This morning, Alma wanted me to take a picture of Topsy.
All of a sudden, we were not alone:
The cows have been around for several weeks. Bellowing in the field below us, they sound like special effects in an old dinosaur film. The farmer said, last winter, when they were confined to the cow shed, that these are the loudest cows they’ve ever had. This is the first time this year that they’ve been in our driveway. It can be a bit of a challenge driving out: not only can they tip cars over if they don’t like them (they like ours, though), but I have to make sure they don’t come charging into the garden — you wouldn’t believe how fast they can eat.
Not all of us are crazy about cows. Some went to hide in the goat house.
While others didn’t really care:
I went out to take pictures. When cows see you, they are as curious as any animal:
They want to know what’s going on:
There’s one way to find out if you can eat a camera…
I sat down with them.
I can’t say the goats weren’t curious about the cows. After I went out, Holly and Misty followed me…
but they kept their distance.
A Bad Guide 
AJP, I remembered that you once asked for more pictures of food. I don’t know about you, but I usually find photographs of food a bit repulsive. They don’t look — or feel, or smell maybe — like the real thing and there’s something cheap to them I think. Maybe they shine too much most of the time. However, when I saw a few coloured elements on my plate today, I thought of you and I grabbed the camera before eating the stuff which is shown here:
http://mauricianismes.wordpress.com/autres-clins-doeil/sur-un-dal-pouri/
not only can they tip cars over if they don’t like them (they like ours, though)
Is it because it’s a BMW?
No, we had an ancient Mercedes stationwagon that they liked more, that was the one we used to take the goats in, it was very solid. We’re getting rid of this car, it’s too light for our environment; we need something more like a bulldozer.
That is so interesting, Sig. Thanks (thanks for sharing, as the spammers say, too bad we can’t).
You’re welcome AJP. Like the French say : ça ne mange pas de pain, i.e. it costs nothing.
You ought to look at Jamessal’s girlfriend, Robin’s blog, it’s called Caviar and Codfish (in my blogroll), if you want to see some delicious-looking food that looks like the real thing.
You forgot to get a close-up of an eye so we can study the pupil.
It is interesting that your goats seem less than emoured of the neighbour’s cows. Our goats and cows used to share the same paddocks with apparent unawareness of the others’ existence. Of course at least one of the cows was so spectacularly stupid as to seemingly prefer grazing on rhubarb leaves, so perhaps that’s why she was perceived as no threat by our goats.
“emoured” should of course, be “enamoured” – I blame Stanley Fish’s “anti-I” rants, as chronicled at the Log.
I love the picture of the little goat lolling about with one leg folded beneath her and her head to one side, as if posing on a sofa.
I’ll do that.
Me too.
I was so spectacularly stupid that I planted the rhubarb right next to the goats’ gate and they are always dashing out to grab some. They love rhubarb leaves, last year we didn’t get any at all.
What’s the Norwegian word for “cows” of that sex and age?
One ku, several kuer. Heifer is kvige.
Ku and the letter Q are pronounced the same in Norwegian. There is a company here, selling milk and other dairy products, called Q Melk.
Cows of the other sex are okser (I think that’s both ‘ox’ and ‘bull’, in English) and calf is kalv. Kveg and storfe is cattle.
Thank you for that. Where I grew up, “two cows” was “twy kye”.
Is that somewhere in Skottland?
Annandale
I like the goat (Misty? Holly?) standing straight up and leaning against the tree in a yoga pose.
Topsy is also adorable, like all your animals. What kind of dog is she?
Handsome cows.
I see the cows have those awful yellow ear tags. Does that mean they’re immigrants as well?
As children we were always taught not to eat rhubarb leaves. They’re supposed to have some mild poison like oxalic acid in them.
That’s right. It’s hard to hear. I’ll finally get to take my ear tags out after I’ve been here for twenty-five years, but already I’ve graduated from yellow to blue.
That’s right, most rhubarb (not just leaves) is bad for you, though I’ve forgotten the details. We have a modern kind that’s supposed to be okay.
Yes, it’s only Misty who does that. It makes her stomach (s) look enormous. Which they are, of course.
Topsy is a Soft-Coated Irish Wheaten terrier (with an ‘Irish’ coat, rather than the stiffer ‘American’ coat). It’s a hell of a long description for a dog breed, but dog bureaucracy is formidable and we just call her a wheaten terrier. We got her first of all because they’re one of the most hypoallergenic breeds, but it turns out she’s such a great dog too. We adore her and I’d recommend them to anyone.
It’s a peculiar place, was it one of those 1960s Ministry of Defence experiments, like The Prisoner?
When I looked it up on the google maps satellite picture the arrow pointed to the middle of a field where kye were grazing. I then clicked on the roadmap, and small roads appeared that are supposed to be located in these fields. I’m sure they did’t really exist, though; there is no trace on the photograph.
