Garlic

There is a day dreaded by every caretaker of God’s greatest gift to the practice of the culinary arts. And that day came most unfortunately to Serendipity Farmhouse late in December 2021. That was the day when Blondie walked into our well-stocked pantry and let out a most terrible and mournful shriek. Despite the pain caused by four broken ribs, I dashed for the pantry at a full run. – There must be something dreadfully wrong. – And there was!

Yes, it was worse than I could have ever imagined. The wondrous pantry of the soon-to-be-world-famous SFH Test Kitchen had become something worse than the “bog of eternal stench” from the movie Labyrinth. The smell was beyond description by any words from any language devised by man – it was the smell of decomposing garlic.

If you read our post SFH Journal: 2020-06-30 through 07-05 – Happy 4th of July!! you will be instantly aware of the tender love and care that we lavish upon our yearly harvest of garlic. We take every precaution to ensure that our precious crop is dried and stored to ensure freshness from the first to the last clove of the year. So, how could it be that our crop could be going bad this early. – – The answer was, and this makes me most proud to say, it was not our crop that was going bad. No, we had done everything correctly. Our crop was still good. But this year we had purchased a large number of garlic heads from the CSA across the road from us as a backup to our supply. Apparently, they had not dried or stored their crop with as much care as we had. It was their garlic that was causing the obnoxious odor in our pantry.

Upon close inspection, we determined that only some of the heads were beyond salvaging. The remainder needed to be either consumed immediately or preserved in some way. So, we searched for various alternatives for preserving. That is when we the read the post Storing Garlic in Wine or Vinegar and Refrigerating on the Garlic Blog. – – We decided to give it a try. We also decided to do the same with the remainder of our own crop. After all, this is the SFH Test Kitchen! We are always ready to try something new if it looks like it has promise.

Below are some pictures from our latest experiment. We will post results on how well this technique works in the coming weeks.

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Hackers

Self-respecting bloggers never want to admit that a blog they run has been hacked. Yet here I am with no alternative other than to say that the SFH blog was hacked by a very cunning, devious, and malicious hacker.

I came to this realization this week when I saw that a post entitled Access Granted to 黑客猫 had been published from our site. I knew that I hadn’t posted anything. When asked, Blondie said that she hadn’t put out anything. But there it was, Access Granted to 黑客猫. I quickly checked out our site statistics and found that there had been 23,417 views of that particular post.

However, when I tried to open the post to read it myself, there was no post. All that was there on my screen was just this picture providing indisputable proof that we had been hacked.

I really don’t know what to make of it. Somehow though, there is something about this photo that seems vaguely familiar to me. I just wish I could figure out what is. – – If anyone has any ideas about this, please let me know.