Say, is that a mutant cherry tomato in your pocket, or…?
Plucked from Uncle B’s greenhouse. I was just on the point of dropping it in the soup, when I noticed its enthusiasm. Sadly, I did put it in my pocket, thereby destroying its most signal characteristic.
Incidentally, this is a variety of tomato called gardener’s delight and they are simply spectacular. I usually don’t like raw tomatoes, but these things really do taste sweet, like the fruit they truly are. Raw or cooked, I can’t get enough of ’em.
And that’s it for me today. I’m still on mother-in-law duty and the stress of being on my best behavior all the time has plumb wore me out.
September 1, 2009 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 7
Buy my onions! I am from France!
I saw a real, live Frenchman! And I buyed onions from him!
For almost two hundred years, farmers from Brittany have been coming across the Channel to sell their onions to the English. Brits call them “onion Johnnies.”
They sell a particular mild pink onion from the area around the town of Roscoff, which they braid onto plaits of straw, loop over the handlebars of their bicycles and sell door-to-door. Oh, yeah…they wear little black berets and little black mustaches and really camp it up.
It started in the early Nineteenth C when one farmer realized he could get more for his crop here than they could there. Eventually, there were a couple of thousand making the regular run. They’d bring the crop over and warehouse it in July, then slowly fan out on their bicycles selling them to housewives until December or later.
The onions keep about six months; hang them up in the kitchen and snip one off from time to time. (My old mother would have LOVED this. She had a sort of onion fetish, as did her mother before her. We had onions as a centerpiece at the dining table and got onions in our stockings at Christmas. Come to think of it, that kind of sucks, doesn’t it?).
Our onion Johnny was cheating; he had a table outside the local grocery shop. And no mustache. But he did have a slick color brochure (printed with an EU grant — don’t get me started) which I have lost. It informed me that there are now 25 onion Johnnies.
They’re probably as authentic as the Pirates on a Disney ride, but poor old Uncle B got all excited. He remembers real onion Johnnies from the Before Time.
August 31, 2009 — 5:39 pm
Comments: 12
Because everything should taste like bacon
Bacon salt. I get a little hankering for some down-home processed chemical fake empty-calorie useless tongue-corroding junk from time to time, and this seemed perfect.
So, does it? Not really. Well, kind of. To the same degree and for the same reason Bacos tastes a little like bacon and a little like armpit: it’s made from paprika and autolyzed yeast extract and like that.
Put it this way: bacon salt is low in sodium. And it’s kosher.
August 17, 2009 — 6:03 pm
Comments: 27
Cream of Mutant Soup
It’s the funniest things that throw you, when you’re a immigrant. Like pickles. If you think pickles is pickles, then you, sir or madam, are a booboo.
My hankering for a big fat kosher dill ran into a brick wall of gustatory mixed metaphors when I bit into my first British pickle. I did not know the pickles I’m accustomed to are preserved in garlicky brine with just a soupçon of vinegar. British ones? 100% vinegar. Looks like a pickle, tastes like what the fuck??
Hence, Uncle B very kindly grew me some gherkins for pickling. So, ummmm…any gardeners out there grown gherkins? Google was no help at all. Do they turn orange when they’re overripe? Like Ticonderoga pencil orange? Like, line-down-the-middle-of-the-highway orange? Because I plucked a mutant off the vine this afternoon that looked like a knobbly safety vest.
I ate it, of course. I cut it up with a couple of the ordinary green kind some herbs and junk from the garden, and I made soup. And very tasty it was, too. I feel okay so far.
Only, my farts could strip wallpaper.
July 28, 2009 — 5:55 pm
Comments: 30
Who is Melba that she should have a toast?
When I was in art school, my best friend and I spraypainted the Oscar Wilde aphorism, “who is art that he should have a sake?” in bright yellow on the outside wall of our dormitory. That’s it. My one and only act of vandalism.
Uncle B is feeling a little poorly today, and so his fancies turned inevitably to toast. Melba toast. I did not know there was an actual Melba for whom there was a toast, and it worries me that he did.
She was Aussie opera singer Dame Nellie Melba (1861 – 1931), born Helen Porter Mitchell and a Very Big Deal in her day. In 1897, she fell ill and twice-toasted toast became a staple of her diet, invented especially for her by chef Auguste Escoffier. He also came up with peach Melba. He was, I think, awfully lucky her name wasn’t Snotrag McShitbucket.
I found a recipe for homemade Melba toast (which sounds very nice, actually). Also, I discovered Wikipedia has a whole page on toast, which includes a useful side-by-side split-screen photographic comparison of toasted and untoasted white bread that should enable the alert student to discriminate between the two easily.
