Today, even better
Oct. 3rd, 2009 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrishansenhomeIt was Saturday, and I awoke with some eye irritation, probably from a piece of the hard crust that forms in the corner of your eye when you're asleep. This is always annoying, and made me feel pretty awful. Blood sugar was good this morning, though, and thus I had an interesting day.
I decided that I needed to clean some of the pots and pans that had been accumulating grease deposits for a while, so off to the DIY store at the Elephant I went. Bought two boxes of Brillo, two different types of pot cleaner, and some caustic soda for the upstairs bathroom (hair gets down in the trap and there you have it…).
I cleaned the enamel casserole pot first. It had lots of brown gunk on the bottom, burned on. The pot cleaner (kind of a paste, applied with a web cloth) seems to have softened the gunk—then the Brillo pad and a little elbow grease removed it. I was amazed. It's still a bit the worse for wear, but it's clean. I followed that with a shine on our Moka espresso pot, and that cleaned up too. It is amazing how accomplished doing this kind of thing makes you feel.
I kvetched to my friend Fraffie Welch in Marblehead about the awful Tesco corned-beef hash I had a few days ago after reading her column in the Marblehead Reporter. She replied saying that Prudence hash is the best canned hash around. Unfortunately, this isn't available here in the UK and I don't think it would be a good idea to get another appetite that can only be satisfied by hauling cans back from the US. So, I made my own.
Sliced some raw potatoes and parboiled until they were nearly done. Sautéed onions in my mother's black cast-iron frying pan, then drained the potatoes, cut them up some more, and dumped them in to fry along with the onions. Took two cans of corned beef (Yes, I know—I should have used fresh corned beef but you can't get it here, at least not in the places I shop), wondered yet again why these cans have a key rather than just letting us open them normally (perhaps it's the squareness of the cans), then had to disentangle the first key from the can lid because the second can was missing its key, and finally got them both open and the contents mashed up and sliced a bit. Into the frying pan it went, and I fried it until it was heated through.
Tesco's hash was something that looked like what I used to fill my diaper with, studded with large cubes of barely cooked potato. My hash, while it was not perfect, had some texture and flavour. I made myself a salad, poured a glass of Diet Bitter Lemon, and voilà!
Couldn't finish all the hash, so into the fridge it went for tomorrow's dinner. HWMBO will be back Monday morning, thank goodness! Back to normal.
Of course, while I was making my dinner, others were catching and eating theirs. Yesterday I went into the back garden to discard some vegetable garbage on my compost heap, such as it is. I was startled to see a large spider web above the heap, with a very large spider waiting for its dinner smack in the centre. I'm kind of an arachnophobe, so I was a bit unnerved, but discarded my garbage and went back inside.
Today, of course, there were potato and onion peelings to go onto the heap, but when I took them out I saw that the spider, too, was eating its dinner. A bee was caught in the web, and the spider was coming and going, eating a bit and then moving around a bit. Perhaps it had already injected its venom to liquify the bee's innards, for easier digestion.
Does anyone else think of The Fly when they see this picture? I know I did. I hope the bee was already dead by then.
In Masonic symbolism, a beehive symbolises the industry that we should all show in our public and private lives. I wonder if a spider in her web is even more symbolic of the effort to which we should strive each day. I feel accomplished today, like a bee but also like the spider. I am glad that I don't have to capture my dinner, kill it, and then liquify its innards in order to eat it. The spider, were it to know about our lives, would probably be quite happy not to have to run to Tesco's every time it was hungry, be behind one of these people who makes the clerk pick change out of his hand to pay for his shopping, be in front of a guy who had obviously been inside his house for months smoking every waking minute and exhaling into his clothing, and being served by a guy who was suffering from too much work and too many boneheaded customers—thus making me the perfect person at whom to snap when it was time to snap.
I wonder if the spider has to clean off its web when its bee dinner is finished, to make the web ready for breakfast.
I decided that I needed to clean some of the pots and pans that had been accumulating grease deposits for a while, so off to the DIY store at the Elephant I went. Bought two boxes of Brillo, two different types of pot cleaner, and some caustic soda for the upstairs bathroom (hair gets down in the trap and there you have it…).
