chromedome

There's a moment in the movie Hollywood Homicide where Lena Olin's character ribs boyfriend Harrison Ford about being an old fart. His reply (I'm paraphrasing, it's been a while since I saw it) was "Hey, as long as I take my ginkgo I can still remember where I put the Viagra..."

https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling

At my place, I preemptively designed the menu so that most of the items either were naturally gluten-free or could be made gluten-free with a simple substitution. I also had a couple of vegetarian/vegan-friendly dishes. Turning out 30-odd covers a night at 3-5 courses per, mostly single-handed, with a battery consisting of two domestic ranges with electric coils, meant I couldn't afford to do things on the fly. My menu explained this, and also stated explicitly that (because of my limited resources) no other substitutions could be made at the time of order. Anyone else with special needs was invited to find me in the kitchen before mealtime and discuss options. If I could work with their needs I generally would, but we were out in the boonies and making a 2-hour round trip to town to pick up special ingredients was just not an option, with the best will in the world. There were only a few occasions when I couldn't oblige someone and it truly sucked, because my restaurant was at a small seaside inn and there was no alternative eating place except a gas station a few km away that did pizza and fried chicken (neither of them good options for anyone with dietary restrictions I couldn't meet).

That would be "Shoppe," not Shop. The brand was quite popular when I was a kid, and got revived a decade or so ago. Definitely, the beverage has always been "pop" in Canada (at least Atlantic Canada, I can't vouch for the rest) for at least my lifetime. The term "soda" only came into vogue in the 80s, and was reserved for the putatively Italian-style beverages made with plain soda water and a squirt of flavored syrup. Lately it is also applied (sometimes) to those unsweetened soda waters infused with fruit flavorings.

The listeria recall for Compliments brand sweet kale salad has been expanded to include a number of other cut-vegetable products. If you've bought any prepared-vegetable items from Sobey's, up to and including Thursday (Oct 31) then by all means click through and read the list. http://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-11-01/eng/1572663865437/1572663871425?utm_source=r_listserv

It's been difficult here over the past decade. My former lamb supplier gave up and went back to her day job. Of the four artisan raw-cheese makers I used to buy from when my restaurant was open, two have folded and one sold out to a new owner. My boar supplier sold off his last livestock this past summer and converted his space into a wedding venue. An ambitious young family with a natural foods store in Fredericton went broke trying to establish a network to connect local growers and vendors with chefs and consumers. It's frustrating to see it happening all around us, and yet have it be such a struggle here. On the upside, the local craft beer and craft distilling scenes are booming and the local wine industry has gotten through its infancy. No startlingly good wines yet (it's a couple of decades behind NS), but many serviceable ones.

https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a29622461/anthony-bourdain-auction-bob-kramer-knife/

Even worse, they shoot themselves in the collective foot constantly. A few years ago they opened up a big new highway crossing point outside of St. Stephen/Calais, where the old crossings were. It's great...lots of lanes, and right away you're onto a broad, multi-lane highway that can take you straight through to NS or north to Quebec. Unfortunately, it also means that most tourists simply race past the entire southwestern corner of the province. That's where most of the Fundy coast is, with its fishing villages, the historic resort town of St. Andrews-by-the-Sea and some really prime food and drink. Of course, people could just pull into the nearest tourism information center to find out about all of those things, right? Wanna guess where the nearest one is? Well, technically it's in St. Stephen itself, but having bypassed the town and gone through the new crossing you wouldn't know that. Instead, most drivers zip 90 minutes up the road to Saint John before seeing a tourism center.* The Chamber of Commerce in the affected corner of NB even offered to foot the bill for constructing one near the border crossing, but the province refused. SMH... (*Which promotes a couple of local attractions, but mostly attempts to funnel people onwards to Fundy Park and Hopewell Rocks. Because that's how they've always done it.)

The part of Atlantic Canada where I live is something of a backwater. Although larger than neighbouring NS and Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick is small by the standards of Canadian provinces (roughly 28K square miles for you Americans, a titch smaller than Maine but bigger than Virginia; for Europeans our 72K square km would put us between Serbia and Iceland in size) and decidedly lags those two in promoting itself. Most of the province's tourism budget goes to promoting a handful of sites: a couple of living museums (Acadian Village, showing how the Francophones lived before most of them were deported to Louisiana; and King's Landing, representing the Loyalists who came here after the American Revolution, ie "Colonial Williamsburg...The Sequel") and mostly the high tides and Hopewell Rocks at Fundy National Park ("Walk on the Ocean Floor!"). A few local chefs and food writers are staging a symposium next week to host representatives of the tourism industry and drive home the message that food and drink can make a significant contribution to tourism. We do have some really high-quality talent here, and plenty for them to work with. Here's the writeup: https://huddle.today/nbs-chefs-will-gather-and-tell-the-provinces-food-story-at-tourism-symposium/

It's a Canadian brand, I don't know that you'd be able to find it where you live.

