Wednesday 30 January 2013

Road Runner (Adelaide style)





This little fella lives in a street in Clearview, near a friend's house *waves at Ms C!*.  He saunters along the pavement, pecking for food, or waddles along the side of the road, blithely ignoring cars, who have to go around him. My thought the first time we saw him was that he was lost and needed rescuing.  But let me tell you, they are remarkably hard to catch, so I couldn't take him home!  Having seen him 3 or 4 times now in the same street, it seems that he lives there as a free ranger.

He (or more likely She) is a guineafowl, a species of ground-dwelling  bird native to Africa.  According to Wikipedia guineafowl have a long history of domestication, mainly involving the Helmeted Guineafowl. The young (called "keets") are very small at birth. The keets are kept in a brooder box inside the house until about six weeks of age, before being moved into a proper coop or enclosure. They eat lice, worms, ants, spiders, weedseeds, and ticks while on range, or they can also eat chicken layer crumbles (one kind of commercial bird feed) while housed in a coop. The cooked flesh of guineafowl resembles chicken in texture, with a flavour somewhere between chicken and turkey.

There is also a band in Sydney called Guineafowl, and you can like them on Facebook here.



Wednesday 23 January 2013

Chicken + cola flavoured potato chips

I find the idea of these strangely appealing!  But only for sale in China, sadly...  Thanks to International Business Times for the story. 

Pepsi-Chicken Chips By Lay's Added To Weird Potato Chip Flavors, Snack Epicureans Delighted

BY IBTimes Staff Reporter | December 13 2012 2:35 PM

Crab, Seaweed, Pickle and Lobster. Bizarre flavored potato chips flavors are nothing new internationally. But Lay's has a brand new bag in town: Pepsi-Chicken flavored chips.

Wednesday 16 January 2013

Smoked salmon tried to kill me

So, the amazing knives of the last post?  They're really REALLY sharp.

Note to self - don't try to pry frozen smoked salmon slices apart with a brand new knife, because it will slip and stab you in the palm, and you will have to phone your best friend to drive you to the hospital at 10 o'clock at night for stitches...  And then she will laugh at you.


(when labelling this post I found I already had all the labels I needed - accident, embarrassing, F Dick, funny, hospital, ouch, shame - which says a lot about my escapades, lol)

Wednesday 9 January 2013

Knifegasm, or 'how I learned to love F. Dick' (it's a German brand of knife)

My lovely friend Mrs F has long been horrified by the 'quality' of my kitchen knives.  She's a chef, so she finds it particularly painful to see me try and chop things with the blunt metal sticks I've been using for years.  In my defence, I've never bothered with really sharp knives since the kids were big enough to pull over a chair and climb up to my knife block.  And when you find your largest carving knife embedded 'sword in the stone' style in a tree stump in the garden, there really is very little point in being precious about them!

This Christmas Mrs F finally persuaded me that my children are now old enough to respect my knives, and so she arranged for my hubby to get me some PROPER quality blades as a gift to us all.  Hence my new love for Herr Friedrich Dick of Esslingen, Germany, and his very shiny and very VERY sharp products.

I've got this one:

3 inch Kitchen Knife

Küchenmesser
 and this one:

8 inch Chef´s Knife

Kochmesser 

and they're amaaaaaaaaaaazing.  Carving the Christmas ham was an absolute pleasure this year, although I did feel a little like a serial killer (maybe I've been watching too much Dexter, hey?)!  Even Darling Hubby admitted that he could see what all the fuss was about after he tried them for the first time. 

Wunderbar!

Wednesday 2 January 2013

The most romantic gift I got my hubby this Christmas...

...was the amazing, heavenly condiment that is Heinz HP Sauce!  We haven't had any in the house for years, and I found it at our local Asian grocer, next to the soy and sweet chilli.  Awesomesauce, indeed.

HP Sauce

"The original and unmistakeable HP sauce. Used for generations in all styles of cooking. Its malt vinegar base is blended with fruit and spices, but the rest is a closely guarded secret. The name HP comes from the Houses of Parliament, a restaurant that first served this sauce. There’s nothing like it to give a kick to pies, grilled meats and burgers. It’s low in fat with no added colours, flavours or preservatives. Available in in a squeezy 372ml and 220ml glass bottle."