Tag / Jerry Dumas

by zbicyclist

Chewing Twice

Mitch4 sends this in: “I figured it must be an idiomatic expression, and a lookup confirmed it. But I had never before run across it in the wild.”

Your editor hasn’t heard this one, either. Mayor McGuffey’s name doesn’t sound German, so I guess we can’t call him a sour kraut.

There’s a suggestion here that this is a combination of two sayings: “I don’t chew my cabbage twice – Response when someone asks you to repeat what you just said. This phrase is probably a combination of: I don’t chew my baccer (tobacco) twice and I don’t boil my cabbage twice.“

I have no doubt that chewing tobacco twice would be unpleasant. Chewing tobacco at all sounds unpleasant. But what about boiling cabbage twice?

What Happens if You Boil Cabbage Twice

Boiling cabbage twice — or overboiling it — can significantly affect its texture, flavor, and nutritional value.

Texture and flavor changes
The first boiling softens cabbage, but a second boiling (or extended cooking) makes it mushy, limp, and less appetizing. Overcooked cabbage can also develop an unpleasant odor and lose its natural sweetness and crunch voyoeats.com+1.

Nutrient loss
Cabbage contains heat- and water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and B vitamins, which are sensitive to prolonged cooking. Boiling it for more than 5–7 minutes can deplete up to 75% of vitamin C and reduce sulforaphane precursors by over 50% thelivinglook.com. A second boiling compounds this loss, reducing the health benefits.

Health considerations
Overboiling can also break down compounds that may interfere with thyroid function, especially in people with hypothyroidism eatandgeek.com. While this is more relevant to raw cabbage, repeated boiling increases exposure to these compounds.

How to avoid the problem

  • Limit cooking time: For shredded cabbage, 5 minutes; for wedges, up to 10 minutes
by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, June 4th, 2023

Show of hands, did the term “body shop” make you think of lotions and scents, or crumpled fenders?

A couple of maggiethecartoonist suggestions:

When BillR sent this one in, we all racked our brains for common sayings, or notable events, or famous stories, involving tomatoes and lemons …

… but then it dawned on us that there is a traditional remark about comparisons, and it involves apples and oranges. So this could be a joke about literalizing that idiomatic remark, thrown into confusion by a colorist’s error! (Subsequently we found it discussed at the Comic Strip of the Day site, and there also attributed to colorist error.)

Here’s one spotted by Usual John at Comics Kingdom. It feels eerily like something we just recently saw, and discussed, with remarks about how it could stand in for a motto for CIDU. But then again, there’s today’s date, 5-31, right there in the panel; which makes it less likely this could actually be an oldie that CK happened to replay today.

Update! We put the above questions to an expert archivalist, who came thru with answers!

First of all, yes this was a rerun; but because the previous Comics Kingdom appearance was exactly a year earlier, on 2022-05-31, the date “5-31” embedded in the artwork for panel 3 does not mean this comic was actually new this week; nor does it make that date a paste-over job. (Though the syndication copyright notice running vertically between panels 1 and 2 does have the current year inserted.)

Also, it did appear at CIDU, and get discussed, on its publication date last year. Which is not really “just recently” as suggested above, but also is not absurdly far off.

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