DISHWASHER LASAGNE
Serves four Cooking time: 1 hour
Ingredients:
Use a recipe of your choice for vegetarian ricotta or spinach lasagne.
Steps:
1 Make the lasagne in the middle of a large sheet of foil, building up layers of pasta and filling as you go.
2 Wrap lasagne securely in the foil.
3 Place the package flat on the bottom rack of the dishwasher.
4 Set to the normal wash cycle and repeat if necessary until cooking time is reached.
5 Before serving, leave the lasagne to stand for five minutes.
A genuine benefit of dishwasher cookery is that you’re far less likely to burn your dinner. But sometimes it’s going to happen, and when it does the urban bushman knows exactly whom to turn to…
SLUG SKIVVIES
RECRUIT YOUR GARDEN SLUGS TO DO THE CHORES
For centuries ancient tribes have cooperated with animals for mutual benefit, whether it’s working with dogs in the hunt, following birds to a source of water or using maggots to clean wounds. Now we can translate this tradition to the urban environment, calling on the expertise of some back-garden wildlife to help with some particularly dull chores.
Back-garden pot washers
Burned-on food gunk is the last thing you want to face on a Sunday night after a particularly good lasagne or nut roast. When your scourers have turned black and the dishwasher won’t shift it, here’s what to do: forget washing up, just pop it outside overnight and let the slugs go to work. Slugs are equipped with 27,000 tiny teeth spaced along a rasping tonguelike appendage called a radula. It’s custom-made to get into small gaps and crevices and scrape off rich sources of food, like mould (or burned-on cheese bake). They really are specialists at this.
TIPS
Slugs follow habitual trails, so for a better chance of success put your pots on a slime line. If they don’t finish it off in one sitting, they’ll be back.
Place pots upside down (leaving a gap for slug access) and wash before re-use.
Cleaning grout the organic way
Black mould on the grout between your bathroom tiles is a sad inevitability of modern life – where there’s moisture there’s mould. But one thing’s for certain: you need to get that off before the parents/in-laws come to visit. It can be a devil of a job too, unless you recruit the assistance of that supremely equipped mould-muncher, the slug.
You’ll need to find a few slugs and familiarise them with the new environment on the tiles before they do much cleaning. Give them a dark damp hideaway where they can spend the day, making sure they can get out. They prefer to work at night so be prepared for a shock if you like a shower after dark.
If you get the timing of this right, the slugs munch away on the mould all night, leaving you with spotless, if slightly slimy, grout. The great benefit of course is that it’s entirely free from nasty detergents or cleaners.
It can take a while, so be patient and if there’s no improvement after a few days, consider changing your slugs.
THE WEEKEND BUSHMAN
Now that your chores are done it’s time to focus on something more edifying: bushcraft that soothes the soul, especially designed to fill up your weekend or while away an evening in or crafty morning off.
I’ll start with a favourite demonstration of the mood-altering possibilities of bushcraft in the home
.
HOW TO TURN YOUR TV INTO A COSMIC TIME MACHINE
This is a cure for a condition commonly known as ‘Nothing on the Telly’. When we complain that ‘nothing’s on’ what we mean is that there’s nothing that’s going to grab us by the scruff of the neck, slap us on both cheeks and demand our attention. Well if that’s the case, then this will fix it.
Here’s how to use your television to pick up a 13.7 billion-year-old signal from outer space, in three easy steps.
1 Turn on telly.
2 Unplug satellite or cable box, unplug aerial.
3 Stare at static.
That ‘snow’ or static is background ‘noise’ generated by the soup of radio waves washing around the earth. When you’re tuned to Coronation Street, the signal is so strong you don’t see the noise. But when the telly has nothing else to latch on to it tries to translate the ‘noise’ into a picture, and ‘snow’ or ‘static’ is the result. Now turn up the sound and listen, because here comes the good bit…
Most of this static is caused by the radio and TV signals that are constantly buzzing around the world, Chinese minicabs, Somali weather men, Russian tank commanders. During the Battle of the Atlantic in World War Two a young telegraphist on a Royal Navy cruiser picked up what he thought was a coded signal from a nearby German U-boat. Out there in the Atlantic they tended to think about U-boats quite a lot. Nobody could understand the message or even recognise the code. The report was duly sent back to Liverpool to be pored over by the experts, who couldn’t understand how this message had come to be received in mid-Atlantic. It wasn’t any code or language they recognised. Then, eventually, its origin was tracked down. It was a short-range transmission from a Russian tank commander in Stalingrad, appearing as bright as you like thousands of miles away at sea. This is a shining example of the erratic behaviour of radio waves and their tendency to pop up all over the place, a syndrome known as analogous propagation.
But 1 per cent of the noise that you’re seeing (and hearing) is something else; it’s the radiation left over from the event that gave birth to the entire universe, it’s the receding echo of the Big Bang, now showing on your very own TV.
I’ll pause here while you take in the enormity of what you’re looking at. Now stare at the screen again. One per cent of that fizzing energy and activity is coming to you from something that happened more than 13 billion years ago.
For me this is a bit like smelling salts: you can use it to snap you out of any mood, at any time. And that’s not the end of it; the explanation of how we know all this is pretty good too.
How it works
If we’d always had digital tellies we’d never have seen this phenomenon. But in the old days of analogue, TV had to pick up a wide range of frequencies, and this microwave echo of the Big Bang – gradually fading as it spreads through our ever-expanding universe – just happens to overlap into the same range, so our tellies were able to see it. Its proper name is Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR). It’s on the radio too, somewhere in all that white noise between stations.
CBR was found by a pair of American physicists in the 1960s. They were trying to listen to the stars and were getting increasingly irritated by a constant noise on their super-powerful receiver. At first they thought it might be caused by pigeon poo on their dish, but they had it cleaned and it was no different. Then they wondered if it could be radiation from nearby New York, but they pointed their dish the other way and it was still there. Eventually they found it wasn’t even coming from within the galaxy, but was present everywhere, throughout the universe. Then they looked