OT: Ice was Re: [Sca-cooks] Tamales

[Bill Fisher]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:31:32 -0800, Laura C. Minnick <lcm at jeffnet.org> wrote:
> At 11:32 AM 1/30/2005, you wrote:
> > > On a side note.  I live in a city that is known to get ice storms in the
> > > winter.  Why am I the only person at work who owns an ice scraper?
> > > A big, northern style ice scraper :-)
> > >
> > > Cadoc
> >
> >Got me.  Auto parts stores in Southern California don't even sell them, and
> >I've been asking.  It's been a weird winter all over North America.
> >
> >I wound up bringing a hard plastic spatula out to my car for the icy days.
> >So far it's working!  Just, nobody better ask for pancakes until the weather
> >turns warm.  <grin>
> 
> We get ice storms here in Oregon too (especially when the wind comes from
> the Columbia Gorge) and I discovered that a credit card works really well
> in a pinch. If it's just the windshield, that is. Last year when we had the
> 6" of snow topped with 1 1/2-2" of ice, the plastic snow shovel did a
> decent job of peeling the huge sheets of ice off of the Volvo. The street
> wasn't clear though, so it's not like I could go anywhere...
> 
> 'Lainie

I used a plastic lid to bust the ice off of my windshield on Friday night
before I went to work.  My mexican neighbors were telling me I shouldn't
drive because the roads weren't safe and calling me a crazy dead man.
I had looked in my truck then because I was fairly sure I had a scraper
but couldn't find it.    

When I went to leave work at 7AM, my boss gave me one of those tight
lipped looks that tells me that he is gonna call me a crazy person.  So I 
wound up working till noon (14 hours) and then went out and busted the
ice off of my truck once I found the ice scraper (it was under the drum, 
behind the jump seat).  

I watched the rain freeze last night after I got up.  Then watched it
slough off of everything as the sun came up before I took a nap, 
then got up and went to the International Farmer's Market for produce, 
chicken and sushi.  

It is good to buy the sushi right from the fish market sometimes.
They have a sushi chef there who resembles one of the Iron Chefs
(Michiba, I think, but taller).  I asked him which was the freshest
fish he had and he cut me a small sample, very cool.

I checked on the Tripe - it is supposedly raw, as in they clean it up and
cut it up, but they use an alkalai solution to clean/whiten it.  They also
had some unprocessed tripe and it was a happy grey color. I figure
the alkali bath softens it a bit too as well as dissolving any rogue 
biomass from the tripe. The unprocessed tripe looked way harder than
the processed.  

They also did not have squid ink in stock, but they didn't look very
hard as they were quite busy.  They said commercial squid usually
blows its ink when it is caught, trying to outwit the net. I kept looking
at the frozen squid and thinking mmmmmmm......bait.  Don't get me
wrong, I love to eat squid, but I grew up fishing in Deleware on the 
weekends, using block frozen squid for bait.

I'd like to be able to go through the store with someone who is able
to read at least one of the asian languages....some parts of the store
are just jars of pickled things in various sauces to me.

Cadoc 
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