I have a tenuous relationship with cooked fruit.  Ideally, a cooked fruit develops a natural sweetness and depth of flavour that makes it taste more like itself.  If raw fruit is earnest and refreshing, then cooked fruit is confident and mature.  I don't think I've ever met a baked pear I didn't like.  However too often overcooking leaves the ( Read more... )

I'm pretty sure now that it's raccoons that have been stealing my plants - they left a "present" in the garden.  So - does anyone know of a good repellant? Most of the sites I've seen talk about removing the food source, but since in this case the food source is my flowers..? I heard they don't like peppers, so I'm gonna try spreading some chile ( Read more... )

Northanger Abbey is on tv right now! I wish I wasn't so busy.

even to someone like me, who admittedly is only a lukewarm fan of star wars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb2GmBkkaTU

Optimus Prime's evolution of dance ( Read more... )

Being sick with a cold sucks. What doesn't suck? My new cough suppressant.  According to new studies, there's a chemical in chocolate that works better than codeine as a cough suppressant.  So last night I woke up with a dry cough that was keeping me up. I made a slurry out of water an cocoa powder and that stopped my coughing completely! It was so ( Read more... )

Today I learned about 2 instruments I've never heard of before - each from the turn of the century. The stroh violin was apparently invented around 1899 and is basically a violin with the sound box or body replaced by a brass horn. Traditional violins did not record very well before the invention of electronic microphones, so this was apparently ( Read more... )

I had a very culinary christmas this year. I got a bunch of icing colours and candy modeling tools to play with. Our kitchen is now pretty tricked out, as I also got a food processor and an automatic mandolin! Chopping veggies is now fun! But the best food related gift I got was from Rod's parents - they gave us an ice cream attachment for my mixer ( Read more... )

http://failblog.org/2008/08/11/safety-fail-3/

This is a good spooky hyper-fiction. Or at least it was until the author added all that Loreen Mathers stuff that tries to explain things. I think i've promised to e-mail this to various people at various points, but I don't think I ever have, so here it is.