It’s better than bad, it’s good!
Bought this at a smallholding fair. It’s a grow-your-own ‘shroom kit.
Dude sells wooden furniture pegs — you know, like the ones you bang together Ikea furniture with — covered in different varieties of mushroom spores. Sells ’em in little burlap bags, along with instructions and a correctly-sized drill bit.
What you do is, you take a freshly-cut hardwood log (needs to be fresh because the mushrooms live on the moisture and sugars), about four inches by two and a half feet, and drill a series of holes in a diamond pattern. The holes are a little deeper than the pegs. Bang the pegs in, plant the log in a cool, damp spot and…wait a year, eighteen months.
I bought hericium Erinaceus, which is supposed to taste like delicious lobsters.
But where in the Sam Hill do you get freshly cut hardwood logs? Anyone who sells wood will swear on his granny’s silver noggin that everything he’s got is two years old or more and seasoned all to hell.
We had begun eyeballing out neighbor’s orchard and planning a midnight raid when we remembered a local smallholder who sells apples. He had a perfect pile of wood…only it was six months old. Two months or less is optimum.
Oh, well. It’ll have to do.
Then the drill bit snapped off in the log before I got all the holes drilled.
Well, hell. This shit grows wild. In the woods. How hard can it be?
September 22, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 31
More pig uterus, Vicar?
Uncle B had a business appointment in London today. I went with, so we could visit the happiest place on earth — I mean, of course, Wing Yip.
These are the guys who supply all the Chinese restaurants in the UK, pretty much. Here you can buy hundredweight sacks of rice, gallons of soy sauce, great sawn tree-rings to use for chopping blocks, wicked sharp cleavers engraved all down the blade with Chinese characters. There are iron woks from omelette size to great rice boats.
There’s one whole long aisle of nothing but ramen noodles.
Oh, I love Wing Yip. Most of our day-to-day cups, plates and bowls are Wing Yip-ware — if it’s good enough for the chinko on the corner, it’s good enough for mustelids. The staff is friendly, even if we are reduced to communication via squeaks and gestures, and they have everything. Where else are you going to get frozen pig uterus?
We dropped nigh on a hundred quid today — which, let me tell you, is a hell of a lot of pot noodles.
August 3, 2010 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15
Rose hips!
That’s what those are — the edible fruit of the wild rose. The books say you should harvest in September, after the first frost, but the rose in our hedge ripened this time last year, too. In fact, it caught me off guard last time and I didn’t make anything more interesting than cups of rose hip tea.
This year, I caught them in time and I’ve candied a bunch. Mmmmmm. I love the flavor of rose hips — something between an orange and a tomato.
During the war, my mother-in-law and other young women were sent out to collect rose hips to make syrup. Shipping had been terribly disrupted, citrus fruit was in short supply, and rose hips are incredibly high in vitamin C. Like, forty times an orange or something.
Next year, I think I’ll make syrup. You can crush whole fruit to make syrup. To make anything else, you have to cut them open and empty the seed pod — a highly painintheassical operation. Besides all the fiddly little seeds, the pods are lined with tiny hairs — he only known use for which is making novelty itching powder. No fooling.
You know, I haven’t eaten so much shit out of the yard since I was raised by wild hippies.
UPDATE: oh, right…almost forgot. Tomorrow. Dead Pool. Six p.m. Weasel Blog Time. Be there, or somebody else is going to get Zsa Zsa. And sherlock? If you want your dick, you need to shout out…
July 29, 2010 — 11:07 pm
Comments: 17
Yes, but is it art?
Uncle B harvested the onions today — a bit early, but they’d bulbed up nicely and he needed the space. And here they are, clipped to the plastic thing he used for air-drying his socks when he lived in a small flat.
What? I thought it was brilliant.
Gotta run…we have a friend visiting tomorrow and I have to scrape the uppermost archeological layer of filth off the place.
July 27, 2010 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 27
Random
Ettore Boiardi — Chef Boyardee — was a real person. I guess I knew that, though I was too young to have seen him in the commercials (click the picture for a YouTube).
I gather from paddling around the web that he was a famous and splendid chef, and his mass-produced food was actually very good — when he made it.
He sold the whole outfit to a food conglomerate in 1946, though, and that must have been when some accountant cried, “wait! This food needs more suck!”
Canned pasta. Yuck.
He’s the reason I never voluntarily ate pasta (or anything pretending to be Italian) until I was in my twenties and tripped over the real thing.
My chicken has a black eye. And a bloody comb. And a couple of scabby patches on the side of her head.
It looks like she flew full-tilt into the mesh and rode it down on her face. The two don’t fight, beyond a little belly bumping, so that’s surely exactly what happened.
Eh. She’ll be fine. Both well otherwise.
And about this Journolist thing. The attempted spin seems to be “who’s surprised that lefty opinion writers have lefty opinions?” Not so fast, sonny. There are many delightful nuggets in there.
■ The Listers are such utter douchenozzles.
■ They weren’t sharing opinions, they were building consensus on how best to spin — warp the reporting of — news for partisan advantage.
■ If I employed any of those bozos, I’d be pissed. They are paid for original work, not copypasta. Though all their bosses are liberals, so they’re only going to be pissed at the embarrassment.
■ How many more people are going to wreck their careers before it is generally understood there is no such thing as off the record??? I knew it in the days when ideas were written on paper. Didn’t you? Now that words fly around at the speed of electrons, no one should EVER type ANYthing he wouldn’t want to see under a blinking siren on the Drudge Report.
This scoop must be a godsend for Tucker Carlson, working to get a new site off the ground. So I totally understand why he’d dribble it out day by day. But I do so wish this one had gone down like the CRU emails dump — released in one big go for busy webmonkeys to crawl all over.
