chromedome

Yup. Brisket, too. When we still ate beef occasionally (before it became a medical issue for my GF), it was always the braising cuts I shopped for most aggressively. It was a constant frustration to me the so-called "cheap" cuts were so difficult to find at a good price. Grilling steaks went on sale regularly, but if I wanted flank steak or oxtail or shank or short ribs I had to hope for a near-its-date markdown. Perhaps that's why the sous vide selling point of "make a cheap cut just as tender as a premium steak" never really landed for me; why bother when I could usually buy a grilling steak on sale for the same or lower price? Also, to be blunt, I prefer braises to steaks anyway. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike steak (we're not talking Liuzhou and corn here, or our dear departed Anna N and beans), I just don't find it compelling. I know I've cooked them occasionally for my current GF before her medical problems, so it's been sometime in the past decade, but otherwise couldn't tell you when I last cooked one. One of my cooking classes, maybe.

Superstore and Sobeys have them occasionally, though it's been a while since I've bought any because I'm a cheapskate. The meat-counter manager will usually be happy to bring some in for you, if you ask. That's what I did the last time I had an insuperable craving for oxtail soup. Like many others here I used to buy oxtail when it was inexpensive, but then at some point in the 80s it got "discovered" or something, I don't know. The price went from budget-friendly to stratospheric almost overnight, around the same time flank steak skyrocketed (another of my low-cost staples at the time).

I do it with bone-in frozen rabbit and chicken. I just use the "Meat" preset and walk away, couldn't even tell you without checking how long that is. My GF has chewing problems and likes things cooked to a pot roast consistency, and occasionally I need to let it go a few extra minutes to arrive at that. If you're looking for a less-cooked texture I can't help you with the timing, but I'm sure other sources can. Bottom line, there's no particular reason not to.

I can second the rolled-oats option. When I was growing up, that was my mom's go-to for meatballs and meatloaf and she even used it sometimes in burger patties (I suspect that latter was when money was tight and she needed to stretch the ol' grocery budget). The beta-glucans in the oats (the soluble fiber that can make cooked oatmeal seem gummy) makes them a good binding ingredient. Just be aware that while oats are naturally gluten-free, most brands are processed in mills that also process gluten-containing grains and are therefore susceptible to cross-contamination. You'd need to look for a brand that's certified gluten-free.

...and not even baby vegetables, at that.

Here in Canada they only stock one decaf coffee in whole-bean form. There are others online, but I hadn't thought to check until reading your post. This is the one: I bought a bag, on the reasoning that a) I could return it if I didn't like it; and b) it was far and away my low-cost option. My preferred choice is the Swiss water decaf from Halifax-based Java Blend (20-ish years ago I lived a block from the store, and smelled their coffee roasting when I woke up), but that's $13.99 in my local supermarkets for a 340g bag (12 ounces, for the non-metric folks). The Kirkland gets me 1.13 kg (40 ounces/2.5 lbs) for $22.99, and I bought a bag on sale at $19.99. At over 3x the coffee for 1.5x the price, that's pretty compelling math. The coffee itself is... fine. I've had better, and I've had much worse. I don't detect the burnt undertones and chemical aftertaste that usually mar Starbucks' coffees for me, so either 'Bucks is in fact no longer roasting the Kirkland stuff (at least for the Canadian market), or they've gotten better at it, or maybe my palate just isn't as sensitive as it used to be. I dunno, but it doesn't really matter I suppose. It's good enough and the price is right, so I'll continue with it.

My summer squash (a pattypan, rather than zucchini) was still producing well but I pulled it up because it was smitten with downy mildew during one of my visits to NS, and I didn't want it to spread to my buttercup and spaghetti squashes. I have plenty in the freezer, shredded, and still a dozen or so on my counter. I'll probably use several of them in a casserole to go with Thanksgiving dinner later on today. Gotta pot my rosemary and bring it indoors, as well. Going to cover my bell pepper and "basket of fire" hot pepper and see how long I can coax them into surviving. Also need to find my soldering iron and fix up the second of my T-50 tubes, which has been hors de combat for a couple of years. I suspect it's just a bad solder connection somewhere in the fixture, and they're easily enough fixed. We have several of those inexpensive 1000-watt equivalent LED lights that we use for our indoor plants in winter, but that's not a pleasant light to share a room with. The Sunblaster T-50s give a naturally warm full-spectrum light, and I plan to mount this second one vertically on a wall in our bedroom for a small tropical tree we have there. As a bonus, the light will also help with my GF's SAD. It's unrelated to the current discussion, but once I find that bloody soldering iron I'll also be able to fix my matched pair of 24" monitors. That generation of LG monitors got a batch of defective capacitors on the power board, and both of mine blew within weeks of each other a year or so ago. I picked up a used 24" to replace the first one, and recently added a bought-new second monitor so I can finally have my two-monitor setup back, because I haven't been able to carve out time for the repair (and still have no idea which box contains the soldering iron, 2 years after we moved, but the number of remaining boxes has dwindled sharply). My current monitors aren't a matched set, and I have to say it was nice having identical monitors on both sides, but so be it. Once they're repaired I can probably sell the older LGs as a pair and make back most of what I spent on the new monitor.

