... and if they didn't make a hole in the road, they will make a hole in your stomach.
Most of my investment is canned/jars/bulk dry stuff, but for reasons I'm not prepared to go into here, I also really want/need to one fresh vegetable. Even commercially frozen is a problem since the blanching destroys one of the two key chemicals. Now I believe I can get that chemical from dessicated[1] mooli, but it is all somewhat unclear!
So I'll freeze my own without blanching, and, if I get off my backside keyboard, I'll also be able to freeze veg from the garden.
[1] my daughter has a dessicator that was £12 on special offer at Amazon, and is quite fun to use. The smell of mushrooms drying is quite pleasant.
Indeed. I can handle about one a week myself. I can't stand mooli. It smells of farts whatever I do with it!
Dessicator looks fun for sure. Interestingly, and TEA related, the cupboard where I used to keep my oscilloscopes in was used for a period to grow mushrooms in. I had great luck with a suttons mushroom kit my mother bought me one year. Must have had about £50 of mushrooms out of that! Was thoroughly tired of them when it gave up.
I use these guys for seeds - very nice stuff:
http://www.realseeds.co.uk/My old dog tucker and bait freezer gave up the ghost a week of so ago....thank heavens it was in the garage, we knew it was dead from the pong !
Didn't dare open it to check and when I had a mo a couple of days later dragged it out the double garage door with a rope and tractor.
Then slid the front end loader forks under it and ever so gently closed the log tusk onto it so it wouldn't fall off and took it to a deep hole down the farm that the son had prepared with his 14t digger.
So with clothes peg fastened on my snout tipped the rotting stick into the hole and got the hell outta there leaving the lad to cover it with 2m of clay.
What a nightmare it would be dealing with that sort of thing in town.
Gah that happened to my uncle. He worked on oil rigs on and off so no one knew when he was at home or not. Got sent home off the rig sick one day, got home and dropped dead. No one expected him to be home and he didn't tell anyone so basically rotted there for 3 months. Neighbour alerted my father when they started smelling something unpleasant. I didn't have to sort it out but I got roped into helping clear the place. Turns out the first thing he had done was go and buy some fresh maggots and chuck them in there to kill them off for his fishing days out. But the freezer had given up about the same time he had, we assume that evening. I opened the lid on that with a stick and both myself and my sister were puking for about 10 minutes. A lot of the maggots had turned to flies and it was like a scene out of alien in that freezer. Defrosted food, maggots, all sorts. Total nightmare. I will never forget that. We hired a disposal company to come out and sort that out. Good plan with the burying it idea
Edit: one thing I used to do a lot, but alas no longer really is make bread. Can't beat it. Plus there's something scientificy and engineeringy about it.
The smell of baking bread hits the hindbrain hard - to the extent it is reckoned to be useful when selling a house
Nowadays I just use a Panasonic breadmaker. If I foolishly take it out when still warm, 200g bread instantly disappears along with lashings of melted butter.
When I get my next breadmaker, I'll fork out the extra for the little compartment used to contain goodies added at the final stage of mixing.
Does it leave a buggery hole in the side of the loaf? The last bread maker I did which annoyed me. End up using a kenwood chef with dough hook (ebay £20!) which ironically for this thread blew a RIFA and scared the original owner away from using it. That and leaving it next to the dryer to rise with a wet tea towel over it.