UPDATED: Frilled Lizard Yellow Takes Many Servings Meatloaf: Greed!!!

UPDATE: new one up at UJ, pervs! and its short, too! yay!


Here are my glorious potatoes and equally glorious tomatoes. You may worship them. Seriously. You can.



Starting on the far left we have the little Andean blue potato. I planted these at the same time as the rest of the potato crop, but they took the longest to mature. It grew into a huge big sprawling plant and blossomed (pink) continuously for 2 solid months. The other potatoes were ready in July; had already blossomed (blue and white) and begun to fail a bit while this one was still throwing baby tiny little potatoes far out from the main stalk, so I left it in. Suh-PRAZ,Suh-PRAZ,Suh-PRAZ... the thing threw nearly half a bushel of little tates per plant!

When you cut these open there is an intense ring of purple blue surrounding flesh that is almost baby duck yellow, although some of them will be lavender blue all the way through. It is very sweet and nice, on the mealy side rather than the waxy side, and the flesh cooks white. It isn't a long keeper at all; it goes soft very quickly even though the skin is relatively thick.

Next comes the standard 'Roma' tomato. This is the tomato that I would grow if I had to choose just one; it has huge, huge flavor and really firm flesh thats easy to work with...not overly juicy either. The only drawback is that the plant itself doesn't run too terribly hardy, but it produces like a mad thing so I guess it all evens out.

The new red potato is the one with what's described as 'waxy' flesh, although thats kind of a disgusting way to describe a structure that's just very fine grained once cooked. You can't make mashed potatoes with this one because it starts forming gluten like bread dough; it has no structure at all once its crushed and lots and lots of carb-sugar. This is perfect in potato salads, cold potato dishes with a dressing, things like that. It doesn't keep very long because the skin is thinner than tissue paper.

The grapette is just your standard little oval-shaped tomato. I found it in a salad and thought it tasted really good so I saved the seeds and I've been growing it for about six years now; maybe longer. Its not icky sweet like a cherry tomato, and like the Roma it has huge, huge flavor. It's very juicy and the plant is quite vigorous. Never had a problem with any kind of blight or spots with this one. Its a heavy producer, so I always have more than enough. I like to dry and pack them in a good thick olive oil with garlic for a special treat in the middle of the winter.

The Early Girl tomato is a Burpee hybrid, and its supposed to be a beefsteak. What I get here is more of a saladette because I don't manure heavily or do any fussing, and the season is really short. Still, its a great tomato, firm like a Roma but much juicier, and running somewhat more acid than the Roma. The seeds are spread throughout the meat of the fruit, not collected in a central vault around a core like the Romas. The plant and the fruit are really succeptible to blighting off, though, although its super vigorous in early growth and it sets fruit enthusiastically.

Yellow Pear is really different. First of all, I have never seen a plant that grows like this; it grows rampantly, just goes totally apeshit,. It's the rankest smelling tomato plant I've ever smelled; and when you crush the plant it leaves a substance on you (and anything else) that turns yellow. The Yellow Pear is the tomato most likely to volunteer as well. The fruit is very sweet, citric and yet almost buttery; very juicy too. It still tastes like a tomato, though, which is what I was after. (I won't grow a standard cherry tomato like 'Sweet 100'. Whats the point? All they taste like is sugar water.) This is what makes my tomato sauce taste different and really good, this little guy here. It just transforms the whole mix.

White Rose potato is just a nice, basic, somewhat sweet potato. Not a very long keeper; it has the thinnest skin of all the potatoes I grew this year.

The Russet is simply the standard Idaho baker. Keeps damn near indefinitely; the skin is more of a hide and the cooked texture is nice and mealy.

I grew this combination of potatoes because, when cooked and riced together, they make the most heavenly, meltingly delicious combination imaginable. The dish I make with them is kind of fussy simply because you need to have special equipment (a ricer, which is essentially a big thing with two handles and a basket that looks and works exactly like a garlic press) and you have to hurry and get it to the table before it 'sinks', but its so very worth the effort. It needs no butter, no salt, no nothing. You've never had a potato dish that did this; it melts like snowflakes on your tongue. Mmmm!
The recipe is simply this:

-Equal weights of blue, white, red potatoes: the total weight equal to the same weight in Russets, (think of it as a ratio) peeled, chopped medium and boiled all together in salted water until tender, drained

-While still hot, squeeze through a ricer into a warm bowl and serve immediately.

Lets look at them again, shall we? Yes, lets!



And heres my recipe for perfect tomato sauce:

-Roma, yellow pear, grapette and early girl beefsteak tomatoes, washed, seeded and run though a food processor until smooth

Place in an 8 1/2 by 11, 3 inch deep baking dish and put into a cold oven on the middle rack.

