Penelope is not a boy.

Evidence #1:  Penelope is a girl’s name.

Evidence #2:  When my sister dressed up like Penelope, she did not put on a penis.

Evidence #3:  Today there were three duck eggs in the coop.

Just because two people have sex does not mean that one is a man and one is a woman.  It is the same with ducks.

Blake, you did not see any duck penises or duck vaginas let alone duck semen being ejaculated into a duck vagina.  You tried to sound objective and journalistic, but you did not have all of the facts.

I doubt you even know what a duck vagina or duck penis looks like.  I object to your duxploitative presumptuousness.

I Saw America in My Steak

Last night Liv and I ate these gigantic Sirloin steaks in order to combat our Iron deficiencies.  They were so thick that when I thought they were done and took them off the grill it turned out their middles were still basically raw.  Then we ran out of gas for the grill.  Meanwhile, Liv discovered a particular component of potato anatomy which retains the consistency of raw potato no matter how much you microwave and mash at it.  The answer for the steaks was to put them under the broiler on hi for a few minutes, which blackened them nicely on the surface while leaving the centers pink and juicy.  The broiler, kids.  The broiler is great.

Oh say can you see

Also, when my steak came out of the broiler it looked just like this great nation of ours.  I felt a deep spiritual connection with this great nation of ours as I consumed its likeness in beef form.  Also Liv’s looked like a decapitated sea turtle head.  I think.  She said it looked like an old man’s head.

Half man, half sea turtle, 100% beef

But I think she was stretching it a little bit.  Clearly there was some jealousy involved regarding how the great spirit of America had decided to bless me with its meaty image.  But you know, Liv wants to be blessed by the great spirit of decapitated sea turtle heads, who am I to stop her?

Adam and the egg.

Adam thrust his head into the hot stuffy coop, leaning forward on his hands to look for eggs.  His finely sculpted rear end waggled invitingly as he located two grey duck eggs amongst the straw.

As his powerfully muscled back straightened he looked down at the eggs, still warm, in his palm.  One was freakishly huge, twice the size of a normal egg.   He imagined the dual-yolked monstrosity exiting through the hot, wet vent of one of the ducks.  He rubbed his thumb along its surface, still moist with the dual anointments of avian sexual effluvium and slippery excreta.  Secretly, in his secret place, he hoped that the egg was one of Ferdinand’s.

He took the egg to the sink and began to wash its surface.  The lubricating factor of the detergent on the hard, slightly rough eggshell excited him even further.  Before he could stop himself, he felt his thumb plunging through the shell into its raw, forbidden interior.  Albumen and yolk went spurting outwards, spraying onto the front of his blue hooded sweatshirt.   After a moment spent in wordless ecstacy, he patted the wet spot dry and washed his hands.  The spot was not overly conspicuous.  He would wear the soiled sweatshirt to work.  It would be his (and Ferdinand’s) little secret.

Erotic Duck Fan Fiction

An anonymous fan of duck eroticism sent this one in:

It was a hot and muggy summer afternoon.  Potassium and Penelope were sitting in the grass in the shade of the trampoline, quacking quietly at each other.  One of the humans who lived in the house had decided that it was time to clean the duck pool because it was getting to smell very bad.  The ducks didn’t mind the smell, but they did like it when the pool was filled with clean water.  They just wished it didn’t take so long.

Draining the pool had caused a big duck scented puddle to form next to the pool in the yard.  The ducks always get excited about puddles and Potassium got up and started quacking excitedly while drinking from the puddle and splashing with her webbed feet.  Penelope thought this looked like good fun so she got up and started doing the same.  The two ducks made so many excited quacking sounds that they attracted the attention of Ferdinand, the third duck, who had been sitting in some bushes behind the trampoline.  Quack quack quack, splash splash splash, went the three ducks.

Finally the pool had drained all the way and it was time for the house human to start filling it up again.  The hose does not quite reach all the way to the pool, so the human had to rig up a system involving a ten foot section of rain gutter to get the fresh water into the pool.  The clean cool water cascaded into the empty pool, attracting the attention of all three ducks, but the ducks would rather have a pool of water than a waterfall, so they continued to play in the puddle of old duck water until the pool had filled up about half way.

swimming is a great way to cool down when things get hot

Ferdinand was the first duck to get into the pool, but Potassium had other ideas.  Potassium got into the pool with Penelope following close behind and the two of them chased Ferdinand out.  Ferdinand had some idea what was going on and decided it would be nice to just sit down in the shade for a while.

