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Sarah Palin is allowed first dibs on Alaskan wolfpack kills.

calendar   Saturday - March 26, 2011

Forced Spring Cleaning

We got a new refrigerator today. The old one was 15 years old and was on it’s very last legs. I’d repaired it as much as possible over the years, and glued the shelves back together several times. But it was done. Water leaking out on the floor every day, etc.

The new one is 3 cubic feet bigger than the old one. Yay!! But getting rid of the old one forced me to clean it out, and toss out all the little mystery items that had multiplied in the dark recesses. And I had to dump the out of code stuff. And I had to go through my sauce collection. Where does this stuff come from? I’ve got every kind of exotic sauce known to mankind, I’m sure. I’ve got frozen tamarind concentrate and a block of palm sugar and some proper light amber fish sauce, in case I feel the need to make Pad Thai. I’ve got 4 kinds of jerk sauce, and even a frozen bag of jerk marinade. Hoisin sauce, peanut sauce, oyster sauce, black bean sauce, spicy black bean sauce, stir-fry sauce ... I could open a Chinese restaurant. I won’t even mention my collection of hot sauces and horseradishes. And salad dressing. And all sorts of little and not so little jars of pickled Italian veggies and things. Mama mia, what is all of this??

New rule: no more new sauces or pickled anything until the old ones are used up. Pickled Sea Urchin? WTH? Oh yeah, when we made sushi ... a year ago. Buh bye!!

Then when I put all the thinned out and still good food back in the new fridge ... after lugging the old unit out the door and down the stairs, and hauling the new unit up the stairs and installing it and then realizing the door was on backwards so reversing that ... it looked so lonely inside that I just had to go grocery shopping. But I was smart, and just got food for the next couple days. So it’s fresh chorizo tonight, with red beans and rice on one side and fried plantains on the other, with a black bean and red onion soup. I didn’t have to thin out my spice casket (we call it that because it’s a great big air tight tin box nearly the size of a footlocker) so I have plenty of Epazote.



Tangential note to non-Mexican folks: If you like stewed beans but not the aftereffects, get yourself some epazote. It’s a light green powdered herb, and only costs a dollar or two for a cupful. The dried herb doesn’t have too strong a flavor, a bit like sassafras, but you use the stuff because of what it does. What it does gives us our Word For The Day, and that word is “carminative”, which means it takes the farts out of the beans. It really works. Add a teaspoon to a 1lb can of beans, or a heaping tablespoon to a big pot of them, and let them stew for 20 minutes or so.

A further tangent: The oil that can be expressed from fresh epazote seeds or steamed from the whole fresh plant is said to have numerous medicinal properties. The stuff was once known as “wormseed” and “Mexican Tea” and was used as internal delousing medicine; it is a vermicide. It is also an abortifacient, so don’t go near the stuff if you’re pregnant. Even more interesting than that is that the expressed oil from the whole plant contains up to 70% ascaridole, a naturally occurring chemical that just happens to be an explosive that gives off poisonous gas when heated. I didn’t know that Mother Nature made explosives! It’s also the active ingredient in a common commercial pesticide. Geez. Maybe they should start calling stuff this “terrorist bush” instead.

Carminative. That’s a good word. Like “hormesis”, the word Ann Coulter introduced us to the other day with her radical little hypothesis that certain exposure levels to certain kinds of radiation may actually be good for us (well yeah, Example #1 is called a suntan, through which we absorb vitamin D), we can get the carminative and vermicidal benefits from the hormetic effects of dried or concentrated “wormseed”, which just happens to be toxic, explosive, and a carcinogen in higher doses. “The solution to pollution is dissolution”: a little poison is good for you! Go figure. Better living through chemistry, and through a clean refrigerator.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 03/26/2011 at 12:32 PM   
Filed Under: • Daily LifeFine-Dining •  
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