(no subject)

[which_chick]

Problem: I made an acorn squash the other day for dinner. It's a fall thing and I like acorn squash a lot. Anyway, I emptied the seeds out after halving the damn thing. Halving an acorn squash is an exercise in playing with knives, let me tell you. I'm always glad that I have all my fingers when the squash is in two pieces. I put the squash in the oven to bake and then I regarded the seeds.

When I was a kid, we used to bake pumpkin seeds and salt 'em and eat 'em. (I suspect that this was an activity devised by my mother to add some additional non-candy activity to Halloween while increasing the value we extracted from the price of the pumpkins, but maybe other folks did this too.) Anyway, I got to looking at the squash seeds and it came to me that probably acorn squash seeds would work just as well as pumpkin seeds, right? I mean, they're both squash, pumpkin and acorn squash. They should be the same, thought I. (One day I will wind up dead from this sort of reasoning... but not today.) So, I cleaned up the acorn squash seeds in the colander. I put them in the cast-iron skillet with a pat of butter (everything is better with butter) and I baked them (default temperature is 350) until the first few sploded in my oven. (They make a popping noise when they splode.) Then I poured the crispy squash seeds into a bowl, dear readers, and I salted them.



After that, I ate them with a spoon. They were absolutely way better than I remembered and the hulls, well, okay, they were sort of fibertastic but I would probably eat sticks if they were roasted, buttered, and salted so these weren't bad at all. I want more. I think I'm going to have to buy a pumpkin for the seeds inside. I don't have any earthly desire to eat a pumpkin but maybe I could make a jack o' lantern, which is a time-approved and culturally appropriate way to dispose of an unwanted pumpkin.

I wish I'd thought of this last weekend when doing gooseneck squash with my cousin Heather. I'd have had all manner of squash seeds to roast. *sigh* Hindsight...

In other, entirely unrelated news, our Heroin Tenant (Alecia Secrest, because we have had enough Heroin Tenants that I need to distinguish them by name) from 347, who alleged that she did not deal drugs,. was recently convicted on four counts of dealing heroin and sentenced to four to eight years in prison. She also has to pay restitution to assorted people, none of whom are us.

I would really like to send Alecia's mom a card. "Congratulations on your daughter's accomplishments. You must be so proud of her!" That would be wrong, though, I betcha.

Comments

Dead reckoning

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

One day I will wind up dead from this sort of reasoning... but not today.

I found out ten years after the fact that I could have killed myself reasoning that way.

As a non-chemistry student in an internship in a chemistry lab (at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in White Oak), one bored day I thought: "NaCl. KCl. Wonder if they taste the same?"

Yes, I tried it. Potassium chloride tastes, in fact, cold. (It's an endothermic reaction, apparently.)

Then I was telling this story in front of either our friends or my father-in-law, and they said... lucky you didn't have any cuts in your GI tract. Basically, that much potassium in my blood would have been Bad News.

So, whoohoo! Yay surviving one of my rasher moments.

Re: Dead reckoning

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much you were eating, but they mix potassium chloride with sodium chloride up to about fifty-fifty for "lite" salt. Unless you were eating it by the handful, it probably wouldn't have killed you.

References here:
http://health.msn.com/centers/highbloodpressure/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100152030

http://virtualweberbullet.com/salt.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt