Any room for me at the 'because meat' table my dear? Lestat is an obligate and highly carnivorous form of life. Why? because fucking well meat, thats why. Lestat likes meat. Preferably well done. Not quite electrically conductive or crunchy on the outside but chewy and well the fuck done. Gods below he could MURDER a juicy fried slab or two of beef fillet steak, slapped into a searing hot frying pan with a trace of oil in, after first marinating in a mixture of worcestershire sauce, 'devil's brown sauce [its like HP sauce but spicy hot], dark soy sauce, a generous slosh of tabasco habanero variety pepper sauce first, before liberally dusting with his special steak spice mixture:
A little bit of garlic and onion powder, not too heavy on those, but some,
cured, fly agaric mushroom, treated to remove the poison and cured for culinary use.
Chalciporus piperatus, a parasitic mushroom that grows, like fly agaric, under the silver birch tree because it is a parasite on the mycelium of the Amanita muscaria [fly agaric, you know, the one the gnomes live in or sit on with their fishing rods, red cap with white warts, white gills, stem, basal bulb rather than volva, and when raw is poisonous, but when given a long, slow heat-cure/drying combination in an oven with the door propped open on baking foil-lined baking trays then its ready for use when crispy dry, the parasitic mushroom its associated with needs no such preparation but its most conveniently dried, so it can be powdered in a spice grinder)
Plenty pink peppercorns, pounded to pulpy fragments
Black pepper, generously added
the seeds from a few cardamom pods
Dried, mild smoked chipotle chillies
Some much more fiery, carefully used chilli peppers such as the tiny, but lethal little birds-eye peppers, nukes in disguise
Szechuan pepper-just a little. It isn't hot, its weird stuff, exerts a numbing, anaesthetizing effect upon the tongue and oral mucosa, taste-somewhat camphoraceous, cooling, cold.
Piper cubeba seed (Cubeb, another of the true pepper family, that black pepper belongs to) Less cooling than the szechuan pepper, no odd anaesthetizing/almost semiparalytic properties upon the sensation of the mouth, complements chilli peppers and hot spices very well. Highly camphoraceous taste, only a few (maybe 8-10 seeds are needed for a tablespoon full of spice mixture when powdered) are needed.
And IF I can get it, for it is not commercially sold, water-pepper, a relative of bistort, grows in marshy and riverine areas near the banks of the river and in areas of pasture next to and close by the rivers. Long, paleish green leaves, lanceolate in shape and about 1.25cm wide and quite thin but do not droop if picked. Shape like the blade of a spear, long thin and pointed, this, like fly agaric and the parasitic peppery boletus cannot be bought, although especially the two mushrooms are two of my favourite meat cooking spices, all three however have to be hunted down and harvested by hand though. Not rare, but I don't know any waterlogged, riverine fields where the plant grows locally and its very hard for me to get. But the mushrooms those I can get easily, and I've got several tupperware boxes of fly agaric, cured, detoxified and dried, as the young caps in prime condition)
And after powdering together, minus the bay leaf, and using a mortar and pestle to crush the heavily oily pink peppercorns and coarsely crack them, they all get sprinkled on, and the bay leaves taken out of the steak marinade, one on each side of each steak placed, using the marinade to stick on the spice powder and soaked marinaded bayleaves, and then a light brush of olive oil to retain flavour, or better still, the oil of toasted sesame seeds, brushed on thinly to retain moisture, and then the pan turned on high, heated up and the steaks slapped down, bay leaf on each side, two steaks minimum to a serving per person, and seared for a half minute or so until lovely brown on the outside with the odd patch of black just thinly showing, then turn over and sear the other side, before removing from the heat, turning the gas stove down, and putting back on for a longer, slower cook at lower temperatures so the flavour is all sealed in tightly, and the juices prevented from making a run for it, whilst the steaks slowly fry in toasted sesame oil, and braise in their own juices until light grey throughout and the juice runs clear. Without a single hint of pink. If a steak has pink flesh in it Lestat ain't happy. Grey-brown is perfect, lightly so, chewy and tender and full of delicious juices when chewed into. Oh my, oh yes. Done the Lestat way, miss K, you'd never want to eat a steak