Poor Man’s Penicillin

Whenever you are sick the ultimate answer is soup, someone will always say they will make some soup as if it can cure all.  I was brought up on Chicken Soup which was considered to be poor man’s penicillin.  I will give you two recipes my Dad’s original recipe and my tweaked version.

Dad’s Original Recipe

The amounts for the ingredients can vary dependent upon size of saucepan you are using, in theory if you can fit a small chicken in it with room to spare for vegetables then I would use a whole chicken however myself I tend to use chicken thighs my largest saucepan is not that big.

• Whole Chicken or 3-4 thighs (with skin on) or legs
• 3 Large potatoes (peeled and chopped medium sized) an alternative to potatoes you can use Turnips which is a sweet flavour
• 3-4 sticks of celery (chopped)
• 1 Sweet Onion (chopped, if you cannot get a sweet one you can use a normal large onion and a large banana shallot)
• 1 Leek (chopped)
• Chicken Stock (enough to cover all the ingredients)
• Ideally you need Chicken Fat if you can get it normally very difficult to get these days but you can do without it.
• 2 Carrots (chopped)
• Salt/Pepper

Layering the Saucepan

• Place the potatoes in the bottom of the saucepan followed by the celery then put the chicken on top.
• Sprinkle Salt & Pepper on top.
• Put Chopped leek on top
• Put Chopped Carrots on top
• Pour hot chicken stock/fat over the ingredients until covered.

Cooking

• Place on a high heat until it is boiling and then turned down to simmer and cover with lid.
• Check every 15 minutes and stir.
• The liquid will eventually go clearish and the smell will be amazing
• Taste after 45 minutes, check that the chicken is done.
• If you are cooking a whole chicken it may take as long as 90 minutes

Serving

You can serve the soup separately to the Chicken it is entirely up to you.

My Tweaks – Ingredient Changes

• Instead of potatoes I use one large sweet potato peeled and chopped (upon reheating tends to turn into a thick broth)
• Sea salt
• Celery seeds
• No chicken fat

I eat the chicken (thighs) with the soup normally takes about an hour to prepare and cook which is a quick and easy meal plus I always have leftovers I can reheat.

Pulling the Wool

I see Farage is being used by the Yanks now to show just how easily you can dupe the voters into doing what you want.

“You can beat the pollsters, you can beat the commentators, you can beat Washington. And you can do it by doing what we did for Brexit in Britain.”

The trick is simple really you just give them almost no information about what they are voting for and use an single election “promise” on the side of a bus that says you are going to save a lot of the taxpayers money.  Then let human nature run its course!

As everyone knows election promises are never kept not always the fault of the incoming government since they soon discover that not everything they were told whilst in opposition was technically on the up and up.  Effectively an election promise turns into dust when rammed against the hard rock of reality.

The other key to Brexit was having a stupid opposition that assumed they would win no matter what happened, that sort of optimism will always breed disaster for those that believe it.

You really did not need Farage there at all it would of happened without him, he was just going along for the ride paid for by the EU which is a whooping £109K salary including expenses.  More taxpayers money down the drain at least all of Europe contributes to his salary not just the UK.  I wonder how much Trump paid him to put in an appearance in Mississippi and has he declared it?

Admittedly this is nothing compare to (excerpt from Wikipedia):

“In May 2009, The Observer reported a Foreign Press Association speech given by Farage in which he had said that over his period as a Member of the European Parliament he had received a total of £2 million of taxpayers' money in staff, travel, and other expenses. In response, Farage said that in future all UKIP MEPs would provide monthly expense details.”

Conspiracy theorists will be having a field day with Farage and Trump, what really is happening in Mississippi?  Probably has something to do with Tall Eight hundred year old aliens, which is also just misinformation from a document supposedly created by the KGB to scare the west.

I do find it ironic that a MEP is considered to be instrumental in breaking up the EU when in fact it was the pro-EU Conservatives that did most of the damage themselves.

I am surprised the EU cannot sack him under the premise that he is working against the stability of the Union.

Dilbert’s strip today works on so many levels including politics perhaps it should be called: Fararumptium:

Genre Locked

During my teens the first book I ever read that was more than 50 pages was War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells which is about 200 pages.  It was also mostly likely the book that got me hooked on Sci-Fi but I digress, this particular novel took me several months to read not due to the length but it was down to the way it was written.  Basically it was hard to read, as I read more of Well’s books I discovered he had different styles of writing,  The Time Machine for instance was much easier to read than War of the Worlds.  Similarly C.S Lewis’s Sci-Fi novels which were only 200 pages each are heavy on philosophies and little on the action where as his Narnia Chronicles (written for kids) were a doddle to read admittedly a more extreme example of style of writing.

