[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Rue DeDay *
“something that is earth”… an “earthdog”
::quickly lifts head from sleep, looking around…ears perk up::
::sighs and lays head back down::
Well, I feel it is incumbent upon me to keep this sucker going since I’m the late poster. However, due to an unscheduled mass melt-down at work yesterday I’m not feeling particularly witty. Since Kallessa mentioned food I’ll just throw out some stuff to chew on.
My younger brother, the chef, likes to get back as closely as possible to the roots of cooking. He hates premade products. Once, during a bout of baking experiments, he decided to try ammonium carbonate. It’s listed as an ingredient in a lot of old recipes for cookies and such. It’s supposed to make them really crisp. Which it does, but I gotta say, hold your breath when you open the oven door. I didn’t and got a faceful of ammonia vapor. Not pleasant to say the least.
I looked it up and ammonium carbonate used to be called hartshorn. Because, it appears, it was derived from antlers. Now I wonder who was the first to think that was a good idea?
Actually, I wonder that about a lot of odd foodstuffs. Who was the first to find out rhubarb stalks=tasty pie, rhubarb leaves=kinda toxic pie? Who knew that brining olives turned bitter into yummy? And, boy, shrimp paste! Looks like a vile brownish mess, but in a curry it’s wonderful. Chinese fermented black beans-smell like…well, rotting beans. Throw 'em in a dish with spareribs, garlic, and ginger and I could eat a ton. Another good one-cashews. A nut with a shell containing a compound that causes blisters on skin. Why even try to eat them?
Who were the intrepid comestible searchers who first tried all these odd but tasty things? And why?
Food for thought indeed.
ninja mistletoe??
Okay, here?s the story. This is a story about my and my four dearest friends in college (three guys an one other girl). It was that sort of dead time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we?re all studying for finals, and decide we need to take a break to refresh ourselves–to clear our minds in order to let all the new knowledge in. To do this, we decide to spend a Saturday partying. With alcohol. Lots and lots and lots of alcohol. We want to make our minds really, really clear of anything even resembling a thought process.
We began drinking in mid-afternoon and by dinner time, were a little too drunk to go to the cafeteria (we all lived on campus). So we decide to take a walk around campus to practice walking straight (it was a private school, so it was okay to be an underage drunk, but they frowned on students falling into the salad bar). As we walked, one of us notice that many of the trees were covered with mistletoe. Barry–a science major–solemnly informed us that mistletoe was a parasite and would kill the trees. Diane–a tree hugger in training–thought this was too sad for words. Bill–a ladies’ man–thought it was a waste of good kiss-inducing mistletoe. Bruce thought it was time for another drink and we distracted him by going to have dinner.
But we continued to dwell on the fate of the trees and the possibilities of the mistletoe. There were a lot of trees, and bushels of mistletoe. ?Wouldn?t it be nice? wondered Bill aloud, ?if everyone had mistletoe over their dorm room doors?? This seemed like a good use for the little green parasite but, I pointed out, the mistletoe was way up in the trees and we were all the way down on the ground. ?No problem,? said Bill, removing his shoes, ?I can climb anything. We trekked back out to the trees (it was now very dark, and rather cold and we had to stop halfway there to let Bill put his shoes back on).
Bill could indeed shimmy up the tree, and once there, cut mistletoe and dropped it down to us. After having several bunches of mistletoe fall on our heads, we moved out from under the tree and congratulated Bruce on remembering to bring the tequila with us. After Bill sent down two or three big garbage bags full of mistletoe, he fell out of the tree (he didn?t say anything about being able to climb down from a tree), but he landed on Barry, so it was okay.
It?s now midnight. We spend almost two hours preparing the mistletoe–cutting it into little bunches and putting tape on each bunch. We then all got our biggest coats --and this was the era of down jackets and suede and sheepskin coats, so they were big coats–and we taped all the mistletoe to the inside of our jackets (so if anyone saw us, they wouldn?t know what we were doing. We then went to every floor of all five dorms–we would peer out from the elevator of stairwell to make sure the coast was clear, and then, working in pairs (Bruce went solo, he often did) we silently ran down the halls–staying close to the walls (to keep in the shadow like ninjas) and rarely ricocheting off them, and at each door, we quickly snatched out a bunch of mistletoe and stuck it at the top of the door. I was too short to reach the top of the doors, so if I out-paced Bill, I had to jump up and slap it on–but I did this with grace and a certain flair. If a door opened, (as it sometimes did after I?d smashed into it while jumping and slapping) we snapped our jackets closed and pretended we were looking for a party. We then proceeded to the classrooms, the library and the administration building and did the same thing to as many doors as we could get to. As our final piece d?resistance, we also did the chapel and the doors leading into the Brothers? house (did I mention this was a Catholic college run by Christian Brothers? And yes, wine tasting was on the curriculum, I believe I fulfilled one of my science requirements by taking it :D).
By this time it was 4 or 5 in the morning and we were sober (except Bruce, who taped a tequila bottle to his jacket, instead of mistletoe), so we drove into town and got great big omelets at the truckstop place that had really excellent omelets and better than average french toast (and was very used to serving hungover college students and so didn?t ask any questions when we occasionally shed a branch of mistletoe as we waited for a table). We then went back to campus and all slept through the excitement and awe that followed when everyone awoke and discovered their own personal piece of mistletoe magically attached to their doors. The mystery mistletoe was the talk of the campus for weeks. Well, days, at least. The Brothers’ were rather perplexed by it (this had been an all-men’s college and they still weren’t used to the feminine influence).
And nobody ever knew it was us.
Hi y’all.
Speaking of mistletoe, our son noticed we never took it down off the entry chandelier. (It’s not really a chandelier it’s more of a glass lantern on a chain, but I don’t know what it’s really called.)
Um, yeah. I know it had nothing to do with the op.