done any other way again in your life I'd wager. One bite and I'd have you hooked and coming back hungry for more. I reckon you'd love my steaks too, my recipe is, if I say so myself, a bloody good one. And if desired to taste, can be served with a slight citrus tang as a modification, by giving a light sprinkling of the grated zest of a lime, and serving with a quartet of lime wedges cut from half a lime, and the same from a lemon, seeds removed, ready to squeeze the amount of juice desired on any given bite. Maybe a tiny dash of runny honey in the marinade to offset the acidity. Just a tiny dash though, so its not sweet, but oh so meaty (thats what the fly agaric mushrooms are in there for, and they are a critical ingredient. I'd be happy to mail you some for your 'because meat' nights if you'd like, plus some of the harder to get spices like szechuan pepper and pink pepper as well as peppery bolete if I can find any this season. Already got the fly agarics though and plenty of em, dried, cured, detoxified and needing only grinding and adding to a dish to use. They aren't highly toxic raw, but would cause digestive upset and make the eater wish they had not eaten thereof. But, when cured properly they accentuate meaty, umami, savoury flavours by activating glutamate receptors on tastebuds and will turn average meat to enjoyable meat, enjoyable meat to good meat, good meat to excellent meat and excellent prime dead animal into something you'd willingly rip somebody's head off to get at, slavering and snarling in a furious driven quest for them there steaks or roasts where you'd have drawn a blade and unsheathed those sharp kitty-claws and become a yowling, hissing, spitting ball of ravening fur and fangs.
I make a mean curry and an even better chilli con carne with a similar spice blend too (beef or lamb or both for either) and it is as gorgeous in taste as your smile and eyes are in their mere existence upon the face of this world. And its been proven by testing on folk too. My old man told me several times 'don't put those mushrooms in there, you will ruin the meal', nevertheless, in they went into my spice blend and did he guzzle it down with enthusiasm without the least negative comment to be said of the food? yes, yes he did. I've never ever witnessed a bowlfull of that chilli con carne to be started to be consumed, and to finish without the eater cleaning his or her plate to the last scrap:)
Tested it out on the neighbors too, the cute young lady and her boyfriend were having a BBQ, and I offered to bring some goodies to the table if they were willing to have me there, and they were, I did, and after I revealed the secret ingredients they were not upset whatsoever with the meat I brought to the grill, and it was devoured eagerly by both the woman and her boyfriend. (I'm on good terms with them both, I do really have a liking for her, and indeed reckon she might have slight aspie tendencies if not more than a tad of them). She's really nice, open, kind, a lovely girl to have a good long talk with (and very, very pretty indeed, with a lovely smile, eyes, lovely long blonde hair, slim figure, quite petite, not tiny just gracile and of a good degree of apparrent physical fitness, generally a real stunner just as she is a great person inside too; if she were single I'd ask her to a home-cooked dinner or meal out of her choice in a femtosecond although as she has a BF, I have and will, unless that changes, say nothing of my feelings, and express them only by making sure I go out of my way for her to be the recipient of good fortune, good will and kindness in ways of any manner which be under my control, and by continuing to be her good friend and a loyal one, because I do like her BF as a person, decent guy, they seem to get on well and love each other, and I would not wish to take them apart from each other for my own gain at their expense, least of all hers. I just wouldn't do it. Being a supportive, kind and loyal friend to both on the other hand is perfectly find in my book. Neither of them know I have feelings for her, and neither ever will unless things change between them and she is looking for somebody else, in which case I will offer myself up on a silver platter:P
And, also needed are per steak side, for each person making a total of four whole, single bay leaves two, whole unbroken leaves are first used in the marinade as it soaks into the steak then, removed and added to the steak once its been fully prepared to be fried and used to decorate and further flavour the steaks although not themselves eaten, but added to the marinade, and then in the pan whilst frying the steaks.
