chromedome

Yes, I probably should have phrased it as "difficult to cultivate at commercial scale in a controlled environment." We actually tried COTW this year, as part of our mushroom experiment. The ganoderma and trametes versicolor (reishi and turkey tail) produced moderately, the winecaps went gangbusters, but the shiitake, oysters and chicken did not give us anything past a few false starts. Those we'll try again next year in slightly different conditions.

Well, they're a bugger to cultivate for one. Also their preferred substrate is oak trees, and those have LOTS of other commercial uses. Somebody will crack the code one of these days, I suppose, but some mushrooms are just not well suited to cultivation and they may prove to be one of them (a discussion of the difficulties here... https://chickenmushrooms.wordpress.com/about/). The do turn up from time to time at farmer's markets and such. I thought I'd finally spotted one on our little acreage here, but it turned out that our mastiff (or perhaps one of the grandkids) had left her rubber chicken chew toy on a rotting stump. Which you could almost kinda-sorta call similarly themed, I suppose, but it wasn't at all the same thing.

I read his earlier book on cod; I rather suspect the research for that one inspired the salt book as well.

I stand corrected, her pots are also Cuisinart. Her exact ones don't appear to be currently on the site (may have been a Canadian variation, I suppose) but this one is pretty close to what we have here, and also to what you currently have. I expect they would perform similarly. https://www.cuisinart.com/shopping/cookware/saucepans/719-18/

That's Kurlansky's book, is it? A great read.

My first four thoughts were the exact three suggestions you'd floated in the original post, plus the obvious "too much thyme on my hands" Dad joke. (Sorry... but I restrained myself for three hours...) As Christmas gifts go, perhaps put the thyme together with other dried herbs in a suitable mixture, and put them into attractively decorated and labeled jars? Or perhaps a herb jelly that straddles the sweet/savory line?

Ugh. Probably what inspired The Onion piece.

My stepdaughter has a closely equivalent set from KitchenAid, except the drain/strain holes in the lid are only on one side. Hers work on induction. I'll take a look when I'm next upstairs in the kitchen and see if they have any kind of identifying mark so I can look them up, but I suspect you'd be able to find them on Amazon or KitchenAid's website.

I know, I know... but "morbidly funny" is appropriate in October. https://www.theonion.com/green-giant-introduces-new-frozen-death-cap-mushrooms-f-1850907505

At least one of the big old-school wineries in BC (Andres, maybe?) did that when I lived there in the 1980s. In fact, that was the wine we had at my wedding. Wine in single-serving cans is a big thing now in the liquor stores up here, but those aren't counted in liters.

I'm late seeing this. It's not entirely surprising - I had an inkling from her last handful of posts, and from the "radio silence" since - but it's deeply saddening nonetheless. In one of his Flashman novels George MacDonald Fraser had his anti-hero paraphrase Donne, to the effect that if indeed every death diminishes us, some diminish us a damned sight more than others. This is one of those.

Honestly, I think they'll get there. I expect texture will actually be a bigger challenge than flavor in the long term, because we're getting better at manipulating flavor molecules either directly or through manipulation of yeasts, bacteria, fungi etc. I don't feel a strong imperative to curb my dairy consumption for environmental or other reasons, because it's already pretty minimal, but I know a lot of people who are lactose-intolerant (and vegans are a steadily growing contingent as well). The market is absolutely there, if they get it right. Logic suggests we'll see an initial "artisanal" product to generate a halo effect while they're working out how to manufacture at scale (ie, Tesla's progression from Roadster to Model S to Model 3), though if somebody makes a breakthrough on the manufacturing side we may see a mass-market "good enough" product followed by niche specialty products afterward. I have no crystal ball, but I'm all in on having options. ETA: I actually popped for an "artisanal" vegan cheese at the supermarket a few months ago, simply because it was marked down to half price. It was a Boursin-ish soft, flavored cheese, with lime and jalapeno. The flavor was perfectly acceptable for what it was, but the texture was slightly wrong in a way that was difficult to articulate. The best I can get is that it had a hint of that cream-cheese gumminess about it, as opposed to the fine-grained smoothness of the real thing.

