Apparently, the weird weather we had at Sunset this year favored tomatoes, because we had quite a few. I’ve made fried green tomatoes 3 times and will probably make more; I also have some green cherry tomatoes that I’ll be using for mincemeat if the apple trees cooperate. But we had far more ripe cherry tomatoes than we could use for salad (because I don’t eat salad), so I decided to make salsa (which is a staple in this house thanks to Grace). What you see in the picture below is two pounds of cherry tomatoes; I chopped them up pretty thoroughly in my ninja, then finely chopped half a medium-sized onion, half a bell pepper and four cloves of garlic, and sauteed them for a few minutes in two tablespoons of olive oil. I mixed that with the tomatoes and added the following: 1 small can (4 oz) of diced, roasted green chiles; two tbsp each of vinegar, cilantro, and chili powder; and 1/2 tsp each of salt, granulated garlic, extra-hot (Indian) chili powder, cayenne, and MSG. Now, I didn’t just dream up those proportions; I started with half the tomatoes and none of the spices, and Grace and I repeatedly taste-tested the salsa, adding or increasing ingredients as we went, until about two hours later we had something we were both happy with. It made enough for two pints and a bit left over, and the full jars are in the canner right now as I type this. I’ll let you know how it comes out, but I think we may have a winner!
The heat wave hung on until a week ago today, and though it wasn’t as bad as some of the heat waves we’ve had in recent years, it was bad enough (especially since I still haven’t managed to shake that allergy yet). Most summer days we’re in the low 20s Celsius, with occasional surges to the high 20s and plenty of sunshine and no rain at all. It looks like it’s pretty good for my tomatoes, as long as I keep watering them every day; I also need to fill troughs for for the animals nearly every day because the evaporation rate is pretty high this time of year (in sharp contrast to the ten months of the year that aren’t named after Roman emperors). All in all the summers here are much more annoying to me due to excessive light than to excessive heat, but when we do get the occasional heat wave in a house without air conditioning, icebox cake is a lovely cooler.
I hadn’t made crumpets in a while, and was craving them recently so I made a batch. Several people on Twitter & BlueSky expressed interest, so I decided to share my recipe. You can’t make them without crumpet rings; when I got mine they were fairly difficult to find, but I imagine finding them on the internet would be no big deal. Since crumpets are eaten toasted anyhow, it’s best to make these earlier in the day or even the day before you actually want them. I’m assuming most of my UK readers who cook already have a recipe, so I’ll just use standard US cooking measurements here.
2 1/4 cups flour
1 packet yeast (I like the quick-rise kind) 1/2 cup milk
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar 3/4 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp warm water
1) Mix milk, 1 1/2 cups warm water, salt & sugar in a small saucepan and heat until warm (not hot). Mix flour and yeast; add liquid and beat with electric mixer on low speed for 30 seconds, then high for 3 minutes. Cover with a towel and let stand in a warm place for 1 hour.
2) Mix baking soda into the 2 tbsp warm water; add to the batter and mix well. I usually just let my stand mixer set up during the wait time so I don’t have to dirty another beater. Let stand covered in a warm place for 10 minutes; meanwhile, grease crumpets rings, place them on a griddle or large skillet, and preheat over medium heat.
3) Ladle the batter into each ring, filling about 3/4 of the way up. Cook for 5-7 minutes or until the tops are mostly dry (the middles will usually be still wet). Remove rings with kitchen tongs and set aside; flip each crumpet with a spatula and cook for another minute. Remove to a cooling rack.
TIPS: Keep your eye on the griddle temperature; I use a cast-iron skillet so I usually need to nudge the heat down after the first batch to avoid burning the bottoms. Also, since you want to regrease the rings for each batch, I find cooking spray is the fastest & easiest way to go.
SERVING: Toast the crumpets when you’re ready to eat them; I find it’s best to do them just a notch lower than you would sliced bread (unless you’re one of those barbarians who like your toast burnt, in which case do them several notches lower). They’re great with butter, clotted cream, jam or marmalade, lemon curd, anything like that. One of my readers said he likes them with Marmite, which I have not tried but sounds interesting. This recipe will make roughly a dozen or just under, so put any you’re not going to eat that day in a sealed Tupperware-type container. Anyway, that’s all there is to it; the thing I love best about them is their texture, much more like a proper waffle or pancake than an English muffin. Enjoy!