Two leaves to each side of a steak, spaces equally apart roughly whilst frying so as to get as much flavour out of the marinade-soaked leaves as possible and ensure its application across as even a spatial area and as equalized in density as possible across the steaks, two on one side one at each end and the two on the other closer to the middle, spaced somewhat apart and placed, per side on opposing axes (as in plural of 'axis' not as in 'hatchet' or the double-bladed article prefixed with the word 'battle' often applied also to miserable shitbags, usually female, and itself prefixed by the word 'old' or *insert nasty turn of phrase of choice here*-old battle-) to each other, as in two either side, two top and bottom to ensure thorough and as ideally even distribution as practical without breaking the leaves, so that they may easily be, once cooked and served, removed by the eater of the steaks whole since they aren't to be eaten directly themselves but are there to flavour the food and to ensure it looks nice as an afterthought.
The result, as I do them, is as tender as the soul of miss K, as juicy as a really salacious secret or rumor to a gossip, or a tough chemistry mystery to a Lestat Rett, and as delicious as the very finest of food.
Ideally, the hand of mother nature being sufficiently generous permitting, such a steak should be served with not only the dried, powdered detoxified fly agaric mushroom and its parasitic poroid spicy hot basal taxon within the Boletus genus and Bolete-like and related mushrooms, but with a lovely steaming heap of wild mushrooms that had been picked that same day, and of the best eating quality species to be had, picked during a long hike in the forests, and a demanding one too physically, that ensures that by the time your back home, you'll probably want a small, but small enough to not inhibit appetite, dose of a stimulant to keep you on your feet momentarily whilst the wild fungi are cleaned, prepared as appropriate for the species collected, identified of course first and foremost for those that cannot be so instantly and reliably in the field on the spot, even caffeine for those that can tolerate it and do not dislike it. a hot cup of white tea or lady grey with lemon balm chopped and added to an infusion with honey, then made to serve as the liquid, once filtered, to brew the cup of tea from will work wonders, but make it a good bloody long and tough wide-ranging, rampage, yet both a rampage and a nose-to-the-ground and hands reaching deep into the bushes, up trees and raking through patches of leaflitter in order to ferret out the tastiest and choicest bagfulls of morsels, get yourself out there for a good several hours, and you'll come back, hopefully with bags full of choice, tasty superfresh wild mushrooms to eat and you'll have an appetite to match a meal to which superb justice ought be done.
In fact just thinking about the prospect is making me get up a fierce hankering to go hunting for wild mushrooms, and once I find some, preferably revisit my Lactarius deliciosus forest 'spot', that also has a tendency to produce the excellently tasty Boletus appendiculatus, which is quite a rare find, bay boletes (Xerocomus badius, Phillips et al syn Boletus badius), Suillus luteus, the slippery Jack bolete, as well as various larch boletes, such as Suillus grevillei, in addition to the star attraction of the show within that particular large, heavily coniferous, acid-soiled (heavy presence of acidophillic Ericaceous plants such as billberry bushes (like blueberries, but tiny, tiny tiny little wild ones, much darker in color than a blueberry, and without the pale bloom, blackish blue fruit, tiny rounded green leaves that have a tendency to redden a fair bit with age, and the fruit being about the size of a BB pellet, or slightly bigger, basically small to midsized shotgun pellet-sized and intensely sweet, juicy with an overtone of quite delightful tartness) patch of woodland, its mixed though, plenty of old, hardwood deciduous trees like oaks, along with hawthorn, hazel, some silver birch, a lot of bracken fern which some things seem to like associating with in combination with their host tree species, for those mycorrhizal mushrooms (mycorrhizal fungi being those which form structures called mycorrhizae (plural, mycorrhiza sing.) with their hyphae, these are delicate microstructures which emanate from fungal mycelium (fungus roots basically, mycelium) and these mycorrhizae intertwine and intermesh and in many, many individual structures, penetrate the most delicate tips and tiniest parts of the roots of, typically in the case of those macrofungi which form host-symbiote associations, trees, although not exclusiely trees. Usually. A very well known case would be the Fly Agaric, Amanita muscaria with its red cap, white warty growth remnants of the velum universale upon the surface of the cap, white spores, white stem with a droopy, kind of soft, delicate but large and well developed ring present, and a distinctly meaty taste, and