With Ferdinand out of the pool, Potassium and Penelope swiftly got down to business.  Potassium swam to the middle of the pool, and Penelope swam up behind her.  Penelope swiftly mounted Potassium, grabbing Potassium’s head tuft with her bill while she inserted her duck penis into Potassium’s duck vagina.  Penelope dunked Potassium’s head under the water several times during their duck intercourse.  Potassium’s serene duck-smile and half closed eyes when her head surfaced each time let the voyeuristic house human know she didn’t object to Penelope’s rough handling.

Soon Penelope had ejaculated her duck semen into Potassium’s duck vagina and she dismounted.  Having gotten what she wanted, Potassium exited the duck pool and went to sit down next to Ferdinand.  Potassium and Ferdinand exchanged a few quite quacking sounds, and Ferdinand, with a glimmer in her eye, got up and waddled over to the duck pool to join Penelope.

. . . to be continued?

Grape Raspberry Jam

grape peeling

Allison has started a jam making project.  Our grape vine went crazy this year and produced a couple gallons of grapes.  In addition to that, Allison has been working on a farm which gave her a big basket of raspberries.

Allison says that you have to peel each grape before putting it into the pot, so people were peeling grapes in the kitchen all day yesterday.  That was basically the main thing that was happening in the kitchen:  grape peeling.  The raspberries did not have to be peeled, as they do not really have a tough outer surface like grapes do.  Apparently the idea is that you take the grape peels and put them through the food processor and then you add them back in with the peeled grapes.  Nobody could provide a good answer for why you couldn’t just put the whole un-peeled grapes in the food processor.

There were a lot of grapes to be peeled.

Pre-Prohibition Martini

So here I was thinking to myself that it’s time to try something new. Some kind of drink I’ve never had before. Maybe something with that Benedictine I’d made a fuss about acquiring and then never used aside from taste testing it against the Chartreuses (I think it tastes more like the yellow than the green, but I neglected to write down those results so probably the tests will have to be repeated at some point in the future). So I get out our copy of the 2009 edition of Mr. Boston:  Official Bartender’s Guide.  Actually it was already sitting on the bar, but I’m going to call the act of picking it up getting it out.  Usually with these things, these bartender guides and books of cocktail recipes, I just flip through them until I find a drink that looks palatable but new; or on some nights, I meticulously craft which ever drinks are possible considering available ingredients in sequential order as they appear in the book.  Generally that’s how I end up with a drink with raw egg in it.

So this time I was after something that contained Benedictine.  I open up Mr. Boston, and this time I start in the very front for some reason, probably because it’s a pretty new book and in good shape and it seems like the respectful thing to do to a book, open it up to the beginning, and it’s got all the little tables and drawings and instructions on how to muddle, how to shake, and that stuff is always so much fun to read so I get side-tracked and start reading about like how if I have four people at a dinner party I should have two 750 ml bottles of wine or just one 1.5 liter bottle (I guess the chart got more complicated later on) and how there is a special muddling tool you can buy that is made of wood and then at the end of all this there is a chapter titled “Cocktail Classics.”  The chapter starts out with the Old-Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail.  I start turning pages.  Next is the Manhattan.  I’m drawn in by the opening line, “A hundred years after the Old-Fashioned, near the end of the 1800’s, we find the Manhattan.”  Really that should have made me go back and read about the Old-Fashioned, but I was intrigued.  I had always thought the Martini was the first cocktail, and that it was a product of the San Francisco gold rush, putting it’s origin somewhere after 1849, right? Anyway, next page:  the Martini Cocktail.

Mr. Boston does not agree with my San Francisco gold rush story at all.  Instead, he claims the Martini is some kind of better looking brother of the older drink:  the Martinez, sort of like Micky vs. Mortimer.  Except I think most of us probably knew about Mortimer.  The “Martinez” shows up in “The Bar-Tender’s Guide” from 1887 and calls for:

Martinez Cocktail

• 1 dash of Boker’s bitters
• 2 dashes of Maraschino
• 1 pony of Old Tom gin
• 1 wine-glass of vermouth
• 2 small lumps of ice

Boker’s is apparently like angostura.  Old Tom, some kind of sweetened gin which is no longer produced by anyone.  Mr. Boston helpfully explains to us that 1 wine-glass means two ounces.  However, we are left on our own to decide what 1 pony means.  Or Google, I suppose.  Apparently a pony is an ounce.

