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 -

Fire in the Hole!

The original lists were probably carved in stone and represented longer periods of time. They contained things like ‘Get More Clay. Make Better Oven.
- David Viscott -

Did I ever tell you about The Car Guy’s To Do List? It contains things that I put on it (see Pink Jobs and Blue Jobs for an explanation of what kinds of tasks I put on his list) and things that he adds. He often adds items after he has done them, and then he immediately crosses them off.  He likes his list to look like it is close to completion.

This week he added Order a new oven bake element from Amazon.com.

We’ve never had an oven element self destruct before. It is pretty dramatic. It started in one spot with a spark like you see when someone is welding. This white hot spot slowly inched along the element, even after The Car Guy turned the oven off. It stopped as soon as he closed the electrical breaker.

This seemed infinitely more sensible than the recommendation from some guy on the internet who said he tried to put the same kind of fire out by dousing it with water.

Red House Diaries – October 2012

 Spelling Lesson

Stressed spelled backwards is desserts. Coincidence? I think not.
- Unknown -

Pink Golf Balls – Back Story: As the Crow Flies, so Goes the Pink Golf Balls

I golfed again after the pink ball incident. The Course Marshall told us  “Watch out for the crow. We had a tournament here a few days ago, and the players were using pink golf balls.  The crow stole at least 9 of them.”
I used my pink golf balls anyhow, but kept an eye out for crows before I teed off. I only lost 2 pink balls that day – none to the crows, though. The water monster got them.

Canada and US Revisited – Back Story: Politics in Action.

Here in Canada, national political campaigns are brief: We begin by pretty much ignoring the whole thing for a few weeks – then there’s a debate, a little yelling, maybe some pointing, every leader buys a bunch of Timbits and, boom, suddenly it’s election day.
But in the United States, presidential campaigns last longer than all pregnancies and most wars.
- Scott Feschuk, MACLEAN’S Magazine, September 3, 2012 -

The United States currently has only two federal political parties with significant representation – the Democrats and the Republicans. In Canada, we have 4 ideologies to dislike – the Conservatives, the New Democrats, the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois. Of course, both countries have many minor parties, though I think Canada has some of the most interesting ones: the Marijuana Party, the Pirate Party and my favourite, the Rhinoceros Party. If you were going to form your own party, what would you call it?

Disgusting Flavoured Jelly Beans – Back Story: Weekly Photo Challenge: Mine is Blue

I told you about Jelly Beans with horrible flavours – one of the comments I got suggested another one - school paste. This made me wonder if every occupation has a flavour that would be similarly revolting. Can you think of any that would fit your job?

Canadian Culture- Back Story: Fifty Shades of Grey.

Scott Feschuk, a sometimes very funny writer for Canada’s MACLEAN’S magazine, wrote a single chapter of a book he called Fifty Shades of Eh. Here is an excerpt:

I gaze upon him with my intrepid eyes. My mouth, which is also intrepid, curls into a sly smile. “
Did you remember the clamps?” I ask.

“Canadian Tire was closed. But I found a bunch of clothespins in the garage.”

I swoon. My breathing quickens. My heart beats a frantic tattoo as I surrender myself to the anticipation of languid erotic pleasures and several hours of splinter removal.

Maybe you would have to be conversant in Canadian culture to think this is as funny as I do. If you don’t shop at Canadian Tire, and you don’t know you can buy wood clothespins… well, sometimes context is everything. Here are a couple quotations with more worldly references:

On a scale of Voldemort to Pinocchio, how Nosy are you? – Unknown

On a scale of One to Osama Bin Laden how good was my hiding spot? – Unknown

When we first moved to England, much of what we read in the newspapers went right over our heads.  We knew the words were English, but we hadn’t been there long enough to understand the cultural references. So, if you don’t know who Voldemort  or Osama Bin Laden is, these two quotations will go right over your head too. Put on your thinking cap – can you come up with an “On a scale of” comparison?

Signage – Back Story: Stores and Signage

Here in the land of six months of ice and snow, many of us wouldn’t think of stepping off the tattered rug at the front door without removing our boots or shoes first. I don’t know if this is a Canadian thing or not.

Parking Ticket Machine Scores Again – Back Story: Give Me the Good Old Parking Meter, Please

Another trip to the city, another encounter with a parking ticket machine. We inserted our ticket, and the machine said we owed $7. The Car Guy inserted his credit card. The Card was refused. He tried another card. It was refused too. A parking attendant was standing nearby, and he said we would have to start again and use cash because the machine was refusing credit cards today. So we inserted the parking ticket again. This time the machine said we owed $8.75. (It costs $1.75 per half hour to park there, and we had stood there long enough trying to pay to move into the next half hour segment.) There is something essentially wrong when a parking attendant has to be posted next to a parking ticket machine…

Strange Things Happening

This post started life as a page called Addendum- which a few of you have already read. I decided to move it to the Post Section, and had to migrate the comments made by Al and Suzanne before I deleted that page. Unfortunately,  Al and Suzaane’s  comments now don’t display their gravatar. My gravatar has stayed attached to their comments, even though I have used their email address and blog link. Maybe WordPress will correct this after Halloween, but I expect not. WordPress does not have a tool that lets you easily move a comment from one place to another.

Happy Halloween, by the way!

Halloween 2012

Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen,
Voices whisper in the trees, “Tonight is Halloween!”
- Dexter Kozen -

At night, if I don’t rein in my imagination, the walk from the road to The Red House is spooky. It is a long winding driveway, lined with tall dark spruce trees and just beyond are thick woods where all the wild animals lie in wait. When I was a kid, I would not have ventured up this driveway on Halloween – unless I knew with absolute certainty that the treats at the door were worth being that scared. It is a forbidding stroll at night.

We haven’t had a trick or treater at our door for a long time. There used to be a few children on our rural road, but they have long since grown up. I still decorate for Halloween anyhow (as does my blog – isn’t this a fun theme?) and we still buy a few treats just in case. And I will likely walk down to the end of our driveway and back, just to get the adrenalin going. Nothing like a wee bit of fear to take me back to the Halloweens of my youth!

We recently spent a few days with dear friends who have a new kitten. (There is no better kitten than one that belongs to someone else – all the benefits, and no responsibility.)

Word association: ask your mind to remember kitten – cat – Halloween – pumpkin.

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When we weren’t playing with the kitten, or wandering around the farm, or talking or laughing or watching the first season of ‘Castle’ on DVD, we carved Halloween pumpkins. This was my pumpkin. Can you figure out what it is? It would be best if you told your brain it isn’t a face with one big round eye. If you fixate on that idea, you will never see anything else. Really.

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Here are our pumpkins at night. The one on the far left is mine from the photo above. Now can you see what it is?

The one on the right is our hosts. He did the carving with various size drill bits – trust a man to come up with a way to use a power tool.

The pumpkin in the centre is what happened when I took up the drill and three sizes of bits – and no plan at all. Don’t try to see anything in this pumpkin – it is simply the result of not knowing when to quit.

There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin.
- Linus Van Pelt in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” – by Charles Schulz

So starts my other post about Halloween. It was called Pumpkin Face.  You wouldn’t know it from the quotation, but in this post I talk about how Halloween has fallen victim to political correctness and a process similar to homoginization. There is also a photo of the pumpkin my grand daughter carved – the face is one Charlie Brown could relate to.

Last, but not least: I used the WordPress Theme called ‘Monster’ for a few days during Halloween. This is what it looked like: