What have you bought lately?

[Fun With Matches]

Cold Sesame (Cucumber) Noodles (Edited by me.)

INGREDIENTS:

1 teaspoon sesame seeds
2 large cucumbers, preferably seedless
1 tablespoon tahini
1 tablespoon organic sunbutter                 {Or replace Tahini+sunbutter with 2 tbsp nut butter)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon coconut aminos (I used soy sauce)
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/4 teaspoon powdered ginger
1 scallion, dark green part only, thinly sliced


DIRECTIONS:

1) Toast sesame seeds until light brown, about 2-3 minutes. Set aside to cool.

2) Julienne cucumbers with peeler or spiralizer. (I recommend you salt them and place them in a colander for at least half an hour, then rinse and squeeze dry as much as you can with towels. Then the texture is much like normal noodles instead of crunchy cucumber, and far nicer).

3) In a small bowl, mix the tahini, sunbutter, oil, coconut aminos, vinegar, water, red pepper flakes, garlic, and ginger with a fork until smooth.

4) Pour the dressing over the cucumber noodles and toss gently until evenly coated. Mound on a plate and sprinkle with the sliced scallions and toasted sesame seeds.

I find these are great for summer, especially when the cucumber noodles have been in the fridge. As the website says, you can prepare the noodles and sauce and keep them seperately until you need them. I just eat the lot.





Source
http://meljoulwan.com/2011/07/16/cold-sesame-cucumber-noodles/

[Queen Victoria]

sounds scrumptious

[Lestat]

Canned fish? oh EW. Caviar, that I can live with, shellfish, sure as long its no oysters and as long as its dead before being eaten. And not done it yet but need to replace the TV. I fucked it, somehow punched a hole through the screen. I don't remember what happened exactly, just beginning to black out, vision cutting out and the next thing I remember is hauling my arse off of the floor, suppose I got lucky, that I didn't break the lab flask thats in a crate in front of the TV too. That I haven't even used yet and cost just short of £90.

[Lestat]

Several all-glass syringes. Both plunger and barrel and needle/cannula attachment point are entirely made of glass, with the inner portion of the barrel and outer of the plunger partly ground glass, to serve to stop the things falling apart too easily. Two 10ml and 2 30ml ones.

Also bought a 1-liter side round-bottom flask with a long side-arm (unground glass) a bit more than half way above the bottom. I used to have a smaller one...but...somebody, a clandestine chemist, and a really bright, promising and talented girl from albania, a real sweet lass, she drew a hand-done charcoal sketch, showing me with that other, smaller sidearm still flask I had in one hand, and her, walking just behind me,  me clothed only in shoes and trousers, and her, wearing nothing but an erlenmeyer flask in one hand.

Just a very short time after, she took her own life And not long after that, that flask, the side-arm shattered. I have yet to have the heart to try and fix it, or even just seal the hole and convert it to a boiling flask with a long neck. Why? because of the timing really, and because this girl, although I never got to tell her, partly due to op-sec reasons and partly because, I just hadn't enough time...but she had been growing sweet on me, and I had a lot of affection for her. She never got to hear it from me just how much. And Quite honestly, whilst it might already have been a pretty ragged few scraps of an organ, when she took her own life, what was left of my heart, fucking broken.

I'd have loved to have been able to freely, safely meet her, and for us to spend time together, work side by side together in either her lab or mine. (and believe you me, it takes a LOT for me to voluntarily permit anybody to enter my lab, or even just to look in. Only my closest friends have ever looked in, and a very few of them have. And I haven't let anybody in for a long, long time, in fact I'm not sure if I ever have. If I have, it will have been my beloved former fiancee, Cazzie, someone who still, even over a decade since I last saw her, at 14, I love still, and I know her to have been my true soulmate. What I gave, what we had, she still has to the point I have never again been able to fully love someone, bar one person, who could have been a soulmate, a beautiful, bright, elegant and charming autie lady by the nick 'heretic' who briefly popped up, for a really short time on AFF, we got talking by chance and got to know each other, and we'd gotten into a long distance, but intimate as possible, relationship. A very special girl. Quite the opposite, age-wise to cazzie, nearly 50 at the time, but could pass w/o effort for 30s, and if she tried using makeup (pretty sure she doesn't, it just isn't her, to try and look or be anything other than 'what you see is what you get' kind of girl, in the extreme. Heretic doesn't just not wear a mask...she collects them to hold bonfires of them Unusual woman, Tim McVeigh the terrorist bomber guy's former prison penpal (she wasn't locked up, she isn't that type of person at all, and a very special one. Autie, and everything a guy could ever dream of a woman being. Although unfortunately the fucking filthy hell-beshat gorgonslut cunting whoreborn bitch borderline PD bitch queen from Tartarus former housemate of mine, the one that tried to kill me did everything she could to get in our way, and IMO that plus Heretic really not being a people-person, that fucked things up. Although we still care about and for each other. And I'd still willingly give her a vital organ or organs if she needed a transplant, even, even if it would end me. Something I'd do only for cazzie and one, maybe two others. One an ex gf who is one of my most cherished friends I've ever had or do have, and the other, well, someone who doesn't know it, at least unless she's clocked on to it but said nothing, and who I have loved as much as what is left of me can do, although silently, for..ever since I've known her.

Got a replacement sidearm distillation flask, the one that broke shortly after the girl who drew us together in her sketch she did just for me, took her own life, that was 150ml or 250ml, I forget which, 250 I think. But even looking at this new one...holding it can't help but make me think again of sov, (not her full name), the clandestine chemist girl from albania.

When I try effecting a repair on that one, I think I'll sprinkle a pinch of the glass dust, from the sidearm of the flask left from prepping it for an attempt at repairing it with what glass-blowing skills I have, into the soil at the heart of the memorial garden I have planned out to be planted in her memory, and in commemoration of the loss to both the clandestine chemist community, and of what could, if things had been different, ended up as love. I felt for her, and I still miss her.

I can't read a post of her's even, or see her avatar on the forum we interacted, see her name referred to, or read a PM she sent, let alone see the pic she sketched of us, showing us each with a piece of glassware, and neither of us wearing much. In her case, nothing but the erlenmeyer.

Days to a week or so later, one of her relatives, of a sort, an other half of one of her blood relatives posted, just a few posts, not a chemist, but came on, to post the news that she had taken her own life.

And days after, the flask in the picture, the side-arm broke off.

RIP hun, you are going to be missed. You, your intellect, our touching of minds, your quirky, idiosyncratic way of using english, the kindness and effort you spent in drawing that picture, which I'll always treasure. All of you. Lol, I don't  know if she was or not, but the language difference, when she wrote in english she even sounded kinda spazzy. It was really cute. Wish I could have told you that, and how and why. I'll always be fond of you. And come this year, there will be sown the start of a memorial garden, with a pair of yew trees planted side by side, along with white and red roses, for death, and for love, along with a field of opium poppy, the best seedstock that money can buy; to symbolize peace and eternal rest. And other things besides....I know she would want those other things.

And every distillation I do with this new side-arm flask, I'll be doing it for you at heart. I know if there is anything past this life, and after death, you'll be watching and smiling that pretty smile, as toasty as any hotplate cranked up to maximum or any bunsen burner with a roaring flame going.  Because thats what you made me feel. Like a fucking thermite charge igniting. Intense, blindingly flaring heat, yet all too ephemeral and way too short. Although when the oxides are separated out, then things of value to be found within. Things like you, dear one.

[Lestat]

Oh and about a half kg of sliced roast beef, cold from the fridge. Only got one slice left, maybe two though now I just opened that bag a few minutes ago and washed down with most of a carton of toffee milk. And THAT with some pear, apple and lychee mix 'tropicana' juice. Plus two bottles each of concentrate cordial mix for elderflower and rose&elderflower cordial mixture. Just add water and delish.