It is wholesome when we learn together.
July 17, 2009 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 29
Uncle Badger had a farm, E-I-E-I-O
a youthful primrose yellow colour which cooks to a pale honey. Once cooked, the papery skin rubs off easily, while underneath the flesh of this salad potato usefully keeps its shape when cut or squeezed.
Let the potato cool slightly after cooking and then squeeze it lightly. There’s an immediate hint of fresh cut grass and a delicate earthiness. This is followed by deliciously buttery aromas, as if the potatoes had already been topped with sweet, unsalted butter.
In the mouth it is full-bodied, and tastes equally fresh and buttery, with a lingering note of sweetness. The flavour is remarkably long and persistent. The texture is firm to bite, but it gives way immediately to a supple, velvety melting quality.
That near-pornographic potato tasting comes to you from the British Potato Council. They are referring to a potato called Charlotte, which we will be growing next. The crop in the picture is a variety called International Kidney. And very nice they are too, even if they haven’t got a “hint of fresh cut grass and a delicate earthiness.”
Or maybe they have. How the fuck would I know?
We’ve done very well out of the garden this year, considering he has very little actual land under cultivation. We’ve had potatoes, peas, spinach, carrots, onions, broccoli, lettuces of several varieties, green beans, tomatoes, chili peppers, gherkins and cukes, with cabbages and cauliflower and godnose what else yet to come. And that’s not counting the fruitcage, with rhubarb, red currants, black currants, white currants, strawberries, loganberries, raspberries, gooseberries (two kinds!) and blackberries. Or the herbs in pots. Or the flowers, which I only eat when he’s not looking.
We could be entirely self-sufficient for the summer, if we had a taste for runnybabbit and I didn’t mind disemboweling and skinning adorable fluffy buns in the sink.
I’m not a very good weasel 🙁
July 13, 2009 — 7:23 pm
Comments: 15
Jam and Jesus
That’s who you can blame for the lack of a proper post today.
I promised to do the layouts on a guidebook to the local church — the quaint little place we done got hitched at. Only, all my work muscles have atrophied and it took me forever to remember how all the dinguses and thingies worked. Oh well. “Making excuses” is my besteses job skill, and one I will NEVER forget.
And then I remembered my strawberry conserves were due for the final boil and potting up tonight.
Jam. Jesus. Where the hell am I and how the fuck did I get here…?
July 6, 2009 — 9:16 pm
Comments: 8
Jammin’ with Uncle B
Got a little jammed up tonight.
Ho ho ho.
Bit of a pickle, really.
Hee hee.
Seriously. If I ever see another strawberry, I’m going to wrestle it to the ground, shove a thermometer where the sun don’t shine and beat it to death with a wooden spoon.
June 29, 2009 — 6:26 pm
Comments: 14
Dog’s breakfast
Dog’s breakfast: (mainly British, idiomatic) An unappealing mixture; a disorderly situation; a mess.
This post is a dog’s breakfast, not the thing in the picture. That would be a pizzurger: a double Whopper with a slice of pepperoni pizza between the beef patties. Brought to you by the fine folks at This Is Why You’re Fat.
Hell’s yes I’d eat one. Right this minute. No monetary wager required.
So, my RSS feed is down. Any ideas how I fix it? Yes, I realize there’s probably mucho documentationio on the WordPress site, but I’m in the “I’ll sit here with my mouth open and hope a ham sandwich falls into it” school of technical support.
I only vaguely grasp what an RSS feed is and was astonished to learn mine had been working before. Wonder how I did that. Presumably, it were the last WP upgrade what killed it. Thanks to everyone who wrote and told me it’s dead.
And the answer to this question is: lawnmower. I peeled that decal off the deck of my new (old) pushmower prior to treating a couple of rust spots. Not much help, is it? I guess the third icon describes pebbles being kicked out by the blade, but I’m still bereft of clue what the monolith is all about.
It’s American, by the way (trust me to run to the only American-made mower we saw and throw my arms around it). So that there’s probably good old-fashioned Yankee impenetrability.
Good weekend, ever’body!
June 19, 2009 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 13
Say, is that a pie funnel under your crust, or are you happy to see me?
A little something Uncle B whipped up. It involves kidneys. And pie crust. Hells no I didn’t taste it.
Please savor his culinary triumph in place of my usual thoughtful and engaging blog post. I got jammed up tonight trying to do the layouts for the church guidebook.
Yes, really.
Shut up.
May 21, 2009 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 24