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.

Just thinking about words again. On the GoComics website, in today's Calvin and Hobbes, Dad uses the expression "now, now" to Calvin, and it got me thinking. (And you know how dangerous that is.)

“Now, now” is the opposite of “there, there.” Both used for calming people, but “now, now” is for anger, while “there, there” is for sorrow. “Hear, hear!” (pls note spelling) is for saying someone is right, listen to them! But nobody ever says “Then, then!”

Groovy wrote: "So, this is really a nut bread, not a cake--right?"

Yeah, it is. And if you do the slice-and-toast thing, you have a kind of biscotti thing.

Add a good pinch of dill to that, and you have one of my summer favourites!!

Okay, I made the full recipe for this, and it came out uber-dense and heavy. Granted, it's meant to be dunked in coffee or vin santo (sweet wine). You're supposed to be able to shape it into loaves, but I had to pour mine into a cake pan. So maybe I need a different flour?

Tozetti (Nut bread thing)

500g flour
250g sugar
100 g butter
3 medium eggs
200 ml milk
Salt (I'd go with about half a teaspoon-ish)
20g baking powder (Royal or Calumet, not bicarbonate of soda!)

Flavours, to taste any and/or all of the following:
Zest of one lemon or orange (or indeed both)
Aniseed, cinnamon, clove etc.
50 g raisins or craisins or other dried fruit, plumped up in a hot cuppa tea
250g peeled almonds or other nuts

(You can drink the tea after removing the fruit. Cook's perks and no sugar needed).
Preheat oven to 180C/350F

Cream butter with sugar until smooth, add eggs and milk. Put flour, baking powder, salt and spices in a sifter and sift into the bowl, mixing well. Mix in any dried fruit/nuts you intend to use. Form into two equal sized loaves (or pour into two loaf pans.)

Bake for 25 min.

If you like, you can slice when cool, put slices on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for 5 min at 180C/300F.

Dip in sweet wine, or coffee, or what have you. I'm thinking drizzle melted white chocolate over it.

Yes, Food and I have been very close all my life. Far too close! We spend too much time together.

"Curry." Now there's a warming, satisfying word.

A couple of budding comedians, we got here!

Me either, and I want that recipe!!

Coconut cream pie!!!
I just made an Italian nut-cake. When I get I minute I'll post the recipe here. Trouble is, I was given the recipe in French!

Why do so many new authors, particularly of the paranormal/shapeshifter type books, think that spelling a word in a different way makes it better? Mylk for milk. Wymyn for women. Faerie. And I just found a new one, "faete" instead of "fate." Supposedly, it's because they attach new meanings to the word so they "must" have a new spelling (or perhaps thae moozt hav e nu spileng.)

My language is being raped before my face. Like Miniver Cheevy, I was born too late.

mrbooks wrote: "A plants definition of a weed.

Man"

Gosh I'm slow. I've read that several times and just now got it.

Aging brain.

A therapist I once knew used to say: "You can lead a horse to water---and then feed it a lot of salt!"

Dorothy Parker is famous for being asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. She responded: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."

Me toodles.

Groovy wrote: "Ori, do you still have that scone recipe with the lemon-lime drink added to it? Or a recipe for lemon scones?"

Yup! You can see it done on Youtube, but it's so simple.
4 cups of self-raising flour, or 4 cups of flour plus 2 tablespoons baking powder and about a teaspoon of salt, sift through before starting.
1 can of very cold lemon-lime soda
300 ml (1.25 cups) cream
Throw it all together in a bowl, mix quickly with a table knife. (According to my source, "don't ask why, just do it.") Slap your dough on a lightly floured surface and knead just enough to bring it all together. Cut out with a cutter, or a cup, or just whack triangles off and sling on a baking sheet, nearly touching.
Bake at 400ºF for 15 min, fan bake if you have it.
Best piping hot from the oven with lashings of butter and jam and a good cuppa tea.

Just in passing: I am sick to death of the latest food fad being touted as a "centuries/millenia old natural remedy from ("exotic" culture of your choice)" -- and yet nobody's ever heard of it before it got buzzed in all the blogs and fad websites.

Latest in line is "moon milk". A pretty little drinkie of milk and honey and "adaptogens"....ie herbs and spices and stuff. It might be good, okay--but spare me the hype.

From a GR blurb for a book entitled The Glass Sided Ant's Nest:

The corpse, in striped pajamas, lies in the middle of a room completely absent of furniture.

"Absent of furniture"?
That's not what absent means.

Empty of furniture, certainly.

Alone. In the rain. To die. (Ernest Hemingway).

Groovy wrote: "I need to take a BC..."

Birth Control? O.o LOL

Growing up in the 1960s, my teachers (mostly women over 50) taught us to say, "Oh I feel badly about that." No, you don't. You feel bad--an adjective--because you have bad feelings, or you feel like a bad person. If you say you "feel badly", which is an adverb, it means you aren't terribly good at feeling. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives modify nouns.

That was even more so 40 years ago.

One of my students is 14, and she and her friends are all crazy for a Korean boyband called BTS. Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the group's start, so we were talking about boy bands and pop music etc. She asked me if I had had a favourite boy band when I was her age, so I searched on YT and pulled them up: the Bay City Rollers.

Oh dear. I thought those guys were cute???? And the noise they made was rubbish as well. I spent two or three years wearing tartan stripes down my highwater pants.

No wonder I couldn't get a date to the prom.
Strewth.

Later, of course, much later, I was shocked to hear on Radio 4 news that the drummer had been arrested for having child porn on his computer...and the lead singer had committed suicide.

Life life.

Mr B, I'm not talking about mobility vehicles. I'm talking about the modern version of the child's push-along scooter, which now has an electric motor, and people stand up on it with both feet and zip along the sidewalks, glaring at pedestrians who dare to walk in the walking area that they want to race down.