My father turned 70 a couple of weeks ago. This posting is late, because I have been busy. The crazy season is upon us.
We drink a lot of bubbly, and we’ve sabraged using anything from a sword to a kitchen spoon. It’s not difficult if you hit the bottle right (and yes, we are intimately aware of the other meaning of hitting the bottle. 14 Bottles of bubbly bit the dust on the day).
Which leads us to… how not to sabrage.
We had a visitor for Sunday lunch, and I made the ever-popular Upside-Down Chicken which is basically beer can chicken (I use the AGA recipe I got from the American Grassfed Association, looks like the link is dead at the moment) using a pottery megafter some friends made for us.
Pioneer Woman posted a recipe for Sweet-Roasted Rosemary Acorn Squash Wedges and she made it sound so nice that I had to try it. Couldn’t find Acorn Squash, used Hubbard Squash instead. ’twas good, but I ended up with quite a bit left over.
Meanwhile, we’re in a USA frame of mind (thinking of visiting) and with Halloween coming up and all, someone mentioned pumpkin pie. So I made pumpkin pie, using the first recipe I Googled across.
And it’s good!
But I suspect Vanilla Basil‘s recipe for A Not-So-Pumpkin Pie might be better.
Meanwhile we’ve been in the house for a year and we still don’t have a door on the master bedroom. Eish. We do have a new front door though.
Welcome to our home.
Rather boring, isn’t it? Ugly, even.
A new front door has been on the list ever since we moved in. We just never got around to doing something about it until this weekend. Went over to Glasscraft in Lakeside.
Decisions decisions :-) We considered the two on the left, we did not consider the two on the right… although that tree has a certain charm…
The door on the left was the most expensive door in the place. It was on our shortlist. The door on the right happened to be the second most expensive door in the place. It won by a small margin.
Yup, that’s the way our taste runs…
At the National Championships, I borrowed Gunther’s Freedom Arms .22 revolver. Gorgeous gun.
Walked over to him after the event, said “I owe you money”. “Huh?” “Well, you’re not getting your gun back”.
Now with a gun like this, those are fighting words. Good thing we’re buddies.
Ludi overheard and mentioned he had a Freedom Arms revolver for sale, on behalf of someone else. This only happens when someone dies or emigrates — there is no upgrade path, so people tend to hang on to these things. Fortunately, in this case, the fellow emigrated. So that same evening I bummed some computer time off a friend, and a ridiculous amount of money changed hands.
Behold, Biatchez! My shiny new toy (apologies for crappy phone photograph).
Now to convince the nice fellows up in Pretoria to give me a licence before I die or emigrate… :-)
… is what happens if you have a vegetarian daughter :-)
A while ago I poached a chicken. Stuck the meat in the freezer. Took it out this morning, figuring it was time.
Started with this recipe. Modified it, as always.
Black pot. Melt some butter, add one chopped green pepper and one punnet of mushrooms, sliced, Wait for it to draw water, add a few shakes flour (’bout a quarter cup, maybe). Add salt and pepper, and about a teaspoon of English mustard powder.
Add 250 ml of cream, stirring all the time. Add a cup of chicken stock (the Ina Paarman stock powder is vegetarian¹), stirring all the time. Add about two tablespoons of cider vinegar.
Mix some cold water with some Maizena in a cup, add to pot while stirring.
Add about four spring onions, sliced.
You now have a nice thick sauce, so go play on the computer a bit while someone else cooks some rice and veggies.
Add half a tin’s worth of pimiento, sliced. Stir through, remove enough for said vegetarian daughter to bowl. Add chicken, sliced into bite-sized bits for people with small mouths. Heat through.
Enjoy.
¹ : And Kosher, Parev and Halaal — and it actually tastes good. It’s a miracle, I tell you!
The SAMSSA National Championship was held at the Eastern Cape Silhouette shooters‘ headquarters at Kuduskloof. I wasn’t really planning to attend, but Tanya saw the opportunity to get me to park the kids off at the in-laws in Knysna, leaving her free to attend her scrapbooking course.
Which is what we did.
Left for PE at oh-dark-thirty on Wednesday the 30th, popped in at Fuller Firearms along the way, dropped the kids, some books for Charl, and some stuff for my boss off in Knysna, and got to the Blue Skies Country House just before 17:00.
Thursday morning I was at the range at 08:00 and… it was raining. Bugger. No fun shooting in the rain. But first, I’d been squadded as Range Officer, so that’s what I did — walked around making sure that people don’t do silly things, as we are all likely to do when things go wrong under pressure.
Now my first set of licences for silhouette guns took six years, and I’ve been waiting for the current set for a bit more than a year already, so the reality is that I need to borrow guns to be able to compete in all the events. By design, I was squadded with Francois, who also borrowed some of Juan’s guns, so we decided to start with Event 1, Big Bore Revolver, and he, being somewhat foolish, elected to go first.
Which means that when my turn came, we had the sight settings for Juan’s Freedom Arms .357 Magnum pretty much sorted, and I klupped 8 chickens, 7 pigs, and 10, yes, count ’em, 10 turkeys. And this is where the wheels came off. It was raining all the time, and dripping on me through the awning, and I was not particularly happy, but what doesn’t kill us makes us strong. But then some well meaning fool went and stuck a pole under the awning, causing all the water which had pooled on top to come over the side and drench me completely. This made me more than slightly unhappy. Fortunately there were no kids on our side of the range.