As well as a 2.3kg of multi-grain hydrolysed protein plus added peptide aminoacid easily digestible protein, chocolate flavoured, going cheaper by far per weight than 1kg (the 2.3 would have cost near £80, now it costed me just £33 or so. Might have been £36. In an effort to supplement my diet and make it healthier and make it easier to consume larger amounts of protein than dairy alone provides (I find it easier to drink food than eat it, appetite/hunger wise since I have now relatively little sensation left of hunger but thirst is still there as it ought to be, or at least more or less intact)

Oh and a really huge crate of cans of coke, going for far less than the price of a 1.75 liter bottle (they used to be 2 liters, now one of the smaller ones is more expensive than a 2 liter ever was, the greedy, skiving pennypinching fuckburglars.)

And two packs of cigars'

[Lestat]

Just discovered 2 packs of wasabi-coated roasted salted peanuts that I forgot I had bought too. Never tasted wasabi before. Oh my golly god's goshified nipples on a pointy barbecue fork, thats a CHANGE *tard*

[renaeden]

I made the mistake of thinking the benign-looking green paste - wasabi - was fine to eat in a spoonful. Far out, I though my tongue was cut up.

In keeping with Japanese food, I had beef sushi for lunch at Tafe today.

[Icequeen]

Sardines ...I don't know ANY of you...except maybe Lestat, I like roast beef.

I have purchased seeds. Flower seeds, vegetable seeds, herb seeds, a ton of seeds.

I will definitely regret this decision at planting time. I've been trapped in the house waaay too long this winter.

[Lestat]

Oh damn ren. Your usually one of the sharpest tools in our collective box Bet that wasn't fun.

Reminds me of one time I read this chemist's toxicology blog, and ROFL 'about how I nearly killed my dad', after this guy as a kid, was preparing horseradish in bulk, grated it and stuck it all in a blender, then left it for some time to let the enzymatic reaction release as much allyl isothiocyanate as possible, took a sniff part way through, then, after it sends him reeling and choking and about to start vomiting out of both ends at once, goes to his father, moments after his mother saw him as a kid pick it up and say, 'hey, look at this', and knowing him, wisely scarpered:D

His old man put his face up to it even longer and took a big horf, expecting horseradish to be spicy, but not close to a chemical warfare agent (methyl isocyanate, for example and other isocyanates and isothiocyanates, and hell, allylic groups are reactive enough, are really reactive and pretty noxious stuff, it being a release of industrial methyl isocyanate that formed the lethal gas cloud that rolled down towards the citizens of Bhopal after the industrial disaster there and wiped the place out pretty well, not 100% but a significant kill rate.

In the likes of mustard etc. and a lot of other such  Brassicaceae and Alliaceae, the plants have separate cells holding a precursor that reacts with an enzyme, such as myrosinase, in mustard for example, the two react to form volatile isothiocyanates via a nifty as hell little molecular rearrangement, which then after a time, mellow to less toxic alllylic cyanides and similar, its a defense against predators, where the plant is crushed, the cells release their contents into each other, one rearrangement reaction later, you get the characteristic smell, which we humans have learned to see as something tasty and spicy to stick on food, rather than deterring us from eating the things (lol I've even heard from my old man he knew someone who would pick up onions and just crunch into one with his teeth as though it were an apple....*shudders and nearly pukes from both ends himself*) it encourages us to grow them just for eating.

And this kid nearly gassed his old man with the closed blender having prevented all the allyl isothiocyanate and allyl cyanide from escaping, and flooded the kitchen with virulent, choking, eye-ripper toxic fumes like one of josef mengele's own farts in hell while being busy roasting in lava (I hope at least )

And was dumb enough to get smacked senseless like that, then his old man even dumber, took the thing later and shoved his face in it like a complete tool.

