the food rant thread

[ian]

Oh my friends, this week is not going well. The other night I chanced it with a dubious looking courgette and that didn't go in my favour. That went through me like a tsunami. The thing is that I've not being shopping for an age because my wife is on bear patrol in the Rockies and I can't drive the car because I have the attention span of a midge so the fridge is getting more and more interesting. There's stuff in the bottom drawer that has evolved to point of sentience. Close it and leave us alone, it says. Oh and turn out the bloody light.

I have just risked an inventory and discovered some parmesan cheese that's yet to get lively, a jar of mayonnaise (best before July 15, but I'll assume that's 3015), a jar of wholegrain mustard that I bought the other week, a jar of semi-safe pickles, a cucumber, some limes, grapes, a peach, two mangoes, a lettuce that reminds me of a limp and drowned Ophelia, a couple of radishes and I'm sure I've not bought a radish for years, and some beetroot that promises to be good until November at which point its seething resentment boils over into purple rage. When beetroot goes bad. There's a load of beer, of course, a fridge is not a fridge without beer. There's imperial stout for pudding at least.

There's a meal of champions in there. I have some tins of tuna but opening one of those risks cat-geddon. I have to open two tins and throw one sacrificially out of the back door. There's some sweetcorn that's labelled in marker pen with 'don't even think about eating me'. My wife's handwriting is only legible when she's telling me not to do something. Muesli. I evidently eat a lot of muesli. A jar of harissa paste. Sundry rices and pasta. Quinoa, oh that died in May 2014. Do people eat quinoa or merely buy it so other people think they eat quinoa? I don't even know if I like it. I'm still smarting from the buckwheat kasha that started this thread, the one that tasted like soil from my own grave.

Beyond that it's the beer coffin (it's not an actual coffin, it's a trunk, but it's a perfect fit for my corpse, so when I pass my best-before date they can put me in it and bury out back under a pile of buckwheat kasha) which is admirably well stocked and the gin cupboard (you don't want to know how many bottles). The cocktail cabinet. It's like a wino heaven. Damnit, the Unicum is still in there.

I think I need a stiff drink before the another evening of perilous gastronomy. I should have gone to the pub.

[Ruthie]

You need JustEat.

Men will bring hot food to your door.  No, honestly, it's a thing. 

[ian]

I always find takeaway ineffably disappointing. Curry that doesn't just look like sludge. Pizzas someone has probably sneezed on and charged me £1.50 for the extra topping. I sorted the leaflets and waved each one at the cat. She shook her head to each. I think she senses a tuna proximity alert. There's a voice in my mind. Open the tuna. Open the tuna. I think bad cat may be telepathic. What are the odds my wife knows how many tins of sweetcorn she has stashed (it's 'salad crisp' apparently)? Oh I'm sure she has a very precise inventory (eight tins btw). She probably has satellites tasked to keep tabs on it.

I have reserved the cucumber for gin purposes and eaten the pickles.

[Mrs Pingu]

Ian, please can I have a list of what's in your gin cupboard? Enquiring minds need to know.

[hellymedic]

You need JustEat.

Men will bring hot food to your door.  No, honestly, it's a thing.

I suggested hungryhouse.co.uk to Wow when he was home alone and believe this was successful.

Online grocery shopping suits me fine too. I can refer to my shopping list whilst clicking on my selections without having trolleys ram my calves and hearing whiny kids.

Arranging your slaves online is a 21st century luxury.

[Hot Flatus]

I heard an amazing statistic last week.  Type 2 Diabetes treatment costs 10% of the NHS budget and the spend is predicted to nearly double over the next 25 years.

That is roughly double the cost to the NHS of smoking related illnesses.

[ian]

I heard an amazing statistic last week.  Type 2 Diabetes treatment costs 10% of the NHS budget and the spend is predicted to nearly double over the next 25 years.

That is roughly double the cost to the NHS of smoking related illnesses.

Oh, the diabetes thing is huge, and will conflate with lots of other obesity and other diet-related problems. Future generations are looking at a shorter lifespan than currently and more poor quality end-of-life years.

Like air pollution (which doesn't kill people, it merely results in more deaths, and thus is euthanasia made popular) there's no government response other than a shrug and hold a meeting with their friends in industry, who are always happy to help out, especially if it creates a product space (so we have green Coke placed as a healthier alternative). Medical professions seem more interested in their own wellbeing than that of their patients.

At least with tobacco we did something, if too slowly and often ineffectively, and we continue to do something. That's gone from other spheres of public health.

