Contemplating Sardines

The Curmudgeon at Large is compiling a Cookbook and one of his first selections is a menu that incorporates the nine food items that will help you to prevent a heart attack. He says that one of the foods is the Sardine.

I can’t remember the last time I bought a tin of Sardines, but the thought of oily fish packed tightly in a tin made me curious about the current status of sardines in the world of the gourmet. Taking that one step further, what would be a sardine-wine pairing?  (Wine is also on the Curmudgeon’s list of heart healthy  foods) . The first web site that addressed this question was on a Chowhound discussion forum – What to drink with four year old sardines?  Apart from the suggestion that it might not be good to eat a tin of sardines of that age, the pairings included Maalox, Pepto-bismol, beer, sherry, and several white and red wines.

From there, I clicked on the link to The Society for the Appreciation of the Lowly Tinned Sardine.  This site artfully combines serious dedication to the fish with not so serious delivery of information.

Some of the great Chefs appear to be fond enough of the sardine to have figured out how to put it into a recipe. Jamie Oliver posts recipes for pizza, spaghetti and potato salad, while also paying tribute to the British favourite, sardines on toast.  Alton Brown kicks it up a notch (though not the way Emeril would)  in  a recipe for  Sherried Sardine Toast.

That is about all I can dredge up on the sardine. If there is anything else to be said about the sardine, I’m sure you will tell me!

It is much better to eat little fish like sardines directly from the ocean, rather than after they have been filtered through a larger predator.
- Deep Sea News -

Weekly Photo Challenge: Mine is Blue

The WordPress Photo Challenge this week is titled Mine. I don’t have any photos of land mines, or strip mines or mine shafts, so I took a photo of something that I think of as Mine.

This blue glass is mine. I have two others just like it. The fourth one got broke. It is my water glass, and I use it every time I want a glass of water. It makes the water look very blue, and I like that. I used it once for milk, but blue milk is wrong.

There is no known navy-blue food. If there is navy-blue food in the refrigerator, it signifies death.
- Erma Bombeck -

Blue food – there aren’t many things I would eat that are bluish in colour, so when I looked in the fridge recently and saw that the Pickled Garlic had turned blue, I was ready to throw it out. But it wasn’t Mine to throw out, because The Car Guy was the one who pickled it.

I checked on the internet to see if there was any possible way blue garlic could be safe. According to LifeTips, this isn’t an uncommon event and blue garlic is safe to eat as long as it doesn’t exhibit any signs of spoilage.

Raw garlic contains an enzyme that if not inactivated by heat reacts with sulphur and copper, to form copper sulphate. The amount of copper needed for this reaction is very small and is frequently found in normal water supplies, and in some utensils.

Moving from odd colours to odd flavours: I read a post today by Jennifer S at 40 is the new 13. She describes her experience with vomit flavoured Jelly Beans. That reminded me that we have a few small boxes of similarly disgusting Jelly Belly beans.

Notice how there are two different flavours for each coloured Jelly Bean. Pick a black one, and it could be licorice, or it could be skunk spray. A red one could be strawberry jam, or it could be centipede. A brown bean could be chocolate pudding or canned dog food. (I think canned dog food would be a relatively easy flavour to develop, but exactly how did they determine what flavour skunk spray or centipede is, I wonder.)

Back to blue things, the blue jelly beans could either be berry blue or toothpaste and I’m not sure that toothpaste would be all that bad.

If you want to try these Jelly Beans, they are made by Jelly Belly, and they are called ‘Bean Boozled’.  Which flavour do you think would be the most disgusting?

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Speaking of glasses and flavours and things that start with ‘B’, here is a post called Let’s Hear it for Beer! Not a single one of them tasted like moldy cheese.

The Strawberry Diet

I lost 2 pounds last week. I’m not sure where they went, but I won’t be sending out a search party to find them. How did I do it? I’m going to claim it was because of my Strawberry Diet.

It I had an ounce of Entrepreneurship in me, I would write another book about this diet (I’m not the first person to eat a boatload of strawberries and write about it). But the procedure is so incredibly simple, and I’m all for the free sharing of ideas (and Garage Sale Stuff), so I’m going to tell you my secret.

First, you need a bargain hunting husband like mine who bought a very big container of strawberries from Costco because it was so much cheaper than a small container at the grocery store. Then, you need him to wash and hull and chop them all up for you.  My spouse also came home with one good size watermelon which he also cut into bite size chunks.  Since he doesn’t really like strawberries all that much, he overdosed on the watermelon, leaving me to use up the strawberries.

Day 1 – Breakfast is a good time to start eating the strawberries. A good size bowl full of them and a chopped apple, with granola sprinkled over top, and a big dollop of yogurt – I ate it with enthusiasm. Lunch – more strawberries, more yogurt, and a spoonful of peanut butter on the side for a bit of protein. Afternoon snack – a bowl of strawberries, a banana, and a small spoonful of ice cream. Dinner – a bit of meat and a bunch of vegetables, then dessert – a bowl of strawberries, and a squirt or two of chocolate syrup. (A bit of exercise is good too – I painted a bedroom.)

Day 2, 3 and 4- Pretty much a repeat of Day 1 as far as the strawberries were concerned. I varied the other foods, just to keep it from getting too boring. (Keep up the exercise! I painted the dining room, weeded the flower beds and cleaned the house.)

Day 5 – Coming down the home stretch on the strawberry front – I finished them off by bedtime. I didn’t like strawberries all that much by then. My enthusiasm for painting, cleaning and weeding wasn’t all that high either.

So there it is – The Strawberry Diet. Of course, I should call it the Strawberry, Yogurt, Other Foods, Painting, Weeding and Cleaning Diet, but I don’t think that would sell as well.

Macro Monday – A Rainbow of Colours

You are all very observant, so you should have no trouble figuring out what this is a photo of:

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Last weeks Macro Mystery was a ‘from the top’ view of my chicken wire trellis in the garden. Rust never sleeps, and this metal bar is a testament to that!