The problem I have had with books like these and I have read quite a few over the years is that they are locked into their specific genres there is no link to real life I suppose you might say ‘Duh!’ its fiction why should it do so.  To be clear I have read number of horror books by Clive Barker and James Herbert none these contained any humour which happens in real life all the time even in the most dire circumstances it is integral to way humans are wired although James Herbert’s Domain did contain some black humour.

Moving on from books to movies, until perhaps in the Die Hard films action movies contained very little humour similarly horrors contained zero humour whatsoever.  The more recent Marvel movies do contain limited amounts of humour whereas DC movies are quite dark and detached.

Apparently if the genre is of a serious nature there seems to be unwritten rule that no humour is allowed.

Should war films for instance been limited to only serious scenes to avoid detracting from the horrors of war.  I think it dehumanizes the fiction and makes it easier for people to watch that being said a film like Saving Private Ryan brought back some very bad memories for veterans of WWII.

Heroes are not allowed to laugh otherwise they would seem like everyone else in the minds of the readers/viewers.

Is this a purposeful detachment for fiction from reality?  Perhaps fiction should never be too real, I am aware totally aware this opening big can worms.

I have always found book/movies that contain humour far easy to read/watch, some of the more recent TV series have added humour into single episodes to offset this possible of loss viewers, to name a couple X-Files and Supernatural and curiously enough The Simpsons managed to do a wonderful Halloween special using Edge Allen Poe’s poem The Raven which reversed the humour beautifully.

These unwritten rules are slowly being broken however creators of fiction love to go retro, Crimson Peak for instance was a return to the Gothic Romance which had almost died out in the movies but still exists in books.

My own stories always contain an element of humour in order to anchor it and keep my readers awake or interested.

Perhaps people just cannot cope with multiple genres, ironic considering what is in the News everyday.

Why?

That age old question of Why? Why are we here?  Since the earliest days of humanity we have wondered why.  Even in this day and age there is no answer to the question and without that answer nothing really make sense other than what science has managed to discover so far.  Although science is more about the How and the What as opposed to the Why.

Even without the science of today early people solved this question by creating a workaround, we know it as Religion.  It solves so many problems, you don’t have to worry about the why anymore that is in the purview of the Gods or God depending upon your belief system.  They know all the answers or it’s their fault either way it is beyond our understanding therefore we do not need to know.

Early beliefs system centered around the Mother Earth, the Goddess (female) was more important than the God (male) primarily because females could create the miracle of life.  Later that changed and the Goddess’s were knocked off their thrones and it became a man’s world.  After that Religion went downhill somewhat to the point where it became more about the control of its subjects/believers than about providing answers to difficult questions.  Dogma has ruled ever since and the only new ideas are violent ones subverting what started out as peaceful systems of belief.  Throughout history Religion has been the prime excuse for violence/war/terror imagine what history would have been like if the question had never been asked or that Religion was never considered as an option.

Even if you do not have any religious beliefs you are still aware of the idea effectively Religion is the ultimate meme it has always been with us lurking in our memories.

Consider a thought experiment:

Perhaps our existence is not real but a simulation (see The Thirteenth Floor) then the answer to the question is simple and many of the gaps in science start to make sense as well (all that missing matter for instance).  No requirement for Religion at all.

Whether this life is real or not there is one simple truth to it which people never seem to get:

Life is hard!  Get over it!

Everything is hard the first time round, next time it is a little easier.

An easy life is boring which breeds stagnation and that is a killer to any civilization.

The upshot is that the answer to the question is that either it is very simple (seemed like a good idea at the time) or that it is incompatible with our current world view so it becomes unknowable.

The irony is we have created far harder lives for ourselves over a simple question.

Note: I do love the synchronicity of me coming across the following article on The Register.

Tied & Knotted

My pet hate is Neckties, a men's fashion that should of gone out with flares.  I hated wearing a tie in school not to mention it is somewhat dangerous. I mean come on who thought it would be a good idea to wrap a a piece of cloth round one's neck with a slip knot commonly used to hang people with?

I'm not the only one that thinks this: Question Everything?

Okay a little heavy on the sauce but you get my drift.

It is like Superheroes and capes pretty much the kiss of death, 32.5 people die every year from wearing a necktie.  I can only assume they brought back only 0.5 of person to get that figure, probably because the necktie was still attached.

Apparently we can blame the Chinese for this ludicrous idea, ta very much NOT!  Looks like the rest of world cloned your idea for a change and ironically a stupid one at that.

The following businesses: Google, Amazon, Apple and Ikea have banned neckties in their offices and promoted casual wear instead. They want their staff to feel relaxed and open caused that's when good ideas pop into the grey matter above their unrestricted necks.  Probably saves on higher life insurances premiums too. 

These businesses make oodles of cash based upon ideas invented by their staff which basically tells you neckties are evil to every other business out there that forces their staff to wear them, of course I maybe generalising like I always do.

The irony is that nowadays I just wear a polo shirt to work, I will no longer wear tie for anything.