Never had vegemite, the 'vege-' bit rather puts me off
, but similar to marmite, isn't it?
Useful, if so, even for some who don't find it tasty (I do like marmite, not crazy about it, but in or on the right snack it's alright), as it's extremely rich in B complex vitamins as well as trace elements of various kinds, and in forms, given it's been crapped out by something organic, that tends to be easily uptaken by other living organisms when included as an ingredient in agar when making up one's own, as opposed to buying ready-sterilized pre-made semisolid culture media, cheap too, especially for the kinds of quantities needed to make up enough agar to pour hundreds of plates.
Cold pizza? I do that too. Actually if it's co-op brand stuffed crust double pepperoni with extra cheese ones, I've even been known to go 'fuckitall' and not even bother cooking it in the first place, just take the plastic wrapper off and start munching away straight out of the fridge. I do at least make sure they have been unfrozen if needs be, but sometimes thats about the limit of preparation of pizza I've been known to take things to. Not just cold pizza, but pizza that's just a few degrees 'F short of having a pulse and running away if not hit over the head from behind by surprise in a dark alley first, close enough to alive to wonder if it'll scream when you stick a fork in it, or just start tearing it to pieces with my bare hands and stuffing it down my neck.
Never heard of anyone else eating raw pizza before, but I do, it tastes nice enough and it isn't like any of the ingredients-bread dough, semicooked, smoked, nitrite-saturated and salted meat, I.e pepperoni, cheese, a bit of tomato paste and spices aren't things unsuitable to be eaten while they are still squirming, and if I can eat any and inclusive-every one of those ingredients and not be made ill by it, in the uncooked state, then logically their coming mixed together should have no negative effects on the consumer, it's taking a plastic wrapper off and removing a cardboard box, not organic chemistry where the same certainly doesn't hold true, and eating a raw pizza sure as shit ain't rocket science either
(I've often wondered just WHY people refer to things as 'not rocket science', when meaning a thing is simple. Why should rocketry be any more difficult in theory or practice, than organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry (such as the propellants and their storage etc.), of course being needed. But why rocket science particularly be regarded as any more challenging than for example, pharmacological neurochemistry, particle physics, just doesn't make sense. Hell, I'd go so far as to say quantum physics poses much more of a difficult cognitive challenge to me, personally than pyrotechnics. I was doing pyro stuff when I was still a preteen, so quite literally, it's a challenge a child could learn to meet. Because one has. Me. I've built plenty rockets, rocket propelled grenades, explosively-launched RPGs (a lightweight pistol-design, in fact, was something I came up with as a pre-teen, that used a blank 12ga shotgun shell to launch a shell carrying guidance fins and a thin 'tail' housing a slow-burning propellant suitable for a rocket motor and carrying on the end various high-explosive, low-explosive and incendiary or/and smoke compositions, even played around with teargas rounds, just by switching out the type of grenade that was loaded into my RPG-pistol and occasionally playing with the fusing and arming mechanisms etc. So 'rocket science' is something one can begin to learn as a little child FFS!)
