Wet
Sitting in the kitchen. Peacefully. Quietly watching the
rugby on the computer Sky Go (as advertised by Joanna Lumley). Saracens v Toulouse at Wembley. Good
game it was, too.
Then out came BLISS with DLL’s (cold) hot water bottle, and
she poured about nine gallons of freezing water down my back. Apparently this
would’ve been funny enough as it was, but I also did some squeaking,
threatening, started whining about my saturated polo shirt and water-filled
boxers before complaining about going a bit dizzy.
Laugh?
She smudged her mascara.
Biltong
I’ve been on the lookout for some bargain, or special offer,
or fallen off the back of a cow, or so far past the sell-by date we’re giving
it away beef for a while now, to make biltong – air dried seasoned beef. I got
hold of some, and went in search of a recipe. I googled: “biltong recipe”
because that seemed a reasonable starting point.
Then I googled: “quick and easy biltong recipe”, because “quick,
easy biltong recipe that does not involve a fully kitted out laboratory and a
PhD in organic chemistry” might’ve been too long for the search engine text
box. There was quite a contrast between the quick and easy and the full-on
methods. I didn’t, after all, have to do a long soak in vinegar, treatment with
a spice mix, and then a cure mix, with periods of turning every two hours for
days in between, before rinsing all the good stuff off (in the reserved vinegar…oh…didn’t
I say…you’ve thrown it away?...bit quick off the mark there, eh?), re-applying
the good stuff. Drying, at least, was with kitchen paper and not a borrowed
Tony and Guy hairdryer on an obscure Lady Di undercurl setting. Neither did I
have to then set off to the bottom-of-the-garden hi-tech meat hanging facility,
where maybe, some time in the distant future, someone might actually get to eat
the stuff, having been left it in my will.
The sensible recipe mixes everything in a bowl, and leaves
it for a while. Not too long, it warns, or it’ll be too salty. So I left it
overnight but reduced the salt. You can dry it in the oven on super low with
the door ajar so it does not get too hot. That’s bit of a relief because we’re
not going to get hot, arid South African weather conditions here anytime soon.
So, there’s biltong on the way (or something resembling it,
anyway) without the kitchen looking like the set for an episode of Breaking
Bad.
Corpse crunchers
The biltong thing (and I suppose hanging up strips of flesh
on straightened paperclips to air dry after steeping in vinegar, salt and
spices does have a slight cave-dweller aspect to it) leads onto the new name
the veggies, BLISS, Kiz and DLL, have for me and MM. We’re, as of now, known as
corpse crunchers.
So. Given the choice between corpse crunching (and it may be
a Polish thing here, but I can’t imagine never again picking up and devouring a
bone dry, spicy, garlicy stick of kabanos) and muesli-munching, I’m in the
blood-down-the-chin zombie gore-fest corner. You may live to be a hundred, but
who wants eighty years of cords, socks and sandals, debating the merits of
various types of oats among those bags of dried stuff that’s in Holland
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