The Bluestocking Pub: Infinite Cocktails, Questionable Logistics

[MyrtleLion]

Welcome to the nth iteration of the Bluestocking women’s pub, where gerbils are staff, the drinks are free, and alcohol has no effect except to get you to the sweet spot just before the drink you really shouldn’t have had.

Men can go to the Staunch Ally next door.

It’s OK if you don’t understand. Just assume everything is normal.

Previous thread is here:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5523989-bluestocking-womens-pub-its-maytime

Having fallen in love with the food at a (localish) Lebanese restaurant, a fattoush salad is now my summer thing. The mint, parsley and sumac make it sing.

Totally unrelated to your post, but on reading the news about Peter Murrell today I thought of you.

I'd forgotten about that one! Perhaps one of the parcels was the £2,618.16(!) Lalique salt and pepper grinders he ordered and about which Oor Nic seems to have shown no curiosity -

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yeevz915jo

I too am solar-powered, Pasta. I start to struggle in late January and February unless I spend a lot of time outdoors, or we go away somewhere hot.

Your catering sounds amazing. The most I've managed recently is to turn a surfeit of eggs (many thanks to a neighbour's chickens) and a large block of chocolate into chocolate mousse. I'd forgotten how easy it is.

And how delicious.

I took B&B for what was, by their standards, a very short walk. There was Something in the wheat (partridge? Hare?) but I was very mean and refused to let them trash the crop. I know the farmer (and his wife). He works his socks off on a holding of borderline viability, and is a very kind and helpful man (and his wife is lovely, and appreciates him). So, 'GetoutofDuncan'swheat NOW!' They got out.

As for elderly relatives, I spoke to a lot of mine before they died. My father's side was well strewn about after the nightmares that WWII inflicted on them. They were surprisingly willing to talk about what they'd gone through. I wished I'd got there 10 or 20 years earlier, when more of them had been alive, but I was still able to speak to some remarkable people.

Have you tried making Toum to go with it? Lebanese garlic sauce, doddle to make and it’s ab fab.

Edith, I know we've talked about this before, and the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I should have tried harder to talk to my family about their war experiences, especially my grandmother. But, as I get older, I also now understand why they kept things to themselves. It was their experience, their lives, not just an interesting story to tell your descendants.

But, if we don't talk about these things, how do we understand what happened and prevent them from happening again? I've just finished reading Inherit the Truth: The Cellist of Auschwitz, by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. It's a powerful testimony that she wrote 30 years ago, mainly for her family, a record of their lives. I thought she died recently, but she is 101 this year, I think!

Yum, just looked up fattoush, definitely my kind of thing. I've been experimenting with sourdough bread (as someone here recommended) and flat bread, to see if I have the same gut responses to regular bread and, amazingly, the flat bread doesn't make me expand like a balloon! So maybe it isn't wheat that bothers me, but yeast??

There's no yeast in flat bread, right?

So I can make fattoush! I also love, love, love tabbouleh 💚

DH shopped this morning, we lunched on crab salad with avocado but tonight’s fish needs to be done in the oven.

It doesn’t feel too terribly hot in the kitchen at the moment but that may be because I’ve been toiling in the garden most of the day which was very warm.

I'm going to try toum, as well, although I think today and tomorrow,it would just melt and separate. My kitchen's not too bad, 24C, but hotter tomorrow probably.

5'8" - taller than average for a woman of my generation. I'm one of 4 sisters, born between 1946 and 1957, whose heights range from 5'6" to 6'. My mother, born in 1916, was 5'9". At 14, in a school photo, she towered over her classmates, including the boys.

Blood group O, though.

It's a sad, sad day.

Today one of the items evicted from the house were <sobs uncontrollably> one of my pairs of Highland cow slippers.

#sadtimes

To be fair though they were becoming dangerous.

But look at the way the one on the left is looking at me! I'm sorry Highland cow slippers.

I have not and having looked up the recipe, it is right up my street! Will be trying that next - thanks!

I've found that I react better to bread made with spelt flour - it apparently has less gluten (or a difference in the gluten structure) than normal flour

Thoughts and prayers, Boily. 💐

Hugs, Boily. It’s very sad.

That's an option if I need it, thanks! Never thought of that...

That's sad, Boily.. very brave of you to let go of them and release them back into the wild.😞

That's a shame Boiled. I love seeing them appear on images.

Err....you said one of your pairs. Do you mean you have more?

This story has been all over the news all day, and I keep checking to see if there's a thread started about it, perhaps with a comment about campervans from the Real Feminist
[a campervan which Nicola S. apparently knew nothing about ...]
Strangely, there's none, or last time I looked there wasn't.
Maybe it's too hot to get bothered about it😄

Deano - sorry, I realise you said in your post that the effect of the weather was physiological, I obvs didn't read to the end before starting my post where I asked you about it

I've only just noticed the date! Happy Lilac Towel Day, all.

I'm definitely missing something here...Lilac Towel Day?

I can't eat wheat - it triggers asthma - 'wheat cough' and I think a range of other inflammatory responses, but I can eat spelt. A wonderful discovery after about three years on gluten-free stuff, which does its best, but.

It's both Towel Day, in honour of Douglas Adams, and the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of Treacle Mine Road (Discworld), survivors of which wear a sprig of lilac in remembrance. Hence Lilac Towel Day.

Ah, I knew it was The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May (Discworld) but hadn't realised it was also Towel Day (HGTG).

For the Discworld fans -

'The men with the lilac, I have to say, fought like tigers. Not skillfully, I'll admit, but when they saw that their leader was down they took the other side to pieces.'