All Activity

Turns out (surprise!) that keeping avian predators around is a good way to limit bird/rodent damage to cherry crops. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/tiny-falcons-are-helping-keep-the-food-supply-safe-on-cherry-farms/

I spent some more money, and got an option: Also, I removed one of the leaves. Living in an apartment, its a whole lot easier to leave the leaves in the table than it is to find some place else to keep them. But I decided that having that table all gigantic all the time was inviting junk and also making me feel lonely. So I took one off and put it under the sofa. Anyway, new every-day tablecloth, I ran in the opposite direction of creamsicle. The creamsicle might in fact go on ebay, although it does look nice beneath my heath plates.

Another example is 水饺 (shuǐ jiǎo), meaning "boiled dumplings". Both syllables use a falling and rising tone. If you get it wrong and use only falling tones, 睡觉 shuì jiào, then you are saying "sleep" or "go to bed".

Banana pudding shouldn’t have ANY artificial banana flavor in it! It’s made of layers of vanilla pudding, vanilla wafers, and slices of actual bananas, all topped with either whipped cream or baked meringue! It’s basically a trifle.

Leftover piece of pizza and small salad. Was delicious and plenty for me. Included a Pic of the best way to reheat pizza. Stove top! Can't stand nuked pizza and oven dries it out too much. I did drizzle with a bit of pesto oil since it was a bit dry first round. Helped!

While the locals are battling to get their favourite places back, the local government, in their infinite wisdom, is trying to lure more Tik-Tok idiots to the city. They have commissioned a luosifen mural near the entrance to what used to be my favourite market but is now a hell-hole.

I think that a Savage Brothers Firemixer will work.

I'm not sure what we are doing differently, but it's not just me. The Modernist Bread French Lean Bread recipe, which uses slightly more flour than the bread I make, comes with the note: "For an 8 qt stand mixer, multiply this recipe by 1.5 or up to 2.5. Unless you use a 4.5 qt stand mixer, the 1 kg recipe is not enough mass for the hook to catch and mix all the ingredients to make a uniform dough. Even with a 4.5 qt bowl, with only 1 kg of dough, it may be best to start the mix using a paddle attachment; switch to a hook after autolyse." And it is not only KitchenAid. My Ankarsrum struggles and fails to mix a kg of dough. The bread recipes Ankarsrum gives are for larger batches. For 1 kg I've gotten good dough results only with paddle type mixers, such as the Sunvivi and my other similar mixer. One of my KitchenAid mixers lives on my counter but it is more used for grinding meat and rolling pasta.

Like many other languages, Mandarin Chinese is tonal. This means that each syllable is assigned one of five tones. Other syllables with otherwise the same pronunciation will often have different tones. These tones are important. Get the tone wrong and you change the meaning. This can be embarrassing in that while you intend saying something inconsequential, you actually come out with something shocking or amusing. One that I hope is deliberate (I know it isnt) is food related. Bell peppers, the most pointless vegetable ever are, in Mandarin 甜椒 (tián jiāo). The first syllable, tián, has a rising tone while the second has a high flat tone. Accidentally change both tones to falling then rising and you've changed the meaning to the verb 'to lick feet', something more flavourful! There are many more food related examples which I will put here as I come across them.

As long as you are delighted with the dough from your KitchenAid, use the KitchenAid.

We just call ‘em pies 😉

Wednesday was a favourite - chicken sausage with broccolini, chilli and garlic pasta. Thursday was a hot day, 36°C so salad was in order. Mango, avocado, cherry tomatoes on a bed of rocket, dressed with a spicy lime mixture and a few prawns for protein. There’s some bean sprouts in there too, and the mango is from our tree !

Thank you! I love that you do this. I know the recipients are grateful. Thank you, ma’am! I love toppings on chili. I prefer diced red onion, but thought I should try to please the masses.

PERFECT! I love the chopped onion, cheese and Fritos as toppings. And, I often use all different kinds of beans in chili because I have all kinds different bags open already. Great job!

I have never had banana pudding, probably because A) It is not a thing you find in these parts and B) I have a strong aversion to artifical banana flavour. No doubt due to the fact that someone thought that fake banana flavour would be a good addition to oral penicillin when I was a kid (that did not go well.) However, one of my daughters is crazy about anything banana - real or artificial. You may remember me asking how to get the most banana flavour in her banana wedding cake with banana filling! Anyway, I'm sure she would love banana pudding and she is down with influenza A at the moment, so I'll ask her if it appeals.

Thermomix is not hot enough for caramel but a Hotmix Pro would work

Another lovely and nourishing meal - well done! I dropped off my January Birthday Cake Kits to the food bank and the director, whom I've come to know, said that they are quite popular. So I will continue with my 6 per month promise to myself.

I've been thinking lately about how much we spend just stirring our big pot of caramel waiting for it to come to temperature. Has anyone come across a high heat stirring contraption that allows you to be more hands off during caramel cooking?

I almost feel guilty that this week’s CFM meal was practically stress free. Apologies for not taking pics of everything along the way. At any rate, once I decided how to package the extras, I decided to go ahead with my plan for chili and “fixins.” Started off with two pounds of beautiful Rancho Gordo black beans. Two varieties, but it worked out well to cook them together. I cooked the black beans on Tuesday for adding to the chili being made on Wednesday. I cooked them with aromatics and basic seasoning, but no seasoning meat or other flavorings because of their use in chili. I thought I had pics of the finished beans (other than mixed in with the chili), but it seems that I do not. Because I like variety and also because I needed more than the two pounds of black beans, I also used canned kidney beans. (Regretfully. Wish I’d also used dried kidney beans.) I have shaker containers of these spices and seasonings in the cabinet, but I was using more than usual so I pulled these out of the freezer. Others were also used. Added to the ten pounds plus of browned ground beef, cooking in two pots. Each pot was seasoned the same way. Tony’s was used, but not shown. Not pictured but used was tomato paste. Instead of cooking or preparing a side dish to go with the chili, we included the fixings for chili Fritos. I diced up some sweet white onion. My husband grated sharp cheddar and bagged in snack size ziplocks. Sour cream went into other containers. Ready for filling the brown bags. Ready for covering, and then bagging. All of the elements together (spoon included with the lunch, but not pictured). Delivered about 11:45am today.

apparently , Sabrett's has ground bones in it : just not too big ones ( bins get X-rayed ) maybe all HD do ?

Yeah, I think Smithfield's owns most of the pork producers here in the midwest now, too.

Well, lookee what I found in my freezer! I have no idea how long this has been lurking in there, or why it went into the freezer in the first place. Frost on this bit of leftover pimento cheese quiche is visible. I can now report on freezing it for later. I put it into a microwaveable pot. You can see how firmly it had molded itself to the container. After flipping it over I gave it a couple of minutes on very low so it could begin thawing. Then I gave it enough time and heat to actually warm up. This was the result: It threw off a fair amount of water (which, incidentally, also happens to the refrigerated leftovers when I microwave them). The texture suffered slightly...there was a bit of chewiness, maybe almost graininess, that hadn't been there before. The flavors were still very good. It may be that preparing the dish but not cooking it at all until the day it's to be eaten, as @JAZ suggested above, would give better results. It may also be that if I'd packaged the leftovers more carefully and/or baked them instead of microwaving they'd have come out better. None of those options is useful for my road trip purposes (frozen, microwaveable meals, or maybe wrapping this quiche in a breakfast burrito for reheating later) but others may find the information useful so they can take different approaches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a3DCzZ2cmQ

Time for everyone to switch to Sabrett's.

. . . . and . . . Smithfield Foods is majority owned by a Chinese company . . .