Jul 02
We did it.
Last weekend, we cooked up our snails and ate them.
And they were good.
Yes, I did feel slightly bad for eating them and yes it was fairly disgusting but I would probably do it again especially as their death serves some sort of purpose rather than simply stopping them eating all Jo’s flowers.
As previously posted, we waited until their poo had turned orange as we only fed them carrots and water then we stopped feeding them about 24 hours before cooking time. I got a medium pan of water going on a rolling boil with a large kettle full of water ready to go as well. I washed them all with cold water and made sure that they all shrunk into their shells so were alive. I then dropped them into the water and kept it boiling for a good 15 minutes. I had to change the water about 3 times over. The first pan full turned bright green with a frothy scum on the top about an inch thick. The second pan was slightly less green with only a small amount of scum and the last pan had a bogeyish tinge to it but nothing else. After 15 minutes of cooking I drained the pan into a colander and doused with lots of cold water before using a thin meat skewer to take them out of their shells and dropped them onto some sea salt to help take off some of the slime that was still on them (or so I hoped!).
Next I chopped up far more cloves of garlic than I should have and added this to a small omelette pan we have with a large knob of butter. When the house stunk of garlic I dropped the snails into the pan and sautéed until I’d effectively cooked off the small amount of slime that was still coming off the little buggers. Note that I didn’t try to chop off the snail’s hybrid pancreas–liver thingy nor did I chop them up. I figured that I eat whelks, winkles, mussels etc. as is
so I would do the same with these.
Whilst all this was going on I made a lovely, simple mushroom risotto to go with the snails and so poured in the cooked snails, garlic and butter into the risotto pan at the same time as the parmigiana. According to Jo it was very delicious albeit very garlicky.
Finally, here are some links that I found helpful during my research with the first 3 links being very helpful:
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Jun 11
Jo has starting collecting loads of snails from our garden and rather than killing them immediately, she suggested that we cook them as Gordon Ramsey suggested on the F Word a series or so ago. So we now have several jam jars full of them with carrots inside and in a week or two when their poo turns orange they are ready to be eaten! Yummy! Found this delightful article on eating your own snails which confirms much of what we suspected. Also found an entry over at Cooking With Richard (the new entry on my regular read blogroll) which is equally helpful. More will be posted when I have it.
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Jan 22
I received an e-mail from Kev today asking if I had set-up an online pharmacy.
Yes. Had me confused for a moment there too.
Turns out someone has purchased a domain called ginger-ninja.net
which is obviously almost identical to my own domain gingerninja.net
. Not only that, but this individual is also using the site to sell medical items of a somewhat dubious nature. I’ll give you a taster:
Buy Cheap Viagra, Discount Viagra, Kamagra jelly, Kamagra, Apcalis and many more erectile dysfunction treatment solutions by Ginger Ninja!
Does that really sound like something I would do?
You’d think that after 21 years as my best mate, Kev would have known better than to ask. But, I said to myself, maybe Kev had only my best interests at heart? Afterall, a hacker can still get in and takeover a website if the admin has been rather silly with their security procedures. Maybe Kev was simply ensuring that it wasn’t my site and to ensure that I didn’t have a major problem. It doesn’t hurt to ask afterall and he’d me doing me a favour if that is the case.
And then it hit me. There is also always the possibility that Kev was looking for some assistance with his upcoming wedding and was hoping I could supply him with something to keep his ….morale… up on his wedding night? I’m not sure but I really do wonder if supplying little blue pills is above and beyond the call of duty for a Best Man.
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Sep 23
My PC has been taking an increasingly longer time to boot over the past few weeks to the point yesterday where it sat at the loading screen for nearly an hour. So there followed several hours of running CHKDSK /R in the recovery console and making sure that everything was fine and it was, or so I thought.