Woke up to the same recall in my in box. Here's the official alert: https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/rana-brand-tagliatelle-seasoned-white-chicken-mushroom-sauce-recalled-due-listeria?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Cukes are about done, beans and tomatoes are still hanging in (froze another 5 kg/11 lbs of beans the other day). My late planting of peas came and went fairly quickly, but it was a worthwhile experiment. Kale and chard are still going, of course. My mid-summer plantings of cauliflower and broccoli are starting to head up (broccoli is farther along than the cauliflower), but it's just about time to start giving them some protection at night. Will harvest my buttercup and spaghetti squash soon. Still haven't had a frost yet, despite a couple of advisories. I don't expect that to last much longer; the forecast has overnight lows down to 1 C over the next week (that's just above freezing, for the benefit of those Stateside).

I was first introduced to them as "mouse melons," and still prefer that name.

For those of you who live in Ontario, several brands of jellied beef tongue are being recalled for listeria. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-brands-beef-jelly-tongue-products-recalled-due-listeria-monocytogenes?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

You betcha. I have a pressure canner that I intend to make more use of, but that in turn requires finally getting our cupboards organized so we have space for the Mason jars (I also had to replace the seal around the pressure valve, but I have that now).

I have a full-sized chest freezer, two apartment sized chest freezers, an smaller upright (14 cu IIRC) and the pull-out freezer drawer of our 36" French-door refrigerator, *all* of which are packed. We've been through the fridge freezer, the upright and one of the smaller chest freezers so far, still have the other small chest freezer and the big one to organize and purge. I barely fit my last batch of rabbits into the available space a couple of weeks ago, and I have a large quantity of bush beans and greens still to go into the freezer, so it's definitely time to streamline. Much of the process consists of eating up "made-ahead" meals and using containers of broth, though the big chest freezer is also where my stepdaughter keeps her kid-friendly convenience foods (the packaging takes up a lot of space).

Nice tip! I don't have a circulator myself, but at some point I'll find a way to work that into one of my articles.

I add my coffee grounds to my compost, rather than directly to the soil, but I do use 'em. Eggshells get lightly toasted (to make them brittle), then crushed and fed to the chickens and quail as a supplement, which they in turn use to produce more eggshells.

Forgive me if this has been covered somewhere along the way, but I've tried a few searches and come up dry. For reasons too tedious to delve into at this point, I'm in the unfortunate position of having to drink decaf coffee and tea. As a freelancer and longtime caffeine addict this was very challenging, though now that I'm being treated for ADHD it's less so: the frontline ADHD meds are all amphetamines, and when you start your day with an amphetamine your caffeine intake is more or less a non-factor. As I was hitting Costco the other day for a few things, I happened to notice that a) they do have a decaf among their Kirkland whole-bean coffee offerings; and b) the price is extremely competitive relative to the supermarket brands in my area. A bit of Googling tells me that their coffees have been roasted by Starbucks until just recently, which gives me pause (I'm not a fan), but I've also seen conflicting information saying that The Green Siren maybe isn't doing all of their roasting anymore? Pending further research, I thought I'd seek out the wisdom of the eG crowd. Does anyone here drink the stuff? What do you think of it? At my local supermarkets 10-12 oz bags of whole-bean decaf mostly run $10-$15 CAD, while the 3 lb bag from Costco is in the low $20s. It's an unquestionably good deal, but 3lbs of decaf is a whole lot to deal with if I don't care for it. I know they'll refund it on request, but returning it is a minimum 2-hour round trip and my time is always at a premium.

I expect it's an electric or mechanical issue; a failed switch or a bad solder joint or a failed capacitor or something like that. I wouldn't be buying a new Vitamix to use with the old SS jars unless I found one at the same kind of price point (ie, $25 CAD at Value Village) and that's pretty unlikely.

