Battle Bread Secret Hits the Street

OK since I have been pounded with requests for the secret for the battle bread I will divulge it, even though I understand the DSP (Dwarven Secret Police) is even now looking for me for ever making the stuff. Are you ready.... here it is ...

First make Viking Flatbread dough.(see below) However you must screw up the recipe and add 1 cup too much cracked wheat. Then instead a kneading it you must hammer it. (a rubber tent stake hammer works well) Bake in a 1 inch loaf on a pizza stone until hard as a rock. Let it cool for a month or two.

And there you have it. Good luck. And if the DSP come looking, you never heard it from me.

Viking Flatbread

Flatbreads have a long history because they have a few simple ingredients, are easy to make, and store well. They are found in many countries and cultures from the common tortilla to the pita and lavash. The Asians have egg roll and wanton wrappers and there is also Indian roti.

The recipe that I am using is taken from a Norwegian book Vårt Norske Kjøkken (The Norwegian Kitchen) edited by Kjell E. Innli, translated by Melody Favish and published in Norway by KOM Forlag, © 2002.

On page 37 it mentions that in Viking times (793 - 1066 AD) "flatbread and gruel or milk often was served in the evening."

This book offered four different recipes for flatbread. I chose this one because it had the simplest ingredients, it didn't have oats but did have rye (personal preference).

Since it is a simple recipe and hasn't changed in centuries, I am using it "as is" with no redaction except to convert from metric and clean up some of the poor translation from Norwegian.

Flatbread

3 cups water
2 cups coarse whole-wheat flour(This is the part you change for dwarf bread)
½ tsp. salt
3 cups fine rye flour
3 cups barley flour

Bring water to boil and pour over wheat flour. Cool. Add salt and most of the rye and barley flour. Kneed into a pliable, not too stiff dough with the remaining flour. Dust the baking board with flour. Roll out part of the dough into a 1 inch thick sheet. Cut circles of dough with a 3 ½ inch cookie cutter. Roll out each dough circle with a patterned rolling pin to a thin sheet. Bake sheets on a griddle over medium heat until lightly colored on both sides. Let cool. Stack under a light weight and store in a dry
cool room.

Yield: about 14, 6inch wafers

Notes: I stone ground the grains in my own mill to control the fineness of the barley and rye and the coarse texture of the wheat. Instead of a griddle I used a clay baking stone in a gas oven at 400°F to more closely approximate Viking conditions. (It was too hot outside to start a fire and make a clay oven.)

Joseph of Palmyra

House Luminous, Golden Rivers, Cynagua, West Kingdom

Dwarven Battle Bread Draws First Blood

Joseph of Palmyra made some bread. It was authentic Viking flatbread. He found out why the Vikings went a' viking. If that was what thier old ladies were making back home in the frozen north, then no wonder they went to England and France looking for tasty food. Rumor has it that Viking flatbread could be made at a child's birth and served at his wedding. I tases kind of like rye krysp, but dryer.

When he screwed up the first batch, he accdently stumbled onto the long lost seceret of dwarven battle bread. I looks like a bread frisbee, but harder, and with jaggy edges. In his book "Diskworld Companion" Terry Pratchet explains Dwarf bread thusly:

"A dwarfish delicacy and battle weapon. Origionally a sensible attempt to make a weapon that could also be eaten, it contains all you need to sustain you for days, mainly by causing you to preform miricales of endurance in order to get somewhere where you don't have to eat dwarf bread. .... A properly thrown slice of dwarfbread is a fearsome weapon, especially in view of its erratic aerodynamic properties."

At West Kingdom (SCA) June Crown Joseph found this out for himself. On Sunday he and a few of his friends were tossing the loaf about and having a great time. Sven and Sir Connell were having a great time since Sven is a simi-pro frisbee golf player. Sven made a perfect toss that Colin attempted to catch with clapping hand style and when he looked at his hand it was bleeding. The battle bread had taken a chunk of skin out of his palm and he was leaking a bit.

They hauled Sir Colin over to the chiurgeon and got a band-aid. Since the medic wasn't there they had no choice to haul him before His Majesty, King Radnor and apoligize for injuring one of his knights. This of course led to His Majesty making a few tosses of the loaf, and getting hit in the leg.

After about an hour and a half of this foolishness the bread started cracking up and they had to quit, because Joseph wanted to save this, his only loaf of dwarven battle bread, for posterity.

The Song of Haste

The Song of Haste
by Mr Whipple

Haste was born a bummer lamb two thousand years ago
Who came to find within his heart the Christ child for to know

He’d lost his flock and all his friends by trying to think things through
He missed the path his shepherd laid, lost flock and family true.