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
One of the main manifestations of my OCD is that I have a system for nearly everything I do. My readers can see it in my blog: a new post every day, always at the same time, with certain kinds of columns appearing on certain days of the week and/or month in a strictly-managed format. There’s even a lot of deep structure in the blog that few of y’all probably even notice, but which in my mind is an integral part of the blog’s structure. And beneath that is another layer of organization completely invisible to y’all: I write certain kinds of columns on certain days, and to a lesser extent certain times of day. For example, I’m typing this on the evening of Tuesday, May 21st, because (unless life forces me to do it another time) I write Monday columns on the preceding Tuesday (after two of the news items for the next Saturday’s news column). I pore over Twitter with my breakfast, collecting news items, commenting on what I find, and promoting things I’ve already written; I’m generally done about noonish and then move on to my morning ablutions, followed by my chores. Afternoons vary by the day; I usually wash clothes on Monday and Friday, and also do my groceries on Monday. Other days are for appointments or weekly chores like vacuuming the floor or burning the garbage, and some days I actually manage to sneak in some other task I want to accomplish like baking cookies or tackling some kind of odious paperwork. I cook dinner nearly every day, and there are patterns there too: red beans & rice on Mondays, soup & sandwich on Tuesdays, pasta on Thursdays, meatless Fridays, Tex-Mex Saturdays. My cooking patterns aren’t merely daily and weekly, either; I usually make waffles on the first Friday of every month because we only eat a few, and the rest go into the fridge so Grace can rewarm them in the toaster oven for breakfast. And similar patterns apply to other day/month combinations, which are of course subject to interruption by seasonal events; on top of that the times I cook, turn the lights on, feed the animals, and other such tasks follow a set schedule which varies by season. Overwhelmed? I’m not, because that’s how my brain works. And directing my OCD toward scheduling chores and planning meals keeps me from obsessing too much about far more distracting minutiae, even though I also have the counting to 16 thing.
It has become abundantly clear that when internet denizens write "capitalist", what they *actually* mean is "fascist" or "corporatist", a political system in which society is run by a triad of political, corporate, and military/paramilitary interests, each reinforcing the others.
I met my oldest friend when we were 4. I met one of my closest friends in 1984, and I've been living with my best friend since 1998. https://t.co/Eb0T1yYq5K
I'll start paying attention to these when they actually incorporate as sovereign nations with territory, a government, a constitution, etc. https://t.co/hhPxAt5cht
Self-ownership means each individual, not the State, determines what to do with their own body. There is no specific "right" to get high, but there *is* a right to be free from the State's trying to stop anyone from doing so. https://t.co/FccvPaSAH2
I've been trying to figure out what those lyrics mean since the song came out. I just read them again, and still no luck. Specifically, what or where is "the tropic of Sir Galahad"?
I'm sure there will be plenty of work for all those mechanical sienists, teahers, pohets, and warlords in Mouska-ears. And plenty for real humans too, for employers who actually want competence. https://t.co/xTtOJfPywi
Exactly. The twist must be *part* of the plot, not an optional extension. The twist must needs be planned from the beginning, not used like a Habitrail extension merely to fill up an episode count. As a writer of many a twisty story, I can tell you that I *start* with the twist.
Speaking of word usage: in a Constitutional republic founded on the principle of limited government powers, allowing State actors to do basically whatever they like without the wronged citizen having any means of redress is not "conservative" by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm painfully fascinated by people laboring under the delusion that their 21st century authoritarian repression is morally superior to old-fashioned 20th century authoritarian repression because the excuses used to justify modern repression are based in 19th century ideas.
Comment on the reader comment: they could have sex if they wanted to in 2020 as well; bureaucratic rules are not laws of nature, however much lawheads might want them to be. https://t.co/7SwckO0A1A
Does ANYbody really believe that all over the world, people "approach" cops with weapons openly displayed? Don't badge-lickers ever question why on earth anybody who wasn't both completely deranged and actually hallucinating would do such an obviously self-destructive thing?
