It's Bloody Delicious.

Alan says we have a dark side.
What? Just cause we were merrily juicing up some veggies for a potent, power packed supremely healthful drink he thinks we have a dark side?
Is it my fault that raw beets ooze red, blood like juice all over heck and back when you chop them up?
Nooooo.
Is it my fault that juicing a beet yields a delicious, nutritious albeit damn bloody looking drink?
Heccccckkkk No.
Is it my fault that for the 3.2 seconds he had his back turned I paused mid-juicing so that I could carve the core of the beet into a rat like body that would do any horror movie gross-out scene proud?
Ummmm.........maybe?
I'll admit to that being my own idea but it's not my fault the beet had such a long rat like tail, and that when I chopped it up to fit in our juicer that fate handed me a deliciously disgusting opportunity.
It's fate's fault! A ha!!!
Usually if I babble on long enough I can find some one else to blame for anything and everything, I am much relieved this time is no different.
Fate stepped in and provided this afternoon's grotesque entertainment. My muse screeched in my ear that I should pull out my carving knife and..NOT not cut off it's tail but be a good wife and smooth out the core of the beet into a rat like form...I supposed a skinned and de-legged rat like form to be accurate.
How does one go about plating a bloody rat for their husband? A virginal white dish to show off the wet, darkly oozing rodent/vegetable is best. Flick your fingers a la Emeril in a deliciously dark home version of "BAM" to splatter excess beet juice/blood all over the plate. Be mindful of your flicking as you'll have to clean up the splatters that will....er...COULD make it on to you, the floor, the cupboards, the counters...the ceilings...if you get too enthusiastic. And unfortunately I've never suffered from a lack of enthusiasm.
Present the plate to your loved one with all the pride you can muster and rejoice in their chuckle, their appreciation of a terribly good joke.
If you think carving a bloody rat was fun you should try juicing one, held by it's tail as you lower it in to the grinding mechanism of your juicer, you'll never look at your veggie juice the same way again!
Usually when we drink beet juice we just pretend we're vampires and cackle over every sip and bare our teeth at each other and sigh over the many months away that Halloween is.
But this time we giggled like mad scientists, twitching our whiskers and slurping our ridiculously red rodent juice with mephistophelian glee.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm beets make a bloody good drink.
p.s. I don't really have to state the obvious do I? That beet juice is as close as I wanna come to eating or drinking any rat or related product..right????

The Beauty of the Big Biscuit...

