Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Thoroughfloof (floofinition) – a fastidious, meticulous, or tidy housepet.
In use: “A thoroughfloof in his litter box habits, the big tabby tom always dug a hole, did his business in the hole, and then covered the hole with his business with brisk, quick strokes.”
“The beagle was a throughfloof when it came to food, snatching up and lapping up anything dropped on the floor before two seconds passed, and licking his bowl clean at every feeding.”
My friend nan referred me to Mary Roach’s book, Gulp, when I wrote about how my urine tastes, and I’m in her debt. After working down through my book piles, I started reading it on Saturday. It’s one of those books that forces me to set it down to think and conduct research. I’m still reading Gulp, but it’s a fascinating read. Ostensibly about the alimentary canal, it includes much about animals and humans’ eating habits, and some of the psychology behind our food choices.
One of the early facts that she stated is that most people only eat about forty flavors. When I shared that with my wife, she asked, “Is cheese one flavor?”
Good question, right? Is an IPA the same as a porter, stout, and lager? Why, no. I drink each for the different flavors they share with me. My choices also depend on what I’m doing and eating. So, do I put down beer as one flavor choice, delineate between the different beverages, or go more deeply into what makes it all up?
These are important distinctions because my wife and I immediately set out attempting to catalog our flavors. We quickly became trapped in a ball of mud about what parts of what flavors we like. We like dark chocolate but I don’t like it overly bitter, like past seventy-two percent. She likes it a little sweeter. Is dark chocolate a flavor, or is it chocolate with sugar, with whatever else is in there?
Those of you who eat gluten-free foods probably understand what I mean, along with the folks that eat sugar-free and fat-free offerings. They taste different. They’re a different experience in my mouth and on my tongue. Some of that may be psychological. In taste tests done with white and red wine, being able to see the color makes a difference in how the flavor is interpreted and described. Likewise, tests have shown that frequently, most of the differences observed between ten dollar bottle of wine and more expensive ones are often about perceptions of quality and expense; the more that something costs, the better it’s supposed to be, right?
It’s a knotty question. The whole thing about pet food was pretty mind-blowing. According to Mary’s research and writing, most cat food tastes about the same to the animals, regardless of what the flavor is supposed to be. To which I respond, say whaaat? My cats seem to show definite preferences, preferring to eat fishy stuff — which smells fishy to me — over the chicken, and chicken over beef. None of them are impressed with “Supper Super”. Gulp claims that these preferences are mostly about my perceptions, and not the animals.
It could be that I’m reading the whole thing wrong, or mis-interpreting the data. It does explain the waffle and fried chicken cat treats that have arrived. It’s not that the animals like waffles and chicken, but we, their owners, think that they’ll enjoy them.
The book fascinates me, too, because of the connections between tasting food and smell, and our brains’ acceptance about what is not good for us. I’m often smelling things and trying to analyze what I’m smelling, a process that I call, “What the hell is that smell?” My wife does the same. This leads to a game at our household that goes like this:
Her: “Do you smell that?”
Me: “You need to tell me what you mean. I smell many things.”
“That smell.”
“Again…”
“It smells like cat piss.”
“No, I don’t smell that.”
Sniffing the air, furniture, and carpet, we start looking around the area to see if it looks like a cat has pissed where they shouldn’t.
Me: “Maybe it’s the litter box.”
“It smells too strong. It smells like it’s right beside me.”
“Maybe a cat peed on your clothes. Are they wet?”
“I think I’m going to go change.”
Me: “I don’t smell cat piss, but I do smell someone’s marijuana crop. Or maybe it’s a skunk. Do you smell a skunk?”
The game goes on forever, it seems like.
I’ll keep reading Gulp. If more is explained, than I’ll come back and read another post.
That’s just the way it goes.
Foodiefloof (floofinition) – a housepet who displays loyalty to whoever has the food; a housepet who is fond of food and eating.
In use: “Titus is sometimes a dudefloof, but when I’m cooking, he becomes a foodiefloof, and then, he’s all mine!”
I was eating some dandelions the other day. It wasn’t quite a whim. It’d begun with yard work.
We have lawns. We don’t pesticides or fertilizers on them, except some fertilizer from our compost barrels. We compost a lot of kitchen waste.
I used to pull the weeds from my lawn. We stopped doing that as we read about the bee decline and witnessed how the bees enjoyed our dandelions. Butterflies, too. But, for fire reasons, we cut the grass back to four inches high. That height also protects the roots so watering the lawn isn’t required often. In the even of drought or water shortages, of course, the first thing I do to save water is to stop watering the grass.
While I was doing the back yard cutting the other day, I was taking stock of all the dandelions we had. I knew that people used to eat dandelions as part of a basic diet and wondered about dandelions’ health impact and their taste. To the Google! Sites claim that dandelions are tremendously healthy. Here’s an excerpt from Nutrition-and-You.com:
Sounds impressive. Curious about how they taste, I went out in the morning, harvested some fresh dandelions from the yard, and chowed down on the raw leaves and flowers.
Turns out that they taste like mildly-bitter Romaine lettuce to me. Super, I thought. I liked being able to eat it because. It’s a great added bonus to helping the bees, and it helps reduce our yard waste. I guess I have a new pastime this year, harvesting dandelions and trying new recipes. Bet they’d be pretty tasty on a grilled pizza.
I’ll let you know.
Hibble (floofinition) – term housepets use for the foods that people eat.
In use: “Hearing the plastic bag rustle in the other room, the cat and dog recognized that she was getting one of her favorite hibbles, corn chips, out, and prepared themselves to beg for a few themselves, as the salty snack was one of their favorite hibbles, too.”
“What are your goals today?”
