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Gonna throw a few random, haphazard updates in here at odd moments through the day, just to catch up a bit. Belatedly dealt last night with a cohort of rabbits that had been ready for processing 4-6 weeks ago, but life has been too busy to circle around to them. Ordinarily, when I get them done at the ideal 16-week age, they average about 7 lbs live weight and 3.5 dressed weight. I didn't get a live weight on these ones, but the dressed weight averaged around 5 lbs so I'm guessing they'd have been 10 lbs or thereabouts. We've been negotiating with a couple of local vendors to get sausage made from our rabbits, just to give my poor sweetheart (who, remember, can't eat most red meats and especially pork) something that she can eat in breakfast wraps, on pizzas, etc. It's not that I can't do this myself, or haven't in the past, but the meat grinder and sausage-stuffer attachments on my KitchenAid are just not up to the task of doing anything like that in bulk. Also, there's the time issue (which never goes away). So I may or may not splurge on an upgraded meat grinder and/or sausage stuffer, depending how much it costs us to get this batch processed. This batch of rabbits seemed ideal candidates for the purpose, given that they're oversized and also likely to be tougher than those harvested at 16 weeks (their legs were perceptively more sinewy than usual). So after I cleaned them and broke them down, I deboned everything except the forelegs (we jokingly call those "wings," and treat them like chicken wings; they're a bit fattier and richer than rabbit meat in general). We're also going to have several pounds simply ground up for us, because ground meat is a really useful/handy thing to have for all kinds of purposes. So, of the nearly 50 lbs/20+kg of dressed rabbit, I got a total of 12.4kg deboned meat (27-odd pounds), 3.2kg of forelegs (7+ lbs), and the rest went to bones/carcasses which I roasted off for later processing into rabbit broth. It was a big project, we started at around 3 and I wasn't finished until after 10. Ordinarily, when I'm not deboning the bunnies, I'd have been done 1.5-2 hours earlier.

quite some time ago , even here on eG , a review of the O.G. caused a bit of a stir. I did search for that thread , and could not find it NYTimes , Today : https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/dining/marilyn-hagerty-dead.html ''' Marilyn Hagerty, a food columnist who startled the online world with an earnestly detail-oriented and nonjudgmental appraisal of a North Dakota Olive Garden, and who was startled in turn when the review racked up more than one million page views, bringing her national media attention and a book contract, died on Sept. 16 in Grand Forks, N.D. She was 99. Her death, in a hospital, was from complications of a stroke, said her son, the journalist James R. Hagerty. Ms. Hagerty had been writing The Eatbeat, her restaurant column in The Grand Forks Herald, for 26 years when, in early 2012, she filed her report about the opening of the city’s first Olive Garden outlet, part of a local branch of a national Italian restaurant chain where the warm breadsticks never ran out. The Olive Garden’s menu was enormously popular but also routinely mocked for taking starchy, cheesy liberties with the cuisine. Ms. Hagerty did not engage with that debate. Her descriptions of the restaurant and its food were direct and matter of fact. “The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day,” she wrote. “The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese.” '' When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.” etc, etc, for review purposes.

@ElsieD Ive used the RB40 technique several times in the distant past , on nice looking marbled NYstrips supermarket choice . rubbed a little on each side , absorbed by the meat , then refrigerated on a rack for air cirvulation 2 - 3 days , then SV'd 130 F , ( forgot the # hours , y0u would have to search for that ref ) I used that meat for RB sandwiches and it was very tasty , mimcking a dray aged steak. the meat was loosley covered to prevent too much drying out. If I had a well marbled choice steak ( Prime , if you can find it , is not very ' prime ' these days , and way over priced ) Id do the meat this way again. the fishy flavor disappears w heat

I have never bought Shio Koji but, I have used dried koji rice to "dry age" steaks, similar to this. https://blog.thermoworks.com/koji-aged-steaks/ We enjoyed it each time and I will do it again. I've made Shio Koji and used it with vegetables, sauces and marinade to good effect. I can't remember exactly which book or article mentioned that the commercial Shio Koji varies in quality. Making Koji and miso etc, seems interesting and is on a list of things to try.

