Category Archives: Wildlife

giant blue lobster caught in Britain

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Bluey, they called him. I guess they’ve got creativity rationing in place in Blighty.  And maybe not so much “Giant” as “Really more than you could eat at one sitting.”

Anyhow, this Ananova report is the third in the “bizarrely-coloured lobster” series, a semi-regular feature on the raincoaster blog. He wins on sheer size and age; he’s around my age! Wonder if he’s got a blog, too.

Zahra d’Aronville, from Blue Reef, said: “Bluey is quite an unusual lobster. Scientists say that only one in every three to five million is this colour.

“He has been very lucky to survive because being so blue he is quite easy to spot by predators.

“Lobsters this colour usually get eaten when they are much younger and smaller so it is very unusual to see a lobster of this colour so big.”

giant octopus attack!

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This came out a couple of years ago; take a look at some of the local wildlife and maybe you’ll understand why I don’t like to swim in the ocean.

West Coast of Vancouver Island an 80lb Octopus Doflieni – Giant Pacific Octopus, tentacle spread of 16ft, charges an underwater robot (ROV)and wraps a tentacle around the vehicles manipulator claw, in full reverse the ROV blasts the octopus away with thruster/propeller wash.

Crowe on Irwin: appalling

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 irwinshark

Make of this what you will. Personally, if I’d been an Aussie, I’d have died to portray Steve Irwin. Russell Crowe apparently feels differently.

Actor Russell Crowe called reports that he may play “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin in a film biography of Irwin‘s life “appalling,” he told CNN’s “Showbiz Tonight.”

“This is my friend,” Crowe told “Showbiz Tonight” anchor A.J. Hammer during an interview for Crowe’s new film, “A Good Year.” “All right? He just died. We’ve dealt with his funeral, we’ve dealt with a memorial to him. You know?

“I’m not doing business over the grave of my friend. I find that appalling. But, you know, that’s not just in the tabloid[s]. That’s in The Guardian, its in The New York Times. Understand? Absolutely disgusting.”

cooking salmon in your dishwasher

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Salmon, ready for duty!‘Round these parts I am the dishwasher, but I recall the glory days when I had one of these handy, if energy-spendthriftish, machines. It did indeed make a nice poached salmon, as the Surreal Gourmet claims and every BCer could tell you.

Actually, the best alternative use of a dishwasher was the one the techs at Starbucks came up with. When the dishwashers died (as they all must) they converted them into salmon smokers, and they worked beautifully, too. Wood chips in the engine compartment, salmon on the racks, the whole thing clad in airtight stainless steel; it was perfect.

In any case, here, via BoingBoing, is the immortal “How to Poach a Salmon in Your Dishwasher” recipe, from the Surreal Gourmet.

Poaching fish in the dishwasher is a virtually Now THAT is a salmon!foolproof way to shock your friends, prepare a succulent meal and do the dishes — all at the same time. I’ve poached salmon in more than 100 dishwashers on three continents. There’s never been a dull party.

It all started with the release of my last book, The Surreal Gourmet Entertains. To promote it, I traveled the globe throwing spontaneous dinner parties wherever I could rustle up a kitchen and a willing audience. The hazard of having a good publicist, however, is that guests tend to arrive with impossibly high expectations. Instead of trying to compete with their fantasies, I countered by turning an urban legend into a practical cooking method. My kitchen resembled a mad laboratory as I pushed my dishwasher well beyond the uses covered by its limited warranty. With a minimum of collateral damage, the process of testing and tweaking the following technique was good fun and yielded results that even surprised me.

As it happens, salmon’s very forgiving. Although temperature and cycle durations vary with each machine, a little more or less “washing” doesn’t greatly affect the results. To heighten the drama — and prove that you have nothing up your sleeve — let your dinner guests crowd around the dishwasher when you load the fish. Then, when the cycle’s complete, invite them back to witness the unloading.

Here’s all you need to know to set your doubts aside, put dinner in the dishwasher and watch your multitasking kitchen appliance steal the show.

Poached Salmon

lamb/sheep/python turducken

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You know what a turducken is, don’t you? It’s that rare delicacy formed by stuffing a dead animal with another dead animal, which has itself been stuffed with a dead animal, etc etc etc, which is, finally stuffed with junk food. Kinda like Britney Spears. My mother had a recipe like this that began with a sparrow centre and concluded with a layer of camel, but then, my mother was untraditional in the extreme.

Well this Malaysian python decided that he was gonna save some poor, hardworking chef all that trouble, and went for it himself.

Behold the python that swallowed a ewe.
What’s he to do? He swallowed a ewe.
He swallowed a ewe too massive to chew.
The ewe was expectin’, so he swallowed two.
Then up he threw.

Python Ewe Lamb Turducken for table #4!!!