Ever wonder

[cornerofmadness]

how hungry someone must have been to learn certain foods are actually food. I was thinking about that trying to power my way through a pound of chestnuts, scoring them for roasting. This is a lot of work. A lot of foods are (looking at you crabs). How many people died figuring out this plant is tasty food and that plant is poison?


I gave my last final today so it's all over but the crying (and trust me there's that)

I went to the hot chocolate party with my healthy recipe entry for the drawing. I won...an electric jump rope. THanks but no. I'll redonate that sucker.

If you want to do that Ghosts of Christmas Past with Boroughs of teh Dead on Saturday, tomorrow is probably the last day to buy a ticket
here. is the calendar, just click on the virtual tour to get a ticket (10$)

Have some fannish stuff.

Cowboy Bebop is already canceled


Prodigal Son


another installment of the Prodigal Son BtVS AU

a follow up to the above Prodigal Son BtVS AU

Touch and Go ch 3


Flashing Light ch 3

Crushed ch 2

Shattered Ch 3

What Lies Within

Oh You Just Wait Baby Boy



Other Fandoms

Christmas Dance Trixie Belden

Lucifer fic

Take it Back Stargate Atlantis

Think Chilly Thoughts Stargate Atlantis

The Keepsake Box Mystery Trixie Belden

King's Affection ficlet

Desire of the Endless Lucifer

Astro ficlet

I Can See It In Your Eyes 911

Cuddling For Idiots 911 Lonestar

Comments

[goddess47]

I get that food thing, mostly when I'm cooking... ;-) Like, where did baking soda come from? And what cheese is good and not just mold that will kill you? Yeah -- lots of folk died figuring out mushrooms and berries...

Good luck with the crying. Offer them the cheap tissues, they don't deserve the soft stuff. ;-)

[cornerofmadness]

this is why the school stocks 1-ply tissues

food is interesting, so many things can be toxic when prepared wrong

[ysilme]

I've often wondered about that very thing! And I hear you on preparing chestnuts.... we have trees in our garden, or had; my late father-in-law planted them from seedligns he got in the forest, and they grew well despite the soil being too rich and dense for them. As a result the chestnuts are very small and have such a hardy peel that it's dangerous to try to prepare them for roasting or cooking (I prefer them cooked and added to certain foods, like red cabbage, pumpkin soup, or as a side). OTOH the spiky shells, once dried, fall apart to such dangerous thorns all around the garden that we took two of the trees down and the third half way (the rest remains to hang our hammock from), although I'm sorry for the bees as they were awesome pollinators. But it's been impossible to collect all shells, expensive to discard of them, and even one we missed caused the thorns to be everywhere, and dragged into the house in the fur of the kitties. Thankfully they never had any problems with them, but I've stepped in so many fragments of these things even indoors, even requiring surgical intervention twice to remove them from my foot, that the trees had to go. There's a reason they're not native to our specific climate, although they are to the somewhat warmer Rhine Valley not far away - where the chestnuts you can find in the forest are larger and easy enough to cut open. We don't go often to collect them ourselves, though, as I stock up on a few vacuumised packets when they are in stores (only in autumn and around Christmas), or the canned variety I can get in France.