I managed to get two rams, for a total of 27, earning me a bronze in A class.
Of course after all of this I was cold, wet and miserable, and in no mood to get even more wet, so I called it a shooting day and went to support the tannies in the food tent, who made hamburgers for R15 and pancakes for R2 — absolute bargain.
Friday was a lot better, weatherwise, and I shot a 25 in Small Bore Revolver using Gunther’s Freedom Arms, a 28 in Production using my Anschutz Exemplar, an 8 in Standing (I suck at standing) with my Browning Medalist, and a 30 in Unlimited, again with the Anschutz. Believe it or not, 8 out of 40 gave me a silver in B class. And I got a gold for Unlimited, but only because I hadn’t entered for Unlimited before, so I was shooting B class — I’m now firmly bumped up into International, and bound never to win anything again (I’ll need a 37 to get bronze, and then only if the other guys are shooting badly…)
Saturday I shot Smallbore Rifle, for the first and second times in my life, scoring 10 and then 11, not bad, but I’d need around 15 or more to start winning anything. Saturday evening was the prize giving, which was all good, despite the last minute venue change, and Sunday was the long drive back (750 km, a bit over 8 hours).
Thanks to the EP silhouetters, they’re a great bunch.
But not in the financial sense.
Tanya’s folks are staying with us. This started a complicated game of chess where they sleep in the main bedroom and Tanya and I end up in the Rand-Lover.
In theory.
In practice, when Tanya tried to get into the Rand-Lover, she slipped, fell, broke her arm.
So there I was, driving over Boyes Drive going bee-baa bee-baa to get to Constantia Mediclinic. Which is a private hospital where, in theory, things should go quickly.
We were there for almost three hours.
After sorting out the more important people in the queue (and let’s face it, kids with asthma are more important than adults with b0rken wrists), the doctor confirmed that it looked broken, had X-Rays taken, and eventually bandaged the whole mess up, sent us home, scheduled an appointment for this morning.
So now we find out whether they need to open this mess up, stick pins in, whatever.
And they refused to give her Pethadine. Tanya was so looking forward to the Pethadine… :-)
Update: so Tanya now has a bionic wrist. They operated, aligned everything, put a titanium plate in there to hold everything together.
Well, actually, they eventually operated. We were supposed to check in at 8. Ten past seven the nurse calls, tells me that the doctor will be there 9:30. Cool. We pitch at 9:30, nobody knows nothing. Nurse tells me that the doctor will be available Monday. Monday? With a broken wrist? Like hell. I make a bit of a fuss and they scramble the doctor. Doctor decides that this is serious enough to do something about, even though he’s not actually on duty. Schedules Tanya for surgery.
So later I phoned and spoke to the nurse, who told me Tanya’s staying overnight. Ten minutes later the doctor phoned, we sort of concluded that I could pick her up at 3. Went there at three, nurse says no, five. Make that five thirty.
Meanwhile we have a bunch of Tamsyn’s friends coming for a sleep-over. I’ve been relegated to the Rand-Lover, on my own this time. But first I have to fetch Tanya, take the kids to the Spur, and so forth, and so on.
Fun and games.
Update: This is what a bionic wrist looks like. The X-Ray on the right, that is (took me a while to realise that the view on the left is “before”).
“Up”
Go see it.
In a theatre. In 3D.
I’d wager it’s not what you expect, but it’s gorgeous.
Our lime tree reminds me that we’ve been in the house for almost a year.
Meanwhile, it’s still cold and wet enough for Coq au Vin. My recipe is loosely based on Nigel Slater… loosely. But read what he has to say, it’s gospel.
I use drumsticks and thighs. A big pack, four drumsticks, four thighs, for four people.
For starters, peel about two dozen little onions (pickle onions, or whatever they’re sold as). Stick them on end in a black pot, with a bit of oil, and slowly caramelise. Turn them around, do the other side, etc. Remove to a plate.
Then the mushrooms — fry a punnet of white button or portbellinis in a bit of butter, remove to a plate.
Then fry bacon of some type. I use the thick rashers, cut into thin strips. Remove to a plate.
Now fry the chicken, in batches. I normally pull the skin off the thighs once it’s fried up enough to come loose easily. Remove to a plate.
Meanwhile you had a chance to chop up a large onion, three or four carrots, and a stick of celery. And don’t forget the garlic. Stick that all in the pot for a while.
By now you’ll have a lot of gunk on the bottom of the pot, so open that bottle of red and deglaze. I like to use a cheap fruity red from the Worcester area — something that would never win awards but goes down well.
Put the chicken back in the pot, pour the rest of the wine in, add whatever herbs you fancy (a bouquet garni is a good idea). I generally find there’s no room for stock in the pot, but I guess you can toss in a stock cube if you want to (this is how I do it, please don’t blame Nigel Slater). Also add the onions and bacon back in at this stage.
When it starts looking almost done, put the mushrooms in.
Serve with mash. Lots of mash.
