chromedome

An update on one of the BC pistachio recalls. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-raw-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella

https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-raw-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella

It's been a busy "killing small things" week, here on our little acreage. Not my favorite part of the exercise, as I've said before, but more or less inevitable when you decide to raise your own meat. We kicked things off by culling 11 male quail who were, as the Brits say, "surplus to requirements." We've also been picking away at our surplus roosters, and have so far culled 9 of the... 14 or so?... that are currently mature and badgering the hens. We have a couple more clutches that hatched out at intervals of a few weeks, so we'll be doing this all through the autumn. The 9 that we've harvested to date totaled 13.9kg/30.6 lbs, with the biggest (a barred rock, from our "barnyard mix" eggs) checking in at 2129g/4.7 lbs, and the smallest (one of the ones I showed in the photos above, with the green-black plumage and blond head feathers) at just 927g, or less than an ounce over 2 lbs. They were the same age, and the little guy had definitely hit sexual maturity, so it was just a question of either breed size/speed of growth or a combination thereof. Most have hit a relative "sweet spot" of 1600-1650g, or 3 1/2(ish) pounds. The big barred rock, dubbed "Spot" by the grandkids, will be the (ahem) "guest of honour" at today's Thanksgiving meal. Yesterday it was the rabbits' turn, and we harvested a batch of 8 which yielded just over 30 pounds, dressed weight. So they're averaging between 3 1/2 and 4 lbs, slightly larger than the chickens. I'm still keeping track of our income, expenses and yields from the critters. The first half of the year is when we do best in terms of actual money coming in to defray our expenses, and then the second half of the year is when we get most of the harvest. Part of what we'll be focusing on between now and year-end is deciding how to value our eggs, meat, etc for "accounting" purposes (in the personal sense, not in the tax sense, because we aren't selling enough to consider this a business). With quail eggs, for example, it's easy enough to work out their equivalent in chicken eggs at a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1. But for the ones we eat in-house, so to speak (as opposed to selling them for incubation or others' consumption), should I count them at the quantity we were habitually buying (a dozen every 5 days or so, barring Christmas baking season), or the actual quantity we're consuming? Because I use a lot more eggs when they're just adding up constantly, and I feel obligated to get through them. So that kind of thing is a tough call. The chickens are easier, of course, because we'll be able to sell hen's eggs more consistently once our flock starts producing properly (we have a number of hens just arriving at laying age, but only 2 or 3 currently laying for us; we currently get 2 eggs most days). Of course the days are getting shorter, and they lay less in winter, so we probably won't be hitting full stride with them until spring. The quail, otoh, are currently giving us 12-14/day and that will triple over the next few weeks as more of the females hit maturity. As for the chickens when considered as meat, there I have something else to consider: do I price their value at the supermarket $$ for whole chicken, or for the value of individual parts when I break them down into breasts, thighs, etc? So those are all things I need to talk through with my GF. In the final analysis, it's not about making or "losing" money at the end of the year. It's having a good enough grasp of our costs to calculate what we're out of pocket, respectively, for the rabbit meat/chicken/quail/eggs/garden produce, and then work backwards from that to how much each category cost us per kg of food produced. If that's at or below supermarket pricing, great! We've come out ahead. If it's above supermarket pricing, it tells us how much of a premium we've paid for the privilege of growing our own and having a measure of control over the process. I think we'll come out okay on most things, though we're for-sure "in the red" on our mushroom-growing kits over the past couple of years, and the garden certainly hasn't carried its weight this year (because reasons). Overall, for the first time, I have some reasonable degree of confidence that we're not in fact losing ground financially on this (compared to just aggressive/frugal grocery shopping).

Yeah, I missed posting that one and this one yesterday (was processing a batch of rabbits, and didn't finish until late). https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-pistachio-containing-products-recalled-due-salmonella-5

It did.

I'll let you know tomorrow.

The video I didn't know I needed this morning was a time-lapse of a slug eating a strand of spaghetti. The video runs 1:23, though it took the slug 34 minutes in real time. And it's got 25K views! Clearly, it resonates with other weirdos besides me. I hesitated over where to put it, but settled on here because a) spaghetti, and b) I found it strangely funny.

Got an absolute behemoth of a quail egg, last night. The biggest one I've ever seen, and it's not even close. Here's an image to illustrate what I'm talking about (this is an ordinary side plate, for scale, maybe 6 or 7 inches?): The one on the left is as small as we ever get. They don't crop up often, mostly just when we have adolescent quail rounding into full maturity. Second is a normal-sized quail egg, the kind our quail-egg containers are sized for. Third is a large egg, which we get a number of. Those have to go in the middle row of the egg containers (the ones we buy are 3 rows of 4), because the containers won't close if they're in the "hinge" row or the "latch" row. Those two are what we almost invariably see, at a ratio of roughly 60% #2 and 40% #3. ...and then, on the right, we have last night's egg. You can see pretty clearly that it's vastly larger than #3, the one that barely fits the standard-sized egg containers. It's huge! My cheapie Starfrit kitchen scale (accurate to a gram or so, it claims) has it at 22g, or roughly 3/4 ounce by weight. A quick search of a few homesteading/poultry sites tells me that 10 to 15g is the usual range, so I'm guessing that #2 hovers around the 10g end of the scale and #3 at the 15g end. So yeah... 50% larger than "large" is quite an outlier.

May be of interest to those of us who keep an eye on nutrition. It's a review of a new book, by a fellow nutrition researcher (who's personally familiar with the authors, and has co-published with one). There are some key points of disagreement, of course, because it's that kind of a field. This is on the Medscape site, so you'll need to set up a free account to read it, but I can attest personally that they aren't interested in flooding your inbox with spam. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-nutrition-and-health-2025a1000qfa Edited to add eG-friendly Amazon link to the book itself, because duh... (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)

Putting it here, because "cake." My two random thoughts after reading it were a) "of course this was the drama class kids;" and b) you never know what can grow from a silly little thing you start spontaneously.

https://www.oregonlive.com/dining/2025/10/justin-woodward-portlands-premier-fine-dining-chef-of-past-decade-dies-at-43.html

Ours was an "indoor greenhouse," so it was smaller than that, and it lived in our laundry area (essentially a hallway). But the space was shared with a table that had an incubator and eggs, plus a 30"X30" grow-out cage for the baby chicks/quail (depending what had just come out of the incubator) as well as the laundry set and two households' worth of ongoing laundry. So yeah, pretty crowded. My nighttime bathroom runs were often rather perilous, or - as I sometimes put it - "had great comedic potential."

Wood stove, (apartment-sized) chest freezer, multiple plants under a grow light, and last winter a cage with 2 dozen live quail in ours (the latter of which are thankfully outside now, on a permanent basis). Also a "pet latrine" corner near the door, with puppy pads on a tray for the mutts and, on a stand over top of that, the cats' automatic self-cleaning litterbox and dishes. it's not a large room, so when you add in the rack for the firewood, and our respective chairs (and subtract the corner with the awkward under-stairway storage space) there isn't a lot left for actual... you know... living. This has been an ongoing complaint, because my sweetheart - despite her many virtues - has an odd compulsion about filling the available space to overflowing. I told her once that it was a passive-aggressive thing she'd learned while married to her [expletive deleted] ex. She's tiny (barely 5') but he's 6'5" and well over 300lbs (for the Europeans, that's almost 2 metres tall and roughly 150kg). I told her that her love of closely packed rooms (I tactfully avoided the word "cluttered") was a way of making him feel uncomfortable in "her" space, so he'd be motivated to head back up to the work camp (he was an oilpatch guy) instead of hanging around home. She was startled at that, but on reflection thought that I might have been right.