[ian]

You need JustEat.

Men will bring hot food to your door.  No, honestly, it's a thing.

I suggested hungryhouse.co.uk to Wow when he was home alone and believe this was successful.

Online grocery shopping suits me fine too. I can refer to my shopping list whilst clicking on my selections without having trolleys ram my calves and hearing whiny kids.

Arranging your slaves online is a 21st century luxury.

I don't like online shopping, it's like staggering around a supermarket blind-folded. I don't know where stuff is and their categorisation schemes are arcane. Is it groceries or dry goods, and then assumes I know what I want, which I really, really don't because I randomly grab stuff and toss it in the trolley and then my wife take it back out when I'm not looking. This process usually results in shop that has some utility. I don't do recipes I just make things up from whatever is to hand, so there's no organisation beyond by a lot of veg and fruit and – oh look – chocolate tea bags. Then I have to face-up stock and tut at something, as my first junior job was apprentice deputy assistant to the the dogsbody at the local Coop, and man can I still stack a shelf.

Last night came to an epic battle between a new Indian takeaway and the remaining tins of tuna. Bad cat, biased by the fact she's tuna-crazy, was pretty keen we go the ways of tins, and because I hate that sensation of optimism when you order a curry that promises to be cooked by award winning chefs (yeah, just back from winning the cornish pasty awards I'm sure) and be full of fresh flavours and then it arrives and it's usual coloured sludge that tastes primarily of disappointment and despair. So the tuna won out and we ate it all. There's about three extra cats in my garden this morning looking for the buffet.

[ian]

Ian, please can I have a list of what's in your gin cupboard? Enquiring minds need to know.

It's probably easier to ask what I don't have. When I started this quest I didn't believe there could be so many gins and frankly they're reproducing at a rate we can't keep up with. It started by bringing bottles of gin back from the various travels, then other people started bringing them back for us, and then came the internet. International terrorism put a damper on foreign acquisitions through the stupid liquids policy. I've have a bottle of Malawi's finest gin now if it wasn't for that.

[contango]

Bastard hot peppers. Bastard, bastard, bastard hot peppers.

Don't get me wrong, I love hot peppers. Just not some of their effects. And before you think I'm talking about a weapons-grade anal explosion that makes me thankful I left it in the hallowed bogs at Walmart rather than in my own porcelain, it's not that at all.

I spent two hours cutting and processing a mixture of Carolina Reaper peppers and scorpion peppers. A friend owns a business that makes hot sauces, and he had 100+ lb of peppers to deal with, so I went to help him. Naturally you wear gloves when handling peppers like that, especially when you're deseeding them and handling the placenta tissue. But when it came to taking the gloves off, the brief touch of my right thumb on my left wrist to remove the glove created a burning that lasted for hours.

So back to the original premise, bastard hot peppers.

[ian]

There's worse things than wrists, I once sliced up a big handful of peppers for some fissile assembly of ingredients and then with a brief rinse of my hands decided then was a good time to remove my contact lenses. It really wasn't a good time.

There's worse, I know a lady who, under the liberation of liquor, confessed that a previous boyfriend had touched her more delicate tropical regions after similar. I think that was possibly the point he became previous. There's probably an entire sexual subculture of people pepper-spraying their love bobbits that I don't want to know about.

Of course, it seems a rite of passage for men to do similar with their penis. Possibly because boys are always tomfooling down there (one hopes not so much in the kitchen, though perhaps that's how Little Chef came to be known as little). I confess I've avoided this fate (both manhandling myself in the kitchen and peppering my penis) and long may such good fortune endure.

[mrcharly-YHT]

There's worse, I know a lady who, under the liberation of liquor, confessed that a previous boyfriend had touched her more delicate tropical regions after similar. I think that was possibly the point he became previous.

BTDT

[Efrogwr]

There's worse things than wrists…

I like Super Chili, because it's available as a growing plant and has a good flavour. It's rated at 50,000 Scoville Units, so it's a bit frisky.

I make sure that I have a pee before cooking… and wait as long as possible after dinner. Washing my hands well enough to remove onion and garlic odour doesn't help with the chili residue.

[hellymedic]

Washing dishes by hand, without wearing gloves, is the best way of getting nasty/pungent substances of the paws IME, if they are water-slouble

[ian]

Soak your hands and/or love bobbits in a bucket of acetonitrile or aprotic polar solvent of choice (not DMSO as it makes your tongue taste funny after you touch it).

[Efrogwr]

Washing dishes by hand, without wearing gloves, is the best way of getting nasty/pungent substances of the paws IME, if they are water-slouble

Thank you.

