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Mageirocophilia

Strawberry Chilli Liqueur

Strawberry Chilli LiqueurTLSO and I have been prone to putting berries into vodka now that we have actual berry bushes in our possession. This year, one of the things we wanted to try was a strawberry liqueur (with store-bought strawberries, mind – we unfortunately do not have our own strawberry fields, forever or at the moment). But, as neither of us is actually that fond of straightforward, sickly sweet liqueurs, we felt it needed a kick too – enter red chilli pepper! The improvised recipe turned out seriously good: sweet, but not too sweet, with plenty of strawberry flavour and lovely lingering heat from the red chilli. Dangerously delectable stuff, this.

 

The process is utterly simple:

 

Strawberry Chilli Liqueur

 

500 g strawberries, hulled and halved. Red, juicy strawberries with flavour, please: none of those hastily grown, fist-sized things that are white inside and completely bland.

1 red chile pepper, seeded and sliced

250 g caster sugar

500 ml vodka

 

Here’s what you do: Combine all ingredients in a 2-litre jar with a tight fitting lid,Liqueur ingredients in the jar give the jar a good shake, and put it down on the table. That’s it. Now you just wait for 4 weeks, shaking the jar every now and then, and watch the strawberries lose their colour and the sugar dissolve.

After 4 weeks, sieve the contents of the jar; press the strawberries slightly to get as much liquid out of them as possible. (You can line the sieve with cheesecloth if you want a clearer liqueur) Bottle the gloriously red liquid – of which you will get about 750 ml. It’s pretty darn good as it is, but letting it mature a little in the bottle will only improve it.

 

You can use the soaked strawberries and chilli pepper bits in baking. I made one of my favourite quick-fix coffee cakes: French Yogurt Cake, sans rosewater. It totally looks like a salami pie – especially with the red chilli pieces! -  but tasted good.  :-)

French Yogurt Cake

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On mobile internet sticks

(Energy provided by Biohof Pratsch Weinviertel organic wine: ever so slightly effervescent, forming the tiniest leetle bubbles on the insides of the glass. Wonderfully green and fresh – I’d never know it packs a potent 13% of alcohol were it not printed right there on the bottle. Reminds me of vinho verdes.)


This is what I would like to do to my mobile internet stick:


First, I would like to scratch its surface using a tiny, very sharp star-head screwdriver. I would fill its sides with insults – possibly Shakespearean ones, because they are quite stylish – until it would be all scratch and no sides, and you couldn’t even read the insults any more. Then I would take a hammer to it and pound it to smithereens. Then I would jump up and down on the ex-stick smithereens and grind them to powder with a nice pair of heels. Then I would set fire to the powder and laugh demonically. Then I would dump the burnt crap into a bin and throw the entire bin into a landfill. And then I would feel a little better.


Words cannot express how much I loathe that useless piece of shit. Words cannot express how much I loathe Elisa for having the audacity to sell such useless pieces of shit (on a two-year contract too, of course, so you’re stuck having to pay for the useless piece of shit for 24 months even though it never fucking works).


I’ve had five mobile internet sticks, all capable of fuck all. Yes, you’d think I would have learnt my lesson after stick #2, wouldn’t you? The problem is that mobile internet is something I’d actually need and use, so when a salesperson assured me that the technology has evolved and oh yes, these are so much better than they used to be, I naively believed them. The next time they’ll try to convince me that everything is so much better now that they have a 3G network, oh yes ma’am, But I Will Not Believe Their Lies. Done, I am.


Now, where’s that screwdriver?


 

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