It was the female without an accent asking. Accents and the apparent sexes their voices displayed were the only way of identifying the daily taskmasters. Identifying was a weak expression, as they remained nameless and without form.
He scratched and swallowed. He needed to get up and drink water but also pee. Was that ironic? No, coincident.
Goals. “I want to get up and pee.” That would get him no points but they didn’t remonstrate him. Still, sharp past responses made him moderate his approach.
“Write, of course,” he said.
“You always do that,” she said.
Did he imagine that she sighed? “Still counts,” he said.
Silence answered. They weren’t pleased.
He said, “Wash, vacuum, and gas the cars.”
A male overseer said, “Good,” with boredom as thick as flies on shit.
“Yard work.”
“Hmmm.”
“Finish reading a book.”
“Oh.” The female. “What book?”
“Donna Leon, The Waters of Eternal Youth”.
“Very good.” Happiness seemed to shower him. “That’s a good goal. Good luck.”
He was released. Opening his eyes, he sat up. Of all that he’d said, what would most count was reading the book. That was his number one priority. He was hungry and needed enough points to get a decent meal. He sensed that if he failed to read the book, they’d punish him.
Draining his bladder in the water closet, he snorted and chortled. His mind was a strange overseer.
I’m fighting waste and ageism wherever I find it and have realized an amendment is in order.
I think everyone is familiar with the five-second rule. To ensure we’re addressing the same rule, the five-second rule states that food items dropped on the floor can still be consumed if they can be retrieved before five seconds expire.
This discriminates against older people. Our elders can often encounter problems bending over and picking things up. Hell, just noticing that they dropped something can take several seconds.
Therefore, I’m proposing an amendment to the five-second rule. Individuals over fifty-five years of age will be allotted one extra second to the five-second-rule.
Examples: a person of sixty years of age will have an additional five seconds. That gives them ten seconds to notice they dropped food, find it, pick it up, and eat it. Someone who is seventy will have an extra fifteen seconds (twenty in total).
Of course, if you’re over one hundred, you can take all the time you want, sugar.
The floor is open for discussion.
After moving out of Mom’s house when I was fourteen and moving in with Dad, I missed my old home and Mom’s cooking.
Dad, a bachelor, was in the military. He’d just returned from an assignment in Germany. Besides his military day job, he had a second job running the small base’s all-ranks club, so I rarely saw him. That lasted three months. Then he retired and we moved to southern WV.
I’d mentioned missing Mom’s cooking to her on one of our phone conversations. Mom bought me Betty Crocker Cook Book as a present so I could make the stuff she had.
It was a humbling lesson. Mom usually used a recipe in her head. I had to plod their detailed instructions. Whereas her measuring skills were fast and effortlessly, I labored through cups, tsp, tbs, and their incremental differences.
But I weathered it, making myself stuffed green peppers, meat loaf, pot roast, spaghetti and meatballs, along with side dishes, and eventually baked cakes, cookies, pies, and other desserts. I never made fried chicken, odd in retrospect. I preferred roasting or grilling my chicken. In fact, my favorite meal became over-roasted thighs with buttered red potatoes and broccoli.
Don’t know why I never made the fried chicken. Maybe I was lazy, or maybe, subconsciously, I knew that some things couldn’t be duplicated.
We heard a story…
Everyone had grown up and left the home, nurturing their lives, careers, and dreams. Somehow, though, they began having Sunday dinner together every week. Mom was so overjoyed that she made their favorite every week, which was southern fried chicken.
I immediately recalled watching Mom go through her fried-chicken process in our little ranch style home in the mid 1960s. Starting with a whole chicken, she would wash it and rub it down with cold water and then burn the remains of the feathers off over the gas burner. Truthfully, I never saw any feathers. I don’t know if Mom saw any, either, but this was her process.
Next, she washed the chicken again, and then dried it, and cut it into pieces. The pieces were dipped in egg, and then rolled in white flour with salt and pepper. She fried it in grease from her drippings collection in a big electric skillet. (Crisco later replaced the drippings.) The chicken was vigilantly watched and turned. When judged ready, they were removed and put on paper towels so excess grease could drip off.
I know her process well, and know how her fried chicken tasted as well. Nothing like grabbing a cold piece of fried chicken out of the refrigerator for a late-evening snack. Like many things she made for us to eat in those years, it ruined things for me later. I’ve always been looking for something that tastes as good as Mom’s. When you’ve had the best, it’s imprinted.
My wife made something really delicious for dinner this evening. Actually, we had it for lunch. We ate loads of it, along with bread, and then had big salads for dinner.
It’s the third time that she made it. I really can’t say more about it than that, except also that it smells fantastic. You can smell all the ____ and ____ ____. It’s incredible.
That’s really all I can say. She has this thing about me not bragging to other people about the food that she makes. She says that it builds up too much anticipation for it and then she worries that it won’t be good as people expect it to be because I bragged about it so much.
Like, for instance, take her __________ as an example. I loved it, and begged her to make it all the time. And she did. I had her make it for an office pot luck because I thought it was sooo goood. The people there agreed, so much so that they asked me to ask her to make it for several subsequent pot luck lunches. When we had guests, I always suggested that she make her__________. She often did, but then got angry because I’d ask the others, “Isn’t this great?”
That was just the one. There was also her ______, _______ ______, and her ____ _______ with ____. They’re all tasty AND healthy. ____, too. She doesn’t make those things any more, either, because I bragged about them too much. At least, it’s been a long time since she’s made them.
So, I don’t want to jinx this by telling everything how great this thing is that she made, because I really like it, and I want to have it again in the future. But if you ever visit my house, maybe she’ll make it for dinner for you. Then you can see how good it is. Maybe she’ll make her ______ for dessert, too.
I’m sure you’d love them both. Just don’t tell her that I told you about them.