[Parts]

A teething toy for Filburt

[Lestat]

I reckon I need to buy myself another tub of elemental iodine. I'm down to my last 1/4kg or so. Been meaning to get some bromine too, but that I won't need to actually buy anything for, since I've one of my 500ml 2-necked flasks full of sodium bromide, that simply needs to be cooled down on an ice bath and have chlorine gas piped through it, then the bromine tapped off in a separatory funnel and dried over anhydrous calcium bromide or anhydrous CaCl2, then double-distilled to meet my standards then, after keeping it on an ice-salt-methanol/antifreeze bath, weighed out in portion sizes I'm likely to want to use practically, say, 1g, 5g, 10g, 25 or 30g, 50 and 100g and seal them in glass ampoules, flame-fused shut and kept in the fridge until it comes to using the contents. The NaBr is there in the lab already dissolved in water, it just needs me to rig up a chlorine gas generator and start piping in gas. In fact I've one half done, already full of potassium permanganate, just needs some hydrochloric acid pouring in, and the cooling bath to be readied by breaking some ice up, salting it and pouring on some antifreeze and methylated spirit.

I do need to buy ampoules in various sizes though. From 1ml to a 250ml perhaps, and various in between sizes. For keeping Br2 in (its a well-known escape artist of a chemical, volatile, giving off nasty fumes, and indeed its fairly notorious for its escaping from bottles. So flame-sealed amps is the most practical way.), and other things like iodine monochloride, chromyl chloride (a coincidentally bromine looking liquid made by heating a mixture of table salt, concentrated, dry sulfuric acid (98% is good enough, with a little loss due to hydrolysis but not much, and a dichromate salt) need to make more of that too, got the stuff.

Need me to get me some lithium aluminium hydride though, which would be difficult to make. Although might be able to manage it with some  effort, although I'll need to buy a big pot of lithium, I do have some but only 20g or so left, maybe a bit under 25g. Although theres been 100g lots sold on ebay of late in pelleted form. That could be just the thing, starting by melting lithium in a ceramic 'boat' placed inside a quartz tube which has hydrogen and inert gas flowing through it, the exit-gases being stopped from giving a flashback flame with a one-way valve. and some metal mesh in a pipe connected to the outlet., to make lithium hydride, then purification by dissolving it in diethyl ether (higher solubility) or THF, although its a bit less soluble in THF. I'd choose the THF since I have a big tank of THF in the fridge, and just use a soxhlet and heavy-duty soxhlet condenser to continually shunt back the solvent, then distill it a couple of times, treat for peroxides, add a strip of copper as an inhibitor of peroxidation, and leave a couple of nuggets of sodium metal in the can to destroy any, if on testing after the reclamation of the THF, that there has been any peroxidation, plus to deter formation of the nasty little fuckers, after first reacting with lithium chloride to form LiAlH4, with a bit of LiCl in it, although that doesn't matter, although could be removed but it'd mean dealing with the large quantity of LAH in bulk for more time than I'd like. Its highly pyrophoric, causing an intense metal fire that is difficult to put out on contact with air, and it is SERIOUSLY violently reactive with water. And in liters of THF, that would be REALLY unpleasant to have to deal with, and be a fucking difficult thing to put out. It'd be an inferno. And those I'd rather avoid. Especially when they involve a large quantity of alkali metal hydrides (not cheap, difficult to find, difficult to buy, very demanding to produce and if you do get any of them then they are precious reagents)

Hm, reminds me, I need to buy a potato, to make some peroxidation testing strips.

(and if anyones wondering why I'd use THF despite LAH being more soluble in diethyl ether, just so I don't need to spend the time either redistilling the ether I do have, drying it etc., and since I haven't as much diethyl or diisopropyl ether if I want more I'd have either to make some with the alcohol and hot conc. sulfuric acid, or else buy another can of ether.)

Meaning more work, more peroxide testing on a regular schedule. More expense. So I'll use the THF as I've got loads of it, and recycle it with that nice big hefty 5-liter 4-neck flask. Perfect, once I stopper some necks and stick the condensers in place and start distilling. Could maybe even purge the THF can with argon, just for extra safety and then distill off the THF back right into it, since its pretty low boiling.