How delightful are biscuits?
Very, is the answer in case you had a momentary brain lapse and were fumbling through your mind desperately looking for a response that won't enrage this blogger. The answer is very.
A hearty, buttery, flakey bread type product that you can whip up at a moment's notice and be enjoying a bite of, albeit a steaming bite in about 11 minutes.
That's 10 minutes baking time and 1 minute preparation time, I will admit that if you're not a fan of dust clouds of flour, smacking your shins in to cats that get in the way as you dash at reckless speeds across the kitchen gathering ingredients, splattering globs of biscuit dough all over the kitchen, your self and your husband then perhaps a more reasonable (which I'm not, reasonable that is) estimation of total time for everyone else would be around 13 or 14 minutes. Any more than that and I gotta wonder what it is you're doing with your flour that I'm not doing with mine. *insert raised eyebrow look here, the sort Laura Holt is always giving Remington Steele, also guess who has discovered Remington Steele and has been watching back-to-back episodes on Hulu? The answer is meeeee.*
I have very fond memories of biscuits.
They were always the dainty, little, round, perfectly cut sort that made me think of baby showers and women's something or other meetings......sorry the name of that community group escapes me, all I can remember was the table laden with pot luck food, luck indeed, as there were always biscuits, pre buttered with a wee little square of cheddar cheese already adorning the golden beauties like a wee jewel in the crown of...oh God I'm hungry. How many minutes has it been? I've a biscuit in the oven you know.
A biscuit, as in singular.
Because that is my brilliance, my time saving, get a bit of biscuit to my gullet faster than you can say "Beam me up Scotty".
The....BIG...biscuit.
What's with all this rolling the dough out and cutting it in to wee circles anyways? That's like saying you're only going to eat one biscuit and nobody eats just one biscuit. My Grandmother when she lived at home was always in to weight watchers and health and calorie counting and scales and losing weight and this that and the next thing and even she did not sit down to eat ONE biscuit, she ate a whole bunch of biscuits in one go. The tub of Country Crock margarine spread between us, the molasses already loaded into a squeezable tipped bottle so we could ooze out the perfect amount on each beautiful bite of baked biscuit. Perhaps this was why she seemed so aware of her calorie intake every where else I am just now realizing, because when it came to biscuits and molasses we were *good biscuit eaters*. As if consuming a small truck load of biscuits in one sitting was a skill to be proud of.
The Big Biscuit is brilliant.
A batch of biscuit dough pressed out lightly onto a greased cookie sheet (maybe yours doesn't have to be greased but mine does or else there's a kitchen full of broken biscuit dreams, tears and curses when the big biscuit sticks to the sheet and refuses to give you the all important big biscuit bottom layer that's slightly crispy and golden and MINE! NOT the cookie sheet's but MINE. Not that I hold grudges against inanimate objects or anything...for long...it's just I don't like non-sentient things to defy me and my will, is that so wrong?)
Then you pop your big doughy biscuit in the oven for it's allotted time and within 10 or 11 minutes....ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....a biscuit, warm and steaming and just ready to be plopped on your plate..er.....I mean divided up for you and your husband who is now the one giving you the raised eyebrow look but instead of Laura Holt's eyebrow routine it's Remington Steele's cause he's on to me and my Big Biscuit and wants in on the action.
Sometimes we just have buttered biscuit, some times the all important biscuit and molasses routine, though I warn you this is a routine that is impossible to stop. Butter a bit of big biscuit, drip a drop of molasses, munch away, repeat..and repeat..and repeat..and repeat.
You will hear a distant groan of protest that is your stomach but you will also find your molasses addled brain will ignore it and keep eating bite after perfect bite of BIG biscuit and molasses. It's just the unfortunate reality of something so dang simple and delicious.
Sometimes we dig out our cheeses and sit trading hunks of gruyere and cheddar and fontina back and forth over our plates.
Other times we plop a chunk of Big Biscuit on a salad, like a mega crouton.
Sometimes we have it with marmalade or cinnamon sugar or.....like today....fresh strawberries.
A little trick I do, if you like your biscuits extra golden on top, pop em under the broiler in the oven for a few seconds after they are baked. Another little trick I do, forget it's under the broiler, walk away, distracted by shiny objects and bits of fluff and then wonder why the kitchen smells like smoke.
I can only in good conscience recommend the first trick unless you're into charred biscuit.
A ha, which reminds me. A third trick, take your big biscuit while it's still in it's soft, warm dough form and.....pop it on your Bar-B-Q grill. Holy mama, that's a gooooood biscuit and it can get a wee bit of char but the good kind, not the stomach turning, we can use it as a piece of charcoal to draw a picture of our deceased Big Biscuit, kind. I usually dust my big biscuit with lots of flour so it wont stick to the grill when ever I've done this trick.
By the way for those of you with husbands who look at your biscuits with a dark gleam of greed in their eye I want to set the record straight that biscuits, big or otherwise..do..NOT EVAPORATE. Even a little, so should any biscuit disappear while it's cooling and the BIG Biscuit Baker is outside watering the plants then we'll all know it wasn't a natural phenomenon..... I do give him points for originality, and cuteness....so he can have as much of the dang biscuit as he wants if he continues to be my hand model.

How to Enjoy a Big Biscuit:

1. Break it in to hunks, use your hands just like the caveman biscuit makers did.
2. Prepare a little love for the biscuit with some sliced strawberries, a touch of sugar and a drip of Amaretto, let the mixture combine in an almost carnal like way until it coaxes the blushing strawberries in to releasing it's juices at which point introduce the whole thing to it's betrothed...the BIG BISCUIT!
3. Clean the table like mad in a frenzy of energy because you realize that as the sun sets it's highlighting every bit of dust on the surface and making you look like a bad house keeper, which you might very well be but there's no need to photograph the evidence now is there?
4. Raw...HEAVY....cream......thick and luscious and much more adult than the whipped gelatinous-y type stuff that masquerades as whipped cream in the freezer section of the store. If you have the patience you could whip it up, if you don't..like me, just pour a dollop over the sweetened berries and bit of Big Biscuit and try not to let your hands shake cause it looks too impossibly good to have come together that fast.
5. Lure your husband out on to the patio with promises of telling him where you hid the spoons if he'll hold the plates of strawberry shortcake type cousins in the dying rays of the sun.
6. Eat.

p.s. The recipe I use for my Big Biscuit is adapted from Bob's Red Mill
However I use only 100% whole wheat flour in my recipe, omit the sugar, and replace the shortening with coconut oil. Oh and....um depending on what's closer the fridge or the sink I'll replace the milk with water.

America's got BIG balls....