And on that night of nights divine when Angels came to sing
With blazing harps and golden horns and silver bells to ring

They told the shepherd to go with haste to find the newborn king
Without delay he took his crook and all his precious things

So he picked up the bummer lamb and put him round his neck
And started down to Bethlehem, a long and weary trek

They only knew the town to search and in a manger plain
They searched and searched and thought and tried and looked all night in vain

Then in his heart Haste knew the place, he didn’t think a thing
He led the shepherd straight away and found the tiny King

They knelt and prayed with humble voices praising God for Grace
And found the Christ, the Son of God in a most unlikely place

His heart had told him where to look and where the Christ was found
He didn’t have to use his head for God’s mercies to abound

And aren’t we all just bummer lambs all lost and gone astray
And if we look within our hearts we’ll find the Christ some day

Mr Whipple Finds His Toga

I made it! It took a lot of work but I got the sucker running. It took a new processor (80 bucks) and a video card (40 clams) but I got Rome Total War to work. So now I have a part time job killing Gauls and Carthagenians. The pay ain't great but it is 'bout the same as my old job of being self-unenployed.

Now I have to pay back Mrs. Whipple for the use of her PayPal to pay for the parts on EBay. I got to looking at some old ham radio gear that had been cluttering up the closet. So I fired up EBay to see if it was worth anything. It was old '70's ventage tube type Heathkit gear that I thought might get enough to cover the $120 that I owed my lovely wife. After a little research I was shocked out of my mind (what little there is left after the new meds I am on). It looks like I will net out $500 or more. I had bids on some of the stuff within five minutes of posting it and the interest is growing by leaps and bounds.

It turns out that there are collectors out there that will pay a ton of money for this junk. I even mentioned in the discription that I wasn't even sure it all worked. It didn't seem to deter anyone at all.

So now I have to jump out of Rome, take off my toga, put on a tie, and be an EBay merchant every now and again. The role switching really makes my head go wagga-wagga-wagga (but then again, that may just be the meds).

Mr whipple gets roaminized

Ok, so it's just the greatist game ever made, but Rome Total War is driving me nuts. Us game geeks have been waiting over two years for RTW to come out and now that it is here, my system is too cheep to make it run. I downloaded the demo and got it to run after a fashion, kinda jerky and lousy res, but i got it up. So my logic went something like this. If the demo cranks ok then the real game just might work. (don't wory, it's just the mania working!) Well after Sandy Claws put a box of RTW in my socks I ran to the computer and fired it up. I sat shivering as the install proceded. It didn't come right an say that my box was too scukey to realy run the game so my hopes were up. I started the game and the frist part started working. The intro ran fine. Then it hit a wall. When it started the battle, the whole thing just bailed to windows. I desperately tried to change the video and audio settings trying to suck just a bit more performance out of my antique system. All to no avail.

Its Ebay time!!!!!! after crusing Ebay for a couple of days, i found a nice guy that had an adaquite processor that should make it possible for me to imerse myself in the world of 200 BC.

Ducks 5, roosters 0

Well I can now sleep in. The squaking has abated, but it took some work. The last 4 roosters (the gay ones) have found a new home. They were destened to go the way of the other four (ie. the dumpling pot), but what with the recient sugery and all, I just wasn't up to chopping, gutting and plucking the rowdy little rascals. Then we met the russians on the corner. They have a mess of chickens and ducks, so we asked them if they wanted four roosters for free. It took a lot of gestuering and simple words and even help from the kids, but Lydia finally got the point that we didn't want anything in retrun, they just had to come over and bag the feathered thugs. Lydia showed up the next day, but was scared off by the Mongo Beast. Mrs. Whipple and I didn't know this so we were getting anxious and just nabed a couple birds when they were roosting on the fence and took them over to the russians. They came back home with us and we got one more, but the fourth one made good his excape into the neighbors yard and split for the tall grass. Curses! Foiled again!

Next morning his alarm went off on schedule. Of course his ex-pals could hear him all the way down at the russians house, so by nightfall three of the four were helping themselves to all the duck food they could down. Once more, into the breach. Lydia came back over with Vanya this time and with a net. He expertly bagged them all. I showed him how to clip thier wings, but I suspect that now that all the turkey leftovers are eaten up, they have met their maker in chicken heaven. Rest in peace.

On another note, the duckie flock is up by two. We met a nice lady at the feed store who was trying to get rid of a couple of hens that should start laying soon. That brings the duckies up to five. I guess what goes around comes back around one way or another

Guts ripped out in a three-fer

It all started out as a tummy ache in the middle of the night. Then it got worse. A lot worse. Next thing I know, I am on the internet looking up "navel pain".

