The cheese stands alone

As another urbanite I seldom give thought to deer season, but my opinion is that I'd rather see the deer culled through a responsible hunting program than have them starve to death, a likely fate since there are so few natural predators.  And I've enjoyed venison from time to time but it's a difficult item to prepare properly, it being so lean.  The tenderloins are the best, in my experience, but you can also make fine burgers if you add about 1/3 ground pork to the ground venison mix.  A little gamey for some palates but nonetheless satisfying.

The Bambi reference got me thinking about antlers and how weird they are.  The males shed their antlers every year but the next year they grow bigger.  It's like if you grew a beard and it fell off every year but then it grew longer, increasing in size every year.  The same growing period but greater size, how weird is that?  It's amazing what you can find by simply entering a single word in Wikipedia, like the fact that the smooth, curved nature of moose antlers improves their hearing, not something that ever occurred to me.

And if you're out hunting alone Mr. Beagles, be safe.

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YouTube is always suggesting different videos for me to look at and one recently caught my eye, a video to easily make your own mozzarella cheese.  And it does look easy but I looked at other videos for mozzarella and the recipes only vary a little bit.  Heat some milk, add stuff to make it curdle (vinegar, lemon juice, rennet), fiddle with it to drain the whey and there you have it, fresh mozzarella cheese.  Seems like a worthwhile project, so I decided to look for recipes for cottage cheese, which I also like.  Almost all the same ingredients but the preparation is different.  It then occurred to me that there is little difference between the ingredients in cheese and ice cream, something that requires further thought and experimentation.  Has anyone ever made chocolate cheese?

In a callback to an earlier discussion, we've all heard of the moon being made of "green cheese," right?  I could never figure that out, cheese isn't green.  But I learned that green refers to the level of maturity and not the color, like green recruits.  Well, that makes sense.  My father once told me that blackberries were red when they are green and I thought he was just messing with me.

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It looks like 2017 is closing out in a big torrent of scandalous sexual behavior, and it's moving from the Hollywood types to the political arena.  We already knew about the guy in Alabama with a keen eye for the younger girls, but today there is hot news about the good senator from Minnesota, Al Franken.  This came out of nowhere and must be a big shock to the liberal types.  It will be amusing to see how the pundits on both sides of aisle will be spinning these disclosures.  I can't believe I'm out of popcorn already and it's time to restock. Sorry, Al.  You were looking pretty good there for a while.