Apple tree sex
We watched a program about apples last night. And it was interesting. The British are whoop-de-gaga about apples. They eat billions of them every year, in hundreds of varieties.
So. If you eat a Granny Smith for lunch and then you plant the seeds, the resulting trees will bear apples that are not a Granny Smith. In fact, each pip will grow into a unique tree.
Why is this? For the same reason your second child is probably not a lot like your first and neither of them are exactly like you: apples are genetically complicated. They’re the most genetically complicated fruit of all. There’s a mommy tree and a daddy tree and they each contribute genes in near infinite combination. There are more than 7,000 recognized varieties of apple, which doesn’t count all the unrecognized apple varieties that sucked.
Now, I am a complete horticultural illiterate, so y’all probably knew this already, but I didn’t.
So every single Red Delicious or Pink Lady is grown from cuttings off one tree (or, you know, cuttings off of cuttings off of cuttings) grafted onto a different rootstock. Turns out, we figured out how to graft plants back in the days of the Pharaohs.
The program visited the old lady with the original Bramley in her back yard (Bramley is the most popular cooking apple in Britain). Upwards of two hundred years old and still going strong (the tree, not the lady). When she realized the tree was actually growing in the garden next door, she bought the house next door.
The original Granny Smith, by the way, was discovered by Mrs Smith of New South Wales growing at a garbage dump. Word.
And then there’s the dude who found the Next Big Apple growing on the shoulder of the interstate (well, the A4260. They don’t have interstates here). Somebody cruising down the highway eating an apple, tossed the core and — walla — honking great apple tree with especially nice fruit.
Britons: potty about apples.
December 20, 2012 — 11:37 pm
Comments: 37
The ghost of Thanksgiving past
Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorites. Nobody ever believed me when I said it, because I seldom went home for the day and spent nearly all of my Turkey Days all by myself. It’s supposed to be a family holiday, after all.
But what’s not to love? You close your eyes and think to yourself actually, come to think of it, I have a pretty sweet deal — that mental exercise is good for the soul, or the id, or whatever meat gizmo drives the self, I do firmly believe — and then you gorge yourself into a coma. I have never missed observing Thanksgiving with all my heart. w00t!
It is also overlaid with a personal meaning — I arrived in Britain permanently on a Thanksgiving Day. I count the holiday as my Brittaversary, rather than the date. Four years, if you can believe it. Stranger in a strange land.
And now, yet another layer of meaning, as we attended the funeral of a neighbor this afternoon, a great and mighty sheep farmer in our little community. It was a sunny and very windy day, and we stood outside with a crowd (our local church is small and he was a popular man) getting blown around like flags. They carried in his coffin draped in a whole woolly fleece.
And then Uncle B had to go up to London and won’t be back until late. So here I am, like a Thanksgiving of yore, full up on my solitary feast and dozing in front of my Tudor fire while the wind howls away outside. A strange day, but on the whole, you know, I have a pretty sweet deal.
November 22, 2012 — 11:00 pm
Comments: 25
Mmmm-mmmm…! Pudendalicious!
I love Parkerhouse rolls. You know, the cheap brown ‘n’ serve ones you buy in the supermarket. My mother called them “gluey rolls” because duh…but me, I could never get enough of them. It isn’t a holiday without rolls.
So one day, I got the most awful craving for gluey rolls. Out of the blue. I was about fifteen. We lived in the ass-end of nowhere and the nearest store was miles away, so I got my mother to help me make a batch of standard white dinner rolls.
I did the work while she kept a supervisory eye on me. Then, right at the end, before the last rise, she took a pastry scraper and made an indentation in the middle of each one, so they wouldn’t be too thick and bready.
But after she shaped them, she looked at the rolls, and she looked at me, and I looked at her, and I looked at the rolls, and we looked at each other looking at the rolls, and the rolls looked like…eh, well you can see what the rolls looked like.
And forever after, homemade gluey rolls were known as pussy rolls in my family.
So, I have just made the most hellacious batch of pussy rolls for tomorrow (make them up a day ahead, leave them on the counter overnight wrapped in aluminum foil, then heat them in the foil for about twenty minutes. Good as new, and one less job on the day). It is officially Thanksgiving eve!
I’m going to have a slightly odd Turkey Day this year. I’ll blog about it tomorrow, if I’m spared — between hot buttered pussy rolls.
November 21, 2012 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 19
It’s…complicated
Okay, Americans — please back me up here. There are three kinds of potato, no? New potatoes, red potatoes and Idaho bakers. (I mean, not counting those blue things that’re supposed to be Quetzalcoatl eggs or something). Amirite?
Well. No. Geez, you would not beLEEEVE the potato drama that goes on here.
It’s not just that they recognize dozens of breeds of potato, they actually sell them in the store that way. Potatoes with names like Lady Christl, Rocket, International Kidney, Pentland Javelin, Duke of York, Charlotte, Piccolo Star, Maris Piper and Maris Peer. Dozens more. Don’t make me go look it up.
Oh, but there’s also the time of year they’re up: first early, second early, maincrop and second cropping (this is special late potato, for Christmas). Which I guess is mostly for people who want to grow their own, but this data intersects variety.
Oh, plus the place they were grown. Kent. Prince Edward Island. People can tell the difference.
People. Not me. Mash them up with butter, salt and pepper and, honestly — what’s the diff? Food is just too damn complicated here.