This morning I turn on GN-01 and, again, she takes a good twenty minutes to boot up. So I check the eventvwr and what do I see? Two weird entries, one for {F4524160-9145-49C9-8810-46CBC1EA0021} and one for KService.exe which has failed to load several times over. So I search the registry and discover that they are the same thing. I don’t recognise the name or the self-named directory it is sitting in. It isn’t in my Add/Remove Programs listing and I don’t recognise publisher, Kontiki, listed in the apps properties.
Like all good geeks I hit Google and what do I find? It’s peer-to-peer sharing service which most consider malware and Sky Anytime has apparantly installed it. As the Sky service is more than a little bit poo, I decided to uninstall it and see if that resolved the problem. Windows uninstalled the Sky Anytime application but not the KService itself, so with a bit more searching I found some references to KClean.exe at PC Doctor (where I downloaded a copy), the Sky website & AskJack at the Guardian and used that to clean up after KService, followed up with ensuring that it was gone by following the the manual instructions on Geoff’s Blog and checking references to the CLSID and KService.exe itself in my registry. The only thing that hadn’t been changed was the Service actually disabled, it was still set to Automatic, and the files deleted. Those done I rebooted to see what would happen and after several hours of chkdsk running again, boot-up time has once again been reduced to one minute or less.
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Sep 16
Thanks to lovely, lovely Steam I have just downloaded and played demos of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Bioshock.
ET:QW looks simply gorgeous on my new card and I can only imagine how much better it would be under DX10. It took me a little while to get into it though and is very much a Quake co-operative death match type of game rather than a facelift of the much loved (well, by me, anyway) Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory. Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I hate it, it just isn’t totally what I expected.
Bioshock was another surprise. I was expecting a poop-’em-up in much the same vein as F.E.A.R was and started the game expecting to be scared out of my mind. What I got instead was an introduction on the scale of TV’s Lost and a totally absorbing and purely gorgeous experience. The little touches in this game such as context sensitive help and minimalist HUD coupled with the effects when you activate the Incendiary plasmid, which is reminiscent of the nuclear power in TV’s Heroes, all combine to make this a truly wonderful experience. And that was just on the demo! Cannot wait to get the full game.
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Sep 06
No, not me. Had one of those commute’s this morning where everything worked against me. Not only did I oversleep due to not feeling well (I’ve caught Jo’s cold) but when I got to the station I couldn’t catch the train I wanted as it was running late and I would miss my connection. So I ended up waiting on the platform for an extra fifteen minutes for the direct service and faced the thick end of being nearly an hour late for work.
When I arrived at Stratford, it had become even hotter outside which is great if you are spending the afternoon in the garden but not if you have to wait on the platform for the DLR for another seven minutes. All was well and good at this point as I continued to watch Clerks on my Video iPod, which I had ripped from my DVD copy last night, until we reached a station around All Saints where we just sat there. Apparently the train in front had broken down and we were going to be stuck there for some time.
At this point we get to the subject of this little blog entry. A mouth-breathing young man with a shaved head dressed in a trackie top, jeans and sandals got on and sat next to me. This wasn’t a problem except he reeked of weed and I don’t mean a little. He could have felled cattle with his stench. It certainly made me retch when he first sat down. He’d clearly been enjoying his morning with Mary Jane as he started grinning around the carriage like a buffoon, giggling at the adverts on the walls. Again, more amusing than anything, as I continued to watch Clerks (which he noticed as he peered over my shoulder).
Then he coughed.
Without covering his mouth.
A small wad of phlegm flew out of his mouth and landed on my hand.
I duly pulled a face that looked like I had sucked the world’s largest lemon and glared at him as I looked for somewhere to wipe it off. He just looked at me without apologising, mouth open and eyes vacant.
That was enough for me at this point and I duly got up and moved to the doors to get some fresh air and remove myself from the target zone of his projectile coughing. He then proceeded to yell at the Passenger Agent to get a move on
despite the announcement that the train in front had broken down and we would be another ten minues or so, before checking that his lump of weed resin was still in his pocket and returning to his grinning and giggling.
I ignored him and returned to Clerks from the safety of the door well, but not before surreptitiously taking his photo……
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