasy breakfast; the burgers weren’t great.
October 27, 2014 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 16
A mighty rumbling was heard throughout the land
Spotted at the store today (hence crappy cellphone pic). That’s, like, five bucks worth of beans, son!
I finally worked up the courage to say, no. Really. Thanks. I don’t want Heinz beanz with my dinner. Leaving Uncle B to buy those little teeny one serving cans that cost a relative fortune.
I think he wiped away a tear as we left this aisle.
September 30, 2014 — 8:05 pm
Comments: 24
POW! right in the mouse finger
All through the Summer and into the Fall, I make a lot of what I like to call Cream of Shit from the Garden Soup. Basically, harvest a bunch of stuff, throw it in the pressure cooker with some herbs and olive oil, blend the shit out of it. I do add cream, but just before serving (the base soup keeps longer that way).
In aid of this souptastic activity, Uncle B bought me a powerful fancy-schmancy Bamix stick mixer. It’s Swiss, bitchez. Thing is awesome. Zero to suck-it-up-a-straw in no time flat.
I love the way the soup color morphs over the season as different things are harvested at different rates. Cool and green early on. Warm and red toward the end.
Today’s was a proper Autumn soup — the principals were tomatoes, carrots and red onions. A bit of cuke (see above) and potato for body. It was very nice. It was very red. It was slightly redder than it ought to be.
Yeah, that’s right. I cleaned the mixer without unplugging it and, um, oopsied. I’d just given it a good bvvvvt in soapy water and I was wiping off the blades when my left hand strayed to the buttons and…it bit me. Not stitches-deep, but deep. I leaked a lot.
And it’s my mouse finger 😮
September 24, 2014 — 9:25 pm
Comments: 18
Onions.
I leave you this week with a picture of the prize-winning onions at a village fête. Not our village fête, some other village fête from a couple of weeks ago. I’m sure these onions could tell us a tale of bitter rivalries and seething hatreds.
I spent my whole day doing something terribly familiar — attending pointless work-related training courses. Three of ’em. Data protection and workplace safety and the like. Yippee! I was afraid those old cubicle-monkey braincells would never come in handy again.
We’re expecting the ass-end of hurricane Bertha to dump on us this weekend. Oh, well…we need the rain desperately. Good weekend, all!
August 8, 2014 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 10
‘Member these?
Last of the nice days today, so we snuck in another field trip (Sissinghurst, old favorite). We stopped at a convenience store on the way to buy some sammiches, and Uncle B bought me a packet of these (see picture). And I’m, like, “whoa, dude…do you recognize these? They’re candy cigarettes!” Rebranded “candy sticks” for a different age.
Uncle B could do that one better. In his day, they sold Junior Smoking Kits — chocolate cigars, chocolate pipes, chocolate matches, chocolate ashtray and candy cigarettes. I managed to find a picture on this guy’s blog, from his visit to the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh.
Mind, blown.
By the way, all you gotta do is have your picture taken with Spiderman at the circus one time…
p.s. Yes! It came with a Spiderman tattoo! I shall be the envy of the office tomorrow…
August 5, 2014 — 9:08 pm
Comments: 21
Holy toast!
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vermont Novelty Toaster Corporation. Your message here.
I see Obama and Bob Dobson and a fleur de lis and a crab and a Star of David and, hey, looks like it’s 4:20 if you wanted to spark a doobie. And if you’ve already sparked a doobie, check out their awesome whirly toast dingus. You can make the toast go ’round and ’round and ’round…
Yeah, sorry for the novelty toast blogging. I’ve been watching the news today (and every day lately) with that “everything’s going to shit” feeling and I just know instinctively these issues don’t call for my special brand of retarded bullshit. So have a little untopical freelance retarded bullshit, on the house.
Hey, I was torn between novelty toast and baby meerkat.
July 17, 2014 — 9:35 pm
Comments: 26
Things that are hot
So there’s this burger joint in Brighton called Burger Off (see, there’s your first hint this isn’t going to be the feelgood story of the day). One of the condiments they offer is an imported hot sauce. A very fucking hot imported hot sauce.
Like, on the Scoville scale of food hotness, Tabasco peppers are between 30,000 to 50,000 heat units, ghost chilis between 855,000 to 1,463,700 heat units, police pepper spray between 500,000 and 5 million heat units and this shit somewhere between seven and nine million units.
Bit of a fake, the Scoville scale. It relies on humans’ subjective ability to taste hotness, and we all know the more you sample, the less you taste the stuff. Also, in their final forms, all these things are diluted to different strengths. Nonetheless, we can safely say Mr Gambardella of Burger Off is serving a very fucking hot sauce.