It turns out that if you have apendecitis, there is a spot just southwest of your bellybutton that will hurt like the bad place if you push it, and more when you let go. OK so it hurt. Not so bad on the let go part, but it hurt. Now for the tough decision. Do I wake up Mrs. Whipple and haul down the the ER at 2AM, or tough it out till morning just in case it is only gas. I decided to tough it out until I rolled over in bed and felt like I got stabbed in the belly button with a dull kniting needle weilded by a rabid mule.

So it was off the the ER, not an uncommon drill at the funny farm, what with heart attacks and migrane and all. Mrs. Whipple even has a kit of stuff that she takes along. A pillow (for her), a book, some cross-stich, stickers for the cranky kids that you always run into in the ER, and of course coins for the Pepsi machine. They poked me and prodded by tummy. It turns out that every one has to get in on the poking, the nurses the doctors, the interns, the lady from housekeeping even gave it a shot. Everybody was of the opinion that it was indeed an apendex gone over to the other side. Except for Chris. Chris was a nurse, and not a cute as you may think Chris was six foot-two and had a beard. He thought it was gall blader, based on his three days of experince reading CAT Scans. This of course came as a supprise to the real doc, who said that yes, I did have some gall stones, but that was not what was causing all the fuss.

By this time it was almost dawn and Mrs. Whipple was about to blow a gasket. Nurses doing diagnoses was more than she could take. The ER doc wanted me to chat with my own doc, to decide on how much to chop out, so Chris cut us loose with the wrong records and lab tests. Mrs. Whipple was to the forrth level tizzy stage at this point, but she had to go to work anyway. It was casual friday so her jammy ensemble almost fit in at the office. Lovely purple sweats and a pullover sweater, with contrasting tennies. (I had the good sense to wear real clothes to the ER.) Nobody had to wory much about me. The ER doc had given me enough Morphine in my IV to down a mule and even gave me a six-pack of Vikiden to go, so I kept myself pretty much amused for the day counting my toes and picking my nose.

By the time we got in to see my doc, I was in very little pain. Except for the part when he lined up his whole staff to poke my tummy. He made a few faces and called the surgeon. "We can't take chances with you diabetic guys, you know" he said in his east Indian lilt. He was all for snatching the gall blader while we were in there. So it was back to the hospital. The surgeon, Dr. Rajagopal met us in the loby, and in a cost-saving move not often seen in western medicine, slipped me into the hall where he poked my belly on an unused gurney. Of course he had to let three nurses, a janitor and a visitor that happend by, poke too, but by this time I had it figured out that it was some deep seated custom of the medical profession to let all commers have a poke or two.
Before we knew it we were up in pre-op with a whole new cast of tummy-pokers. I was looking foward to the drug induced nap that I knew was comming soon.

Comming out of anasethia is a real trip. My IV pump was beeping so I was compelled to launch into a couple of stanzas of "The Bells" by Edgar Allen Poe. "hear the tinkling of the bells, silver bells, what a melody of meriment thier somthing somthing fortels" . I tried to keep the gigling and sluring down to a minimun, but I don't think I was too successfull. Then they dropped the bomb. They not only took out my apendex and gall bladder, they fixed a hernia while they were at it. I had tried in vain to sign up for the liposuction option, but they wouldn't go for it. Sometimes you just can't trust theese docs. They will rant on about how I have to loose weight or face another heart attack but when they have a chance to let me drop forty pounds to a vaccum cleaner they bail and do a three-fer that includes a crummy hernea fix. At least they gave me all the morphine I could handle and a bunch of Vikiden to take home.

More death

This time it isn't so funny. My beloved hen duckie Pippy died. She was a great layer. No kidding, eggs as big as my fist, often with double yolks. It was raining and she went into convutlions and died an hour later. We think it was avain cholera, or duck plague. The other three seem fine. And now Earnistina is either hiding her eggs, or not laying. I miss the eggs.

Death and carnage at the funny farm

OK, so the roosters finally got on my last nerve! And of course I love the duckies more. But hey, they lied to me at the feed store. Half of them were suposed to be hens. You know, full of eggs and stuff like that. Not theese squwaking lunitics that get up before dawn to anounce that the street light is now on. So I plead insanity on the four counts of murder and mayhem (in a vain attempt to mitigate my crime I spared four of the little buggers that looked a bit more hennish that the other four, turns out that they were just gay)
The dumplings though, were great.

Mr. Whipple gets Pampered

OK I have been assimilated. My wife's sister brought up an old addiction and I got sucked in. It's not blow or weed or anything like that but can consume your life almost as much. The monkey that is now jumping all over my broad back is "Pampered Chef" kitchen stuff.