Set the heat at 325.

Cook for several hours in increments of 45 minutes, stopping each time to stir the sauce thoroughly and checking to see that it is not bubbling..not even a simmer. If it is, turn the heat down to 300 or even 275. The sauce is done when it is reduced by 1/2 (less for thicker sauce or paste. As it thickens it will have to be checked and stirred more frequently to ensure that it does not burn.) This can take up to 4 hours, depending on the juiciness of the tomatoes and the temperature and humidity of the day. Use this time to have a cocktail...read a trashy magazine...give someone special a nice blow job. Or two.

Cool, then return to cuisinart or better yet a blender and blend until smooth; freeze.

When you thaw this out it will taste exactly like summer. It will simply fill the entire kitchen with the smell of fresh tomato and blow you away.

666

yes! i lost your previous comments! thank you blogger! thank you so very much!
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I've been trying to put this off for as long as possible but the truth is out there, clawing big holes in the screen door, plus it crapped out next to the back step and then walked in it and now its tracking it all over the place. Someone please go get a rag and turn the hose on and wash off the Truth before it comes in and tracks crap all over the rug, OK?

Many of you have written in asking "Why is it that you never visit the UK like you used to?" and "Why do my underpants feel all funny after I dry them with synthetics?" And to this I have one answer:

BEAST.

BEAST IS THE REASON.

It started many many years ago, back when Ronald Reagan was just a schoolboy parading around in his mothers bra and panties in the bathroom mirror while his uncle with the funny accent watched through the keyhole. Back in those days the rules were different. People were different.
Babies were different too.

"...congratulations, mrs. bournemouth! it's a....little... strange...thing!"

Some hinted darkly that his mother had been scared by an unknown assailant while she was out taking a pregnant, naked romp through the underbrush one day and that her offspring had somehow been marked by this trauma.

Everyone knows that's bullshit of course but its what people said and I'm not going to argue with them. Some people pointed a finger of blame at Winston Churchill. I like to blame things on Winston Churchill too. Winston Churchill would totally fuck with you. He'd do shit like unscrew the cap on the salt shakers and people would be like "Aw Jesus, Winston, don't be such a douche" but he'd just laugh.

The Beasts' early years are shrouded in mystery. Only this picture remains

...lady of spain i adooooooooooore you

...relic of a time when the Beasts parents had tried to foster a love of music in their growing boys' breast, despite the fact that it kept getting pinched in the bellows.

Back when I was making regular visits to the UK (or as we liked to call it back then "The UK") as a member of Led Zeppelin, we often found ourselves playing venues out in the trackless wastes of the English high desert...our only light the smouldering gypsy campfires; our only audience the smouldering Gypsies. It was a simpler time... a time when a middle-aged woman could lie about being a member of one of rock and rolls' most popular power groups and get away with it. I was happy as their lead singer. Happy save for one thing....

The BEAST.

Somewhere in the darkness you could hear him. Breathing. Panting. Lusting after the taste of rock and roll flesh and entrails and guts and hair and stuff.

In the mornings you would find the print of his huge...print....waiting for you just outside, like a hideous 'Get Well' card signed by a disturbed stranger in a public restroom.

"...and the mark of the beast shall be upon the hand and the forehead of those whosoever follow him, and upon the canvas lawn furniture of them also shall that mark be found" REV 5:33

He was out there.
Waiting.
Watching.
MAKING PRINTS.

For years we remained one step ahead of him, like some maniac game of Cribbage with life and death as the stakes, until Robert Plant would put one of the little marker dealies in his mouth and everyone would go "Oh Jesus Bob get that out of your mouth; are you six?" and he'd sulk, and nobody could remember what the score was.

THE BEAST KNEW.

...he does, too.

One fateful night he executed his fell masterstroke! In one savage moment reeking of blood and panic he leapt upon the prostate form of John Paul Jones and shredded his mortal coil, festooning his still-quivering flesh like icky bloody shredded stuff across the panicked landscapes of our shocked and shreiking brains!!!!! "EEEEEEEEEEEEE!" went our brains. Just like that!

...prostate form of john paul jones, enlarged*

We fled, we knew not where, deep into the dark blackness of the black British night.

AND THE BEAST LAUGHED!


Tune in next week for the further adventures of The Beast of Bournemouth! WHY? Because if I don't hit 'publish' this won't save for some demented reason! So yeah! Do that!





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* oh come on that's funny. get it? get it? enlarged? and its a picture of an enlarged prostate? because prostate sounds like prostrate, and

yeah.

