It’s once again an Australia Time Friday! It’s FRIDAY!!!!
The Tucker
Since we really like the lamburger Steaks, I’m planning on those again. Saute some red onions in the pan, make 1/2 pound steaks about 1/2 inch thick so they cook quickly, lay them in some olive oil in the big cast iron skillet and sprinkle on some dried garlic granules. Salt & Pepper to tasted.
Side vegetables will be an “American” Bag-O-Salad and “California mix” vegetables. This is a frozen mix of broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, cellery and some other stuff I don’t remember. Dump in a steamer basket, hit the boil and steam for about 8 minutes.
For desert, I picked up some fresh strawberries. Mine will likely get too much sugar and a bit of goat milk. Spouse usually just wants the pure berry but sugars them if a bit tart.
Once again Australian Lamburger can be had for about $7 / lb, so looks like the worst of the price hike / shortage has passed. Either that or it just wasn’t moving at $10 ;-)
The Wine
Tonight is a moderate amount (as I actually have to be at work tomorrow morning… how strange…) of Gumdale Cabernet Sauvignon 2017. Strange to think of 2017 as a 5 year old bottle, but there it is.
Dark inky purple, almost black, in the glass, showing just a hint of red in the meniscus at the glass / wine interface. Made a thinner view, it becomes more deep redish. Nose has a hint of smoke in it, perhaps from the barrels? Nice fruit in the nose, but not excessive. Very smooth on the tongue. Dry but not harsh. Tannins enough for interest, but not so much as to be demanding more time in the bottle. The flavor is VERY interesting, but I don’t know quite how to describe it. Reminds me of some of the blends I’ve experimented with.
This ought to go very well with meats & cheeses. We’ll find out shortly ;-) I’d not marry it with a strong marinara full of fire, but a milder one would work well. Nor would I waste it on a pepperoni pizza. But with a nice prime rib, or chops, or lamb? Oh yeah.
Musings from the Chiefio 
CA strawberries are $2/pound this week; central WA USA. They look nice but most are not ripe.
There is too much white on the stem end. I accept the loss and cut that away.
A little sugar and time to get into the cut-up fruit helps.
Many strawberries are now grown in-side where control is good. They even vacuum the bugs off.
I haven’t seen a package that says so, but I think COSTCO sells those. Percent grown that way is an interesting unknown.
Cheers.
The economics of greenhouses and hydroponics are interesting. Due to consumer preference and the added yields of tight control, plus reduced “input” costs for hydroponics, they have started to dominate a few food types.
Lettuce and saladings in general.
Tomatoes and similar small fruits.
Greens of several kinds.
Strawberries and related fruits.
Things like summer squash too.
A tight greenhouse operation or indoor hydroponics rarely has any bugs to vacuum off. If you do get bugs, it is typically easier to isolate them to one growhouse and then eradicate them. No need to drench 1000 acres in tons of pesticides.
There’s even rooftop operations popping up in major cities. Many harvest for restaurants in the building below them. At least one is on top of a Whole Foods grocery store and supplies them. Removing all the transport costs is a gain too.
Not yet done?
Big orchards for big fruit trees and nuts. It can be done, but isn’t as the facilities costs rise and outdoors works fine.
Grains and other bulk ‘field crops’. Just not enough $/ton to be worth it.
Pasture and hay / fodder operations. Though there is a great buckwheat greens operation for dairy cattle. Sprout buckwheat seeds in a dozen layers in a truck / trailer like facility, once a few inches high, feed to the cows roots and all. Make for more and better milk, so a premium
Indoor farming is taking over anywhere the quality maters enough that folks will pay up a little, and where you get a decent $/square foot (and especially where you can put a few dozen layers over the same acre of real dirt…)
You can get several crops a year instead of just one, also.
Per Strawberries:
Yeah, these were a little light in the flavor department from being a bit less than fully ripe. OTOH, I’ve had way too many rot in the basket in a day when peak ripe… And a spoon of sugar fixes a lot of that ;-)
The Gumdale name is owned by Casella Wines, the sellers of Yellow Tail. Name in use for various wines since 2006 at least.
An origin of South eastern Australia means that the wine could come from any of NSW, Victoria and South Australia, so likely it is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon from several areas.
Bon appetit, E.M.