And this is just the total of the court judgments; it does not count the costs of all the robberies, victims' medical & legal bills, uncompensated property damage, spurious "overtime", spurious court proceedings, or mass incarceration, nor the incalculable emotional costs. https://t.co/98ch6Ez8nU
One of the ways Grace and I use cannabis is by ethanol extraction of THC from resin, then using the resulting solution in either concentrated (tincture) or dilute forms. Due to Grace’s many health problems, one of which is severe arthritis, her THC intake is so high it would be cost-prohibitive to get it all from edibles; smoking doesn’t bring long-lasting relief, and doing too much of it is inadvisable anyhow due to her chronic lung damage from decades in the industrial trades. She keeps a bottle of the tincture on her desk, and adds drops of it to her tea as needed; we use the more dilute form (which I call snakebite) in her soup, and I sometimes use it (very sparingly; “dilute” is a relative term, as you’ll see) in cocktails when I really want something strong. We were introduced to both of these by a generous gent who used to make them for us, then decided to buy us the equipment and teach us to do it ourselves. And now I’m going to teach you; it isn’t that hard, and the equipment isn’t terribly expensive.
The first step is to buy “dab wax” (resin) from your local legal dispensary; I’m afraid I have no idea how to get ahold of it in places where it isn’t legal. In Washington, this is actually the cheapest ingredient; I usually get the highest-THC resin available from among the budget-priced selections, which are usually just over $10. If we’re going to make tincture, I get two packs of an indica; for snakebite, a single pack of sativa. I wouldn’t advise going any stronger until you’ve tried it at this level; as I wrote above, “dilute” is a relative term, and the snakebite is still very strong (just not as concentrated as the tincture, which one uses by the drop rather than the tablespoon). Put the wax into a small beaker (we use an 80 ml size) and place that into a decarboxylator machine like this one; you’ll need to read the instructions carefully, but it’s fairly foolproof and has a light that turns from red to green when it’s done. The beaker will be hot, so Grace usually lets it sit in the machine for about 30 minutes or so before attempting to remove it.
Once it’s cool enough to handle with bare hands, take it out and add about 60 ml of pure ethanol; you don’t want to add it too soon lest the beaker break. You don’t need lab-grade ethanol; Everclear is 95% ethanol, and that works just fine (it’s also available at most liquor stores). Next, you need to stir it very thoroughly, over heat; Grace insists stirring it by hand is not sufficient. Here’s our magnetic stirrer in action; you can get similar units on Amazon.
You can see the settings Grace usually uses in this video. When you can’t see any more wax globules at all, either suspended in the liquid or stuck to the sides (roughly 45-60 minutes), you’re ready for the next step. For tincture, that means simply pouring it into a small bottle with a dropper top; make sure you label it! For snakebite, there’s an extra step. If you look at the package the resin comes in, there’s a little chart with the THC content broken down; the one you want is “Total THC”. It will be expressed as a %, and since the resin we get here comes in 1-gram containers, it’s a simple matter to work out the amount of THC in your beaker (93% = 930 mg, etc). Multiply that by 0.75 to get the total # of ml of ethanol for your batch, allowing for what’s already in the beaker; in my example, the total volume of the finished snakebite should be about 698 ml, so if there’s 70 ml of solution in the beaker, I would add 628 ml. You don’t need to be exactingly precise; you just want to know how strong the resulting solution is. At these proportions, the snakebite is 60 mg of THC/45-ml shot; that works out to 20 mg per tablespoon. You could of course make it stronger if you like, but I wouldn’t go much weaker because pure ethanol is over 3x as strong as typical vodka. I keep it in a fancy decanter I bought from a garage sale when I was a teenager, and I add 8 drops of green food coloring per bottle so no guest at your house accidentally pours themselves a big old slug without asking what’s in the bottle (which may or may not have happened with one of our early batches). You could use any color you like, but I chose green in Scotty’s honor.
Anyhow, that’s all there is to it; enjoy it in good health!
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
If you want to donate but don't want a recurring charge, you can send any amount you like via PayPal to my email address (see below). Be sure to include a note so I can thank you!
All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.
I’ve always been dedicated to the idea of this as the time of year for spooky fun. So every year I collect all the spooky, creepy or scary content from the previous year into one place just before Halloween. If you’ve come to my blog in the past year, or don’t remember previous editions, they are “Trick or Treat”, “More Trick or Treat“, “Tricks and Treats“, “This Trick’s a Treat”, “Tricky Treats“, “A Trickle of Treats”, “Tricking and Treating“, “Tricks for the Treat“, “Tricked Out Treats“, “Tricks and Treats and Such Small Deer“, and “Trick Treatment“. Horror, death or Halloween-themed columns of the past year included Day of the Dead 2023, Diary #697, and “Why Zombies?” There are creepy or spooky-fun videos in Links #695, #698, #721, #722, #739, #745, and #746, and a collection of seasonal links appears below.
