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Monthly Archives: April 2016

I make! Radish refrigerator pickles edition

Duck sometimes brings small sandwiches with him to work.  His sandwiches often include radishes.  This made me really crave radishes.  It’s weird.  I really wanted to put radishes in my sandwiches and stuff just because I saw him do it.  So I bought a great deal of radishes (by the bunch, so I sautéed the radish tops with some garlic since it seemed wasteful to throw away all the radish tops).  Now then, I only eat so many sandwiches and I had too many radishes for the amount of sandwiches I would normally eat.  So I decided to pickle the rest of them.

My mother made these really delicious, tangy radish (quick) pickles once.  Unfortunately, I don’t know what she pickled them with.  I mean, I know she used vinegar and sugar, but I didn’t know what kind of vinegar or how much sugar.  So in the end, I just made it up.  I opted for red wine vinegar, since I had that on hand, I was out of white wine vinegar, and I didn’t want the acridness of white vinegar (and balsamic is too dark).

I sliced all my extra radishes about 1/8″ thick and stuffed them in a mason jar.  Then I heated some red wine vinegar and sugar together (about 3:1, and I estimated the amount I would need to cover all the radishes) until the sugar was completed dissolved and the mixture was just starting the boil.  I poured the vinegar mixture over the radishes and let it cool to room temp.  Then I covered and stuffed it in the fridge.

I had pickles with sandwiches, after I ran out of fresh radishes, with hot dogs, because I was craving a hot dog one day, and sometimes just by themselves.  They were a little sweeter than I would have liked so I might go for a 4:1 ratio of vinegar and sugar next time, but otherwise they were quite good.  I think I might try making fermented radish pickles next time instead of make a quick fridge pickle.

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Yes, the whites of the radishes do turn red as they as they soak in the pickling liquid.

I play! Pandemic edition

You know how I’m really interested in virology and epidemiology?  No?  Well, I am.  I’ve always found the topics fascinating.  Partly because of such, I find Pandemic to be a very entertaining game.  In Pandemic, deadly diseases are breaking out all over the world.  All players play cooperatively as different specialists to try to cure and rid the world of said diseases.

Pandemic is nice in that it’s all players against the board.  If you have issues playing games with people because there’s always a poor winner or sore loser, a cooperative game might help.  There is a good deal of cooperative strategy as the board tries to kill everyone on earth with diseases (of four different varieties!) and your plucky band of specialists try to stop it.

You decide at the beginning of the game on the difficulty level.  The game gets progressively harder as gameplay proceeds due to the metered card draws that introduce more conflict and challenge to the game.  Players lose if eight outbreaks occur (because of worldwide panic), not enough disease cubes are left (a disease has spread too much), or not enough player cards remain (team runs out of time).  Players win if they find cures for all four diseases.

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I think this game is playable for older children.  The youngest ones I occasionally have in my care are 7-8 years old.  I don’t think they’d really appreciate the gameplay or understand the strategy.  I have one exceptionally bright 10 year old who I think could do really well with this game if I could convince him that it’s a cooperative game.  All the little boys are really competitive.  Loudly and blatantly so.  The girls can be just as competitive, but generally they’ve been more subtle.

Bonus: If you want to play for the opposite team, i.e. be the disease that wipes out the world, you can play Plague Inc.  This is a phone/video/computer game in which you…try to wipe out the world population with disease.  There’s only one disease caused by one active microbe at a time, but each microbe has different characteristics which requires different strategies for propagation.  You can evolve and mutate the microbe to modify its infectivity, severity, and lethality and drug/climate resistance.  I…may enjoy playing Plague Inc. a little too much.  I…may find it too satisfying to cause a pandemic and wipe out the world’s population…