An American teenager’s perspective on the differences she found when she moved to Australia. Interesting :
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/us-teen-reveals-culture-shocks-she-had-after-moving-to-australia/news-story/21f6f6d50871c31081c9d28b60816b85
We’ve been in Florida when the strawberries come in. I can find dead ripe strawberries.
The trick is to clean and slice them immediately, put them is a container with some sugar, though we use sucralose and it works just fine, and put the sealing lid on the container. When I was using sugar, I’d say I was only sprinkling about a tablespoon of sugar for a whole pound of strawberries. It doesn’t take much.
The strawberries last 4 to 5 days that way. I usually buy some pound cake and slice it, or buy some of the mini single serve pound cakes and spoon the strawberry slices over them . Then pile on the whipped cream. Yum!
BTW, I rinse the berries after hulling them and don’t drain them. The small bit of water that remains on the berries makes a bit of strawberry sauce to soak into the pound cake.
P.S. I suppose I’m just guessing that the strawberries would be good up to five days. They never actually last that long. 😁
Seriously, though, at day three they are still fine and dandy. That’s about the longest they are around before all of them are eaten and they seem to have another day or two left in them.
@P.G.:
Well, dinner was very nice! The wine goes well with Colby Jack cheese as that was the nibble I was using during the cooking ;-)
@H.R.:
Sugar is a preservative. Put enough in and they will keep for years at room temperature (see Strawberry Jam & Preserves). Ours are usually gone in one or at most 2 days, unless I buy way too much and folks are timid …
So between zero and fuzzy in a few days, and lots with water extracted and in a jar for years, there will be “several days to few weeks in the fridge”… IF it were not for the fork… ;-) Isn’t that where the phrase “Fork You” comes from ? :-0
I think I have already linked to a demo project “Greenhouse in The Snow” about the guy growing Citrus in central Nebraska using very low heat-density “geo-thermal” energy and a heat pump.
Might as well link again though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_3_gsgsnk
INFRASTRUCTURE!
Maybe I should write up a grant proposal for my under-two-acre site and see if the Biden boodles would flow my way… The list of buzzwords only begins with geo-thermal. Passive solar heating. Reduced diesel transportation costs. Diverting tonnage from interstate highways or air freight. Modern micro-manufacturing… Yadda yadda
@Pouncer:
Yes, I read that before in your prior link. As I recall, he just blows air through pipes in the dirt to get the warmth. Takes a lot of air to cool down a few hundred ton of dirt ;-)
I, too, have pondered the efficacy of applying for grants with “all the right buzz words” in place… I’m really really tempted to go for it. I mean, really, they are literally tossing $Trillions into the grant garbage disposal / Friends Of Socialism hopper, why not catch a small bit. Maybe just a $Million ;-)
Yea, I have to be at work tomorrow morning as well. Seems WFH is now a 6 day job. Oh well.
@BillinOz – before breaking out the concentration camp comparisons, I suspect she went to a big inner city high school. There are no metal detectors in the schools in my district, the one to the north, or the county to the south. However in the middle is a kind of big city. And it may well have them. It also has the worst graduation rate in the area. And the lowest accreditation rate as well. In short, while not as bad as big cities, it is definitely not as good as rural or burb areas. But I do not know if they have metal detectors.
Based upon the article (and with no additional information), I would say she moved from Austin to Australia.
@philjourdan : yes what you say is probably right. However most people in the USA do live in those big cities like Austin so I suggest in those big US cities metal detectors are ‘normal’ way of preventing violent incidents. Such is not the case here. Something else ( apart from being Covid free ) for which I am very grateful.
Cheers !
I oven-roasted that bone-in leg of lamb. That was good, but way too much left over.
I cut away the remains from the bones and ran them trough a meat grinder with the coarse mesh.
Tonight, I’m doing a Shepherd’s Pie with lamb for the first time. I normally use a mix of ground beef and sausage or just ground beef.
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I made some Lamb Hash this morning for breakfast. I had some fries left over from eating out yesterday. I lined up a handful and cut them into cubes, as was discussed a month or so ago for making crispy hash browns.
As the potatoes were crisping up, I tossed in some diced onion, Then I added the ground up lamb near the end, since it just needed heating a bit and didn’t need to cook.
Lamb hash is good!