But if I'd have taken a serious hobby out of quantum mechanics, that would have been immensely more difficult to get even a toe in the door of serious study and thats not including the entry-barrier of a high setup cost initially for equipment, from geiger-muller tubes to gamma-ray spectroscopy and of course, an electron microscope, which is something I'd fucking LOVE to have. I might actually take my old man up on his idea of building one, which he posited a while back, a DIY electron microscope. At the heart of it, perhaps even a CRT display tube could be hacked for the electron gun, with of course some highly modified vacuum parts and beamline coherer optics compared to what you get in a TV, but using it as the basis for a short LINAC [linear accelerator, that give particles a single 'kick' or per stage if multiple stages are used, in, as they sound, a straight beam configuration as opposed to confining particles to orbital resonances such as with cyclotrons, which allow much more energy to be imparted on a tighter spatial budget by trapping particles under acceleration in a cyclic orbit in electrostatic, electromagnetic, radiofrequency etc. fields and giving them a kick with another field with a different orientation to the confining plane, so that each individual particle gets not just the biggest single boot up it's little furry subatomic arse one can give it, but repeatedly, under hard vacuum, so that the energy builds up, just like pushing a child on a swing, except there is no seat, just 'chains' to confine the trajectory, repeated pushes being given and fr.ex. an electron, positron, proton, antiproton going 'wheeeeeeeeeeeeee! HARDER DADDY! FASTER! WHEEEE! push me more!'. But I'd love an electron microscope of my very own, so I could have much greater freedom to experiment with nanotechnology and it's applications, and new developments intended to be aimed at materials science AND get the fix of condensed-matter physics that I frequently find myself craving for, if I could actually LOOK at nanoparticles, materials like graphene, graphane, silicene, germanene, stannene, and literally see the atoms in a nanostructure and how they are spatially oriented towards one another, that'd be absolutely beautiful to have in the back garden shed, along with the particle accelerator to make it work and the likes of cryoultramicrotomes with diamond blades for cutting samples, chemicals like osmium tetroxide, OsO4, an expensive, and highly poisonous, volatile chemical which reacts by hydrolyzing and depositing, in organic matter, a very thin layer of osmium metal, permeated intimately into the material of interest, such as cells or parts of cells due to it's volatile nature.
Highly toxic via inhalation, but only very small quantities are required, given the application (osmium is a hell of a dense element, and thus decelerates particle beams very effectively, Bremmmstrahlung not being taken into account of course), but so toxic that apparently at one particularly stupid fucker point in their paki-ing careers, terrorists had apparently hatched the beginnings of a plot to obtain and deploy osmium tet as a chemical weapon!
Although this was also extremely stupid; since yes, its very toxic, and volatile it is also a compound of osmium, one of the platinum group metals, which hydrolyzes in the presence of water vapour, so vapour would hug the ground, and break down also, whilst waiting for someone to breathe it in. And it is as said, a platinum group metal, related to iridium, very hard, very dense, very heavy stuff, although not as chemically impervious to nigh on any comers as is iridium....if the ragheads HAD tried to pull off that sort of plot they'd have spent a monetary amount on the OsO4 itself just to buy a few GRAMS, never mind the multiple kilograms that you'd need to actually disseminate a chemical weapon effectively enough to cause casualties rather than only a mass panic after one or two people dropped right next to ground zero of a weaponized agent, that could have set them up with a sarin manufacture and weaponization/munitions development and testing plant that they could have caused massive damage with, or even if they were cheap and unskilled and stupid like jihadis tend to be, sulfur mustard 'gas' [they are liquids, not gases, but if not sprayed as aerosols via aircraft, and fired in shells, it's the explosive bursting charge in the shell that disperses the mustard agent as a fine atmospheric suspended mist or dew, same goes for nerve 'gases', lewisites, nitrogen mustard 'gases', phosgene oxime and what have you, with the exception of chlorine, and of phosgene (not it's oxime, I mean, which is classed as a 'nettle agent', but phosgene, the highly lethal pulmonary agent, they aren't gases, but liquids, again with the primary exception being phosgene oxime, which is a crystalline solid with a very high vapour pressure, as well as some of the novichok nerve agents, solids exist in this case too)
It'd be like buying a 24-carat five-pound bar of gold, casting it into a billy club just to use to bash the heads in of bank security guards during a bank robbery. Ridiculous even in concept, but thats what these pakis wanted to do, use osmium tetroxide as a chemical weapon LMFAO. Just the same, conceptually, as buying a solid platinum baseball bat to mug somebody for a dollar in a dark alley. Makes the same sort of sense, in that yes, it might WORK, if done, but the DOING it would involve expenditure that could if spent in nearly any other way, buy one much more bang for buck in terms of havoc and casualties, even if it were chlorine gas, liquefied and weaponized, simple as can be, you'd get better results!
