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Both of my regular readers will recall my fondness for pickled turnips, but you may not necessarily have appreciated my love for virtually all things pickled. And as one who is not really in the habit of moderating my intake of anything, it’s quite fortunate that pickling (as far as I know) tends to be a fairly healthy way to prepare food.

People have been asking what I’m up to these days, and for the past few weeks I have been mostly out of town. But this week I have been pickling my ass off.

I can recommend without reservation The Joy of Pickling, from which almost all of these recipes came. It tells you how to pickle everything from artichokes to shrimp, and includes good information for people who have never sterilized or canned anything in their entire lives. Many of the recipes are designed for refrigeration or quick consumption, and thus don’t even require the annoyance of boiling water pasteurization.

From left: spicy Japanese cucumbers pickled in soy; Thai pickled carrots; shallots pickled in red wine vinegar; Polish pickled mushrooms; cilantro cucumber pickles; hot and spicy eggs; salt eggs; red onions; green beans; asparagus; and the omnipresent Lebanese pickled turnips

Some of these — both cucumber pickles, the carrots, and the red onions — are ready within hours. Of those, only the red onions will not be invited back for next season (this particular pickle seems to produce a result indistinguishable from simple deflaming; I have higher expectations for the shallots). The cucumbers in soy have a considerable bite that goes perfectly with the salty soy; the carrots are a simple but delicious sweet and sour contrast; and the cilantro cucumbers are so delicious that my entire stock of willpower reserves were required to ensure that any made their way into the jars at all. If you don’t think cilantro tastes like soap, you will love them.

The remainder will be ready at various times over the next three weeks, for which my excitement and hunger are both palpable.

Jacob has a knack for finding unique gifts for people who are absolutely impossible to shop for. I don’t know how he does it, but I wish I had more of that particular trait.

This year, he surprised me with a fantastic gift that I had no idea even existed: a scale model of the upcoming Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Made of Lego.

It is beautiful, and solid. And big. Those pictures don’t give you much sense of scale, but its wingspan is more than two feet wide, about as long as my arm. It contains very few purpose-built pieces, which is nice to see. The wings are easily removable, and the little Lego stand you build is adjustable, for fuck’s sake.

I don’t think I’ve ever had an actual Lego set, just boxes of bricks, so the process of putting it together was very novel. All in all it took about six hours to assemble the 1,200 pieces, with 84 steps plus sub-steps and sub-sub-steps. The process exposed some real ingenuity in its design, and I imagine that the Lego CAD software is pretty cool. The instructions were almost perfectly understandable and unambiguous without any words; Ikea could take some lessons from these guys.

Despite my airplane fetish, I am not typically an airplane-model-buying person. But in the unlikely event that they branch out to other icons of commercial aviation — a 747, say, or A380 — I will be all over them.

My friends and former colleagues at Cray are due some congratulations!

They, along with IBM, won a huge DARPA award that they’ve been working on for years. I’ve seen some of the concepts they put forward in their proposal, and they are pretty amazing.

Investors apparently think so too. Not one of you could pick up the phone and tell me yesterday? Some friends.

Blendtec produces one of my favourite pieces of viral marketing: the innovative Will It Blend? series.

They take their “total blender” — the entry level blender in their home line, I feel compelled to point out — and seek to answer the timeless question that we would all ask if we had a blender of its capabilities and a twenty dollar miscellaneous budget.

Their venerable host turns marbles into incredibly dangerous glass dust, grinds a rake handle into wood dust, and entire oysters, shell and all, into a noxious sludge. I don’t remember how I found these guys, but their RSS-delivered updates have been doing the trick for at least a month.

I know that you place your trust in me, in the hopes of seeking out the finest in online entertainment. Know that I do not hold this trust lightly.

To combat any potential illusions that I may have been remiss in discharging my duties as of late, I provide the following as a sort of peace offering:

There is some pure gold in Married to the Sea, including many train-related humours, as well as the occasional cookie quip. Unfortunately, it is buried in a raft of relative mediocrity. Unforgivably, there is no RSS feed in the year 2006.

Toothpaste for Dinner, Married to the Sea’s sister comic, is also hit-or-miss, but just as strong when it makes contact. No god damned RSS feed means that I almost never bother to read it.

Cat and Girl is not always a laugh riot, but when the mistress of comics is on, she is on. Brette purchased for my birthday a delightful torso covering that I will be wearing on the congressional campaign trail to express my true nature.

This video about how to make cocaine is completely terrifying. Some very clever people turned what was probably a time-tested traditional process into an efficient one that could be carried out in the jungle with everyday materials and huge quantities of gasoline. If you can bring yourself to sign up for a YouTube account — I know, sigh loudly along with me — there is an equally good clip from a documentary about the final steps in turning that yellow base into the white powder as we know it.

Seriously, that is a lot of gasoline.

Aware of my epicurean delight for all things porcine — and most especially bacon itself — Alice and Zach enrolled me in the Bacon of the Month Club for my birthday last month. The first shipment arrived just before I went to Ohio for Thanksgiving.

In this edition of Cambridge Bacon Review, we’ll indulge in FATHER’S hickory smoked country bacon from Gatton Farms of Bremen, Kentucky.

Right away I knew this bacon was special. Whether the package exterior was slightly contaminated, or the sturdy plastic vacuum-pack was unable to contain that universe of aroma, I care not which. All I know is that from the moment I opened that ice-packed box, I could smell the hand-rubbed, country-smoked bouquet.

When I cut open the inner package, put my nose inside the bag, and inhaled deeply, the sheer concentration of hickory molecules almost made me pass out. My Blood Hickory Content was off the charts. There is no mistaking this for ordinary, chemical-cured bacon, the kind of bacon you might buy at a 7-11, the kind of bacon that real midwestern farmers wouldn’t feed to prisoners of war.

This is manly, thick-cut bacon; a bacon that you must treat with tender care and all due respect, cooked slowly over a low flame. For a less subtle hand would ruin it with crispiness, long before the deep fats have a chance to vacate the premises. I like to cook my bacon using chopsticks. To protect my hands. It’s a thing I do.

When it comes to flavour, that first bite made me believe that an entire midwestern, hand-rubbed, salt-cured, hickory-smoked, slow-aged ham had taken up residence in my mouth. We are dealing with intense taste… but not bacon perfection. I like hickory almost as much as the next person, and this may be an admittedly-inexperienced bacon palette talking: but I think the smoke is too thick. Almost nothing else gets a chance against the overpowering wood flavour. I would love to describe the subtle taste of the meat, how you can tell that these pigs were themselves dining on quality ingredients, and so on. But in all honesty, all I can taste is autumn fireplaces.

Given the choice between this and almost any other bacon available to me outside of a specialty butcher, it is a clear winner. However, with eleven months of artisan bacon ahead of me, I must be ruthlessly discriminating in my judgments. When I consider bacon nirvana, on an absolute scale, it just doesn’t match up.

FATHER’s hickory smoked country bacon: C+