@H.R.:
I know it’s too late now as you have fed the grinder… but…
One of my FAVORITE meals is to take two big slices of bread. Butter nicely. Slice nice slices of lamb off the cooked leg (about 1/8 inch thick) and pile them to about 3/8 high on the bread. Apply salt and pepper, put the other slice of buttered bread on top, cut into halves or quarters and man is it good!
Also:
The bone and ALL the pan drippings and some of the meat I couldn’t get off go into a big pot of water to simmer. Add onion, celery carrots, and simmer for a good long while. Toward the end, add potatoes diced and cook until done (20 minutes?). A few minutes before the end, add any diced lamb you want to use up (any tough / grisly bits go in at the start as that softens them over the hour or two) Season as you like it (salt, pepper, garlic, particular herbs, etc.)
Makes a dandy stew.
@E.M. – I did one sandwich. Yup. It is yummy stuff. Oh, except instead of slabs, I do a pile of deli-thin shaved slices.
The Shepherd’s pie came out great! Real comfort food. I made two 9″ x 14″ x 3″ deep pans (one for the neighbors).
It is very mild on the lamb flavor, but it sure as heck is lamb and not anything else. My only regret is that I had to back off on the garlic (zero) and herbs (a little) to suit a broad audience that isn’t into garlic or strong lamb flavor. It’s a PG-13 rated Shepherd’s Pie.
This batch nailed it. People who don’t like lamb will suck it down. People who don’t care for garlicky foods will suck it down. Even the dog would suck it down…. wait… that dog will eat anything. Never mind the dog part. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. 😜
I’ve never done lamb stew, so I’ll have to put that on my list. I have about one and a half pounds of the ground up lamb left, but I was planning on using it for lamb burritos, quesadillas, and another round of lamb hash. Maybe some lamb chili, eh?
Oh…… or maybe instead of ham salad for sandwiches I’ll make lamb salad. The ground lamb, mayo, a bit of dill relish, some pimento, and bit of minced onion. And finally to suit me, add some garlic.
Oopsie! I messed up my credentials, either the H.R. part had a comma and not a period or I accidently used that bad email address that had crept in last year.
There’s a lamb comment in the moderation queue.
@Billinoz – no most of us do NOT live in those cities,
Thank you for your prejudice.
@E.M. – Who in the World has ever done lamb chili?!?
Beef chili – normal. White chicken chili – soooo yesterday. Pork green chili – I am THEEEEEE master.
So I’m starting to lean in that direction. I’ve never heard of anyone doing lamb chili, so mine will be the best ever in the whole wide world, no matter how crappy it turns out. 😜 😮 🤣🤣🤣
P.S. I was watching some show – food? travel? food & travel You ate WHAT?!?! – and they were in South America at a roasted guinea pig specialty restaurant. You picked out a guinea pig and they roasted it for you with ohhhhh… 11 secret herbs and spices, I suppose. I think a junta colonel ran the place, not a Kentucky Colonel. I digress.
Whazzat “Austin“!?
The article linked above:
begins thus:
Uh, huhhh: Another new-millennium snowflake who fears guns.
Whether considering the 2010 Decennial Census, or the namesake bureau’s 2019 guesstimates, out of the 384 U.S. “metropolitan statistical areas”, her former home city Houston‘s MSA [#] ranks 5th in population in the entire Newnited States. Altho’ down from 4th place a few decades ago, it’s still booming: The Bureau’s 2019 population guesstimate:
7.066 M, is +19.35% from the 2010 count: 5.920 M. It remains behind Dallas, which is now ranked 4th [##].
But in violent crime, Houston ranks only 18th [†]. Maybe at least the more clueful violent criminals realize the risks of crime in a state whose inhabitants believe that the U.S. 2nd Amendment means literally what the words mean as written [🔍].
——–
Note # : Formally the “Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX MSA”.
Note ## : Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas.
Yes, the U.S. Census has its own Web site, but its visitors having only casual interest, it nonetheless seems determined to push the Bureau’s latest estimates, incorporating their latest fudge factors, instead of their most recently completed actual counts! Our Deep State at work, I suppose. No, I really don’t want to be instructed to load a whole Census spreadsheet just to get a few straightforward numbers for a few simple comparisons.
Note † : Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate. Beware that these numbers are per 100,000 of total population, for which the bases might be city limits, not the more populous enclosing MSAs: E.g., each of Dallas, Ft. Worth, and Arlington has a separate entry.
