chromedome

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).

I've mentioned that we have largely gone away from using our grow-out cages on the lawn for our adolescent bunnies, because we'd had a problem with the coccidia parasite (adults survive it handily, but it's dangerous for the growing youngsters). We've modified one of the cages so it stays up off the ground, and have used it for our current litter of half-grown kits via Hazel (the "princesses" and their brothers were a slightly older litter from Hilda, and they mostly were sold as pets). This cage isn't made of all wire, like the ones I've built. My father-in-law constructed it with a wooden frame and chicken wire on all six sides. It's a good piece of equipment, though I plan to modify it this off-season to make it more practical. A little while ago, just after I returned from NS, a few of the bunnies were sorely tempted by the fresh clover growing just out of their reach, and pushed hard enough on the wire in their attempts at snacking that the wire (now rusted in a couple of places) gave way. We retrieved all but one escapee, and there was enough slack in the wire that I was able to re-staple it to the frame using a less-rusted area. Well, this morning when I went to feed them, I found that they'd repeated their efforts and there were no fewer than four of the little guys happily roaming the lawn and, in one case, patrolling the space between my garden beds (but not, thankfully, eating the garden itself). Now, I've mentioned in the past that handling our bunnies frequently has many benefits, up to and including the day of our final, fatal betrayal of their trust. This morning provided a really vigorous endorsement of that strategy, because when the little ones saw me coming with my bucket of water they all hopped happily right to my feet, and waited to be picked up and cuddled. I don't need to tell you, this scenario was vastly superior to chasing the little critters around with a net or some such. It came close on the heels of an endorsement from the lady in Nova Scotia who'd bought four of the "princesses" from me at the end of June. They were for her and a friend, and they're utterly in love. She's bought rabbits from other growers down in NS before, and ended up rehoming them, because they simply weren't human-friendly enough to fit in as pets. That was not at all an issue with ours, of course. She says she'll be buying from us exclusively in future, for herself and her friends, because ours are so sweet-natured. So that was nice. As I mentioned upthread I'm keeping a spreadsheet this year, to monitor our expenditures and income re the critters and the garden. It's a work in progress, and I keep tweaking it as I go, so that it reflects our income and expenses with some reasonable degree of accuracy. At present we're sitting at a modest -$470-odd year to date, with sales keeping us reasonably close to the break-even point. That's not entirely accurate, because the running total still includes what I've spent on my garden, and I want to split that off from the amounts involved in the rabbits and poultry. With the critters, I want to get a handle on how our expenses and sales balance each other out, without taking into account the "deemed market value" of the meat itself. It's all well and good to know that a frozen rabbit sells for +/- $10/lb, but I want to know what our actual costs are when year-end rolls around. At that point I'll have a cumulative total of our meat harvest for the year, give or take a few quail. Once I know how many pounds of rabbit and chicken we put in the freezer, and how many quail, I can do subtotals of my cost for each critter and work out what our actual cost was per pound of meat. We'll also look at the approximate market value for those same pounds of meat, and as long as they're close we'll call it a win (because of course ours will be higher-quality than what we'd usually get at the store). That "deemed value" reckoning will also apply to the eggs we get from the quail and hens, with supermarket cost running around $5/doz (I think) right now. Our actual cost for the eggs will be hard to figure, but I'll probably work it backward from the percentage of our flock that will become year-round tenants (a dozen or so, plus five or six silkies that are just pets) vs the number we're growing out for the freezer (40-ish). I'll know what our total costs are for the birds, and just declare that percentage of it to be our cost for eggs. With the garden harvest it's another whole story, of course, because we don't sell any of that as we do with the rabbits, birds, and eggs. In that instance I'm just recording our harvests as I make them (ie, 700g of green beans yesterday), and I'll work out a "deemed value" from the supermarket pricing. We should come out to a reasonably favorable position, because I focus less on commodity things like carrots/potatoes and more on those items that cost us more at the supermarket. Bunches of chard or kale, for example, typically run $3.99 for most of the year, so it doesn't take long for a freezer full of greens to add up to a lot of saved money. If our costs are outrunning our sales by >$500 at this point, I'm pretty happy with that. We'll have 40-odd chickens in the freezer at 3-4 pounds each, so that's 120-150 pounds. Current price in my neck of the woods is about $6.99/lb IIRC for chicken (when not on sale), and higher for boneless, skinless breasts, so we're easily looking at upwards of $700 in value there (not counting the premium one would ordinarily pay for locally-raised, not water-chilled, etc etc). Add in the dollar value of a couple of hundred pounds of rabbit at $10/lb, and the quail at... whatever figure I decide on, per quail... and we're probably coming out well ahead by year-end. One final note, which will amuse some of you. When we had our early-season litters my GF carefully picked and segregated a number of breeding trios, consisting of one buck and two unrelated does, which we offered up for sale to anyone wanting to raise their own rabbits. If we sold them all we'd do it again, and if not, well, we'd call that trio our next-generation set of breeders. We did, in fact, end up with one trio left over, consisting of a black doe, a brown doe, and a white buck. As I've mentioned, my GF tries to keep the names coherent within a given generation, and we're currently on names starting with H. So when I walked into the room, one day recently, she was contemplating H names for the buck. "Hector? Horace? Harvey?..." and she was startled when I burst out loudly "Harvey! Yes, perfect! The white buck *has* to be Harvey!" She was mystified, until I sent her this link. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042546/