[Efrogwr]

Soak your hands and/or love bobbits in a bucket of acetonitrile or aprotic polar solvent of choice (not DMSO as it makes your tongue taste funny after you touch it).

I think I'll sit down!

[ian]

DMSO is great because if you stick your finger in it a few seconds later you taste it. Goes straight through your skin and pops up on your tongue. It doesn't taste very nice though.

[contango]

There's worse things than wrists, I once sliced up a big handful of peppers for some fissile assembly of ingredients and then with a brief rinse of my hands decided then was a good time to remove my contact lenses. It really wasn't a good time.

There's worse, I know a lady who, under the liberation of liquor, confessed that a previous boyfriend had touched her more delicate tropical regions after similar. I think that was possibly the point he became previous. There's probably an entire sexual subculture of people pepper-spraying their love bobbits that I don't want to know about.

Of course, it seems a rite of passage for men to do similar with their penis. Possibly because boys are always tomfooling down there (one hopes not so much in the kitchen, though perhaps that's how Little Chef came to be known as little). I confess I've avoided this fate (both manhandling myself in the kitchen and peppering my penis) and long may such good fortune endure.

I've managed similar experiences (eyes not wedding vegetables, thankfully) after drying and breaking up a harvest of cayenne peppers and then forgetting what I'd done before rubbing my eyes. The guy whose peppers I cut up managed to wipe his face with the same bandana he previously used to wipe up the juice from 50lb of scorpion peppers. From what he said I don't think he found the experience entirely enjoyable.

Given how easily it's done I can't say I'm surprised that people can get intimate (with themselves or with others) and transfer capsaicin to areas that really weren't designed to be the target for transferal of capsaicin. Sometimes it does seem like a case of "there but for the grace of God..."

[contango]

There's worse things than wrists…

I like Super Chili, because it's available as a growing plant and has a good flavour. It's rated at 50,000 Scoville Units, so it's a bit frisky.

50,000?

A good habanero clocks many times that and also has a good flavour. Some of the superhots run to seven figures and have a reasonable flavour, if you can taste it over the heat. You really don't want to be rubbing those anywhere at all, even getting the juice from those peppers on your hands hurts.

I make sure that I have a pee before cooking… and wait as long as possible after dinner. Washing my hands well enough to remove onion and garlic odour doesn't help with the chili residue.
[/quote]

[Mr Larrington]

This came up for discussion during one of the long periods o milling about which take place between speed runs at Battle Mountain.  One of our number once got some in her eye; a nearby Hispanic type deftly wiped the injured eye with the victim's hair which did the trick.  This works better if, like Alice, you have hair down to the small of your back.

[Mr Larrington]

Bend OR is big enough to support a divided highway section of US-97 anna large branch of Target anna Volvo dealership so why the actual fuck is the nearest branch of Pizza Hut nearly twenty sodding miles away?  Grrr!

#firstworldproblem

[ian]

Bend OR is big enough to support a divided highway section of US-97 anna large branch of Target anna Volvo dealership so why the actual fuck is the nearest branch of Pizza Hut nearly twenty sodding miles away?  Grrr!

#firstworldproblem

Surely a branch of IHOP has sprouted mushroom-like from the roadside?

OTOH, I've never met anyone who's eaten there, and they assure everyone they don't just to pancakes. Change your fucking name then.

I ate some lentils at the end of last week (oh, they were there in a svelte little salad, how bad could it be). That's my rant. You can stuff your gluten intolerance, the lot of you, the seismic rumblings in my gut have attracted helicopter new crews. The aftermath is best not discussed. No more beans.

[contango]

Bend OR is big enough to support a divided highway section of US-97 anna large branch of Target anna Volvo dealership so why the actual fuck is the nearest branch of Pizza Hut nearly twenty sodding miles away?  Grrr!

#firstworldproblem

So you can spend a little more time sitting on your ass before sitting on your ass eating your required 5000 calories in a greasy low grade pizza?

[Mr Larrington]

Omak WA does have a Pizza Hut so my long pizza drought is at an and.  I aten't seen an IHOP since the first morning I was over here, but I did have breakfast in it and while a pancake or two was part of the deal the main thing was a plateful of Stuffs that mostly proved that Canadians have a lot to learn about fry-ups.

Now, why do the "in-room tea and coffee making facilities" here have only one sachet of sugar and thirteen of foul zero-calorie sweetener?  It's enough to make you want to skullfuck a dead pig.