Chestnuts seem easy enough to be discovered as food - like after a forest fire or after a burning tree, for example. One of the foods which intrigue me in that regard are oysters, or how people found out how to prepare and digest wild mushrooms - and how much try & error was there to learn about the good and the bad ones. We're currently watching a German YT series about a bushcraft/outdoor challenge, and one of the participants hat to give up early on because he ate a just barely cooked mushroom. Regarding the are where they were (south/middle Sweden) and the images of it you could see it must have been an edible bolete, but he just heated the pieces shortly in water and drank that, too (the participants have no food, very little equipment, and have no permission to hunt as it is common in Europe without a special permit, most have no fishing gear. Insects/larvae are more or less absent, and in the are they are there are more or less just berries and mushrooms.) I'm definitely not bushcraft savvy, but even I know that you need to cook/fry wild mushrooms very hot for at least 15min to degenerate the protein sufficiently to digest it, and never consume the water of cooking or washing them. He suffered from severe indigestion problems (stomach pains, dizzyness, circulatory collaps), and although most commenters so far assume he got ill from drinking unfiltered water I'm sure the mushroom is at fault due to the preparation. (They're at a large lake which are usually safe to drink out of in Sweden, and all other participants who have the same water source don't have problems). I have trouble digesting mushroom protein as well - I need to have even the cultivated varieties cooked thoroughly or will have the same symptoms he had - so I'm wondering how people found out how to prepare mushrooms for them to be edible. ;op
It also takes somebody with knowledge to figure certain coherencies out, I believe. One example: when we moved here and built our house on the plot my husband's family owned since forever, we heard from neighbours that somebody was poisoning cats in the vicinity and we should be aware as we had cats ourselves. We'd planned on a large outdoor pen anyway but were understandably worried. Now the whole quarter used to be a large collection of individual orchards with apple, plum, and pear trees. Our plot was one of the last left undeveloped. My husband knew it well since his parents usually harvested the fruit, and he's a botany nerd, so he knew the whole plot was full of autumn crocus. You probably can guess where this is leading - autumn crocus is typcial on this kind of orchard in our region, and it's so highly poisonous here that you'll feel a tingle at your fingers if you even pluck the leaves and have a little scratch or cut, or even without. We started building in November, and lo and behold, in the next spring, the first greens to come out were an abundance of autumn crocus. We also know cats well enough to know they're jumping onto the first greens after winter when they aren't offered indoor greens - and everybody around here kept their cats in the still typical, common way: feed them cheap food, with luck have them neutered and vaxxed, but for the rest they had to see where they got it.
We had the strong suspicion that the autumn crocus on our plot were the culprit, as visits to the two other still vacant plots around had none, so we stealthily set out to kill the stuff - it's protected so what we did was forbidden; but at the time we were still hoping for kids, and we wanted to open our garden for our cats, so to be able to use our garden the plant had to go - it was literally everywhere. It took three or four years of innocently-placed sacks of gardening soil, or cardboard with whatever stuff on it, to get rid of any new growth. And, surprise surprise, since then, no poisoned cat has been found again.
But without Siljan's botany knowledge and my experience with feline behaviour, the rumour of a person poisoning cats might have lived on. (We put the info around that the cats had eaten autumn crocus and died.)

[cornerofmadness]

ouch to stepping on them (We were horrible children we used to throw these things at each other). Somewhere my Italian ancestors probably had a hand in eating them. Italy produces (and eats) a lot of these things.

A lot of people are used to eating raw mushrooms so he probably didn't think about it and you're probably right that messed him up

crocuses yeah pretty toxic (and yet at the right dose, medicine) and a lot of people still don't know what animals can eat doesn't mean we can and vice versa

[sperrywink]

I'm sure you did have all the crying, ahaha.

I don't know how or why you would electrify a jump rope????

[cornerofmadness]

So much crying.

I think it must be biometrics that report to your phone. All I know is I ain't jumping

[the_siobhan]

I'm always fascinated by food that's poisonous unless you cook it a certain specific way.

[cornerofmadness]

same here, especially fugu and poke salad

[spikedluv]

Yay for no more finals to give! (Also, fucks.) Listening to all the crying will be fun, though. Not.

A hot chocolate party sounds fun! (What is your healthy recipe?)

Just what your knee (doesn't) need!!!

I had seen some comments about Cowboy Bebop on my f-list, so I'm sorry about the cancelation on their behalf. Unless they hated it, lol!

[cornerofmadness]

Yeah the field where I grow my fucks is fallow.

it's was a farro salad. if I remember I'll post it

The actors were pretty gutted but given the sheer level of fuckery from the fan boys over Faye and then the total miscasting/misuse of Vicious (the villain) this was inevitable