I started out doing kitchen scrapers. They are cheap and easy to get and you can use them every day and not even know that you are addicted. I even use them to scrape gaskets off of aluminum engine blocks. Before you know what you are doing you are into whisks and measuring cups. Then you graduate to the "hard stuff". I am talking about stoneware. It starts with cookie molds and soon you realize that you can't make a pizza without a baking stone in the oven. You know that it is all over with when you find yourself slamming your warped, cheap K-Mart saute pan against the wall and screaming and swearing and vowing that you will not spend any money on anything, including Pepsi, until you can afford a real professional grade Pampered Chef pan.

Of course you know that this means that I have to become a pusher to support my cook-ware habit. Please help me. I am a junkie. Is there a 12 step program for helpless addicts like me? Can I qualify for any government assistance programs? My only hope for me is to just let this sickness run it's course. I just hope that I can tough it out!

Phone calls get out of hand

Hey, I am usually pretty easy to get along with, but I have my limits. Now my wife thinks I have a girlfriend and I have changed my name to Phil. Our mystery caller usually rings me up around between two and three in the afternoon, right in the middle of my nappy time.
"Is Phil there." she asks in her distinctive gravely voice.
I calmly tell her that Phil doesn't live here and has never lived here, will not live here in the future and has no intention of answering at this number ever.
"Tell him to call me back." she responds, hanging up quickly.
I decide to check my voice mail, just see if she has totally clogged it up again. Good news! Only four messages from her. Most are filled with mild obscenities, venting her frustration at not being able to reach Phil. This has been going on for months now and it is starting to get on my last nerve.
An hour later she calls again.
"I am sorry ." I reply. "But Phil is dead."
"What!!!" she exclaims, almost breaking down.
Now I finally have her attention.
"O.K. I am going to explain this just one more time. You have the wrong number. This is not Phil's number. Please erase it from your speed dial, your phone book, your quick call list and anywhere else you might have it written down."
"I have never called this number, ever, not even once." This is her usual ploy, but her voice gives her away.
"Mam, I have tried to be polite, but if you call just one more time, I will call the police, the phone company, my lawyer and everybody I can think of to get you to quit calling."
"O.K, I will never call you again." she promises.
Ten minutes later the phone rings. Guess who?
No, It is Phil. He apologizes profusely for her and gives me his number. One number is different. An 0 instead of a 1. I explain my frustration and let him know that she only has one chance left.
An hour later she calls again.
"Hey, Phil, did you talk to the whacko?" she growls.
"I am the whacko." big pause, then click.
An hour later, after talking to the phone company and the police, I am happily typing away on the police website filing a report. I call Phil and let him know to expect a call from the cops any day now.
Well, I haven't heard much from her since and I have been able to convince my wife that I am not having an affair, so we will just have to see what the cops come up with. Stand by for news!

Perseid meteor shower leads to sparks on earth

Years ago I became a big fan of the Perseid meteor showers. Every year I would drive up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and spread a blanket and enjoy the light show. Then I got divorced. The show is not so much fun solo, so I began the search for a viewing mate. Hey, I thought, this could make a great date! It had everything going for it. The excursion would be a) Cheap, b) in the dark, c) require lying down on a blanket, d) involve lots of oohing and ahhing. Looked like a perfect plan to me. The only hitch was finding a partner that would fall for it.
I had my eye on a verrrrrrry cute young lady named Rebecca. The problem, she thought, was that she was too young. (Or was it that I was toooooooo old.) A twelve year difference didn't seem like so much of an obstacle to me, but for her it was a big deal. When I ran into her at a church choir practice I launched my evil plan. I cornered her in the kitchen and began my patented spiel on the beauty of the showers, lamenting that I had nobody to share them with.
"Well you haven't asked me." she replied, batting her long lashes and smiling with that come hither sort of look.
"Would you like to join me tomorrow night?" I implored, hoping desperately that she would accept.
"No." she replied curtly, still smiling and batting her baby blue eyes.
"You are way too old for me, and besides, you know I have a boyfriend."
Shot down cold! I had no comeback. I had to try to smile, but all I could manage is to make some lame excuse and walk away. Talk about cold blooded!
Not be totally deterred from my plan, I talked one of her best friends into going with me. However the blanket never made it out of the trunk and Paula and I sat on the hood of my car to watch the star show. That was it, we just watched the show. It was a great show, but no sparks.
A couple of months later, Rebecca asked her boyfriend to marry her and he said no way. She called me that very day to let me know that she was available and needed a ride to a church activity that night. That was eleven years ago and the rest is, as they say, History. We have been married over ten years now and we still like to watch the big show every August. But, and trust me on this one, that's not the only time of year that the sparks fly.

(just a few facts)