Never eaten jellyfish or trepang, but I'd give them a go. Although fish sushi really doesn't appeal to me at all, conceptually. Raw fish. Ew. 'Nuff said. It's RAW....FUCK....ING....FISH! fish are meant to be cooked before eating them!
One thing I am particularly partial to, is saffron milkies, roasted over an open gas flame, topped with mozzarella cheese and given a little pinch of a powder made from cured, detoxified fly agaric mushroom, a favourite spice of mine, or ingredient in condiments and spices, and Chalciporus piperatus, a parasite mushroom with pores rather than gills underneath which bear the sporulating basidia, parasitic of fly agaric mushroom mycelium it seems, meaning one often gets a twofer when out harvesting and that one species can be used as an indicator hint that you should watch that patch for a week or so, every day, to see if peppery boletes, which as their name suggests, have a burning, hot peppery taste-sensation when eaten, and as their nature hints, cryptically, they go rather well with Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, when the latter is being turned to use in the kitchen rather than either a recreational inebriant, weirdo oddball GABAergic hallucinogen or herbalist's medicine of great value and manyfold uses. The two grow together, intimately linked, parasite and host, so, in dropping a subtle hint, mother nature got that one right on the ball there, suggesting the two go together in other ways too perhaps, namely, in stews, soups and other things made with parts of dead cattle and dead sheep. Which they really do as a wonderfully complimentary pairing.)
The saffron milk-caps, have the scientific binomial name 'Lactarius deliciosus', Lactarius being the milk-cap family of mushrooms, which bleed various colours of liquid, some changing colour either on atmospheric oxidation after a while, or in response to chemicals applied to samples as reagent tests in the field, which, as with the related genus Russula, the brittlegils, which however do not bleed, these reagent tests are invaluable and can even mean the difference between a positive ID on the spot and not identifying it until one gets home to one's microscope. Some are poisonous, some of them are extremely tasty, a few are both, and have to be used in specific ways, or in small amounts as flavourings only, and some make for special purpose spices or condiments. The species epithet 'deliciosus' in this case, implies 'delicious', which they really, really are. Bright orange in colour, stem short, squat, not overly fat but hefty, and covered in shallow pits, with a tendency towards going green in colour all over the fruitbody but especially the stem, and there, particularly the pits and where bruised, a pine-needle type dark green colour. Found, coincidentally, in pinewoods, and in mixed coniferous-deciduous forest, in association with pines.
IF one is damn lucky that is, they are fairly uncommon, but I'm lucky enough to have, by dint of the long years of exploring this, that and the other forest and woodland that I have had the chance to go and ferret about in for tasty, medicinal or psychedelic mushrooms, to find one patch, a single forest, half of it tends to produce a prolific fruiting of L.deliciosus, big ones too, plate-sized caps even, zoned in deeper and lighter alternating rings of orange tones, and that can supply me with BIN BAGS full of fruitbodies, which are simply wonderfulicious, every year, for quite a few years I've been lucky enough to score big sacks of this uncommon, but very desirable mushroom, esteemed for it's esculent qualities since roman times at least.