A quick note to say that the two surplus roosters I harvested yesterday dressed out to just over 3.5 kg, or for those who think in pounds I had one at a little over 4 lbs and one at 3 lbs 10 oz. One of those was Chico, the hybrid I'd spoken of upthread. For a while it looked like he was going to survive on the strength of his engaging personality and become something of a pet, but he made the mistake of becoming aggressive with our grandson (who was quite fond of him, up to that point) and giving him a couple of pretty bad gouges on the face and arm. It's unfortunate, but it's in the nature of roosters. Stepdaughter and I were rooting for him, but he blotted his copybook pretty badly. You really need to handle and socialize roosters a lot when they're young, if you want them to be good around kids. The silkies are getting handled and petted enough that it shouldn't be an issue with them, which is good given that they're intended as pets. Chico and his compatriots were always intended for the freezer, but it took longer than anticipated to get them there (and gave us time to get inadvisably attached to one of them). Now that we're equipped for it, barring the chicken-plucking machine (which is expensive, but can be rented at a pretty reasonable $50/day), the next ones won't go past their time. I do like the option of outsourcing the dirty work at a fairly reasonable $5/bird, too, when we do our main cull for the freezer. Plucking and dressing them takes a lot of time (mostly the plucking), and that's not something I generally have at my disposal. It raises the cost/bird as food, but that's offset by the dollar value of my/our time. Also, bear in mind that chicken prices here aren't as artificially low as they are in the US, so I some leeway before the home-raised birds become too costly. At regular price, a whole 3-3.5 lb chicken at the supermarket is usually $15-$20 in my neck of the woods (I don't buy 'em at full price, but that's the benchmark).

Forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, but I haven't found a dedicated thread after searching the site. As I've mentioned from time to time, I'm a freelance writer, and one of the clients I write for currently has an assignment that's mine if I want it. It's looking for 6-10 good sources for "baking supplies on a budget," and of course it's for a US audience while I'm here in Canada. So I thought I'd canvass the collective eG wisdom, and see what suggestions everyone has. Either general responses (ie "check if your local mill will sell directly") or specific vendors would be helpful; and I'm also open to either full-spectrum (everything you need) or single-niche (ie, chocolate, flour) sellers. This isn't life-or-death, so no immediate timeline (I have other work to do right now, and one of the other eligible writers may choose to have a go at it in the interim), but it doesn't hurt to ask.

I've just discovered that my local farmer's market has a vendor who makes them. Gotta get back there soon and try one; I've never actually seen them "in the wild" and frankly can't see myself going down this particular rabbit hole given all the other demands on my time.