牛肉豆芽炒粉 (niú ròu dòu yá chǎo fěn), beef and beansprout fried rice noodles. Nicely spicy。

I appreciate the help.

I honestly don't know. I can read every word and none say it's koji. Sorry

amazon sold it to me as koji maybe it isn't?

Bizarre. I can't work out what that is. It mentions shio (salt) but I cant see the word koji anywhere on the container. It does however say it's for grilled food, simmered food, Japanese food, stir fried food. Sorry.

Today’s late lunch was a fast food burger - rather a curiosity for me. I don’t do fast food much except for road trips and airports and even then, I look for other options. But this morning, the local news informed me that today was National Cheeseburger Day. Who knew? They featured some great looking burgers. None were from spots in my area but they got me in a burger mood so after running a bunch of errands, I remembered a USA Today poll that picked a Habit Burger as the best fast food burger. A low hurdle, to be sure, but I’ve never had one and figured I might as well observe the national day so I got a double char with cheese from Habit. Two chargrilled burgers, caramelized onions, lettuce, tomato, pickles, mayo, and cheese on a toasted bun: Not bad. Too heavy on the mayo but the charred flavor is detectable. I’d prefer a bigger burger that could take more char vs the two stacked patties but I was pretty hungry and it wasn’t bad at all. Lettuce was fresh, tomato tasted like one. The most embarrassing part is that my errands included picking up my weekly fish share (live, local oysters) and the local farmers market where I chose two varieties of passion fruit to make a mignionette for the oysters and I still stopped off for a fast food burger 🙈🙈🙈

Previous conversation Doesn't look like any of us actually tried it then, but there are more links to articles.

here it is

There is certainly a sweet koji (甘い麹 - amai koji). It does not contain sugar but the sweetness comes from the processing of the rice turning the starch into glucose. Maybe that's what you accidentally bought.

In my hands, I put the meat in a ziploc with a tbsp of soy and a tbsp of Red Boat 40. I put it in the fridge and turn it occasionally for a few hours. Brother @rotuts may have improvements.

How does this work?

So I cut two chunks off of a flat iron steak. One was marinated/incubated with koji for 4 hours. I chopped off the end of the untreated steak for identification purposes. The stuff looked like baby barf, a viscous liquid filled with rice fragments. Left steak is koji treated. It darkened like it was treated with sugar although the label on the koji had no sugar listed. The taste was sweet too. The promised funk in the meat was barely detectable. Unless I made some big mistake in method or choice of koji (certainly possible), I can't imagine using koji again. I get a much tastier speed-age with @rotuts Red Boat and soy and none of the sweetness.

No photos. Went to a local sports bar where an old friend tends bar. Had a couple of glasses of wine and a pork tenderloin sandwich with tots--all scratch made to order. Fatty, dreadfully unhealthy and delicious. And I have enough leftovers for 2 more meals.

Ah. A hidden vice. 🙂

And there lies a major difference. Most people here shop for vegetables daily and never trouble their fridges. (Anyway, there would be no difficulty in cutting it into sections to refrigerate.)

五仁月饼 (wǔ rén yuè bǐng), five nut mooncake. This one, I would eat.

Maltitol is much better for dogs.

Chicken masala leftovers. As with many complex dishes, this was even better the next day.

Every year I have a few of THESE sent to the US from Malaysia. This year is particularly challenging with new tariff and shipping rules changes. Two years ago every one of them had a finger pressed in - later we learned that was the FDA/USDA? shoving a finger to prove there was no egg yolk inside, which is illegal. I find hers to be gorgeous, interesting but not out there flavors, and actually enjoyable versus the more traditional Cantonese style. [ETA for my poor sentence structure - salted yolk filling is illegal to ship in without prior approval, not shoving a finger in my mooncakes. That's perfectly legal. :)]

That looks great!

Slavery-free would be a more notable advancement for Hershey's. But as for sweeteners, Guittard and Callebaut sugar free both use maltitol.