Morfydd St. Clair

Susan Mené wrote:Oh, and we call those bugs "water bugs".

Huh.  When I was in Baltimore for college, we called the 1-inch-long, black cockroaches "water bugs".  (I was like, no, that is a roach.  I even looked it up in a paper(!) dictionary - I'm old - and it said it was a roach.) I thought they were the worst until I moved into a place with the 1-cm-long brown roaches, which we called "German roaches".  Not as terrifying but occur in the hundreds.  I am pleased to note that in Germany I have never seen a roach.  I'm sure they exist (and actually the climate is pretty similar) but so far so good.  Knock on wood.

In Baltimore, people would say they were going "down'y'ocean" to mean Ocean Shores MD.

We were at the garden today so I staked up the three female plants.  The fuzzy brown branches in the foreground are one of the females; a few thorns but not many.  The white spiky branches in the background are the male; thorns aplenty.  (Despite looking dead in this photo they’re all leafing out nicely.)

Apologies for crappy photo, the garden is chaotic right now and the camera couldn’t focus on “scraggly thing here, no, here!”

Nicole Alderman wrote:

Matt McSpadden wrote:In the north we say "you guys" to mean everyone in the group, not just males. Similar to the South's y'all. I actually had a teacher get upset with me (it was a college in Virginia, far enough south that "You Guys" was not used) one time when I was planning to have the class all go out for ice cream. She wanted to know why I hadn't invited the girls. As a matter of fact, there was one particular girl I was hoping would come... but that is another story. My intention was to invite the whole class... and we eventually go it all straightened out. And I got a lesson in regional phrases :)

I'm on the other northern coast of the US, and also use "you guys" to refer to any group of people. If I were referring to a bunch of my female friends, I'd probably call them "you guys"!

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I think one of our weird linguistic things in the pacific northwest is that we call land isopods "potato bugs." Most places call them "woodlice" or "rolly polly" or "pill bug"

Yes to potato bugs!  I have heard that there is another insect with that name out there, which is horrifying looking.  I’m a big fan of not-clicking on the horrifying thing, so I don’t know what that corresponds to.

I also grew up with “you guys”.  “You guys and gals” is not really an improvement, in my opinion .  I like y’all or yins (short for you-uns in the Pittsburgh area).  You would think that in Germany, where there are not one but two words for second person plural, that would not be a problem, but I had a director who addressed us all as “Mädels”. That’s young girls, in a room where I was usually the only woman.  There were layers of ick there.

Christopher Weeks wrote:

John Weiland wrote:My wife had grown up in central PA and recalls "the car needs washed..."   or "the lawn needs mowed...", proposed to be a shortening the German "needs ....... to be" where the "to be" was at the end of the sentence.  This is not something I've ever heard here as a near life-long Minnesotan.

Interesting! The only person I know who says that routinely is from Sedalia, Missouri.

if they misbehaved, they would end up in the "hoosegow"...

I guess I thought that was from out west or something. Colloquial for jail.

there is "A guy could....".

Neat! That rings immediately true, but isn't something I'd articulated to myself. A guy could go crazy trying to list everything. :-)

As someone with an English teacher mother (and all-the-maths-and-sciences teacher father, yes I was doomed), “the car needs washed” makes my teeth itch, and yet sometimes in a hurry I say it.  I don’t think it’s a PNW thing; maybe I picked it up from my best friend, whose parents were serious Okies, or deeper from my Lancaster-area mom.

Re: “A guy could”, that sounds a bit like the way you construct “you can”/“you could” in German: “mann kann”/mann könnte”.  In a way it’s a bit more polite!  You is very direct, where someone-out-there-not-necessarily-you gives you some distance. :)

(Edited for grammar, English and German. :) )

Born and raised in and around Seattle:
“The East Side” can mean east of Lake Washington or east of the Cascade Mountains, depending on context.  Veeeery different areas.
Despite the rainy stereotype, it has always been dry from July 5 (after the traditional rain messing up July 4 fireworks) through September.  With climate change now it’s a hot dry and a real drought.
The “Seattle Freeze” is complained about by newcomers, when they meet new people who are friendly and say, “we should totally meet up again!” and then… never do. I blame the Scandinavian settlers.
Drivers are terrible.  This is true.  Partly it’s so many newcomers with radically different driving styles trying to coexist.  Yes, snow shuts the city down. a) It’s probably been +/- freezing for days so there’s a sheet of ice under that snow.  b) Hills. c) We only have to drive in snow every other year.  d) We’re bad drivers.  

