chromedome

As many of you will know, I raise rabbits for meat. I've done some back of the envelope math at one point or another and worked out that even a small establishment like mine (4-6 does) can put something on the order of 800 lbs of meat in the freezer in just one summer, depending how hard you want to work them (and a few other factors). That compares favorably to most forms of larger livestock, though of course (as I've often joked) you don't get many steaks or chops out of a rabbit. Having made that joke repeatedly, one day my GF challenged me on it. She really enjoys breaded schnitzel-style cutlets, and wanted to know if I could figure out how to make them from a rabbit. I gave it some thought and decided that hind legs or loin pieces were my best bet, so last night I thawed two saddles of rabbit (ie the two loins, and the piece of spine joining them) and gave it a shot. Here's the end result: Three of the loins I left intact, just removed the silverskin and pounded them out. One loin I cut diagonally in half, to make two smaller portions for the kids. There were also the tiny tenderloins, which I didn't bother to pound because they were already quite thin and (of course) tender. Finally, I had the four vaguely triangular pieces of thin belly meat which I'd left in place when I broke down the rabbits; those I pounded with the studded side of the meat mallet (you'll see two of those at the top of the plate). They were chewy, but not unpleasantly so. I served them with boiled potatoes, steamed cauliflower and broccoli, and gravy. No plated pictures, because I had hungry/impatient mouths to feed. (NB: I also roasted the pieces of backbone, with the bits and pieces of meat that weren't worth trimming off, and those are in the fridge as an agreeable nibble I can reheat and pick clean when the mood strikes.)

Basically the wheat version of pearled barley, I guess. I expect you could use it in recipes calling for wheat berries, but dial back the cooking time somewhat. I'll be curious to see what you think of it.

I don't have anything much to add that hasn't already been touched on, but (shrug) that's never stopped me before... I'll add a +1 to the possibility of it being attractive to people who live with a chronic illness or other disability. That's an under-appreciated market (a great many of the kitchen gizmos you've seen on late-night infomercials began with that market, and then expanded into the mass consumer sphere). Also, there are a lot more people with disabilities than most of us realize, not to mention how many of us will be temporarily sidelined by illness or injury at some point in our lives. The hotel breakfast-bar idea seems plausible to me as well, at least as a niche/novelty item. I doubt you'd place them at every Holiday Inn or Best Western, but as a very small company you night not need a large sales volume to do your 401(k) some good. Here in the Kitchen Consumer forum you'll see a very similar request for feedback (a precision cooker) by a European entrepreneur who has been successful in just such a modest fashion. That said - and far be it from me to throw cold water on anyone's dream - it could be argued (for reasons too obvious to require comment) that you've chosen the Very Worst Possible Moment to be prototyping a new electronic device, having it manufactured, and bringing it to market. ETA: Took the time to look up info on the prevalence of disabilities in the US, then forgot to include the link. https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents/disability-impacts-all-of-us-infographic.html

Some of you may be familiar with the work of UK author Robert MacFarlane, whose books and essays on the natural world and our interactions with it (Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, etc) have been international best-sellers. This morning I tripped across an essay from a few years ago, about a trip to the ancestral home of the domesticated apple, in Kazakhstan's Tien Shan mountains. MacFarlane himself didn't take that trip, it was his friend and fellow writer Roger Deakin. Deakin died of cancer almost 20 years ago, and MacFarlane frames an excerpt from Deakin's book about his journey with personal reflections on their relationship. It's fascinating food history re the emergence of the domesticated apple, and pretty fair travel/food writing in Deakin's recounting of the trip. I found it well worth the read, and thought many of you might enjoy it as well (as someone who was born and raised in apple-rearing country, and gets through 7-10 pounds of apples a week, it was especially resonant for me). https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/east-to-eden/ Those of you with an interest in history and archaeology may also want to Google some of the recent excavations that have happened in the Tien Shan mountains, which hosted some substantial trading and agricultural centers going back to several millennia BCE.

This one's pretty specific and small scale, but I'll throw it out there just in case. Some batches of ground beef at Aladdin's Foods, in London ON, are being recalled for E. coli. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/aladdin-foods-brand-lean-ground-beef-recalled-due-ecoli-o103?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

An interesting revival that's been going on in Sicily... https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250328-the-return-of-sicilys-ancient-white-gold

A fun interview with Steve (conducted by a personal friend): https://www.altaonline.com/culture/food-drink/a63904280/steve-sando-rancho-gordo-bean-empire/