....and I've finally had my hands on 'em. There are a few things Alan recalls quite clearly about when we first met in person. I mean besides me obviously. Like the icy cold of a Nova Scotian February, plenty of grocery store visits AND Canadian Bowling. He thought it was a joke, wee little bowling balls that you hold in the palm of your hand and can wing down the lane like a softball...... Though *lobbing* the ball was frowned upon it still happened, I guess the bowling authorities want bowling to be more about the rolling and less about the bouncing. Both are fun.
I knew there were other sorts of bowling out there of course, hadn't I watched the Flintstones? Hadn't I seen Fred's boulder like balls with the intriguing holes in them that our wee little balls lacked. Hadn't I wondered and marveled and, I'll even admit, LUSTED after those same balls, wishing that at least once in my life I could get my hands on some like them.
All the kids in my area wanted the same thing, my brothers even, we all wanted to get our hands on balls like Fred Flintstone's.
It's taken 30 years but I've finally fulfilled that childhood fantasy. I didn't expect it to happen in the belly of a casino, but the actual bowling alley with it's racks of large colorful balls were just what I imagined. Actually, I didn't expect the colours, those were a treat. Fred Flintstone's balls were a greyish white as I recall so I wasn't expecting turquoise, blue and neon pink. I quickly learned a few things about American style bowling.
The balls are heavvvvvvvvvvy.
I mean they expect you to hold a ball in one hand that's like 2 or 3 times the size of a Canadian bowling ball, and I'm pretty damn sure by the 5th ball I rolled that it was actually 19 times the size of a Canadian bowling ball and that it was no longer being thrown down the lane so much as falling off my cold, pained hand and rolling from it's own momentum, aided by the lane lubricant, my wishes and eventually the gutter to it's final destination.
Also, American bowling forces un-lady like expletives from one's own lips when they throw the ball with a resounding thunderous kerplunk-like crack straight into the gutter, but's it's ok I swore ONLY in Canadian. So I'm sure the slew of filth that tipped off my tongue a time or two was unintelligible to lane neighbors. Slew like "BEAVER FROSTED, BLUE NOSE BUGGERED LOONIES AND TWOONIES THAT BITE'S SNOWBALL SOBEY'S AZZ!"
American bowling involves sticking your fingers into dubious holes that God knows how many other people have already stuck their fingers in to...which is weird cause my Mama always warned me about doing things like that...and I'll admit to a tad squeamishness about doing it myself. Which probably accounts for my score.......or lack of score for the better part of the game. Also I'm not fussy in any lady like way, I mean sure I wear my Mary Janes on a short walk through the desert but that's foolishness not ladylikeness, and anyways it's not

reaaaaallllly foolishness if you realize it actually IS foolishness and are prepared to levitate your way back to the car at the first sign of anything that so much as looks like a snake or a snake's cousin...... but anyways breaking more than 4 nails during one game seems to be a bit much even for me so I either have to give up bowling or de-claw myself and unfortunately I like bowling.
I reallllllyyy liked the bowling, I think I might have more than a slight fondness for making a fool of myself in front of a bunch of strangers. Course, no one was outwardly snickering or anything, I saw a few amused smiles but no more than that and can you blame them? I was hefting an 8, 10, or 11 lb bowling ball around and winging it wildly about. (I couldn't make up my mind which size I liked best, 10 fit well but 8 was pink so you can see my dilemma!)
They're just lucky it went down my own lane every time, one ill timed snicker and I could have plowed it straight into the gut of the teenie bopper of my choice!
Sometimes I can bowl better left handed than right handed. This is a weird but true fact, I think it was the same when ever I bowled in Canada with the itty bitty balls they have up there (do you think ball size is a heat/cold related thing......?)
Bowling left handed is harder cause that arm is naturally weaker, being that I'm a righty, but my ball wobbled it's way down the lane and knocked more pins down with frequency compared to the right. I think it's pretty safe to say that from here on out I'm going to study hard and become ambidextrous, I think this would be a cool skill to learn.
A miracle of miracles did occur on this momentous night of American bowling. I got a strike, one glorious strike that came out of no where and if I hadn't been sweating bullets and willing the ball down the lane with the very force of my gaze, never blinking, I'd have thought it wasn't my ball causing the pins to clatter merrily to the ground in a drunken heap but somebody else's who must have hopped the gutter. But no it was mine!!!!! I clapped, Alan clapped and of course the strangers sitting behind us taking in the show that was me squealing like a girl and cursing after every gutter ball clapped most enthusiastically.
Thank-you kind strangers where ever you are. While your attention caused me to go in to spasms of anxiety and much blushing I appreciated the enthusiasm and the impartial witnessing of my first ever American strike during my very first American bowling experience.
I like America, it's got great balls!
p.s. I do realize these two styles of bowling are not actually called American and Canadian Bowling but that's what I'm gonna call them *pbbbbbbbbbbt*