[Queen Victoria]

Bargains at the thrift store:

Disney Tshirt for the PR 84 cents
Running shorts for the PR $2.45
Wrist purse for the PR 48 cents
Paperback book for me 48 cents

[Lestat]

And the PR being treated and made a happy bunny is  double

How is she doing QV? hope you'll pass on my regards to her for me

[renaeden]

Oh damn ren. Your usually one of the sharpest tools in our collective box Bet that wasn't fun.

Reminds me of one time I read this chemist's toxicology blog, and ROFL 'about how I nearly killed my dad', after this guy as a kid, was preparing horseradish in bulk, grated it and stuck it all in a blender, then left it for some time to let the enzymatic reaction release as much allyl isothiocyanate as possible, took a sniff part way through, then, after it sends him reeling and choking and about to start vomiting out of both ends at once, goes to his father, moments after his mother saw him as a kid pick it up and say, 'hey, look at this', and knowing him, wisely scarpered:D

His old man put his face up to it even longer and took a big horf, expecting horseradish to be spicy, but not close to a chemical warfare agent (methyl isocyanate, for example and other isocyanates and isothiocyanates, and hell, allylic groups are reactive enough, are really reactive and pretty noxious stuff, it being a release of industrial methyl isocyanate that formed the lethal gas cloud that rolled down towards the citizens of Bhopal after the industrial disaster there and wiped the place out pretty well, not 100% but a significant kill rate.

In the likes of mustard etc. and a lot of other such  Brassicaceae and Alliaceae, the plants have separate cells holding a precursor that reacts with an enzyme, such as myrosinase, in mustard for example, the two react to form volatile isothiocyanates via a nifty as hell little molecular rearrangement, which then after a time, mellow to less toxic alllylic cyanides and similar, its a defense against predators, where the plant is crushed, the cells release their contents into each other, one rearrangement reaction later, you get the characteristic smell, which we humans have learned to see as something tasty and spicy to stick on food, rather than deterring us from eating the things (lol I've even heard from my old man he knew someone who would pick up onions and just crunch into one with his teeth as though it were an apple....*shudders and nearly pukes from both ends himself*) it encourages us to grow them just for eating.

And this kid nearly gassed his old man with the closed blender having prevented all the allyl isothiocyanate and allyl cyanide from escaping, and flooded the kitchen with virulent, choking, eye-ripper toxic fumes like one of josef mengele's own farts in hell while being busy roasting in lava (I hope at least )

And was dumb enough to get smacked senseless like that, then his old man even dumber, took the thing later and shoved his face in it like a complete tool.

Now that's funny.

But give me a break though, I was only in my early teens when I had that teaspoon of wasabi. I was with a friend's family at a food hall in the city where I bought a bento box that contained the wasabi. My reaction to it made them laugh themselves silly while I tried to ease the sting with a drink. Which was futile. Eating some rice helped though.

What have I bought? I went shopping with Kayleigh after she had her hair done and I bought some shiny socks as well as some plain ones. I also bought two pairs of pants - one pair black and the others army green. Some makeup and a feathery cat toy as well.

[DirtDawg]

Sardines ...I don't know ANY of you...except maybe Lestat, I like roast beef.

I have purchased seeds. Flower seeds, vegetable seeds, herb seeds, a ton of seeds.

I will definitely regret this decision at planting time. I've been trapped in the house waaay too long this winter.

See, now one of you supports my premise.

For the long run, I retract my sexist remark about mainly men enjoying sardines and such while mostly women are not enjoying canned fish, since I have been proven "SO WRONG"  by some of the most powerful, established and seasoned women on this site.


As an aside, my son and I have both observed what I said originally and he posted similarly at his media consorts, only to be shut down by foreign penpals right away. In fact he had a Danish "friend"  write back that if she and her family did not eat canned fish where they live, in the winter they would not have much protein to eat, except for their (often pregnant) animals. 

Generic, sexually biased statement retracted, once and for all.  Except that American women seem to be exactly as I said before. Some one show me an American woman who likes fish of any kind from a can.

OK, a partial retraction.