Breitbart offers a $100,000 reward for the archive and doesn’t get it? And Tucker does? I wonder how much he has and from whence it came.
Hey, I got a fabulous spotted dick for anyone Lister who leaks the archive to me.
July 22, 2010 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 26
Paging Meester Bunny, Meester Bugs Bunny
You ready for this? This is the contents of one ten-inch pot. Huh? Huh? Any closer together, and I reckon these carrots would have facets.
Uncle B spent a lot of years in an upstairs flat smack in the middle of London. That’s where he developed the ability to grow whole fields of waving wheat in little teeny pots.
We’re going to fire up the chimenea, sit under the stars and get quietly snockered. It’s Friday. Have a good weekend, all!
July 9, 2010 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 21
Looks like a turd, smells like an armpit
To be sung to the tune of “looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker.” (Uncle B says I perceive the world through advertising jingles, but he’s just squeezin’ the Charmin).
Anyhoo, this is his fault. He’s one of those guys — I’ve known a few, and it’s almost always guys — whose entire diet consists of peas, potatoes, bread, fruit and dead animals. No veg, no sauces or herbs, certainly no casseroles or stews or furrin food. It’s kind of the Grizzly Bear diet.
(Except he likes Chinese. Work that one out).
So when it comes to navigating my way through all the exotic food on offer here, he’s no damn help at all. One of the oldest and most pervasive being Anglo-Indian food.
That thing in the front is a bhaji, a deep-fried onion concoction. Pretty good, as you might imagine, but really does smell a bit arm-pitty. The other two things are samosas, which are little fried pastry packets full of spicy meat and veg. The pastry was nice, but the filling was heavily ginger. I like ginger, but not as a savory.
So, ummm…that’s it. Later, we went to a farmer’s market.
Any idea what I can do with a large rutabega? SFW suggestions only, please.
February 5, 2010 — 8:06 pm
Comments: 54
I am SO TOTALLY not making this up!!!
I was going to give you a post about all the swell things we’re going to have in 2010, like antigravity boots and Thanksgiving-dinner-in-a-pill. But then we went to the supermarket and Uncle B put this in the cart. I ’bout wee’d myself.
OMFG! Uncle B is eating cheese out of a Wookey hole!
Turns out, Wookey Hole is a touristy tackfest, like Mammoth Cave or Rock City. It’s now owned by the former owner and ringmaster of Britain’s biggest circus, who declares himself delighted to be bringing cheese back to Wookey Hole.
Ahhhhhh…no. Can’t go on with a straight face. Have a good weekend, everybody!
January 1, 2010 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 40
Stuff hippies like
I confess: in the States, I shopped at Whole Foods sometimes. The organic thing is a total crock of shit, but they sell beautifully chosen food — and a lot of exotic things I couldn’t get in my regular Stop ‘n’ Shop run. Sometimes I’m willing to pay through the nose for that.
Here, I scratch that same itch at painfully quaint specialty stores. Where I bought this stuff today — fancy, multicolored, fru-fru, popping corn. Zaramama was the Incan goddess of maize (for reals — I just looked it up).
Whenever a food or cosmetic is associated with an Incan deity, slap a hand over your pocket quick — a hippie is surely trying to steal your wallet.
I’m recently reconnecting with popcorn. My dad — who is super health conscious — popped the stuff in shopping bag quantities. With no salt or added fat. It was appallingly healthy and there was lots and lots of it. When I left home, I swore I’d never touch the stuff again.
So I missed out on movie popcorn and the whole “movie popcorn” manufactured scandal. The one where those pinch-faced lefty scolds at the Center for Science in the Public Interest claimed a medium popcorn contains “more fat than a breakfast of bacon and eggs, a Big Mac and fries, and a steak dinner combined.”
Uh huh. That seems pretty implausible, but…whatever. At least you can safely ignore the part where they warn you off cooking it in coconut oil — turns out the stuff is probably pretty good for you. And good for popping corn, because it’s stable at high temperatures.
I have a simpleton’s sullen distrust of the microwave oven, so I pop my corn on the stovetop in a deep iron skillet with a lid. In coconut oil. Then a light spritz of oil to make the salt stick.
Corn pops because of the hard outer shell — the starch inside can super-heat before the shell goes bang. This happens at around 360°F in a delightful crunchy starch esplosion. If you end up with small, chewy popcorn, you cooked it too hot. If you have many unpopped kernels, you didn’t cook it hot enough.
This stuff? I made some a little while ago. Very nice. No unpopped kernels, fluffy and crispy and exceptionally tasty. I looked online, though, and nobody is selling it any cheaper than my shopkeeper. Special occasion popcorn, then.
Good weekend, everyone!
December 4, 2009 — 8:12 pm
Comments: 36
Eating rodents, eating
The thing above is a harvest loaf. You find them in shops this time of year. Britons serve them at their…naked Gaia-invoking rituals, or whatever damn pagan thing they get up to at harvest time.
Anyhow, the traditional harvest loaf always has a little mouse baked into it.
Meanwhile, the Rat of Badger House has developed a taste for hand soap. Two new bars have vanished from the dish by the kitchen sink in the last week. And I mean vanished — not a trace. That’s got to be a major rodent, right there.
Then this gnawed lump appeared on the pantry shelf. Complete with gnawed wrapper, so it isn’t one of the missing kitchen bars.
I’ve switched to Pear’s (love that herb-y smell!) which seems to have put him off. So far.
What mystifies me is — no piles of waxy rat poops have turned up.
October 27, 2009 — 5:15 pm
Comments: 31