cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My hotness and a 30 year old knife and beer and food and stuff Yesterday I got 70% of my Christmas shopping done in about 30 minutes online. Nice. Someone sent me some very pleasant home made porn or whatever you want to call it of herself yesterday. Which obviously completely made my day. Thank you. Lessee, what else is going on... Can I just say again that I'm incredibly hot right now? Well, I am. Yesterday I went to get a key copied at the lock and safe place downtown. I always like going in there because it's full of all kinds of weird, musty devices that have probably been sitting there for the last 50 years. While I was waiting for the keys I was looking at the dusty display of pocket knives in the back of the store. I need a good skinning knife so I asked the guy behind the counter if he had one. He seemed really surprised that I was asking about this at all but he went back behind the other counter and found some stuff to show me. He said that pretty much all they have are the display models and a few other things behind the counter that have been there for years. Not much call for this kind of thing downtown any more. The store is basically a remnant of when this was more of a typical, rural small town situation. Wheras now downtown is full of hipsters and businessmen and artists and NYC ex-pats who do not tend to buy sharp pointy things. Anyway, I bought this interesting, heavy brass and steel folding skinning knife and went back to the office. Out of curiosity, I googled the markings and found out that this knife, which I just bought 'brand new' was made in 1977. This thing was sitting behind the counter for 30 fucking years! Longer than I have been alive. I'm rather enjoying that fact. It's not a knife that would be made now. Not for that price. The blade is surgical steel and most of the other parts are brass. It's called a 'Sod Buster.' It's pleasantly heavy. I don't like light tools, generally. I like something to have some heft to it. Most knives under $50 are disposable pieces of shit, all plastic and cheap steel that either chips or won't hold an edge. My brewing supplies haven't shipped yet. This shit had better get here in time for me to have beer ready for Christmas and New Years. I've got an armful of hand-split oak heartwood left from that tree that fell on my old house. I've been saving it for a special occasion. Once it had aged a few years it became the perfect fodder for outdoor cooking. Steaks cooked over this wood are fucking heavenly. But it's almost all gone now. Just enough for one more fire. So the plan is to brew an exceptionally nice batch of beer and have one meal where I have the beer that I brewed with a venison backstrap that I killed, aged and butchered myself, grilled over a wood fire fueled by the hardwood that I hand-split and aged 3 or 4 years ago. Too bad I didn't have time for a vegetable garden this past year. That would have made it perfect. This being December, it's pretty hard to forage any wild food other than meat. Well, anything that doesn't taste like shit. There's plenty of stuff out there that one could in theory eat and survive on, but we're talking famine food that tastes awful. Rock tripe and that sort of thing. Nothing that I want to include in my ultimate DIY, 'slow food' meal. And yes, this is very slow food. The wood was aged for years. The beer will take me close to a month to be ready. The meat was aged for 10 days. My kitchen definitely sucks horribly and I don't to have any special skill as a cook behind being very good at following directions and improvising when necessary. But the time and work that I've put into my ingredients and materials are fully consistent with the slow food ideals. I mean, even my most devoted 'slow food' friends who put on all-night cooking parties have never gone so far as to actually butcher and age their own meat. I'm hard core. I miss going to those things. I don't get out as much with small children to take care of. Also Mallory moved to TX and Dan and his girlfriend are in Chicago for another year or so. As for Kaj, well, my only excuse for seeing so little of him is having kids to go home to every day. Usually I'm the one person who gets to sit on his ass and drink all evening while everyone else cooks. Because I already did my part. I would start brewing anywhere from 1 to 4 different beers the month before, of such a variety as to allow the other cooks to come up with a course to match each beer. So I'd already done the work, what with designing the beer and brewing and racking and bottling and so on. Now I do that with meat as well as beer. It would be fun if Kaj or someone would throw together more of those parties where I could bring the beer and the venison for other people to cook with. Blah blah blah DIY beer and food. Sorry. 11:38 a.m. - 2007-12-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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