On the Road

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I’m off to visit my relatives again. I’ll be away overnight, so there will be no news feed tonight. Normal service will resume tomorrow evening.

Dymphna will be keeping a gimlet eye on things while I’m gone. I’ve left an eggplant casserole in the fridge for you to heat up for dinner, and you can drink all the Gatorade you want. Stay out of the liquor cabinet!

Later.

7 thoughts on “On the Road”

  2. Might as well let you know…the Baron umm…fabricates. Crochets little lace doilies with his “eggplant casserole”. That’s just because we wrote a play once and a character in it made such a dish. The idea amused him so much that he still refers to it. The man is a little too fond of his own jokes…

    While I like, oh, eggplant parmesan and ratatouille and maybe throw it in curry just to fill out the dish a bit…hey, wait! We never have gatoraid – gag me – a real waste of money when you could drink water and spend the savings on raw blue cheese.

    When I was a kid I thought I hated cheese because the only kind the nuns gave us was “American” – that slippery yellow cheese ‘product’. When I grew up and ate real cheese I was astounded.

    Someone has found a use for it, though. Dr. Bernstein, the Type 1 diabetic endocrinologist who writes about how to survive that disease, uses it as a bread replacement when he longs for a sandwich: he nukes two slices in the microwave until they puff up. On collapsing they will harden & hold together well enough to take some sandwich filling. I agree with him: bread is lovely but not worth dying over. He says he thinks he’s the only person in his cohort of those diagnosed with Type 1 (he was twelve years old in 1946) who is still alive. Still has a medical practice too, and plays tennis. And eats that nuked ‘chese’…

    Liquor cabinet? Dream on. A donor gave me a lovely bottle of Scotch once, and someone gave the B some Sobieski ?vodka? – I forget. And once a year, in the winter, he buys rum. Some liquor cabinet. He does have a two-level wine rack and has his 8.00 bottles of Portuguese and Chilean and Argentinian. Anything cheap that the future Baron recommends.

    But notice he distracted you away from his dark – VERY dark – bittersweet chocolate?? He waits for sales and never has to worry about me eating it.

    Gatorade? Fie…I like the idea of having a “gimlet eye” though:

    1. A small hand tool having a spiraled shank, a screw tip, and a cross handle and used for boring holes.
    2. A cocktail made with vodka or gin, sweetened lime juice, and sometimes effervescent water and garnished with a slice of lime.
    ———
    [Middle English, from Anglo-Norman guimbelet, perhaps from Middle Dutch wimmelkijn, diminutive of wimmel, auger.]

    The Baron could tell you why the ‘w’ becomes ‘g’ in English sometimes, but I never can retain such things. Too much other trivia is cluttering my hard drive…

    • So the cat’s now out of the bag eh! And here was I thinking after reading the Baron’s bon voyage note that he meant what he stated! Damn!

      So what was for dinner? And no Aussie wines in his cabinet?????

      • Only Oz if the fB recommends. Now that he’s gone thru the trouble to get certified as a sommelier, the Baron listens to his advice.

        Interesting factoid: you can’t be a master sommelier until you’re 30 years old. So…they obviously know what they’re doing.

        Dinner was blanc mange. Irish moss suits my stomach right now…though I do have to doctor it to make it palatable. No English classic blanc mange, thankyouverymuch.

    • You’re right about the cheese! We have a better choice here in the UK, but only the upmarket supermarkets and specialist shops have unpasteurised varieties. I really shouldn’t eat them as I’m on immune suppresants, but then I shouldn’t smoke or drink either…

      • omg. You’re right about the smokin’ and drinkin’. I do hope you’re also carryin’ on whilst you can – seems like you’re in deep doo-doo with those choices. OTOH, giving up cigarettes was the hardest thing I ever did. It took literally hundreds of attempts before it ‘took’. Looking back, I can’t say why I finally succeeded. The (late) guru down the road at the ashram chided one of his followers for nagging his smoking friend. He said the fellow would give up cigarettes “when the pain of holding on is greater than the pain of letting go”…Amen.

        The Baron speaks fondly of English cheeses and the local beers like Theakston’s (spelling?).

        The laws re unpasteurized cheeses are pretty arcane but I suppose we’re supposed to be grateful they allow any. I have made my own paneer, but that’s as far as I’ve experimented.

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