most particularly pronounced meaty-umami-savoury odor when dried, and this becoming extremely intense if dried and then subjected to the action of being steeped in simmering water, as with making a tea from the cured, detoxified mushrooms, a couple of caps being sufficient to fill an entire kitchen with the windows open and extractor fan on full blast, with a sweetish honeyed odour that is intensively redolent of meat at the same time as being sweet.) this is famous almost, certainly amongst mushroom pickers, ask any one of them what mushroom they associate mentally with the silver birch tree most (there are a number of fungi which grow in association with it) and they will tell you 'fly agarics', because, although they can also associate with pine, they are most enthusiastic for the silver birch, out of the two, and are very common under silver birch in ones, twos, threes, sometimes in luxuriant throngs where there be many trees; one may in season go out and pick many pounds of the mushroom to take home, heat-cure and dry, to be thusly certain to have sufficient supplies of it for medicinal use (for which it is particularly serviceable in the winter months when it is not to be found, after the season has ended, and the weather is icy cold and miserable), for cooking, and for those who'd wish to, for use as a psychotropic of the hallucinogenic type, although extremely far different and with nothing in common with psilocybin mushrooms, the common types of 'magic mushrooms' or shrooms. As well as, with a lower dose, for inducing lucid dreaming, especially in combination with the herb valerian, the two together make for an incredibly powerful and effective oneirogenic mixture, whilst alone, or with certain other herbs which modulate the action of the fly agaric, in various ways as desired and as suitable for one's needs, with manyfold uses in herbal medicine;
For it is a sedative, it can also inaways most perculiar serve as a stimulating agent, the dose being the key, also it can ease anxiety, be used to relieve pain, especially that caused by muscular excessive tension, or fluey type coldey ilnesses of the feverish sort, the sort of thing that makes you ache all over from a biochemical cause rather than physical injury causative processes, there it'll shine, when cured and detoxified, given as a honeyed tea, simmering the caps in just-boiling water for a while, before straining through clean cloth, or at a pinch, kitchen towel or even bog roll, (unused of course:autism:) until the particles of dried mushroom flakes spalled off as the caps expand as they rehydrate from the dried state in which they are stored, and in which they come when prepared since heat is used as part of the curing process to convert a chemically and thermally labile, unstable fungal biotoxin to the primary active, desirable compound, namely the toxic ibotenic acid present in fresh mushrooms, loses CO2 and decarboxylates to form muscimol, the fresh mushrooms are rough on the body although nonfatal, and will sicken the consumer, whilst dried, its a good kitchen spice, its an excellent one in fact IMO, I use it all the time and its one of my very favourite spices and similar plant or fungal flavour enhancing roots, shoots, seeds, leaves, stems, pods etc. etc. etc. that are used to jolly up the flavor of other foods)
And in winter especially, the tea made from the cured, dried caps is most gratifying, once out of the acute danger of clinical hypothermia, because it effectively removes the discomfort caused by being exposed to cold (and if actually in danger of hypothermia, stuck somewhere, this, could deaden the warning signs, and cause the consumer to ignore the acute, immediate danger, if one were in such a situation that freezing to death was a reality in prospect) but if this be not so, then a mug of such tea, honeyed to sweeten, will most effectively counter the sensation of discomfort and misery from cold, to such a potent extent that I have, after drinking a cup, and allowing it to act, to test it, walked about 3-4 miles through a howling gale, blasting a blizzard of snow and ice , wearing nothing from the waist up. Shoes, socks, underwear, trousers and on top, only a leather jacket, left unzipped and unbuttoned, open to the icy wind, and a pair of gloves so as to allow me to effectively operate things which required fingers to be able to move properly, without negatively influencing dexterity too much, more a practical concession than a luxury or self-permission during the experiment in terms of reasoning behind it, although they were all the same gratifying.
At any rate, out I went, to go to the shops, wearing just this, plus my facial piercings which do not come out, ever, bought my snacks, after the cup of hot fly agaric tea with honey and I didn't, could not, in fact, feel the bone-seeking deep cold i wasn't shivering, aching, wasn't in the slightest affected, to the extent that I felt as warm the moment I got back inside as I did the moment before I first opened the door of my house to leave.