Incidentally, I don’t know what kind of ‘burgers’ those are up there, but it’s the picture that went along with the Daily Mail article. Looks like a spleen burger or something. I think I’d need a shot of the hot stuff to take a bite of that.
Anyhoo, Mr Gambardella got sick of customers who sampled his sauce and said, “pff! That’s not so hot.” So he now offers a deadly XXX burger to those over eighteen willing to sign a (really illiterate — wonder if it would hold up in court) disclaimer. This burger routinely sends people to the hospital:
One guy came in and he was just a little bit cocky and when he left he was admitted to hospital because prior to eating the burger he had a stomach ulcer and we believe it perforated his bowel. He wasn’t in a good way but he pulled through.
And these two reporters from the Brighton Argus:
Mr Barratt took a bite and minutes later suffered severe stomach pains which increased. He lost the feeling in his hands, his legs were shaking and his eyes rolled back in his head.
And within two hours Mr Hendy was suffering similar problems, following his colleague to hospital.
Mr Barratt said: “It was hard to walk. I needed to drink milk to neutralise the burning, which was hard because I was hyperventilating so much my hands had seized up.”
Mr Hendy said: “I was in so much pain I was telling people I felt like I was dying.”
Why do people do this? I like a drop of Sriracha on my sammich, but I stop short of foods that come with frightening health warnings in pidgin legalese.
My mother once challenged a neighbor to a hot pepper eating contest. All’s I remember is the two of them sitting around the kitchen table after all the peppers were gone, taking swigs of the pepper water out of the jar with tears streaming down their faces. It’s a sickness, I tell you.
But my mama was from Texas.
July 9, 2014 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 23
I…have no idea
Well, now. I wasn’t expecting our…ummm…mystery gourd-like vegetable to grow to quite THAT size. Things are ‘UGE. I have told you this, yes? We had three — count ’em, THREE — vines grow up in our raised beds that we most assuredly didn’t plant and locals tell me the things hanging off of them are marrows. Never et one in my life, so how they got in our compost is a puzzler.
Uncle B informs me the village produce contests, they grow ’em to the size of small children and wheel them in in wheelbarrows. These aren’t quite that big, but they would be if I left them.
Marrow, Wikipedia informs me, is the British word for members of the Cucurbita family. Gourds, pumpkins and squash. These look more like morbidly obese zucchinis, but I’m told zucchinis are called courgettes.
Fuck, it’s hard being a ferriner.
Everyone agrees on the recipe, though. Cut them in half, scoop out the middles and fill them with good stuff.
From our garden: herbs, garlic, onions, this year’s new crop of tomatoes. First the skillet, then scoop into the marrow. Bake for twenty minutes, then: American-style bacon, hamburger. Bread crumbs, cheese. Ten more minutes.
Was it nice? Pff! How bad could anything be stuffed with bacon, hamburger and cheese?
July 8, 2014 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 22
Guzzbries
Behold, the mighty gooseberry crop! I reckon there’s about five pounds there (well, Uncle B weighed them, but I didn’t write it down. Five pounds, close enough). The little dark ones in the back are a sweet purplish dessert variety.
Uncle B says we’ll have to make a gooseberry fool. So I asked “what exactly is a fool?” And he says, “Oh, it’s something like a syllabub.”
Sigh.
Fool. Syllabub. Cranachan. Eton mess. Pavlova.
Ugh. Just give me a smoothie.
June 24, 2014 — 10:51 pm
Comments: 29
It does what now?
Late Saturday night, I’m sitting up in bed reading and Uncle B decides he has a hankering for toast. As you do. Five minutes later — BANG! — the whole house goes dark.
Fortunately for me, I was reading my Android, so I crept downstairs by its friendly glow (take that, stupid old paper books that are not actually on fire). While he fiddled with the fuse box, I shone a flashlight down into the toaster and…
slugs. Two slugs. Our emeffing toaster was full of emeffing slugs. Shorted the emeffer out with their emeffing wet bodies.
After struggling with ourselves all weekend, we’ve come to the conclusion the toaster has to go. No matter what we do to to it, we will never pop a couple slices of cheaploaf in there without thinking slugs. Toasty slugs. Crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside. Oh, dear god, it’s so disgusting.
So, toaster shopping. Meet the Tefal Tt552842 Toast N Bean. While it toasts your toasteses, it heats beans in that little cup on the side there.
Beans, like those runny orange Heinz baked beans you remember from church picnics. Brits think that shit is breakfast food. On toast. There’s also a knob around back that lets you listen to cricket and a linguistic setting that forces you to say “petrol” and “toMAHto.”
We aren’t getting this one.
June 9, 2014 — 8:50 pm
Comments: 41