And be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you

[venta]

Tut, tut. I have, up til now, regarded ebee as one of the world's most well-prepared people. She can produce a first-aid kit which would shame a minor hospital from nowhere, and remains unflappably calm and competent if required to use it. On a recent holiday, some mischievous guests attempted to manufacture circumstances she hadn't catered or allowed for. We They failed.

I'm briefly camping out at her house just now and was about to make myself a sandwich (using a foodstuff which has been provided for me even though she doesn't eat the item in question).

This is why you can't trust a vegetarian to equip a kitchen. They don't treasure those vital, purpose-built little bits of metal which are so hard to do without. They don't, apparently, keep a pair of pliers[*] in case emergency intervention is called for. Bluntly, they don't have a strategy for dealing with corned-beef tins which have lost their keys.

Yes, yes, I'm sure you're all carnivores, and the reason that you're not equipped for this particular brand of crisis is just because you're southern or middle-class or something. So sue me.

[*] Long-nosed pliers, known in the family house as "81s" (after their part number on my Dad's original GPO tool-list). Useful for any number of cookery-related things, including tricky jobs like getting the funny stringy bits out of the legs of turkeys or opening corned-beef tins.

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

My pliers live in my toolbox :p but you're right that I don't eat corned beef, or for that matter spam or luncheon meat. Life is too short to eat cows from tins.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Obviously my other, non-cookery pliers live in the toolbox :)

I'm right with you on spam and luncheon meat (which I think are actually pigs in tins) and many other forms of meat in tins are best avoided. Corned-beef, however, is brilliant stuff. Completely unlike beef, of course, but one of the things I think I'd really miss if I were ever to give up meat.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I have a theory that corned beef is indispensable because it has a taste which isn't quite matched by anything in else. In the same way as, for example, Marmite.

So if you're exposed to it as a kid it's got you for life!

[venta.livejournal.com]

It is a very distinctive taste. Which made it all the more disappointing when I ordered a Reuben sandwich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuben_sandwich) in the US. I got quite excited at the idea that there was a corned-beef speciality.

Sadly, US corned beef ain't the same as UK corned beef. The sandwich was pretty good otherwise, but such a disappointment.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I respectfully submit myself as a counter-example. Corned beef hotpot was on our rotation, but I'm happy to see at least the corned beef part of it consigned strictly to my personal dietary history.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I must concede that some forms of cooked corned beef[*] are actually quite nasty. I always regard corned-beef hash with great suspicion, since I've never quite worked out what the defining cooking technique which makes it nasty is.

[*] Obviously, it's all cooked. I mean stuff which has been cooked more once it's been wrestled out of the can.