chromedome

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:

Last night was one of the coldest nights of the year thus far (perhaps the coldest), with our deck thermometer showing -20 (about 0F) and the various forecasts projecting wind chill in the -25 to -28 range. So of course, that's when the breaker for the outdoor outlet on the south side of our house chose to randomly trip (we keep a couple of "garage ready" freezers on our deck, and once in a blue moon their cycles will overlap and trip the breaker). Which, in turn, meant that our heated chicken watering bucket became an unheated bucket, and was frozen almost solid by morning. Not a Really Big Deal in the scheme of things, but it meant some extra running around for me on a morning I'd hoped to be done with the critters quickly because I have work-related deadlines coming up. Anyway, the breaker is reset, the solid block of ice melted out of the waterer under the bathtub tap, and "normal service has resumed." Kind of a minor thing, but I could have done without it. Especially given that with it being so cold, I had to manually empty and refill all of the waterers in the quail cage as well. Usually only the three in the bottom row are frozen, so it goes much faster. I always bring out moderately hot tap water when I feed/water the critters on these cold mornings. If there's just a thin skin of ice in the rabbits' bowls, I can just pour the warm water right in and it'll melt the ice. With the birds' waterers (I have a regular gravity waterer in with the chickens, as well as the heated bucket) I'll plop them right into the bucket of water for a few moments, and that loosens them up enough that I can twist them apart and knock out the ice. We'd planned to have a heated gravity-watering system in place for the quail by winter, but fell a bit short due to a late-year cash crunch. The quail shed has a shelf, sized and positioned to hold a 5 gallon bucket, up near the peak of the roof. We'll have a spigot on the bucket, and a flexible tubing running from cage to cage, where a tee-connector will run the water into a small drinker attachment for the birds. A low-voltage wrap-around heating wire (the kind people use to keep their pipes from freezing, in cold climes) keeps the water running in the tubing. We have all the bits except for the tubing and the heating wire to wrap around it, because the bloody tees are an unusual size and the tubing needs to be special-ordered. Maybe by February? We hope to have a similar system in place for the rabbits by next winter, as well. On another note, the young man who bought a breeding trio of rabbits from us last week wants to come over when we harvest the next batch. He'll trade his assistance with the process for a bit of education, which is perfectly reasonable.

I fear for our friends Stateside, as the regulatory regime there is actively dismantled (I'll leave it at that, because it's a topic that's inherently political, and I can't get into it any further without violating board rules).

Yeah, I've long since stopped posting those. But hey, for the first time in a while, we have a change of pace. Si Ji Mei brand Wuhan Egg Sheets with Glutinous Rice (that's a mouthful) are being recalled in BC and Alberta for salmonella. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/si-ji-mei-brand-wuhan-egg-sheets-glutinous-rice-recalled-due-salmonella

You know those big water pitchers they use for drinking water in meeting rooms and buffets? For a 4 inch-deep hotel pan, I used those and did 2 of rice, 3 of water. Cover the pan well (we used the heavy commercial plastic wrap, then foil) and pop it in your oven. Sadly I don't recall the actual cooking time, which is fairly important, but it was probably something in the range of 45 minutes to an hour.

Here's a look at my quail condo this morning, looking more like a quail-sized "ski chateau." And yes, the deep snow in front of it is my driveway, so the snowblower and I will be taking some exercise together once I've finished my article this morning. Not pictured: the chicken run, the middle of which has collapsed under the snow load. I really should have thought about that when I got home and saw how the snow was falling. If I'd swept the roof then, and again at 10 when I was out to give the critters their night-time feeding, it probably would have been fine. Now I have a reclamation project ahead of me that will soak up a few afternoons of my time.

A tip of my hat to the marketing team responsible for that one.

I'm 60-something, so I can't crank stuff out like I did in my 40s (see my back-in-the-day foodblog), but you're right... it's hard on the back unless you're really, really careful about matching the height of your work surface to the height of your chair (or your standing height, as the case may be). In this case I was mostly using small parchment cornets, rather than a piping bag. The ones requiring a solid fill I just dipped, rather than piping and then flooding with the royal icing, because although the result isn't as professional-looking it's a whole lot faster. The fun bit is doing the Christmas trees, dotting them with "decorations" in different colors. When I make my cornets for the higher-volume piping (like the blue decorations on the sugar-cookie snowflakes, or the white ones on the gingerbread cookies), there's always a strip of parchment left over at the end. I use those to make smaller cones for the little "detail stuff" like this. I do one color at a time, starting with blue because I make lots of that for the snowflakes, and then finish up with small bits of yellow and red that I mix up on the fly. I just try to mix 'em all up randomly, so each tree is different. Occasionally I see specialized, themed "quins" for decorating cakes and cookies, and maybe one day I'll find some that would work as miniature decorations. I did find some mini candy-cane quins a couple of years ago, and put them on some of the trees with tweezers, but I didn't have time to do it properly with all of them and multiple kinds of decorations. Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I remember seeing yellow star-shaped quins at Bulk Barn (for the Americans, that's a wonderful bulk-store chain* we have up here), so I could maybe give each tree its own star next year. That'd be worth the extra effort, maybe. Last year I did one where all the "decorations" were at the bottom, and told my GF "Little kids decorated that one." *Bulk Barn's site: https://www.bulkbarn.ca/en/Products A young American's reaction to encountering BB during a visit went viral in 2022, and it's still fun: https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2022/11/american-tourist-bulk-bar/

By request, some photos of the cookie binge. First, here's an overview of the spread. ...and some of the decorated cookies. Closeups of a couple of 'em (note the food-colouring stains on the fingers...). Last pic is cookies monogrammed for three grandkids out west (initials S, M, and L, because the yellow icing gooped a bit and they're not entirely as pretty as I'd have liked). Glad to have it all done with for another year; they're all packed up and ready for mailing/hand delivery. For the curious, if you scroll back to the panoramic view, we have (clockwise from top right): snowman sugar cookies, Christmas tree sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies, the three big personalized sugar cookies, some zimmtsternen, vanillekipfeln (not sure of the spelling on that, there may be an 'r' in there somewhere toward the end), a shortbread-ish ball cookie known to us as "Russian tea cakes" but which is also known as "Pecan meltaways" and many other things, linzers with raspberry and apricot filling, the "faux linzers" I spoke of earlier, gingerbread snowflakes and gingerbread people, and finally snowflake sugar cookies. I had tubs with additional quantities of several of these, but this was enough to give you the idea. Not pictured were ginger crinkles, which are much like gingersnaps except soft and chewy (I'd parked those on top of the fridge and forgotten them until after the pics were taken), and chocolate-filled sandwich cookies because I realized while setting up the photo that I hadn't actually made the ganache or filled them yet.

Woo hoo! So... six months old for next Christmas. Just about right for wide-eyed and highly photogenic bewilderment.