Recent Comments

1. about 1 hour ago on Stone Soup

   Agree. In matters of how food tastes, “YMMV” is the key!

2. about 1 hour ago on Pickles

   When my dad, who had first gotten infected during WW II while in the muddy trenches in Europe, game to visit in the late 70s, he was suffering from another bout of it (In his day, it never really went away, just varied in intensity). At the time, I worked outside a lot, in the rain of Southern coastal Oregon, and had recently discovered Miconazole ointment (I think it was a store brand?). When I found him soaking his feet in bleach water (which doesn’t work) I had more than half a tube left over and just handed it to him.

   My dad was NOT a communicator, very seldom wrote, never called long distance. So when I got a letter from him a few weeks later, it was quite startling. He had written to thank me for the “foot stuff” noting that it had been more than a month since the last outbreak and his feet were actually comfortable for the first time since the mid 1940s.

3. about 2 hours ago on FoxTrot

   It was embedded in a story where the emperor invited people to invent a war game so his sons could become better generals. The one who invented chess impressed him so much he was told to specify a proper reward. Which was this amount of rice. The emperor was so grateful he said “yes”. But it didn’t take very long for him to understand the catch. Various endings, but the one that resonates for me is that when he DID understand what he’d agreed to do, he simply had the inventor killed so the debt was cancelled.

4. about 12 hours ago on Stone Soup

   If I were living prior to refrigeration and without access to grocery stores, I might find myself trying to preserve my apple harvest any way I could. Apple butter would then be something I might tolerate because apples preserved that way might be better than no fruit at all. Maybe. My dad had stories about storing ALL the apples for winter use, each individually wrapped in newspaper, and never getting to bite into a good apple all winter long because you had to eat the ones that were about to go bad before they rotted. And that was a family that was pretty well off, had a root cellar and from some of the other stories, ate quite well.

5. about 12 hours ago on Stone Soup

   I kind of enjoy applesauce. Not my favorite food, but more than tolerable. The one time I had apple butter I disliked the spιces and  the texture.

6. about 12 hours ago on FoxTrot

   First time I heard that it was one grain of rice associated to the first square of the chess board, two grains for the second, four for the third, “and so forth, doubling each time”.

7. about 12 hours ago on Pickles

   I used to have odorous feet, but MUCH worse when I had an athlete’s foot infection. In fact, once I realized that, I was able to start treating the problem before they even started to hurt/burn.

   One of the wonders of modern medicine is that we now have more than one treatment for foot fungus that actually works and pretty quickly too. I remember when it wasn’t so.

8. about 13 hours ago on Stone Soup

   When I was a kid we simply didn’t lock the doors. My father: “But think about how bad it would be if someone NEEDED to get inside and couldn’t!” (he was not talking about family members.) As an adult, I learned to lock the doors because “living in a city”. But once we were in a better location, I’ve never had a house that didn’t have a backup key hidden somewhere near a door that it wouldn’t unlock… a key that would unlock a door on the other side of the house.

9. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   If he can scream, he can still breathe.

10. 1 day ago on Stone Soup

    I dunno what people appreciate about apple butter. I get it in terms of subsistence food, but by choice I never will eat it, having tried it once. Except… maybe in a recipe?