Okay, it makes more sense in the context.

I just picked up a few for table use. Shopper's usually has butter on for $2.99 on the weekends (house brand or whatever) so that's what I load up on for baking purposes. I keep a couple of pounds of unsalted in the freezer for when I make laminated doughs, but that's about all I use it for. It was always hard to find in my neck of the woods until this past decade or so, and always sold for about $1 more than salted, so I just always used salted. I guess that's what my palate is attuned to.

My mom made those, too. Though there was no Saran Wrap then, so they got wrapped in wax paper.

I generally have multiple brands on hand, but usually just because they've all been on sale for a really good price at some point in the recent past. I'll occasionally buy the butter from a local couple I know, if I happen to be near a store that carries it (it's hard to find, and I don't often drive out to Sussex to buy it in person). I also watch for sales on Lactantia, a quasi-premium supermarket brand which generally commands a higher price. It's "better enough" to be reserved for table use, while I use the regular stuff for baking or cooking with.

Truthfully, I don't see that it's an issue. Plopping bleu cheese on top of the burger requires no skill or artistry, in essence there's no difference between doing that or peeling the plastic from a slice of equally-plastic processed cheese. Is it a good burger? If so, then it doesn't need the cheese in order to shine. If it can't stand on its own without the bleu, then perhaps it needs tweaking. In fairness, I know zero of this restaurant or chef and if the bleu cheese somehow impacts on the other courses, then so be it. It's not in the same sphere as the customer I had one night in Edmonton, who wanted to order the seafood medley (a lobster tail's shell stuffed with rice cooked in shrimp-shell stock, topped with shrimp and scallops, with medallions of the tail placed around the plate)...without shellfish. (Disclosure: I don't care for bleu with beef, which to me just makes the beef taste like it's several days past its "serve-by" date, so obviously it's not a hill I would choose to die on)

I was the kid who liked those little red boxes of raisins, and took one in my lunch most days. I could always swing a deal to get all of my sister's raisins for cheap.

Compliments brand sweet kale blend, listeria, almost-national (they haven't named Quebec yet, but the other 9 provinces are all listed): http://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-10-30/eng/1572471987686/1572471993795 Ontario and Quebec only, "Fromagerie Bergeron" brand Gouda curds and something called "Le Populaire," for salmonella. http://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-10-30/eng/1572495600607/1572495606863

Again with the E. coli... http://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-10-30/eng/1572471987686/1572471993795

You know you spend a lot of time on eG when a song comes on the radio, and your brain immediately tries to tell you that Freddie Mercury is singing about a "killer" kouign.

Yeah, trying to keep weight on is a thankless thing (in large part because you sure as heck will struggle to get any sympathy). When my ex was having major health issues, 20-odd years ago, her metabolism was super-quick, and she needed to eat six real meals/day (minimum) or she would just fall to the floor. To complicate matters her gall bladder was acting up so we couldn't resort to high-fat, calorie-dense foods either, and (the kicker) we were also terribly broke in those days. It forced me to be creative in the kitchen, that's for sure.

I've never had it that way, but thanks for the idea. (love me some dill, still have a bit surviving in my garden...it's been a very mild autumn to date)

After I was widowed I eventually settled into a routine of cooking an ordinary quantity (ie, 4-6 servings) whenever I cooked. I'd eat a portion that night, put one in the fridge, and the balance in single portions in the freezer. It takes just a couple of weeks to reach a point where you're able to maintain a "float" of varied meals in the freezer while cooking only once every 5 of 6 days. For me it neatly solved the two main issues: I didn't need to adapt to cooking single-person quantities, and I didn't need to muster the time and resolve to come up with a meal every night.

A word of encouragement, fwiw...my GF had her gall bladder out several years ago, and like you was unable to tolerate fat for a while. She's thoroughly over it now, and can "keto" with aplomb and pretty much chug heavy cream right from the carton. As always YMMV, but there's hope.

http://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-10-29/eng/1572385988607/1572385994611