I'd quite like a plate full of those, freshly picked and roasted over the gas oven ring burners on a fork, smothered in molten peppery bolete-fly agaric-spice blend-spiked mozarella cheese until it bubbles and browns and sucks up lots of flavoursomeness from the fly agaric/peppery boletus and from the Lactarius mushrooms themselves; could go make and eat that right now if only I had some mushrooms left, frozen for example. One of my favourite wild mushrooms of all time, ranking up there with such exalted company as Laetiporus sulfureus, the sulfur polypore when it's young, juicy and tender, with giant puffball, sliced, given a tiny bit of salt added to salted butter, and fried, or deep-fried in hot butter after battering them once cut into 'steaks', fried in eggy brown bread batter or in a batter like used for fish'n'chips , lovely, and the puffballs grow so fucking BIG that just one of them can, if it reaches the maximal size, of about a meter and a half in diameter, and weighing as much as a grown man, easily feed several families for a week, assuming every meal was going to have giant puffball served somehow, and that it'd be used for snacks, and the families being both large, and gluttonous for the sublime flavour of the giant puffball, which once tasted, nigh anyone would be pretty soon
and with Macrolepiota procera, the parasol mushroom, of meaty, savoury taste and texture, very good eating indeed, and personal favourites of my own, that others might not share as being of quite the quality I rate them, such as Suillus luteus, the slippery-jack bolete, and the similar, but more gracile, slender larch bolete, both coniferous mycorrhizal species, acknowledged by guidebooks as edible, unlike fly agaric for example which all term poison (you just need to know how to use it correctly to not be made sick by it), some even say slippery jack is 'poor' or 'mediocre', something I heartily disagree with, loving them either simply divested of the slime layer on top of the caps by peeling it off before frying, or doing so then frying in salted garlic butter with a squeeze of lime or lemon juice, served russian style, I happen to think them anything but mediocre, indeed some of my favourite wild mushrooms. I'd even rate them above Boletus edulis, the famed Cep or porcini mushroom, aka the penny-bun bolete!
I've, over the years, had quite the range of experiences sampling wild mushrooms many never ever get the chance to try because they aren't sold in shops or markets, and they've ranged from the simply sublime, to the truly, hideously foul, to even in one case, a really unpleasant all-night-long stomach upset, where I was violently sick, had the shits and severe nausea, after consuming stinkhorn egg-stages, which are rumoured to be edible, and are eaten by some. I evidently do not react well to the species, even as an egg stage, before it develops the loathesome rotting flesh and decaying faecal material stench as a mature specimen, which they do, releasing some stinky, disgusting smelling chemicals that can in some cases be detected at concentrations as low as one part per trillion of air, meaning you SMELL a stinkhorn long before you ever see it. Indeed it's a bit of mycologist field-trip gaming, to try and track down the stinkhorn itself using your nose, because you'll smell the fucker half a mile off, more if the wind is blowing it in your direction, sniffing them out until you've actually come within eyesight of the offending and indeed, most offensive little object in question as you cannot but KNOW is there, but just have to find out where by sniffing them out.)
I knew full well I was correct in my identification, I knew what I was eating, its just that the guidebooks stating 'edible in the egg stage although not reccomended, eaten in the egg-stage by some' were at odds with what it actually did to my insides. Which was make them into outsides, repeatedly, and in a horribly nauseating, stomach-cramping, diarrhea-loaded vomitathon all night long in misery. So never misidentified a species and poisoned myself, not even at 4yo when I first started eating wild mushrooms, after teaching myself what to forage for and what to guard against, indeed teaching myself to READ with the mycology textbook of quality I first had. But anyone can react badly to mushrooms, even well known excellent edibles like oyster mushroom, ceps, slippery jack boletes, with not a nanogram of poison to be found anywhere, some people are just allergic to some kinds of mushroom, some species, like sulfur polypore, slippery jack, honey fungus (Amillaria mellea and other Amillaria species) being worse offenders than most, in allergy frequency, but nevertheless, edible, just with a few people who react badly to them. Obviously in the case of common stinkhorn (as immature witches' eggs of course, before that foul malodorous stench starts being vomited forth by what looks like a cock, growing out of a ruptured testicular abscess, slobbering pus and slime, and tipped with a 'head' covered in greenish food poisoning-diarrhea, that often as not, has, due to the foul stink, drawn so many blowflies it literally HEAVES with a single contiguous coat of buzzing, writhing blowflies, drawn to the stench of carrion and so thick they completely cover the entire mushroom as an adult specimen!)
Those are every bit as nasty as they sound like they might be and smell like they are. It's a case of a time when one really ought to judge a book by it's cover and say 'fuck right off, no chance, even if I AM a life-long wild mushroom gourmet with a thing for the exotic and novel, it's as bad as every other sense tells you it'll be, if not worse than that, which is saying a lot, all things considered:autism:. Foul, just...loathsome in every possible way it is to be for a living entity to be disgusting and abhorrent.