Note 🔍 : The entirety of the 2nd Amendment, for which the complex opening phrase is a rationale, not a condition limiting that Right. The Founding Fathers, on average, were significantly more literate than the average for any modern U.S. legislative body. That opening phrase just screams ablative absolute at any literate person familiar with idiosyncrasies of Latin, as were the Founding Fathers.
Just a few extracts from the News online article Imposted the link for last Friday :
“Since posting the video on Thursday it has already been viewed over 300,000 times and received almost 57,000 likes.
Among the 1500 comments were people discussing the fact school kids in America have to walk through metal detectors – the vast majority not realising that occurred overseas.
“Some Australians don’t understand how lucky we are,” one said.
“The metal detector one made me sad for you and the kids in American schools,” another said.
“Being Australian is like winning the lottery,” one person stated.”
I know that this may feel like gloating but I’m trying to simply describe how it feels to be here in Oz.
Is life perfect ? No. But it’s a lot better than anywhere else I know on the planet..
PS I cannot get lamb steaks anymore…:-(
The drought has really broeken with lots of rain over most of the continent. That means green grass and farmers are not selling livestock. Instead they are buying cattle and sheep to fatten up for market. And livestock prices have gone way North !
PPS We are going into an early cold Winter here in Southern Australia. – 6 weeks early..I’ve got the wood fire going each night to stay warm.. Buggered if I know where that Gorebull Warming has got to. !
@BillInOz:
Kids through metal detectors in schools is not a USA vs Australia thing.
It is a Democrat Ruined Cities vs Rural thing.
My kids never went through metal detectors at school. I’ve never seen one. We live in a nice middle class suburb. I’ve heard horror stories from about 50 miles north of me (Oakland area)…
It is also an “over time” thing. When I was in High School in my rural farm town, the first day of Hunting Season the cars (parked in a dirt lot directly in front of the school) were rushed at the final bell of the day. IN THE LOT, kids were putting on their hunting vests, racking their shotguns, checking ammo supply, then closing the trunk and headed out to their favorite Pheasant area. There was NEVER a problem. (Lucky kids had been taken out of school ‘sick’ in the morning, by their Dad, to get first crack at the birds…) This lot was on school grounds.
There were also DCM (Department Of Civilian Marksmanship) classes at some schools and kids would take their gun to school to train / do target practice. Yes, kids sometimes walking to school with a rifle slung on their shoulder. Again, no bad thing happened.
But that was 50 years ago. Thanks to decades of Left Wing Indoctrination and suppression of conservative training about guns and such, we now have a hoard of idiots who turn 18 and get their first chance ever to buy a gun. Many of these are now in Urban Gangs in Liberal Left cities. Many with horrific Gun Banning (it is not ‘gun control’) laws. The result has been horrid. “Gun Culture” is largely about assuring folks know how to handle a gun and how to respect it and NOT do stupid or illegal things with it. Driving “Gun Culture” from the public square has resulted in all this mess.
But in rural areas it’s still fine, mostly.
So please do realize anything of the form “FOO happens all over America” is almost certainly wrong. We are an incredibly diverse continent and it is different all over. Some States have legal open carry (was that way in California when I was a kid) and seeing someone with a gun strapped to the hip is more or less normal. Other areas not so much. Some (few in my experience) schools have metal detectors. Most do not. Heck, our schools in California semi-urban 50 miles from gang land only just got FENCES around them about 2 years back. You could just walk in from any direction before that. (Though even now the fences have lots of gates and nobody is monitoring them).
So beware the Click Bait Emotional Hype articles… It can lead to silly Drive By Smugging in error.
@E.M. – Not forgetting that the highest per capita murders with handguns occurs in the cities with the strictest, most draconian gun control laws. Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia
Criminals don’t care about gun laws while law abiding citizens exercising their 2nd Amendment rights are hassled on every legal aspect and transaction and hit with the full force of the law for even the tiniest infraction.
But all your observations are pretty much what my experience has been. We were born in the same year so grew up with pretty much the same cultural touchstones.
@Billioz – I already told you that it was not an “American thing”. It was a regional thing propagated by left wingnuts,. Why do you persist in the lie?
None of the school districts in this area have them, So if we decide to look at the penal colony on your remote facility and say that is Oz, then that must be true?
Ok, Australian is a penal colony! BillinOz has validated it as true.