Tales from Easement Acres
With my post hole digger out from the squirrel centrifuge, I finally got around to installing one of my Christmas presents.
Now that the estate has an official name, it needed a declarative marker. So Liz bought a sign.
Which I then affixed to a plywood backer, painted for contrast.
And then erected in the gardens, alongside the pipeline easement.
Snarky, but in good humor.
–Simon
Okay, so I probably can’t make sushi as well as a professional, but compared to what’s on offer here in Dayton, I can make a damn good attempt.
The trouble with sushi here is multi-fold, and it’s hard to discern the misinformation surrounding a cultural food that isn’t my own. Here are some of the contradictory bits:
Sushi needs fresh fish
Fresh fish doesn’t have any taste
Fresh fish can give you parasites
Freezing the fish will kill the parasites
Freezing the fish destroys its subtleties
Freezing the fish enhances texture
Bluefin tuna is the best
Tuna is one of the blander fish for sushi
It’s all in the rice
If it’s all in the rice, why is sashimi so popular?
Nori adds the flavor
If nori adds the flavor, why are California rolls so popular?
California rolls still have nori
Not always
Cooked fish has more and complex flavor
Cooked fish overwhelms the subtleties of the total flavor package
Says who?
And on and on…
The real problem, I think, isn’t so much that we’re landlocked (if you don’t count access via the Mississippi/Ohio/Miami rivers), but that we’re part of the Midwest. And while Midwesterners certainly know how to fry their freshwater fish, they seem confused with the concepts of seafood. And exotic spice in general. So while the local sushi chefs could probably turn out more flavorful rolls, they don’t because there’s no demand. And they can get away with it.
So with the bar set so low, and prices set so insanely high, we had always considered making our own. And finally, we made the attempt.
First off, the rolling mat. I was not interested in hand-scrubbing a porous bamboo traditional version, so I picked up this silicon one.
Then the fish. Tuna is standard, so that was the choice for our first attempt. I froze it in my blast freezer for a day (USDA says 15 hours at -31F is the minimum requirement to kill parasites).
Followed by a proper workstation setup. The rice was cooked with 1T sugar, 2T rice vinegar, and 2T sugar, according to Alton Brown’s recipe.
And some sliced cucumber and cream cheese. The dog cookies were not included.
Some careful placement and rolling.
And voila! Okay, so it took a few attempts, but this was my best one.
The taste? Pretty close to those store packages. I think there’s some opportunity to get more flavor into the rice, and I can certainly experiment with adjusted levels of (actually good) soy sauce, instead of the dyed salt water restaurants like to give out.
In conclusion, yes we can make something comparable to Dayton-quality sushi rolls (or makizushi, specifically, before the pedants call me out). And I could probably tweak things to make it better. The real cost though is in prep and labor. The execution was a pain. We’ll probably try it again sometime, but I’m not in any rush. Bland sushi it is for the foreseeable future.
–Simon
This one I found not because I was diligently auditing the dialog (I was, in fact, distracting myself from a rather boring conference call), but because the dialog itself didn’t make immediate sense to me and my brain screeched to a halt. The joke was lost on me, and having read every strip multiple times over decades, I’m familiar with Watterson’s humor. It was enough to not slip past me:
November 25, 1988
A second read and it became obvious that this editorial change was much bigger. I would even go so far as to say it changes the entire joke. Here’s my take, paraphrasing and reading between the lines:
Original version:
Calvin: I’m a cranky kid.
Mom: I don’t care.
Calvin: If you were truly the woman who gave birth to me, you would care a lot more than you do.
Mom: If I weren’t truly the woman who gave birth to you, then I wouldn’t have kept you this long.
Calvin: I still don’t believe you’re the woman who gave birth to me. You purchased me.
Revised version:
Calvin: I’m a cranky kid.
Mom: I don’t care.
Calvin: If you were qualified to be a mother in the first place, you would care a lot more than you do.
Mom: If I weren’t qualified to be a mother, then I wouldn’t have kept you this long.
Calvin: I still don’t believe you’re qualified to be a mother. I want to see documentation that you’re certified to be one.
It’s sort of a similar punchline, but a pretty significant change. It’s modernizing the joke (as in, our growing obsession with professional certifications). As I previously mentioned in…
…kids and families often “joked” about the inherent “legitimacy” of children. In fact, that’s still done today in biological nuclear families with much frequency. But again, the editors must have considered that insensitive to adopted children/broken families/divorced families/remarried families and whatever any other form of non-traditional families out there that they preferred to update the text.
And again, I’ll accuse them of trying to edit history by changing art to be more palatable to a new audience.
–Simon
The hops are blooming! I hadn’t planned to do any brewing, but I’m getting curious. Maybe I’ll soak some in a cheap beer and see how they impact flavor.
For now though, they’re just cool.
–Simon
Squirrels are great. They offer endless entertainment. They bicker amongst themselves until one falls out of a tree, which is always hilarious. Clumsy squirrels also take spontaneous flights to the ground. Absent-minded squirrels turn into dog chew toys. Public land squirrels end up on my stove top being pan fried. And now, gluttonous squirrels shall be vaulted from a centrifuge.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00004ZB4U?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
I haven’t seen it in action yet, but I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, there’s lots of sparrow watching.
–Simon