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Tag: octopus

noodlepus, or, how to fox up your chicken soup

Someone made a batch of chx soup at the farm Friday, but put off the noodlemaking because he wanted to use a mixer, and didn’t have one there.

He finally got around to the noodlieoodlieoodles last night, and started running them through the marcato lasagna attachment, which cuts nice, inch-and-a-half wide noodles with a scalloped edge. He wasn’t sure this was the width he was looking for, and he wasn’t especially excited about the scalloped edges, but he noodled boldly forth because it was getting late and the soup had been sitting in the fridge for two days now.

He laid out the noodles along the counter, and threw the strip of excess dough that had run outside the cut in a pile to the side, to ball up and roll out and use for another go when he finished with the first run. But when he glanced over at that little discard pile he was struck by how much it looked to him like the tentacles of an octopus. See for yourself:

Whoa, he said, because there is something deep in him that resonates with the octopus. So he made the rest of the noodles that way. It was, as you can see, unquestionably, utterly, totally worth it. Look at that noodle. Tell me it isn’t hot. Not hot like spicy. Hot like, you know, foxy.

eremurus like octopus

I am beginning to think that the octopus is my familiar, though I am not sure we’re supposed to enjoy our familiars as cuisine as much as I love mine.

Regardless, I like its style.  I like the cut of its jib. I like its inky defense mechanism and its stink-eyed seafloor stare. I like its sucky tentacular gelatinous reach and its super-slick swimability.

So naturally I like things that resemble the ‘pus. Exempli gratia Eremurus rhizomes. Check them:

eremurus-ruiter-cleopatra

I planted half a dozen of these bad boys when the ground thawed for a minute last week. Come spring: kapow!