Tippicanoe and Kangaroo Stew

My beard has been getting quite long here with two and a half months and counting. But my hair was getting to be a bother. I have the sort of hair that grows laterally rather than vertically. I think sometimes that some air hose in my head never got disconnected and thus i get the bobble-head effect rather than long luscious locks billowing behind me in a wind machine. So getting in the DIY spirit of Delmore i decided to take on the clippers in single hand combat. What followed was the longest, most painful and irritating hour and a half long battle with hair that i have ever had. Keep in mind i have never cut ANYONE'S hair let alone my own. But innumerable "OW GOD DAMN IT!"'s and one floor covered in hair later i emerged bruised but victorious. Whether i gave myself a "good" haircut .. . . . .  i don't know. But make my hair shorter, albeit unevenly, I did.

Also, more beer was got from town and bad decisions were made. We decided that while we were here at Delmore we had to try a Kangaroo tail. We sell them at the store and the aboriginals LOVE them. they buy them 5 at a time if they can afford them. And i had heard that kangaroo is pretty good anyway. But the frozen tails that we sell, not only have the skin and fur still on them, but they smell HORRIBLE. Nevertheless we went for it. We thought the best way to cook it would be to cut it up and make a stew so that if worse came to worse we could mask the flavor of it with other stuff. Luckily getting the skin off was not a problem. Esben is a hunter and has skinned animals before so he tackled it like a pro even with my now very blunt knife and the musty old tire and BO smell that came wafting our direction from the flaccid appendage that would be our dinner. (It really was that bad) The first problem though, presented itself when we tried to cut the tail into chunks that would fit in the bowls. What we didn't realize is that the tails like most of the rest of the meat we sell here, are about 50% bone, 35% fat and or cartilage and about 15% meat. When my sharp but small knife failed to make it through a section, and when i couldn't stand the wet crunch of breaking the tail at all of the bone joints i resorted to violence. I went at it with the big kitchen knife which, though very dull, seemed to do ok in getting the pieces apart. But it proved to be just too much effort for something that we were less and less sure we were going to eat all of anyway. Nevertheless we chucked it in a pot with a bunch of vegetables and 11 herbs and spices and we boiled the hell out of it for 2 and a half hours.

I have to say that the kangaroo tail did not taste OUTRIGHT disgusting. It did taste a little bit like the smell that the skin had, but despite the high fat and cartilage content, it WAS edible. However, no one finished their stew completely i think. Buster was happy to chomp on the leftovers though, and an ENTIRE corned beef that had gone bad. Needless to say i don't think that we will be trying kangaroo tail stew anytime soon, although i do still want to try kangaroo stir fry with kangaroo fillet (which australians pronounce fill-eT, which is a bit like saying sham-pag-nuh or kay-suh-dill-ah)

The stew was not the only bad idea that the beers got us into though. What happens when you put four young guys in a room with beer, a fireplace, wooden furniture and a branding iron? Well i can say that from now on no one will forget that the dining room table is Delmore property. Also i branded my banjo. It is an old style banjo and has more wood surface on it than modern banjos, so i was planning on burning some cool designs into it at some point anyway, but the opportunity presented itself and i went with it. the whole iron didn't fit on the pot so there are just weird markings now but i am happy with the results. How many people in the world have a banjo that is branded with a cattle iron? Not many, that's how many.