chromedome

Yup, I saw it with a lasagne when my kids were young. I'd put it down to just the acidity, though I scratched my head a little over the severity of the deterioration. Good to know what was actually happening.

In the middle of an article about an entirely unrelated topic (90s alt-rock, as experienced via the lousy speakers at a workplace), I came across this absolute gem of a sentence: The article itself, by Niko Stratis, is well worth a read for the way it captures the mood of small-town life and those dead-end jobs most of us take on in our teens. https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/alt-rock-dept/alt-rock-toadies-possum-kingdom

LOL He sounds like my GF, in that respect. She prefers her cheese sauce, gravy, chowder, etc to be thick and stodgy. ...I do not.

Oh, here's a big one. No Name beef burgers are being recalled nationally for E. coli. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/no-name-brand-beef-burgers-recalled-due-e-coli-o157h7 For the non-Canadians present, No Name is a private label of Loblaw's, our biggest supermarket chain.

The FDA's Bad Bug Book is an excellent (fascinating/horrifying) resource. It's free to download. https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/bad-bug-book-second-edition

Speaking of listeria, here's yet another enoki mushroom recall. This one's (so far) BC-specific. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/mushmoshi-brand-enoki-mushroom-recalled-due-listeria-monocytogenes

I can clarify a couple of points, from personal or work experience. As far as potatoes are concerned, there are a couple of ways to go. "Waxy" potatoes tend to freeze and thaw better than "starchy" potatoes, so if you want something like a soup with potatoes (or just cooked potatoes you can reheat), they're the better option. Starchy potatoes can be used in situations where you're adding a lot of fat or rich ingredients, hence Smithy's twice-baked potatoes. The "freezable, holdable mashed potatoes" at Ellen's Kitchen work on the same basis. The recipe as given (https://www.ellenskitchen.com/bigpots/oamc/mashpota.html) is meant to serve 25, but it's not hard to scale. As for starches, I find that potato starch and arrowroot (both available online, or in the gluten-free section) freeze and thaw well. Roux-thickened sauces and gravies will have an uneven consistency when thawed, unfortunately. If you have someone helping with your post-surgery scenario, whisking them back together will often do the trick, and when they're stubborn a cornstarch slurry will help smooth things out and re-thicken them.

As an afterthought to the Christmas 2025 thread, I'll mention that my rocket-scientist friend (the one I'd visited with on NYE) brought me a calendar as a small gift. What kind of calendar, you ask? Why, one with images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, of course. What else? https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/downloads ETA: Not food-related, I know, unless you subscribe to the whole "moon=cheese" hypothesis, but I'd missed my chance to sneak it in with a food-oriented post, and thought some of y'all might still find the images pretty cool.

My GF, who when younger had lost weight easily on the Atkins diet, more recently tried it again. She lost no weight, but her cholesterol hit alarming levels and she's now on a statin for the duration. OTOH, going back to 2017, I lost 30 pounds or so on an eating pattern that was pretty heavy on carbs, albeit mostly in the form of whole grains (because I'm not one for keeping track of details, I centered my eating around fiber, because fiber content overall is a pretty good proxy for "healthfulness": if you're getting the recommended amount of fiber from whole foods, rather than a supplement, you probably can't go far wrong). Have kept it off since, though over the past six months or so I've regained 5 of 'em because I started slacking a bit. It didn't help that the drought meant I lost a couple of hundred pounds' worth of veggies that I'd normally have had in my diet. (ETA: GF is now losing weight steadily again, despite her arthritis-enforced limits on physical activity, with a balanced eating plan. She's shrinking out of some clothes and back into others, and is delighted with her progress.)

The link for the full thread is higher up in my original post. You may not be able to view it if you don't have a Bluesky account. The "TL:DR" is screencapped, so if you're not seeing it, it's not about accessing the page but about whether you're seeing images correctly on eG with your device. IIRC you'd spoken about that just recently?

That's actually a keynote of Haspel's body of work, overall, and covering it is pretty much her whole job at WaPo. She rubs a lot of organic-food enthusiasts the wrong way, for example, by pointing out that the yield loss for full-organic means needing more land to feed the same number of people, which in turn pushes environmental degradation. She has no academic credentials in food or nutrition, but she's been following the field for a long time, and interviewing both authorities in the field and the academics writing the papers she covers, so she's got a pretty deep knowledge of the subject matter (and a suitably jaundiced attitude about poorly-constructed studies).

Here is a link to the new guidelines' "Scientific Foundation" document, for anyone who might feel inclined to geek out on it. https://cdn.realfood.gov/Scientific Report.pdf Some of you will be familiar with Tamar Haspel's work; she's the WaPo's columnist on food and food policy. She's done a lengthy analysis on Bluesky, for those who are active there (she may have posted this on other platforms as well, if you follow her elsewhere). Here's a link to the thread: https://bsky.app/profile/tamarhaspel.bsky.social/post/3mbvzrhtgm22n ...and for the TL;DR version, here's a screencap of her summary/takeaway: Posted this originally in the "Food Science" thread, then remembered that Mitch had started this one. Duh.

She'd been the first Black woman hired as a cast member on America's Test Kitchen. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/07/lifestyle/elle-simone-scott-passed-away-americas-test-kitchen/

This one speaks very directly to my own sense of humour. At one point, when my kids were small, my then-wife and I were in the kitchen cooking or cleaning (I forget which). My wife, gesturing absently in my direction: "Pass me over a towel, please?" Me: (Drops towel on the floor, picks her up - eliciting a startled squawk - and passes her over the towel) This is the place where I often say "I found it much funnier than she did," but in this particular case she also laughed pretty hard.

Found by my GF on Facebook: