Shrooms

Fathers' Day 'shrooms

Kiz got me a box of mushrooms (and the new bog-book: Swearing and Insults in all Languages). Not just a box of ready-grown mushrooms. A box of coffee grounds (yes, recycled waste from making proper coffee) and mushroom spores, to grow in the kitchen.

I looked it up on Google.

Apparently coffee grounds are the ideal thing for growing gourmet-quality mushrooms. They must be fresh, though. Same day. Later and they start to get germs and things that upset the mushrooms and kill them off before they can get going. But, if you can be bothered to buy these bags of mushroom starter-stuff, and ponce the throwings from the local Costa when they close up for the day, then all you need to do is mix the two together, stick them in one of those cool, dark, sunless places the seed catalogues and allotment owners love for a while, then spray them with water every so often when it's time for them to emerge.

Obviously, later the same day I was already moaning about the slow progress.

Many a true word spoken in jest. When they say on the box that the things are going to double in size every day, they're not over-selling the rate of progress.

*Cliché alert*

Look at them for long enough, and you're sure you can actually see them growing.

These ones are dead posh, too. Dark purple inverted umbrellas on ribbed stems. I'm convinced that they're going to taste fantastic. I'm planning a risotto (for the first batch); creamy mushrooms on toast for the second (the promised second) coming; and a garlic mushroom pasta for the (maybe, but I've a feeling this is a definite maybe) third flowering.

Penny Dreadful

Dr Frankenstein's monster's doing a Phantom of the Opera number, working behind the scenes at a theatre specialising in bloody gore-fest special effects. He's demanding the obvious: the bride he craves. Dr Frankenstein is in deep discussions with van Helsing, who, no doubt, will any minute start killing zombies with silver bullets, such is the muddle.

The American with the shaky hand, drink habit and deadly pistol accuracy is in love with the consumptive whore (Billie Piper, playing the Colleen with Brad Pitt, Snatch-like unintelligibility), and in the pay of the bloke who's daughter the super-vampires seem to have taken, but who simultaneously inhabits a spiritual netherworld where...

...it's addictive stuff this, even if little of it makes any sense.

I read a journalist recently, recalling how unwilling he once was to consider listening to anything without that Parental Advisory warning sticker.

Penny Dreadful is introduced with the full warning: strong language, sex, violence, and scenes viewers may find distressing.

What's not to like?