Rhubarb seems to be a huge Norwegian-American thing. I don’t know of other nationalities that even know what it is, so I’m not surprised to see it in Norway. My mother makes pies from it, and I have been known to exchange a bit of yard work for a few stalks of rhubarb from my 95-year-old the next door neighbor. I think she is Swedish, though.
I cut them in inch long peices and boil them with sugar and a little water, and throw in a cinnemon stick, then use it for ice cream topping or put in on my morning oatmeal instead of raisins.
Now that I am back from the 60-year-anniversary party (it was beautiful and everyone cried) I can worry about my housing again. My (possibly) new landlord now says he is buying a business in another state and moving there (without his family again) as soon as he gets back from the bar (he’s going to forget his AA meeting for the moment). In the meantime when I was cleaning the other day, I overheard someone getting slapped; I think his wife downstairs is hitting their developmentally disabled child. It’s such a beautiful apartment, but..and no money has changed hands yet…I have more than half a mind to start apartment hunting again.
Rhubarb jam is one of the first foods I remember eating, because there was not much food in France during the war and when sugar became available in more than minute quantities my mother made jam from rhubarb that was growing in the garden. I love rhubarb and cook it the same way as Nijma does (except without the cinnamon, a spice not much prized in France).
Rhubarb leaves are poisonous (and probably don’t taste very good anyway) but I never heard that the stems could cause humans problems. Potatoes too were once thought to be poisonous because the green parts are.
“Rhubarb seems to be a huge Norwegian-American thing. I don’t know of other nationalities that even know what it is,”
Up here we are a long way from both Norway and the US but rhubarb is very well known here. The same is also true of anywhere that ever heard The Goons broadcast.
I can’t find my mother’s rhubarb pie recipe at the moment, but I don’t remember cinnamon in it. It does have eggs and grenadine. The Jordanians serve cinnamon tea (a handful of cinnamon bark boiled in water then sugar added) when a baby is born and everyone comes around to pay their respects. I rather like cinnamon sticks. I get it quite reasonably in prepackaged bags from the Arab store or sometimes the Mexican section, but I think it’s expensive when you buy it as a “spice” in a special container, plus it’s not so fresh.
http://goons.fabcat.org/
In England, I grew up with rhubarb — in fact everyone did, we had it at school for lunch. My mother made a lovely rhubarb pie, too. I also like stewed rhubarb with brown sugar. I think in England too it has some sort of connection with WW2; perhaps it was one of the things people were encouraged to grow, though I’m not sure it’s particularly nourishing.
I love rhubarb too and it’s very popular in Germany – there’s a huge variety of recipes to make rhubarb pie, cake, compote, mousse etc.
How about Belgium? I bet they have some good rhubarb recipes.
Strangely enough, rhubarb doesn’t really seem to be that popular in Belgium, you get the odd pot of jam, and some bakeries (and a sandwich shop chain called “Exquis”) offer rhubarb pie, but in Brussels at least, it can be a struggle to find fresh rhubarb in the shops, even at the height of the season.
I’d probably never have leant that without this blog. I’ll bring my own suitcaseful of rhubarb next time I go to Brussels.
Oddly enough, and though I can count up to twenty-ish, rabarbaro is one of the few words of Italian I know. I’ve never had it there as far as I remember. I also know barbabietola, or beetroot. I’m not nearly as keen on barbabietola as I am on rhubarb. La barbabietola da zucchero is sugarbeet, I once ate some raw barbabietola da zucchero and got a terrible sore throat. Siganus Sutor has some lovely pictures of flowering sugar cane on his blog.
My only experience with odd Italian vegetables was being told by Sammarinese friends with whom I was staying that “finocchio” (fennel) also means gay. This was five or so years ago now, so perhaps fennel is no longer Brüno’s vegetable of choice.
Sammarinese being, for people like me who had to look it up, the people of San Marino.
I was wondering what the significance of –inocchio is in Italian, so I looked up Pinocchio on Wiki, where it says:
.
The rhubarb triangle is not in Norwegian territory, unless you’re thinking of the early middle ages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle
I’d no idea that Britain led the world at rhubarb — not to that extent, at least.
It’s too bad that all that work had to be done in the dark. You wouldn’t have found Southerners to do that kind of thing. Now I’m a Northerner, I wonder if I could grow it in the dark in winter?
There’s an interesting BBC article here, with a woman who says we were force-fed rhubarb after the war and there was a backlash — that’s my memory too. She implies that it’s good for you, but she doesn’t elaborate.
I used to have a friend who was an Economic Historian. In his cups he would regale us with tales of the Chinese rhubarb war (vs The West) and the Austro-Serbian prune war.
I can understand a war about prunes, or at least plums, but I’d never go to war over rhubarb, not even if they start running cars on it.
Is that how “rhubarb” came to mean “altercation”?