Living in Hamburg, Germany:
They don’t call it the Seattle Freeze but when I describe it, locals get it. I blame the Scandinavians.
Plattdeutsch - actually closer in my head to English than regular German, but wiiiild sounding.
Platt means Flat.  Which the northern third of Germany is.  Good Lord is it flat.
There used to not be droughts - my bf once showed me a graph of precipitation by month, and it was a flat line.  Now there are droughts.
I don’t drive here much. Aside from me, I think everyone here drives pretty competently.

It’s been (cough) 30 years since my metallurgy classes, but I think they’re still safe.

At high enough temperatures they could warp, or even oxidize, but that’s just rust that can be scraped off.  They might lose their structural integrity, so they could break unexpectedly.

I’d be more worried about starting a fire with whatever was in the pot, or at least setting off your fire alarms.  And you’re probably getting more toxins from the gas stove than you ever could from your pots.

(Edited to add: I love old Revere Ware! At least donate it to charity!)

My understanding is that salting/draining/rinsing eggplant is to reduce bitterness, not flatulence.  But most modern eggplants aren’t very bitter, so you can skip it.

Fuschia Dunlop wrote the first Western cookbooks of Szechuan cuisine, and this is her favorite recipe: http://andrewzimmern.com/recipes/fuchsia-dunlops-fish-fragrant-eggplant/

(Fish-fragrant is a weird Chinese term and has nothing to do with fish.  She explains it in the recipe.)

Pearl Sutton wrote:

Morfydd St. Clair wrote:
(Most of) my spices are in similar cans with magnetic backs, stuck to the side of my refrigerator.  (This iteration uses IKEA Grundig, which is expensive and I think discontinued, but I did a DIY version years ago with jewelers cases from… Lee Valley?). Highly recommend!

But this is a great variation on the theme!  Brava!

The metal containers do stick to magnets.
Not sure what's going in them, but it still all looks to me like a display rack, if I took a display to sell stuff. Which I have done before.
Not sure what I'll put in the cans. Got about 40 of them, new, clean.

:D

I am so jealous!  I really recommend them for spices - easy to see what you have, grab a stack for a recipe, etc.

On the side of the fridge that gets warm and more light, live: Table salt, sea salt, black pepper, white pepper, garlic powder, onion powder.  They get used quickly enough that heat and light aren't a problem.

The other side of the fridge has, uh, 36 spices listed alphabetically.  Facing it I attached a steel plate to the side of my Hoosier and it holds 16 spice mixes, also alphabetically.  (Easier for me, and also when I ask the bf for something.). There's much less light and heat and I just have to cook more to use it up quickly! :)

(And I still have a stash of obscure things that get used once in a while, and the asafoetida lives in the freezer securely wrapped.)

My daily cup is made with the AeroPress, which I’ve had for more than 16 years.  I bought a metal filter (back then from some fancy coffee shop) and I’ve had to replace the rubber gasket (about $6) once.

I’ve loved Turkish/Greek coffee (be careful who you’re using which name in front of!) and have an ibrik, but it’s a lot of caffeine and more work.  I’ve recently discovered Dibek coffee, roasted with spices and mellower, also made in an ibrik but a bit faster, so that’s my new treat.

(I also have a French press and a Vietnamese drip machine that don’t get enough use.  And the bf drinks instant - ick, but the glass jars are so useful!)

For people in Europe, I got mine from Lubera.  He has a few bred by a Ukrainian researcher - specifically I picked Ukraine Freedom, which is supposed to be both sweet and thornless.  We’ll see… (The thorny male is tucked into a corner that I don’t need to get to often; the three females are more accessible.)

They’re probably not getting enough sun, and while they’re growing, they’re kind of flopping over.  Should I stake them? Fertilize them?