Don’t even get me started on the twenty varieties of sugar!
November 20, 2012 — 10:59 pm
Comments: 42
Life goes on getting worse
No Twinkies, no problem. Can’t abide a Sno-Ball. I can take or leave your Ding Dongs and Ho Hos. Donettes — nice, but expendable. Without Wonder Bread, you’ll just have to insult middle Americans via some other pale, bland, popular food product.
But, ohhhh. Oh, no. Please. By all that is wholesome and sweet and good, not Suzy Qs!!
So moist. So creamy. So delightfully artificial. I haven’t eaten a Suzy Q in thirty years, but how vividly I recall those slabs of devil’s food and creme melting to the shape of my tongue. It was the surpassing stoner gustatory experience.
Oh, Suzy Q! <sobs, wads fists>
November 16, 2012 — 10:36 pm
Comments: 58
Ever made your own Tabasco sauce?
I usually freeze our chilis for perking up Winter soups (get me! I’m Martha Freaking Stewart!), but this year, Uncle B got a little…carried away. That’s just under two pounds of red, ripe chilis. The ones on the right are hot, the ones on the left are O Sweet Jesus What Have I Put In My Mouth???
So I’m’onna make Tabasco sauce. Well, fake Tabasco sauce. The proper McIlhenny stuff means putting the peppers in a barrel, covering them with salt and fermenting them for up to three years.
Pff! Screw that!
There are a ton of recipes for a homemade simulacrum on the Web, and I have massaged them together into this:
1 pound peppers, 2 cups white vinegar, 2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
1. Don Hazmat suit
2. Roughly chop the ingredients together
3. Bring to a boil, then simmer for five minutes
4. Cool and puree
5. Store in the ‘fridge for two weeks to ‘ripen’
6. Strain through a strainer and put into jars
There’s no reason you need to know this, of course. I’m just posting it so I remember what I need to do.
That’s right. I’m using you guys as a recipe holder.
October 24, 2012 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 28
Look! An alien!
Wow — this is what happens when you neglect to harvest a globe artichoke. That wavy stuff in the middle is vivid purple. Not surprising, it’s just a big ol’ thistle.
I’ve been unplugged most of the day today and the ‘tubes are clogged with the Convention, so I’ll just leave you the flower to stare at.
Still not through my To Do list, and it’s getting on for midnight here 😮
August 30, 2012 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 17
Onions
Okay, no more spiders. Onions!
Yet another sign Fall is upon us — the onions were ready for harvest. Uncle B planted me a whole bed of them this year, and there they are.
Have I ever told y’all I have a kind of a special family relationship with onions? I was weaned on one. For reals. Instead of a binky, I got to suck on a green onion.
My grandmother was so fond of onions, she carried on eating them even after she developed some nasty stomach problems. She’d eat onions, then she’d double over in pain. But she persisted.
My mother had a bowl of onions as the centerpiece on the dining room table. At Christmas, we got onions in our stockings (among other things — the onions were filler. She collected them from us to make Christmas lunch).
There is no finer fragrance than onions frying in bacon grease. Ah, but the ladies of the Stoat fambly are serious alliumophiles.
August 9, 2012 — 10:40 pm
Comments: 28
Count yer blessings, Yanks
In case you aren’t down with math or hip to the current exchange rate, that box of Premium Fucking Saltines costs $26.73 in real money.
Dang. What a weasel has to do for a cracker around here.
Speaking of economic tragedy, our neighbors just got back from a week in Spain. I asked if they saw signs of impending doom and they laughed. Not so much the impending doom, but the madness that drove them to it.
They said Spain is lousy with pointless and abandoned infrastructure projects. Like sections of new, modern, multi-lane highway that run parallel to the old, usable road for miles and then just stop. Connecting nothing to nothing, with no access at either end.
Way, WAY out in the middle of the empty countryside, standing in a field slowly grassing over, they saw an enormous concrete bridge. The kind that a big highway would pass over and another big highway pass under, but no road. Or town or anything to go from or to. All funded with loans that are now coming due.
Liberalism really is a cargo cult. The Spanish know — in a dim, inchoate way — that roads are important to a thriving modern economy, so they built little road-shaped shrines out in the ass-end of nowhere, hoping prosperity would follow.
Oh, this thing is going to get ugly.
June 11, 2012 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 46
Heyyyy, what’s Rummy doing on my nuts?
It’s a funny thing, being a furriner. The familiar crops up in the damnedest places.
Like — wait, what? What is this famous picture of Donald Rumsfeld gurning at a geisha doing on a packet of wasabi peanuts?
Apparently, Tyrrell’s just liked it. In fact, their headline over this image is “English Eccentrics.” Cheeky.
Whew, that got Time magazine’s panties in a wad.
One [unknown] remains: whether the hawkish neo-con, whom many Britons remember from the misadventure of the Iraq war, truly reflects the light-hearted and slightly eccentric view of life Tyrrell’s wishes to associate with its brand. Whichever way you look at it, it’s nuts.
Well, anyway, they got the story right. It was during President Gerald Ford’s 1974 trip to Japan. Rumsfeld was the WH Chief of Staff. He was passing a chopstick scrunched under his nose to the Geisha next to him. As you do.
This was apparently a competitive event, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger won, thanks to superior physical endowments. His nose, people.
The peanuts are delicious.
May 8, 2012 — 8:55 pm
Comments: 22