On the Evolution of Sports

elibalin: Goat grabbing!
syringavulgaris: This appears to be what, a millenium ago, they did and called "polo".
elibalin: If I remember correctly, it's called "Buzkazhi" in one of the places it's practiced.
syringavulgaris: "A mounted version of the game has also been played in the United States. In the 1940s young men in the Cleveland area of Ohio played a game they called Kav Kaz. The men - five to a team - played on horseback with a sheepskin-covered ball. The Greater Cleveland area had six or seven teams."
syringavulgaris: WTF.
elibalin: What else was there to do in Cleveland in the '40s?
syringavulgaris: Drink beer. We had many breweries.
elibalin: And what do people do after drinking lots of beer? They throw goat carcasses around.

Tales from the Experimental Kitchen: Feral Swine For One

1. Go to Gourmet Garage, intending to just grab eggs and yogurt and kitty litter (and to dine on mac and cheese with tuna). Enter a fugue state and wake up with a 1.3lb boneless "mini-roast of wild boar", with a USDA stamp declaring it to be from "Feral Swine".

2. Return home. Visit the vendor's web site for recipes, as the package suggests, only to find that they don't have anything for this particular incarnation of boar.

3. Pour a drink.

4. Remember the packet of dried wild mushrooms that has been staring accusingly at you for a couple months. Start reconstituting them to buy time.

5. Stuffing? It's boneless, so there should be convenient gap. Slowly work loose the net thingie holding it together, realize that not really is there a convenient gap, but perhaps we can make something of this.

6. Go to chop an onion. Realize that the last of the onion went into the beef stew Sunday. Well, shit.

7. Cook rice in the mushroom soaking liquid, add the mushrooms and sauteed garlic and herbs? That might work.

8. Realize we had better get the roast in if it ain't bein' stuffed. Ponder what a good forester would rub his pig with. Drink more. Default to sage, thyme, and long pepper.

9. Surprise yourself by actually getting the net thingie back around the roast. Realize the roasting pan is way too damn' big. However! Grandma's enameled handled pan that she made mac and cheese in! Yes.

10. Heat oven to 4something, for searing. Drain mushrooms, reserving broth (almost forgetting to). Smells kind of like gym socks.

11. Chop a few carrots and celery to throw in the roasting dish, because why the hell not? Put roast in oven.

12. O NOES COCKTAIL IS GONE make another.

13. Measure mushroom soaking liquid, eke out with water for 2c. Begin to put it on the stove, then realize you have a rice cooker, idiot. Transfer operations thither.

14. Chop garlic and some slightly wilty scallions found in the back of the fridge. Sauté for about that long, adding the chopped mushrooms (some of which look disturbingly like horrifying sea life).

15. Turn down the oven to 325. Uncork last bottle of red. Where does all the wine go?!

16. This drink has too much grenadine. However, the kitchen is starting to smell awfully nice. Realize that the mushies have not been herbed. Leap up to rectify.

17. After that's settled it for a bit, add the mushies to the rice, which is still madly cooking away. Lordy, we love the rice cooker.

18. An hour five after beginning productions, everything seems to be ready (modulo letting the roast rest for a few minutes). The meat thermometer seems to think it's about 155 deg F. There is almost no liquid produced by the roast to make gravy or other joy from, alas; a teaspoon, at a generous estimate. This be some lean meat in spite of the nice square slab of fat on the top of it.

19. OM NOM NOM

I Have Too Many Existences

So, I'm posting to DW, and auto-xposting to LJ. This seems to work pretty well (except most people who read me are still on LJ, so the comments don't back-port, but that's not such a big woo). However: the LJ-to-Facebook wall-posting widget that activates when you post to LJ does not appear to be triggered by whatever magic causes a DW post to appear on LJ; and moreover that widget does not seem to exist in the DW codebase. Am I just missing something?