Some of the work that's going into the improvement of non-dairy cheeses. It's potentially a big market (as the rise in non-dairy milks attests) if they can get it right. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/plant-based-cheese-may-be-getting-more-appetizing/

A few months back I told @heidihthat when I get around to doing something other than stew with my homegrown rabbits, I'd post about it. So here we are. My GF found one of the many recipes out there for rabbit in mustard sauce, and sent it to me with a "Can we do this?" As it happened my stepdaughter and the grandkids were out last night, so it was a good time for me to monopolize the kitchen for a while. No prep shots, sadly, because in a typical example of my forward-planning skills I'd just returned my nearly-depleted phone to the charger before I came upstairs to cook. This is the end result. Please mentally insert all the appropriate disclaimers and apologies for the dreadful lighting, my lack of photography skills, and the slapdash "It's late and I'm hungry" plating. Those who saw my post yesterday afternoon in the garden thread will recognize that the broccolini, beans and carrots were among that haul, and the new potatoes also came from my garden. So aside from a few things like the capers and the grainy mustard, basically everything on the plate came from our own yard.

Haven't posted anything garden-related of late because I've been away, and busy, etc etc, but things are still humming along. Here's today's harvest: Clockwise from bottom left we have beans, tomatoes, cooking greens (chard and beet tops), zukes, broccolini,carrots, a "watermelon" radish, jalapenos, one ripe bell pepper, and salad greens. The tomatoes are still hanging in, suprisingly, with help from overnight covers. The beans are finally nearing their end, and I'm going to pull the zucchini out tomorrow because they've started to get downy mildew in the damp autumn weather. Don't want those spores around. The melon patch is done, and I didn't get any pictures of melons past that first watermelon, but overall it was a modest success. I got four little Sugar Baby watermelons and a half-dozen cantaloupes, the smallest of tennis-ball size and the largest about as big as the smallest size you'd find at the supermarket. The cantaloupes were not especially sweet (they began to ripen ad the weather got cool, and I'm pretty sure they needed more heat and sun) but they were juicy and fragrant. Overall, considering I wasn't sure I'd get even one melon, I'll call it a successful experiment.

I'm pretty sure that's a typo, but it's a very amusing one. The headlines would just write themselves.

Nope. In my family we never did turkey because none of us are especially fond of it, but my GF and her family would feel cheated if we had anything else.

At bottom Thanksgiving is a harvest festival (that's why ours is a month earlier than the US version, our climate is mostly harsher and the crops are gathered in several weeks earlier), and those are both universal and much older than North America's colonization . I opted to lean into that theme this year - because I can - so the potatoes, carrots, cabbage, chard, green and yellow beans and summer squash (everything, in short, but the bird and the bread for the stuffing) will be from my garden. There will also be apple pie, made with the apples from our own tree's final crop (as I've mentioned elsewhere it blew over earlier in the year, but has stubbornly hung on and pushed out one last yield of apples). I'll figure out a way to incorporate some of the wine cap mushrooms we grew, as well. Holiday meals at my place are always veggie-palooza. We usually get our turkey from a farm a few km away but we were late reaching out to them this year, so it'll be a supermarket bird instead.

I visited that museum as a kid, and loved it. One of the displays was a prototype propeller he'd made from a wooden venetian blind his wife had ordered for their house. Apparently it arrived while he was going through one of his fits of aeronautic experimentation (some of you Stateside may not know it, but Bell was an aviation pioneer - his aircraft the Silver Dart made the first powered flight in the British Empire - and also tested the first hydrofoil boats on the idyllic lake shown in SSK's photo above), and he thought the slats were an interesting alternative to carving a prop out of laminated wood. The part that made it stick in my childhood memory was a dry observation on the plaque that "it is not recorded what Mrs. Bell thought of the experiment..."

That's more or less my son-in-law as well, who is a fussy eater in the second-grader mold. Essentially his preferred diet consists of things that can be unwrapped and microwaved, which is a constant issue for my daughter given that they live on a fixed income and her medical issues already strain their grocery budget. I struggle ongoingly with the desire to growl at him to grow [multiple expletives] up, but in fairness he's on the autism spectrum so it's only partially under his control. For context he used to indignantly reject any hints in that direction (his brother is more severely affected, so that was his benchmark) until he realized it gave him license to be a complete jerk. Then he embraced it.