Had I not drunk the fly agaric tea, made from this common (fortunately) mycorrhizal mushroom I would have wanted badly to cut short the journey and return home, seek shelter, or if I'd pressed on out of sheer willpower, I would have been bone-achingly, painfully freezing the fuck cold, but instead, zero discomfort, before during or after the journey. A wee nip of spirituous alcoholic beverage was welcomed once I was out of the physical cold, and back home, but it was not hungrily grasped for, shaking like a leaf, whilst getting ready to prepare a mug of hot chocolate, steaming hot tea etc. (mycorrhizal fungus species are often extremely difficult, or sometimes currently impossible to cultivate in some cases. Since it involves infecting the host tree with the desired species, like truffle plantations. It can be done in a lot of cases, in some areas where they already grow too, can productivity be increased by carefully looking after and managing the forests in question to best control conditions and render them favourable for growth of a target species present there, but unlike growing a saprobic species (those which exist by means of feeding on dead organic matter, such as for example, growing meadow/grassland or dung-living fungi, soil freeliving species and woodlovers of various kinds. And even parasites of certain sorts can be grown or cultured in-vitro or even in living hosts, although not all parasites or symbionts can be cultured at all, but some, some can. I'm in the beginnings, after doing much research, into setting up a project regarding a certain parasitic fungus and its in-vitro culture (I.e in submerged culture in fermentation tanks, and for certain purposes during the process, using the natural host species of the parasite as, in a manner of speaking, a 'regeneration cycle chamber', only made of living cellular tissue of a live host rather than glass and metal and teflon and a 'soup' of complex polyol 'sugar alcohol's, aminoacids, trace elements necessary for function of various enzymes and some of which in addition in excess can be used to promote biological processes desired to be so, as well as various more complex and non-naturally coexisting, non-nutrient chemicals used for things like encapsulation in polymer microparticulate beads, doped with oxygen transporting perfluorocarbon/H2O/polymer substrate emulsions and seeded with culture, spiked with surfectants to enhance cellular permeability to oxygen and nutrients and electrolytes to regulate the osmotic pressure balance of the captive cells.
Its a pretty ambitious project, and will involve at a minimum, if, if IF I happen (and this is down to luck and chance as well as skill, in a very heavy degree, and cannot be dictated, it must be obtained as a result of repetitive culturing, testing for productivity of the target compounds the parasite is capable of biosynthesizing, subculturing, retesting, various nutrient surplus or and starvation cycling processes, treatment of culture samples with chemical mutagens (which will kill most of the colonies, but a few cells invariably remain, and which can then be tested further after reestablishing the mutated strains on a fresh agar plate, until at the lowest end, hundreds, higher estimates with average luck probably thousands or even tens of thousands of plates/slants run and tested for alkaloid production levels once moved from a growth-favourable high phosphate medium to a phosphate-depleted medium for production)
And even the likes of doping them with colchicine to inhibit mitosis and thereby inducing an artificial form of polyploidy (a problem with this particular parasite is, although highly tolerant to both monokaryotic and heterokaryotic states, whilst not vital, it is important and most favourable for production to have a heterokaryotic strain, and I'm wondering if, to avoid losing strain stability, to employ colchicine, a mitotic inhibitor known as a 'spindle poison' could, by serving to duplicate the chromosomes of a strain, not by outcrossing, but by essentially internally cloning the chromosomes already there in a homokaryotic monokaryotic strain, doubling the chromosome count using as a template the strain's OWN karyotype but preventing the usual cell division (for certain reasons its difficult to just use a spore culture. The species of parasite has two natural lifecycles, one of them sexual, and involving genetic recombination and thus instability with regard to productivity of the sought natural substances the fungi are able to produce, and the other involving an asexual cycle where the infected plant is made to release something like honeydew, laden with self-fertilized purestrain ascospores which remain true to type.