I cleaned the enamel casserole pot first. It had lots of brown gunk on the bottom, burned on. The pot cleaner (kind of a paste, applied with a web cloth) seems to have softened the gunk—then the Brillo pad and a little elbow grease removed it. I was amazed. It's still a bit the worse for wear, but it's clean. I followed that with a shine on our Moka espresso pot, and that cleaned up too. It is amazing how accomplished doing this kind of thing makes you feel.
I kvetched to my friend Fraffie Welch in Marblehead about the awful Tesco corned-beef hash I had a few days ago after reading her column in the Marblehead Reporter. She replied saying that Prudence hash is the best canned hash around. Unfortunately, this isn't available here in the UK and I don't think it would be a good idea to get another appetite that can only be satisfied by hauling cans back from the US. So, I made my own.
Sliced some raw potatoes and parboiled until they were nearly done. Sautéed onions in my mother's black cast-iron frying pan, then drained the potatoes, cut them up some more, and dumped them in to fry along with the onions. Took two cans of corned beef (Yes, I know—I should have used fresh corned beef but you can't get it here, at least not in the places I shop), wondered yet again why these cans have a key rather than just letting us open them normally (perhaps it's the squareness of the cans), then had to disentangle the first key from the can lid because the second can was missing its key, and finally got them both open and the contents mashed up and sliced a bit. Into the frying pan it went, and I fried it until it was heated through.
Tesco's hash was something that looked like what I used to fill my diaper with, studded with large cubes of barely cooked potato. My hash, while it was not perfect, had some texture and flavour. I made myself a salad, poured a glass of Diet Bitter Lemon, and voilà!
Couldn't finish all the hash, so into the fridge it went for tomorrow's dinner. HWMBO will be back Monday morning, thank goodness! Back to normal.
Of course, while I was making my dinner, others were catching and eating theirs. Yesterday I went into the back garden to discard some vegetable garbage on my compost heap, such as it is. I was startled to see a large spider web above the heap, with a very large spider waiting for its dinner smack in the centre. I'm kind of an arachnophobe, so I was a bit unnerved, but discarded my garbage and went back inside.
Today, of course, there were potato and onion peelings to go onto the heap, but when I took them out I saw that the spider, too, was eating its dinner. A bee was caught in the web, and the spider was coming and going, eating a bit and then moving around a bit. Perhaps it had already injected its venom to liquify the bee's innards, for easier digestion.
Does anyone else think of The Fly when they see this picture? I know I did. I hope the bee was already dead by then.
In Masonic symbolism, a beehive symbolises the industry that we should all show in our public and private lives. I wonder if a spider in her web is even more symbolic of the effort to which we should strive each day. I feel accomplished today, like a bee but also like the spider. I am glad that I don't have to capture my dinner, kill it, and then liquify its innards in order to eat it. The spider, were it to know about our lives, would probably be quite happy not to have to run to Tesco's every time it was hungry, be behind one of these people who makes the clerk pick change out of his hand to pay for his shopping, be in front of a guy who had obviously been inside his house for months smoking every waking minute and exhaling into his clothing, and being served by a guy who was suffering from too much work and too many boneheaded customers—thus making me the perfect person at whom to snap when it was time to snap.
I wonder if the spider has to clean off its web when its bee dinner is finished, to make the web ready for breakfast.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-04 06:52 am (UTC)Thanks.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-04 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-04 06:08 pm (UTC)Spiders and Hash
Date: 2009-10-05 10:30 pm (UTC)A 'hash' is a fine chop. We often made roasts on Sunday, grinding the leftover meat, of whatever kind, to cook with finely cubed potatoes and chopped onions and any leftover vegetables we had, to make Monday's hash. Rarely was anything left for later consumption.
Although we sometimes had leftover corned beef, we usually used it for sandwiches, not for hash. We also ground chicken, turkey and beef, depending on our Sunday dinner, to make hash. My cousin often made venison hash (or venison chili); he got lots of deer while dating the game warden's daughter. I suspect lamb hash would be good.
One rule we observed as I was growing up was that hash wasn't made with fresh ingredients, only from the leftovers of the last few days. No two hashes were alike.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-06 04:41 pm (UTC)and if a bee got onto the web, i think it'll not die so soon. The spider will sting it numb before wrapping it up for a meal later.