Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s Comments (group member since Sep 20, 2013)

Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s comments from the Net Work Book Club group.

Well, when I take my GAD meds, baked, actually...LOL

I actually love cats (and most animals except spiders), but it was the way she told it to me that cracks me up every time.

I found Manisha's blog many years ago quite by accident. I was running some searches for info on Anne Frank's family and she had posted the only known film of her. It's not meant to be of Anne, it was an old cine-camera film of a wedding couple leaving the apartment house, but Anne pedals up on her bike and goes into the building and then her mother and sister come out on the balcony. Lasts just a few seconds but is very moving. Well, it is if you feel about Anne the way I do.

mrbooks wrote: "Groovy wrote: "Thank-you for that. Some of the ingredients I'll have to look around for. One question: What do you eat yours with?"

Her fingers I would hazard a guess."

Naan. Sometimes a spoon.

This one's awful and I deserve Coventry for it, but here goes:


How do you make a cat bark?

Set it on fire; it goes "whoof."

Lightning sometimes shocks people because it just doesn't know how to conduct itself.

I put it on the side of my plate, particularly if you've made something that came out a bit bland. I like it with lentils, or any curry. It's great on sandwiches (like leftover roast meat, for example).
Our lemons are huge so sometimes I slice them in rounds instead of eighths; our eighths seem to swell up in the process!
Unfortunately Manisha isn't posting on her blog anymore but the recipes are there and they always work!

Groovy, if you're interested in making lime and lemon pickle with little work involved check out http://www.indianfoodrocks.com/2006/0...
and
http://www.indianfoodrocks.com/2006/0...

You chop up your lemons or limes, add the spices and salt and sugar in a big glass jar, and set it where it will get the sun for a few hours a day. Shake it well twice a day. Takes about six weeks but all you have to do is remember to shake it.

I make it every year. You can also cook it in a slow cooker or on a low heat and it's done in a few hours, but I find it changes the flavour.

From the 1957 edition of the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, sent to me by a missionary friend:
Cover with cold water about 50 small slim cucumbers. Let stand overnight. Drain and pack in jars. Put in a (large) saucepan 1 quart (read 1 liter) mild vinegar, ¾ cup (read 175 ml) of salt, and 2 quarts (read 2 liters) of water. Bring to a boil. Pour over the cucumbers. Add to each jar dillweed (and a garlic clove if you like it). Let stand about 6 weeks before using. If some liquid oozes out during the first week, open the jars, add enough more liquid (mixed in the same proportion) to cover the cucumbers completely, and reseal. Makes 6 to 8 quarts. (Since the amount of salt is given in cups rather than grams, if you have only one measuring cup you might want to measure the salt before the vinegar. Just a thought).

I make lime and lemon "pickle" (Limbacha Loncha and Nimbu Achar) every summer; I might just try dills. All we can get is the little jars of dried dillweed but I might go for it. I guess I was thinking of my mother's industrial scale production!

ummmm....:(

We used to have signs on the busses here too that said "No Spitting." Fortunately people have stopped doing that. You might see an older man spit, but on the street. I once saw a man spit on the floor in a supermarket thirty years ago, here. When there was no reaction by the employees standing near, my husband said we weren't going back there anymore.

You wanna talk mayhem; my mother's house sat on a lot and a half; the full lot was mostly vegetable garden! We canned and froze all summer so we could eat all winter. To this day, if I close my eyes I can call up the rows and rows of green beans. Corn, tomatoes, green beans and cucumbers were my mother's main crop. It all went into bags and jars. We kids had to set up an "assembly line" to peel, chop and jar the produce in the jars Mom sterilised. I chose to be the one to sit in the hot steamy kitchen and watch/time the waterbath canner (which was so heavy and used so much that it eventually deformed the stainless steel stovetop). That way I could sit and read while a batch cooked, instead of being in the garden picking and weeding!

No canning jars here to keep them in, though. Plus no waterbath canner. People here don't can their own stuff.

Another pet hate, not the phrase but the fact: Tuneless whistling. I'd read in a book when I was a kid that someone hummed or whistled "tunelessly" and wonder what it meant. Now I know--men of a certain age do it all the time here. Walking down the street, working at something, or what's worse, on a bus. They get one phrase and whistle it to death, and it's not a melody, it's just---yup. Tuneless. And they never stop. There used to be notices on our busses, "No Whistling." Now I understand why. What I don't know is why they got rid of them.

I am chuckling at myself. For years I have moaned about the fact that you can't get really sour dill pickles here. Which you can't. The delicious, sour/salty dill pickle Americans know and love is unavailable. All pickles here are actually very sweet. You can't get pickle relish, either. I've been craving tuna salad with tons of chopped celery and relish...and it hit me, the way a rake hits you when you step on it and the handle comes up and whacks you in the leg:
If all our pickles are sweet, and I want pickle relish, all I have to do is take some of those sweet pickles and chop them up fine. Instant relish.

Voilá, as the French are so fond of remarking.

So I chopped me up some gherkins and made tuna salad.

duh.

Which reminds me of a horrible highschool joke:
How do they know that diarohhea is hereditary?
Because it runs in your jeans.

And if it runs into a horse-drawn dray it becomes dralon...

ummmmm....


Guerrilla warfare is more than just throwing a banana.

(Don't know if I've mentioned this, but as a kid in the 60s I kept hearing on the news about "gorrilla warfare". I thought it meant sneaking up behind people and grabbing them around the neck, like a gorilla. Not that gorillas do that--but I was about six.)

Plus she thinks any guy with a ribbon on his chest and medals is a Prince...

This morning floating between sleep and waking, I started thinking about how many phrases there are that use the human body to talk about geography and travel.

Think about it, and add some if you can that I've missed:

The first leg of a journey
The breast of a hill (also as a verb: when he breasted the rise)
In the foot-hills
In this neck of the woods
A finger of land (also, grossly, a spit of land--about as far as you can spit, I guess)
Certain roads are "main arteries" along which traffic "circulates"
There used to be "trunk roads" but I think that means they were made with your actual treetrunks (see also corduroy roads. Imagine a time when there were enough trees in the country that they could just use them to make roads!)

Any more?