Blue Bear Seasons With Garlic: Vigorous Shake

I've started reading a book called 'Writing On Drugs' , and I'm finding it to be really good stuff. Lady named Sadie Plant wrote it. Check it out, its worth a read.

It might be kind of obvious to some of you now that I have a fascination with altered mental states. This book goes into some depth describing the influence of voluntarily altered mental states on the creative process and I'm all over that crap, lemme tell you.

I have no future career as a professional opium eater, sadly. What Coleridge and Baudelaire and them'uns had to purchase at the local apothecary shoppe I seem to posses by right of genetics. Not that I travel around in a perpetual haze (despite what some might think); no, just that I have an inner landscape that I'm pretty well able to traverse at whim. Even the really freaky parts. Their quest seemed to be finding the entrance to Alladins' Cave in order to stuff their pockets with gold doubloons. Mine seems to be finding something in there I can use to peel the gold foil off with so I can eat the chocolate inside.

Really, that's the punchline. It looks like valuable treasure, all that fascinating stuff in your brain, but its just candy, really. If you have a poverty of emotion and imagination in your everyday life, then taking something that allows you to hold dark discourse with Nyarlathotep is going to be an enrapturing experience you'll want to return to...particularly if the alternative is unrelievedly banal. The problem is: Brains are fun*, but you don't get much vacuuming done. Everyday life and everyday things are important, despite what religion and fancy and imagination and everything else would lead you away from believing. Changing the water in the dogs' dish is more valuable than anything you experience or 'learn' while under the influence of drugs.

The first and last time I ever took LSD is a case in point. Oh my goodness was I wasted. Oh heavens to Betsy yes;. But the perceptive shifts were nothing different than things I experienced on a nightly basis, in dreams, or even all that terribly different than some of the things I imagined vividly in daydreams. Furthermore, it was not only 'induced' imagination, it was 'enforced' imagination. And you had to watch, little Alex, you had no choice. It was going to last as long as it took the chemicals to run out of your system.

The 'wastedness' part of the show was kind of fun at first, but got really old after five hours, and after ten it was a real pain in the ass. Being too intoxicated to perform simple tasks blows. Seriously, there's nothing more annoying than over-boiled peas come to find out, particularly when you have to chase them around on a plate and kill them individually, and your manual dexterity is suffering and every time you finally poke one with a fork it bleeds greenish, cloudy lymphatic fluids and makes a disgusting tiny popping noise like a ripe carbuncle finally cutting loose...you get the picture? Yeah. And for that I paid money? I really rather would have had the chocolate doubloons. Chocolate tastes good and you can do crafts and shit with the foil. I mean really.

This is not to say that drugs aren't fun, because they are. As long as you use them for the occasional holiday from reality and you know what you want out of the experience, they're a delight. They just aren't really a means to any other end than simple temporary entertainment.

I met a girl years ago* who frequently used the phrase 'people who'd learned a lot of things from using acid' with a great deal of heartfelt reverence, as though what you and I would term 'burnouts' existed in some perpetual exalted state (one that you and I would term 'brain damage'.) People suffering from a medieval lack of personal hygiene who live on kale and shit in public aren't living in an exalted state. Maybe that looks romantic from the vantage point of a sheltered little suburban teenybopper, but watch them going in to pick up their disability check at the welfare office sometime and see how exalted that shit looks, and take careful note while they shed that 'exalted state' long enough to cash the fucker and not get kicked out of the bank. Squatting to take a dump in public because they've 'forsaken conventional mores' or are 'trying to shock the Man into a moment of reality' is still taking a dump in public, idiot. But oh no, she was all starry-eyed over this supposed 'alternative wisdom path', one of these college freshman types fresh from mommy and daddys' house in the suburbs who'll get allllllll sanctimonious and start in with the 'now, just because it isn't your reality doesn't mean blah blah blah, we have to be open to alternative modes of blah blah blah' and I had to say no, taking a dump out on the sidewalk because I'm too goddamn wasted to remember where the public bathrooms are certainly isn't something I'll be making a part of my chosen reality. Now go join a cult, you retard.

Oh wait...she did.

*snork*




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*particularly giant evil brains from outer space that drive flying saucers and kidnap women to bring back to their home planets for breeding purposes but then they get their tank that they float around in all shot up full of holes and all the gross fluid leaks out and the brain explodes and sick chunks of brain crud go flying around all over the place and some lands on the lady and shes all screaming and shit but the other guys rescue her and she falls in love with one of them but has an alien brain baby nine months later.

*one of my ex-husbands subsequent girlfriends. nothing gets you over the residual heartache of a broken marriage quicker than realizing that your ex is dating a self-inflicted revenge even sweeter than anything you could have cooked up on your own!