When you're preserving like it's 1999...

A few weeks ago my GF questioned why I was watering plants in my garden, because "it's supposed to rain all week." I explained to her that from a gardener's perspective, 4 of 5 days with "chance of showers" does not constitute raining all week. This past weekend provided a startlingly good illustration of that point. On Saturday we had lots of rain: the forecast called for 40-50 mm (call it 1 1/2 to 2 inches), and I'm sure we got every bit of that. On Sunday I made a late planting of carrots, and while the top cm/half-inch or so of soil was nicely soaked it was still dry and crumbly below that. My soil is pretty absorbent now, at least in the beds, after a couple of years' constant upgrading, so that was a sobering reminder of the need for consistent watering. No photos today, but since I'm here and posting I'll note that the cukes are slowing down, the bush beans are still producing though in diminished fashion, my late planting of bush beans is taking off now that their roots have reached the rabbit-manure layer, the tomatoes and pattypan squash are still going great guns, and I have lots of kale and chard with late plantings coming along. The late planting of peas is now beginning to yield, and my winter squashes (spaghetti and buttercup) have set plenty of fruit which are filling out nicely. In the case of the latter, I'm now pruning the ends of the vines to discourage vegetal growth and snipping any remaining buds. I want all of the plants' energy going into the squashes at this point, thank you very much. Also my late-planted broccoli have now surpassed the transplants I bought at the local nursery's end-of-spring clearout in size, and considerably in vigor. The late-planted spinach is yielding nicely, and the cauliflower plants are growing rapidly as well. I've never had much success with those latter two when I've planted them in spring; it seems our springs are just too short and erratic weather-wise. Henceforth I'm not even going to bother, I'll plant them both in mid-summer since that seems to be working.

That's such a power move by any manufacturer. I'm genuinely surprised more of them don't do that! I had a similar experience with Sun Blaster, a grow light manufacturer. At our apartment a few years ago I had a windowsill where I thought I might try a few herbs and lettuces. So I bought one of their T-50 fluorescent tubes, but after a year or so it started acting up. I dashed them off a testy email, and a rep responded within the hour asking for my shipping address. A replacement light arrived two days later, with no mention of a receipt or a warranty or anything else. I had a problem, they dealt with it. Happy customer.

I have two of those in my barn, which randomly stopped working for no readily apparent reason. One of them has subsequently had stuff spilled on it and may no longer be viable, but I hope to carve out time to dismantle and troubleshoot the other. Truthfully I seldom used it for anything except crushing ice (my GF's meds often give her dry mouth, and she really likes a cup of ice powder; basically a snow cone without the artificial flavors and colors), but it excelled at that and presumably at some point I'd have found other uses for it. That whole "make hot soup through friction" thing never appealed to me, I must say. It's bloody loud, so leaving it on for an extended period is a non-starter for me. I'd rather make my soup conventionally, and enjoy the peace and quiet as it simmers.

It's great when the little ones start to take a live interest in it. Right now our grandson (6) is hitting that phase. Asked what he wants at mealtime, he'll usually lead with "healthy stuff" or "veggibles from the garden,' instead of the convenience foods he used to ask for. My stepdaughter is just as mystified as us over this transition, as she hadn't been making any special effort to spur this fixation. Our best guess is that it's just the accumulation of everything he's overheard over the years. The practical outcomes have been interesting. For one thing, he has an unlikely fetish for kale. I've given him carte blanche to help himself to a few leaves straight from the bed, any time he feels like it. A couple of weeks ago he noticed my lacinato kale for the first time (it's a couple of rows away, near the cucumbers, and gasped "Papa! Blue kale!" in tones of awe and delight. Of course he wanted to try it, and was crestfallen that it tasted like the other kind. I explained that the blue kind is more delicate and flavorful when cooked, though there isn't much difference raw. The moment that really made my grandparental heart go pitter-pat was a few weeks ago when I was weeding my herb bed. The little guy asked what each herb was, starting with the mint that I was vigorously culling (I'd planted it in a sunken pot for containment, but had neglected to consider the pot's drainage holes). He tasted his way through two kinds of mint and then sage, cilantro, rosemary, summer savory, thyme, lovage and dill before we were through. That was a proud moment for me, but the highlight came after about the fourth herb. I don't recall exactly how he phrased it, but he said that he needed to take a moment and eat something else because the herbs were all starting to taste the same. So he helped himself to a leaf of kale and munched on that between samples. He didn't know the term "palate cleanser," but he recognized the necessity and attended to it. Papa was so proud...