Thread 10 - TalkLair: “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles.”

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of previous threads (thread 9).

Although the nights are gradually drawing in, the new lair of JTT escapees is all cosy and homey inside. The hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

It has a roof but is open. This sort of thing.

Ah.

We have a brick outhouse and store the wood in there. It's bloody useful. Mr Tric has made a number of other sheds like the one Kuc showed and has collected so much wood you can see it from space.

I would love a woodburner.

My flat is awful in the summer but I’m very grateful of it in the winter. I haven’t had the heating on at all and it’s still 20°C inside.

I'd love a woodburner. They're one of my favourite things. I should care about the environment but given that I'm not big oil or big stupid corporations I'm not sure that my footprint, or any of yours, makes that much difference to the fact that they are destroying the planet.

MouseMinge · Today 19:15

They're one of my favourite things.

Do you remember the old thread in the Old Place, about the song? Gracenoted's "Black Fisting Mittens" is the first thing to spring to mind, any time I see those words!

It’s the start of Mouse’s chicken liver pate recipe that I always remember:

“First melt butter in a frying pan, loads, more than you normally would, go mad with it.”

We have a wood burner, it heats the living room and the spare bedroom above it. Wish we’d got a boiler installed behind it as some people have, but it would have cost a fortune we just didn’t have, and this stupid old cottage is awfully difficult to do modern things to.

The Aga heats the kitchen and our bedroom above it, we do all our cooking in/on it, and it heats the water to “madwoman hot”, just as I like it. But it’s ancient and rather prone to strops and tantrums involving stinky soot bombs.

Saw this excellent research on another thread, made me laugh:

https://www.bmj.com/content/331/7531/1498

That's hilarious. Has anybody proposed chaining them to the kettle? No? Just me then.

Aw, so sweet to have made memories of me for other people. I have no memory of either of those things but they do sound like me. I'm going to a Halloween party, maybe I'll just wear black with black mittens and say I've come as black fisting mittens. That would be a conversation stopper.

When I'm well again I think I'll make chicken liver pate. It's the food of Queens!

Pretty much anything involving chicken livers is the Food of the Goddesses! Somewhere I have an Italian New Year's Eve recipe for Puy lentils topped with chicken livers and sprinkled with balsamic vinegar. I think you're supposed to eat it after midnight, to make it the first meal of the new year, but I can never wait that long!

Do you put a spit of brandy in yours @MouseMinge ? I do. And enormous amounts of butter of course.

Don't put the brandy in until the last seconds, for Athena's sake! You don't want to boil the alcohol off!

Loved the teaspoon attrition! 😁

Oh definitely a bit of brandy! I love a chicken liver risotto as well. I think that magical thing about them is they're so damn cheap and one of the tastiest meats you can eat.

Garlic, garlic, garlic. I’ve bought chicken liver pate from various supermarkets where they have either no garlic, no brandy, or no garlic OR brandy. FFS!

I’d happily made it a few times, then - I don’t know why, when Mouse’s recipe had served me so well for so long - I googled recipes and read I should “trim” the livers or my pate would taste bitter. OMG, the fucking mess, must’ve chucked half the liver away, it was so unpleasant and chore-like that I’ve never made it since, which is a pity because it was so perfect before (and not bitter at all). So much better than the garlicless brandyless supermarket stuff.

I don't think I've ever trimmed chicken livers unless they had visible green gallbladder stuff on them, and they've never tasted bitter.

I have shared that BMJ paper widely with my colleagues! I have a very serious meeting next week about a response to a recent BMJ paper that we have to do. Brilliant stuff.

I wish I knew where I could buy chicken's livers.

Anyhoo, what is slightly horrid is hearing a cat barfing up a hairball, but realising at least knowing where it happened means one can avoid walking through it until after the immediate breakfast provision and consumption interval. I was being stared at.

What is more horrid is putting ones sock-clad foot on something damp and resistant en route to the kitchen despite avoiding the danger spot.

What is horrider still is returning and finding that the undersock menace was not another hairball but a dead white-toothed shrew

What is most horrid of all (so far, the day is young) is looking up and seeing yet another shrew corpse a metre away.

I clearly slept through a midnight massacre. I hope the cats got one each, it's fairer that way, and I hope that there aren't more victims hidden elsewhere in the house.

Dear little pussy cats.

I must wash out the glass from the bedside table just in case the urgent thirst that led Oscar to drink out of it in the wee small hours was connected to the nasty flavour of shrews.

He does have his own water bowl, but it isn't the same.

That's revolting, Elderberry, what a thoroughly nasty thing to tread on.

To say nothing of having to wash socks that had only just been put on.

A quite nice thing happened on Monday. I was working in the small garden of an elderly gentleman and, in the course of the session, I happened to go into the adjoining communal garden to trim back some growth that was overhanging his garden. There is a 6ft stone wall at the end of this bit of garden and on the other side is an infant school and the children have play time while I'm working, always with a great deal of enthusiastic shrieking. Looking around the communal garden, I saw that the grass the entire length of the wall was littered with toys, clearly lost during the exuberance of play. I threw back those that wouldn't break and set the more fragile ones on the top of the wall. It will be interesting to see how many toys have been thrown over the next time I'm there.

Indeed! Do you have slippers?

I tend to wear my slippers on the ground floor but to take them off when I head upstairs. No particular reason, but at least I can find them when I need them. Mostly.

Nice toys find!

It was a nice find and brought up a lot of imagery of children playing.

Many years ago, I trod on a drawing pin which got stuck in my heel and I've worn slippers around the house ever since. Ones with good thick soles.