The problem being that productive strains are usually heterokaryotic, but at the same time, heterokaryon strains unfortunately, typically produce outcrossed spores when they replicate rather than pumping out self-fertilized ascospores. So its difficult to get a producer strain that will remain true-to-type and not form mutated progeny (and this little fucker has a high NATURAL mutagenesis rate to begin with, oh boy has it ever) that may well not have any decent capability to produce. Might, might not, but if it does might not subculture to STAY productive.
So there's colchicine, I want to try after obtaining a productive strain, there is arsenic, to, after growth, act as a poison targeting phosphate metabolism on the intracellular level disrupting uptake by competing with phosphorus, added as arsenate, since arsenic is the element one down in the periodic table from phosphorus, it acts to compete, once absorbed, with phosphorus involving metabolic processes, so adding arsenical compounds might well serve, I theorize, to, if added in quantities insufficient to kill the fungus, to, once the initial growth phase has completed and the culture is ready to be washed in an osmotically static solution, to remove the traces of high phosphate growth medium and then transfer it into production medium containing only trace phosphate, or else forcing the culture to rely on intracellular reserves accumulated during growth, whilst employing low levels of arsenic poisoning to interfere with phosphate metabolism, whilst refraining from disrupting DNA/RNA synthesis since the equivalent of a nucleic acid chain, I.e genetic material has the nucleotide purine and pyrimidine nucleobases strung along a 'ladder' of phosphodiesters linked together as linear chains, but an equivalent arsenodiester is extremely prone to hydrolysis and thus would not be stable enough to coexist and form an arsenical homolog of DNA/RNA. Already got plenty potassium phosphate, and can of course easily buy phosphoric acid as required, now I just need to get myself various macronutrient 'food' for my little parasitic friends there, vitamins in large quantities, various trace minerals to be added in minute amounts, and get me some arsenic, some colchicine, various perfluorocarbons, surfectants, the monomer for the polymer I have in mind to use for the immobilization microspherule matrix particles, an ultrasound generator, and of course, a one-off although rather larger expense in the form of a sophisticated spectrophotometer suitable for performing sensitive analyses of the complex (and also variable) mixture of compounds resultant from a successful strain isolate and successful culture and extraction and purification (will also need to get myself some chromatography columns and some chromatographic silica gel and various alumina types for perfoming column chromatography, as well as make myself some TLC plates for analysis of the spotting patterns and retention times for preliminary ID typing of the alkaloid fraction, whilst the columns are for actual preparatory separation, and the expensive bit, an IR spectrophotometer, although as of yet I still need to determine the spectral range required, and a little finer delving to determine whether IR (infrared) or UV-VIS (ultraviolet-visible light wavelength range) and what specific type, because there are many to choose from. Will help me in a lot of my other work too, although at a minimum it'll cost me hundreds of pounds, half a grand to 600-700 quid or so.
But its something, especially if it turns out that the IR range is suitable, that will serve me indefinitely in a massive number of ways. Nondestructive testing (usually, although in the case of ultraviolet spectrophotometry, some compounds are sensitive to UV light of course)
And requiring relatively few consumables, in the case of IR specs. Something like a Raman IR laser spectrophotometer would be ideal, and allow me to run samples against databanks of structures via a computer for rapid analysis and typing. Similar tech to the likes of what airport customs filth use to identify suspected 'controlled' substances'. Rapid too, able to scan through massive libraries within seconds to minutes.
Some Lithium aluminium hydride, and some Red-Al (sodium bis-2-methoxyethoxyaluminium hydride, aka vitride, aka selectride will have to come for other things, and I'm out of another reagent I need more of, so those will have to come out of my savings. But I do have a goodly amount of money built up, from holding out massively on spending, I might even have enough for the spectrophotometer already. If that is I cannot build my own IR spec. I have seen plans online for using certain types of CD media and prisms to make a diffraction grating for the laser beam and even the code to interface such a device via micro-USB to an Iphone and use a custom written Iphone app to hack together a functioning IR spectrophotometer from a phone, a computer CD-ROM disk, a prism, and some lengths of cable to interface the thing, plus something to serve as a chamber to hold the quartz cuvettes which are used to put samples in to be scanned by the laser.
