Recent content by Toddy

To us an anorak needs a hood. It's an Inuit jacket kind of thing. My Canadian great Aunt sent them over to us when we were children. Parka came from the same kind of folks but in Russia.

You know all those wonderful herbs that are just coming out again ? You can make really tasty, and beautiful, foccacia using those.... :)

My guts no longer tolerate gluten :sigh: It's one of life's great sadnesses, because good bread is a pleasure, it really is, and gluten free bread is dire. Good on you making your own bread, it looks lovely, it sounds brilliant and I'm sure it's going to be so tasty. Good bread, bit of...

A smock is a working garment. It can be a very fancy working garment showing the skill of the wife who made it, or it can be a very practical hard wearing piece of kit.....thus the army....but it's a working garment. Smocking is the gathering that makes loose fabric fit to shoulders and bodice...

Think of Damsons as plums though, and plum sauce is pretty good :)....even with ransoms :)

11.5 oz..... if that's American, then it's just a normal sized bottle of soy sauce. Ours works out at 250ml is pretty close to 8 fluid ounces.

Some warm food inside you, and run about a bit, or do some really thorough stretching exercises before you go to bed. I find that if I'm warmed up before I get into my sleeping bag, then I can sleep. It doesn't work for me to get into it cold and hope I'll warm up. I find the hot water bottle...

I make small tinder bundles. The cordage I use to tie them, and the birch bark that I use to enfold the bundle, all fluffs up well with the edge of my knife. That fluff is prefect spark catch. That said, I do like amadou as a spark catch. It'll even take the spark from flint and steel and let it...

Those ferrocerium rods are reactive too....they 'rust' and rot if they're kept damp. So, wrapping them in tinder...in our climate ? I don't think that's a good idea.

If you watch through the seasons in an area you can wander frequently enough to become really familiar with it, and that can just be even your local park, then you'll spot the mushrooms that come up, and you start to recognise them. Oysters, Chicken of the Woods, Jelly Ears, the birch...

Can you replace a zip ? Seriously, look at the jacket and figure out if it's possible, because I have a drawer load of decent zips meant for jackets like this and if there's one that will fit, then you're welcome to it. Thanks to the wonders of modern machinery there are very few truly bad...

:) I'm telling myself that Tradeston's a nightmare to get to and to find parking .....:rolleyes:

I think of coffee as the product of something roasted, be that beans or roots like dandelion. Tea is just the stuff soaked in hot water. So, technically the chaga is a tea, but it's boiled in the water, and it drinks like coffee not tea.

I have endured rheumatoid arthritis, dermatographic urticaria, and ibs for over thirty years....they only came on after I caught chickenpox as an adult. Now there's talk that some virus' seem to be the 'cause' of such auto immune system issues. The coxsackie B virus/& Epstein barr has been...

Well chaga is mushroom, and it's good as a 'coffee', much used in the far north apparently. I've made it using fomes fomentarius too...the De'il hoof fungus.....and it wasn't so good. It was a tad tcp like.