chromedome

Ugh. After all of the well-reported issues from last year, Boar's Head is about to reopen its problematic plant. Issues there, and elsewhere within the company's operations, remain, though. As said upthread, "Why would anyone buy from Boar's Head ever again?" https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/boars-head-to-reopen-plant-as-mold-and-funky-meat-problems-pop-up-elsewhere/

If you've been thinking "Gee, aren't we overdue for another enoki mushroom recall?", well, you're right. Affects Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/enoki-mushroom-recalled-due-listeria-monocytogenes-4?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

I haven't planted any yet, so I just have a few scraggly feral canes growing in less-than-ideal places around the edges of the property. Just enough for a taste. But when we walked our dogs regularly on the trails around town, we found a place at one of the local parks, in a spot where the hiking trail intersects with a maintenance roadway, that has a massive stand of heavy-bearing raspberries. I'm hoping to get there at some point this week and pick several pounds for the freezer.

We will almost certainly buy it if we see it, but so far I haven't found the "super-premium" Chapman's in any of our local stores. Those are the ones that compete with Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's, both of which are represented here, but there's also a local NB brand in that format and I think they've basically squeezed out the last slot that the Chapman's product might have fit into.

I like them well enough, but I'm a stickler for having the correct ratio of pastry to filling (the pastry has to blunt that cloying sweetness). I'm also happy that Chapman's included raisins, because I'm squarely in the "if it doesn't have 'em it's not a proper butter tart" camp. ETA: Everyone's entitled to an occasional early morning disagreeable comment. Quotas are negotiable, but increase with "time served," and there's a bonus allowance for chronic illness/pain. Yup, my sweetheart prefers the rectangular 2 litre box to the "premium" in the tub. Right now she's on a chocolate kick, but we had a couple of months of buying vanilla and then pouring ganache over it. Getting a prescription for blood-sugar sensors has somewhat altered the volume she consumes at a sitting, of course, as well as the timing.

Chapman's is one of Canada's big ice cream brands. They make fairly bog-standard ice creams of various kinds, from the popular novelties to both standard and "premium" versions of the common flavors. As these things go, they're a perfectly decent brand, and well-respected as a good company to work for, etc. So when I tripped across this, this morning, I literally laughed out loud. Now that I've seen it, I can't believe that nobody'd thought of it before. https://www.chapmans.ca/product/butter-tart-ice-cream-500-ml-tub/

Circled back and found the thread I was talking about, now that I have a few minutes at my computer. It's this one: I'm sure there are mentions in some other threads as well, if you wanted to dig farther.

Pretty sure it's been discussed over in the Kitchen Consumer thread, but am just passing through my office and haven't searched.

One of Hester's little kits has been getting out of her cage, and yesterday when I went up to feed the critters it was on the ground again, hiding in the doorway of the barn. After I'd corralled it, I dropped it into my shirt pocket so I'd have both hands free for the door and my water bucket. The little one, probably tuckered out after a cold and scary night on its own, immediately curled up and went to sleep in its warm, cozy little carry pouch. So I left it there, because whatcha gonna do? And also... awwwwww. You know that feeling when a baby falls asleep on your shoulder, that warm little body going limp in total trust and comfort? Yeah, like that but on a smaller scale. After the wee one had slept for a few hours I put a little plastic food container on the desktop for her, with some fresh greens, and then watched in amusement as a Very Small Rabbit ate a Very Large Breakfast... ...and then helped me with my article (yes, sadly, my desk is that cluttered). I'd finally located the spot on the cage where the little one had been escaping, and repaired it at lunchtime. So now the wee one is back with her mama and siblings. I'd decided that a "pocket bunny" must necessarily be dubbed Polly (my daughter loved Polly Pocket toys when she was little, and granddaughter has some now), and if in fact Polly turns out not to be a girl, well... Paulie also works. I've mentioned before that the youngest and skinniest of our original flock of chickens was a white Leghorn pullet which we inevitably named Miss Prissy, since we'd grown up on those vintage Warner Bros cartoons. Prissy has been setting a clutch of eggs for several weeks, and a couple of days ago got her reward: a single chick. I have occasionally had writers describe a character as fussing over something "like a hen with one chick," and now I'm seeing it IRL. My GF came in laughing from the chickens' run that afternoon, telling me that little Prissy (still the smallest and scrawniest of the adult birds) had bullied the entire current flock of 50+ birds all the way back into the sheltered roosting area at one end of the run. If any other bird dared step out for water or food, she'd be on it in a split second, in a berserk rage. She'd mellowed a bit by yesterday, and had taken up a position near the base of that quail condo I'd constructed (see photos upthread). When she needed to get up for any reason, the little chick (otherwise firmly ensconced under mama) would scuttle underneath the quail condo, where none of the others could follow. When I fed them all, the others stepped out gingerly toward the feeders, keeping one eye on Prissy the whole time, instead of swarming me as they usually do. The whole thing was rather amusing, though I *did* make a point of rearranging the feeders and waterers so the flock wouldn't either starve or keep poor Prissy in a continual state of advanced agitation. Here are mama and the little guy: He's a bit fuzzy, partly because I had to use the zoom pretty aggressively to get this close without triggering the Wrath of Prissy, and partly because... he's a bit fuzzy. We popped for enough 7-ft deer fencing to completely surround my garden, and I hope to have the other half of that installed by this afternoon, after which the chickens will once again have the opportunity to free-range for a portion of each day. I'm less enthused about this than my GF (I think we'll probably lose some of our half-grown birds), but the flock is her project/responsibility, so I'll roll with it and we'll take what comes.

I just paid $7 CAD for 200-odd grams of it, so I could certainly see myself buying 9 lbs of feta to take advantage of the deal. Lots of salads here, in the summertime.

"Chaotic Dumplings." A band name waiting to happen... (ETA: Or more likely, a game app for your phone.)

That's pretty much McD's ace-in-the-hole here, too (it's sure as hell not the food!). Lure in the kids with Happy Meals, toys, and genuinely solid in-restaurant playgrounds, and they'll drag the parents along. Then, as they grow up, of course, they're "imprinted" and tend to think of the chain as a comfort-food sort of thing. I had an afternoon with the grandson recently, which involved some time in town running errands, and given a whole city's worth of lunch options, he chose... yup, McD's. I had a McChicken sandwich, which used to be the most edible thing on the menu, and it was pretty vile. Much smaller and sadder than I remembered (mind you, the last time I'd had anything other than a soft-serve cone at McD's was probably around 2008).

Oh, cool! I'd never thought to check if episodes were available there, or on CBC Gem.

That was a good read, thanks! Back in the 80s one of Canada's most popular food personalities was English-born James Barber, who was an engineer by trade. He was raised by a grandmother who he described frequently as "the kind of English cook who gives English food a bad name," so understandably food was not one of his big interests in young adulthood. But as he plied his trade as an engineer, moving from country to country, he began to notice a lot of parallels between foods from different cultures (I remember him specifically calling out Italian stracciatella and Chinese egg-drop soup, for example). That led to him taking an interest in food for the first time, and became a theme in his unlikely second act as a cookbook author and TV show host. Frequently, in the course of an episode of his show, he would get to a specific point in a recipe and explain that from here you could take it in this, this, or that direction by altering the remaining ingredients and garnishes you added (and those three examples might be, perhaps, Thai, Russian or French). It was a fun show. One thing I always liked about it was that there was no "magic of television" going on. Everything he did on his show was cooked in real time over the course of the 30 minute-less-commercials taping, so you knew if he did it then you could too (maybe not quite as smoothly, but pretty close). My own similar "lightbulb" moment came in a little Portuguese greasy-spoon on Vancouver's Commercial Drive. Their chalkboard special one day was salt cod and potatoes, and having eaten it many times in its Newfoundland incarnation, I thought it'd be interesting to see how different it was. It came out drizzled with olive oil and covered with olives, which at first blush I thought was pretty exotic and left-field (in my defense, I was still a teen). But upon reflection, it wasn't that big a departure. In Newfoundland, the usual preparation involved dicing salt pork fat into cubes and rendering them, then drizzling the rendered fat over the fish and potatoes, before sprinkling the crunchy, salty, rendered cubes of fat ("scrunchins" or "scruncheons," spelling optional/personal preference) over everything. Well, the olive oil served the same role as the hot pork fat (and was a definite upgrade in many respects). And while those olives lacked the crunch of the scrunchins, they brought the same salty element to the meal. That was a real watershed moment for me, in terms of my own interest in/appreciation of food. Vancouver was a good place to light that spark, it was already a very cosmopolitan place even in the early 80s. So... yeah, that plate of bacalhau, and the train of thought it provoked, is probably why I ended up here at eG 20 years later (and at culinary school, at around the same time).