I just got back from my monthly 5-day visit to my mom and daughter in Nova Scotia (it seems to be the optimal compromise between "never enough time there," and "always too long to be from home"). In my absence, the baby bunnies grew immoderately. These are Hazel's and Ivy's litters, so the little ones from the compare-and-contrast above are both shown here. Hazel's kits are still bigger, though the others are catching up fast. This next two weeks, until they're fully weaned, is (to me) when they're at their absolute cutest. Right now they follow Mama around, trying to nurse, until she gets impatient and hops up on top of the nest box to get a break. We separate them right around the time they're finally big enough to follow her up there, because sheesh! They need some downtime. Also, that's just how the timing works out for breeding the does again, at least in our scheme of things. Commercial meat-rabbit growers breed them shortly after they've given birth, so the old litter is weaned just as the new litter is about due, but that's hard on the does and (as explained way back upthread) we don't want to work ours that hard. Healthier mamas and fewer, healthier kits works for us. So yeah, if harvesting our fuzzy bunnies is the worst step in the process (it is), this is the most agreeable. For the next few weeks we'll handle the little kits as much as we can, to socialize them and get them comfortable with humans. Whether we sell them as pets or breeders, or ultimately put them in our freezer, having them associate human hands with warmth, cuddles and - in general - Good Things Happening just makes life a lot easier. I've mentioned before that our buck Carrot is by far the most cuddly of the current crew. When I got home on Saturday and fed the bunnies for the first time since returning, he came to the door of his cage for his usual nose-boop and cuddles. Instead of turning his head after the nose-boop, as usual, so I could stroke around his chin and chest (his favorite thing), he instead just leaned his face into mine and stayed there for several long moments as I petted him. That was a first, with any of the rabbits we've had. I definitely felt I'd been missed.

It's funny, the things that linger on. Here in Canada, for example, the use of personal cheques essentially died in the 90s, with the advent of debit cards, except for the older half of the Boomer demographic and the dwindling number of our parents. The only reason I even have a chequebook anymore is because my former insurance company (note the adjective) would not accept payments in any other format, and my former landlord required his year's rent in the form of post-dated cheques (that was a decade ago, and I still have the remainder of that book of cheques). Yet they remain widely used in the US. On the flip side, that rapid and near-universal adoption of debit cards (especially now that debit and credit are tap-and-go) means that we've been slower to adopt phone-based wallets relative to many other countries. It's not uncommon here, but is nowhere close to supplanting the actual cards in universality. For me it's a no-brainer because my card is always in my wallet, which in turn is always in my pocket, whereas my phone is wherever I last set it down. Also, having written so much about online/digital security, the less of my life is on my phone the better I like it ("Okay, Boomer..."). You might accurately guess from that "...wherever I last set it down" comment that in my case, this is based less in paranoia than learned experience. For another example of decidedly old-school tech, the fax still lingers on here at medical offices. It's used for sending prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies, and prescription requests from pharmacies to doctors (ie, if a prescription is running out and has no refills, they'll fax the doctor for you to have a refill prescription written and returned). I believe they're also still used for sending requisitions from doctors to labs for bloodwork and imaging, though email and the province's new-and-improved digital portal are slowly taking over on that front. I don't know if it's the same in Ontario or if we're just that much of a backwater, though @Kerry Beal could probably enlighten us on that score.

It's a green tomato relish. Very popular here in Atlantic Canada, where some years we're likely to have more green tomatoes than ripe ones.

I remember you! Glad to hear that the LoafNest was a success, however modest (I gave you a quote for the campaign). I am on record here on the site (probably more than once) as saying that induction would be perfect for seniors (for safety/convenience reasons), if only someone would build an affordable induction hob with a simple dial rather than [expletive] touchpads. I'm not nearly as exacting in my use of induction as some of the others here on the site, largely because I have no meaningful use-case for sous vide, but a unit with better control than the two I currently use (both of them increment the power in 10 steps, so I'm often choosing between "a bit too fast" and "a bit too slow." At this point app-controlled/IoT devices are a hard no for me, and I'm an open-source guy by inclination (Ubuntu Linux is my OS of choice since 2007), so you check the right boxes for me on that front, as well. Several people here on the site bought an induction hob called Paragon, which also aimed for precision at a low price (perhaps some owners could weigh in on similarities and differences?) but sadly didn't make it commercially. Hopefully you fare better with this device.

It's almost that time of year again...

Huh. I don't know if it qualifies as "fun stuff," but one of our two national grocery chains (Sobeys) is now carrying a range of products from its UK counterpart, Sainsbury's. It seems to mostly be incidental stuff, like marmalade, candy, canned beans, cookies (sorry, biscuits) and lemon curd. UK peeps, are any of their products especially notable?

Yeah, that's a head-scratcher. I wonder whatever possessed them to make the cooking vessel square (-ish) rather than round? It's a pretty fundamental design flaw; you'd think a beta-tester might have mentioned this?