Anyway that’s not the one I ended up making.  This is what I made:

Martini Cocktail (dry)

• 1 ounce Gin
• 1 ounce Dry Vermouth
• 1 dash Orange Bitters

Stir with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, garnish with a twist of lemon.

There is also a recipe for a sweet martini, which calls for sweet vermouth instead of dry.  The book claims that the term “dry martini” used to simply mean use dry vermouth instead of sweet, and it was during and after prohibition when a whole lot of newbies we manning the bar when “dry” came to mean “less” in terms of Vermouth, and Vermouth came to mean Dry Vermouth.  I have no idea what happened to the bitters.  I’ve never heard of putting bitters in a Martini.  Not a proper Martini, at least, as in a drink made of gin and Vermouth, as opposed to the contemporary definition of “Martini” as a synonym for “cocktail.”  So I made it.  I even stirred and strained instead of putting it into the shaker.

At this point in writing this post I have finished the first cocktail and have had to go and make another.  I’m using Bombay Sapphire, Martini & Rossi extra dry Vermouth, and Stirrings Blood Orange Bitters.  For this second drink I halved the amount of Vermouth as that first drink did seem a bit Vermouth-y.  I am kind of regretting that decision.  The gin stands out way more in this second drink, but there is still the aftertaste of Vermouth.  Now I love gin, and am usually happy to be sipping on a glass of straight Bombay Sapphire, Hendricks, or Juniper, but with these proportions it seems more like the Gin and Vermouth are fighting each other, each trying to punch through.  With equal proportions the drink was very smooth, with more white wine flavours than gin flavours.  For what I think of as a Martini, it was rather sweet, akin perhaps to drinking a fortified white wine.

I do like the addition of orange bitters.  And the twist of lemon is my preferred Martini garnish.  I’ve been experimenting with increasing the ratio of Vermouth to Gin in my Martini’s anyway, though 1:1 still seems laughably high.  Would I give up my more standard Martini composed of two ounces of gin, a half capful of Vermouth, and a twist of lemon for this?  No, but I think it is worth trying.

I think it helps to have relatively fresh Vermouth.  I usually buy the smallest bottle possible.  It is tempting to get the giant bottle for $6 instead of the 375 ml bottle for $4, but it is a wine of sorts and I don’t trust it to stay shelf stable after opening in the same way I trust a scotch or a vodka.

Getting Drunk in the Kitchen

Today in the gun-totin’ Montana backcountry we are making Guiness Beef Stew! I am very excited about this. We will find out:

1) Whether Guiness beef stew can make you drunk
2) Whether drinking while making Guiness beef stew can make you drunk

This is a delicate procedure. To facilitate the experiment, I have here:

1 pint of Guiness (partially drunken)
3 large yellow onions
4 russet gold potatoes
A bag of baby carrots (soon to be chopped)
1 large bottle of Vodka
2 lbs stewing beef
flour
salt
fresh thyme

Also, we have a very lovely 6qt Rival Red Slow Cooker. It’s programmable!

OK, I seared all the beef in a pan and chopped up everything else that I could possibly chop. They say to put the beef into a bag of flour and shake it up and THEN sear it, but I think that’s crazy. When I did that the first time I ended up with beef and flour all over the kitchen. Not this time! I just piled all the vegetables and seared beef into the slow cooker, and put some flour on top for good measure. I added a shot of vodka to myself. Then I poured what was left of the Guiness into the stew, stirred it all up and turned it on HIGH.

You’re supposed to cook it on LOW, but since it is already 1PM and the stew is supposed to cook for 8 hours, I am just going to cook it for a half hour on HIGH instead of LOW! Maybe it’ll be done early! Or maybe it’ll all burn up into a shriveled crisp. Stay tuned!!!

***Update: After 1 hour, neither the stew nor myself seem noticeably changed. I leave the stew on HIGH and make a vodka tonic.

***Update: After 2 hours, one of us is starting to smell pretty good!