Will have to work out which is cheaper and what will be the best performance, see if it works out more economical but will still work well enough, or if I should just go out and buy a secondhand IR spec. Although if I can get the phone second/third/fourth hand etc, for a few quid, doesn't even have to make phonecalls, just run an app, for a dedicated-purpose, handheld 'tricorder'-esque diagnostic IR spectrophotometer scanner that will give me qualitative measurements at least, then I can work with that certainly, and it'd be a neat project, fun to hack together.
Wouldn't mind building myself a Geiger-counter and the tube to go with it whilst I'm at it, mostly for the hell of it and the fun of doing it.
What am I thinking right now? christ fucking wept! my mind is absolutely heaviing and buzzing with ideas and plans right now.
I feel..weirdly quickened, not due to the influence of any outside agents just...on fucking FIRE with ideas tonight. I know where exactly I am going to start, too. Time to put the microwave to some.....shall we say, rather less than conventional ideas as to the uses a microwave oven can be put to. And I know what I'm doing with it too for said uses. Most definitely unconventional as to what is nuked in there and how, but all the same, there are things to be done, and I know just what they are and how to do them, and done they shall be. And then there is the azeotropic drying of a certain sulfonic acid thats got to be purified and gainfully put to service as it has been intended to be so put.
Have to admit, for my very first time, doing a microwave synthesis of anything, it was unnerving to be there operating my lab microwave (picked up from a supermarket car-park after watching it for a long time and nobody came for it, so its been there serving me ever since), standing there with a flask placed in a bowl, containing 3/4 of a liter of volatile and highly flammable chemicals, thermometer stuck in the top, and with a wad of scrunged-up bog roll (unused mind you:autism:) to keep the fumes from the reaction taking place, which had lachrymatory and strongly sternutatory (acting like teargas, giving off highly irritating fumes, and causing constant severe sneezing until I first vastly reduced the release of vapor using a bog-roll plug in the flask neck, which allowed gas pressure to remain equalized with the external environment rather than inducing overpressure in a sealed, stoppered and keck-clipped flask (which would have blown under pressure from the volatiles being repeatedly subjected to pulses of microwave irradiation, not exploded as such, at least not in an explosion, but the same thing happening in a glass container as happens if you continually pump compressed air into a car tyre until it can take no more, and then pump in a bit more, the straw to break the camel's back so to speak. I.e it'd have become highly pressurized, until the glass burst, propelling fragments of razor-edged broken glass shrapnel like a frag grenade. Only in a microwave oven. Full of volatile chemicals. Probably messy and probably end up in a ball of plasma igniting and making a big bloody well mess considering something in there had oxidizing properties and the other reducing properties, and both being flammable and very, very fuel-ish. Voila, one microwave-pumped plasma ball and ignition of the vapors of the sprayed out, atomized fuel-air mixture with very, very ugly results indeed. So, instead, simple bog roll, allowed the pressure to remain stable and prevent it shattering or damaging the flask, and at the same time, also confining most of the teargas-like vapors, and holding my thermometer in position as I checked it every ten to fifteen seconds or so and applied the coolant bath as required to keep the temperature within the acceptable parameters for my reaction to take place successfully, and importantly, cleanly, much more so than with conventional heating, and taking all of 15-20 minutes instead of taking between 5 and 7 hours on the steam-bath and producing a dirtier product, rather than the rapid, clean synthesis via microwaving the same reactants for 20 minutes.
Was unnerving the first time, but I pulled it off all well and good, although a gas mask was needed because of the irritating vapors being fumed off out of the flask, replicating it with the slight modification of the bog-roll plug, that fixed that in a trice, better than expected by far too:)
Time's come that needs to be rerun since I'm in need of a particular reagent that I had to use the MW to make (well didn't have to but I'm bleedin' buggered if I'm twatting around for 6 hours for a product of inferior purity when I can have my same reagent made to a better standard in 20 minutes with some good care and attention paid to temperature control)
As for getting on people's nerves, nah, bollocks walkie *hugs and squeezes*
