chromedome

Alfred, Lord Tennyson/ lived entirely upon venison. Not cheap, I fear/ 'cause venison's deer. (An example of the form known as a "clerihew," if you're curious)

...and another, affecting Gerber. I don't know if they're related, but given they both contain oats and both involve cronobacter it seems a definite possibility. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/gerberr-brand-oat-banana-mango-baby-cereal-recalled-due-cronobacter-spp?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

There's been an update on the baby food recall, though it seems relatively minor. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/baby-gourmet-organic-brand-banana-raisin-oatmeal-organic-whole-grain-baby-cereal?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Huh. Now here's an interesting take on how to mitigate the health impacts of excessive sugar consumption... https://www.wsj.com/science/biology/healthier-sugar-fiber-enzyme-harvard-scientists-a8bb2dce?page=1

Yup, that's the short version. When I lived in Vancouver in the 80s, my best friend was a first-generation Italian-Canadian and these were a frequent drinking snack. Just drained, and sprinkled very lightly with salt (if they're not already salty enough). You'll see that one end of each bean has a small opening. Place that against your lips, squeeze the hull, and the bean will pop into your mouth leaving the leathery husk behind. Chew, swallow, drink, repeat.

This one goes back a little farther than most of our links on this thread. It's less about the cooking as such than creating a baseline for other archaeologists to use as a reference point, but still fascinating. One of my fellow vendors at a farmer's market years ago knapped a range of replica flint arrowheads and spearheads, and I've often thought about tracking him down in search of a few flakes that I could experiment with myself just for personal interest. I had a notion to be an archaeologist at one point in my childhood (probably driven at least in part by a show-off desire to demonstrate that I could spell it, as a kindergartner). https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/hand-me-that-flint-flake-archaeologists-butcher-cook-fowl-like-a-neanderthal/

Send this link to your kids/grandkids and anyone else who has an infant: "Baby Gourmet" brand organic banana raisin oatmeal is being recalled for cronobacter contamination. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/baby-gourmet-organic-brand-banana-raisin-oatmeal-organic-whole-grain-baby-cereal?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Avalon Dairy in BC (founded over a century ago by a Newfoundlander from the Avalon Peninsula) still offers home delivery - in glass bottles, yet - in parts of the province. I can't verify this personally, but when I lived there a friend of mine was a loyalist who would only get her milk from them (whole milk, non-homogenized, where the cream still rises to the top of the bottle). She told me that Avalon pasteurized its milk through an older process that used a slightly lower temperature for a longer time. "Do you remember your mom or your grandmother complaining that milk doesn't sour properly anymore?" she asked. I did indeed remember my grandmother grumbling about that ("it just rots instead of curdling" was her comment). My friend argued (again, I can't verify this and doubtless someone will correct me) that this corresponded with the changeover to the modern pasteurization method, and that was one of her reasons for going with Avalon. I *can* verify that it was wonderful milk. When I lived in Nova Scotia in the 90s the local dairies still offered home delivery on a limited basis, and Reddit tells me they still do, so I guess the tradition isn't quite dead just yet.

I doubt anyone here will be impacted, but the WeCook brand of swiss cheese meatballs in mustard sauce is being recalled for listeria. They're known to have been sold in Ontario and Quebec as well as online. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/wecook-brand-swiss-cheese-meatballs-creamy-mustard-sauce-recalled-due-listeria?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

My daughter sent me this one:

Very nearly opted to put this in the "bad ideas" thread:

Well that sucks a lot. This company claims their additives can help prevent it from happening (and explains why) but that doesn't help you now that it *has* happened. I'm not knowledgeable enough about two-cycle engines (or any engines, really) to offer any directly useful input, but I'll poke around and see if I can turn up any advice. http://www.wellworthproducts.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PHASE-SEPARATION-IN-ETHANOL-BLENDED-GASOLINE.pdf

Okay, this one's a Really Big Deal for those of us who have friends who are vegan or lactose-intolerant. A whole bunch of the Silk brand alt-milks and related beverages, and the Great Value versions sold by Walmart as a private-label offering, are being recalled for listeria. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-silk-and-great-value-brand-plant-based-refrigerated-beverages-recalled-due?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

I've been crazy busy this past month and a half or so, so I'm going to shoehorn a quick catch-up post here. In this case it's "good busy": I have a new client with a massive and lucrative project, so my income will temporarily triple or thereabouts until late September. Leaves me relatively little time for posting, though I've been taking pictures all along with the intention of making a garden post. Gardening season here typically kicks off around the time of the May long weekend, but this year (as posted upthread) I tried planting some cold-tolerant things "as early as the soil may be worked." Germination proved to be uneven, but the things that started did really well. A few weeks after the initial seeding, when I got back from my monthly NS visit, I filled in the gaps where I didn't get the germination. Here's a look at my shelling peas (Early Frosty), for an example of where it worked out well: If you look closely you'll see the smaller second-planting stems scattered among the larger first-planting stems. This bed is now in full swing (that photo was a couple of weeks ago already) and we've had several meals of peas, though I haven't succeeded in putting any into the freezer yet. Another bed I had to re-seed was the lettuce and salad greens, where a few oak-leaf lettuces did really well but most other things (including the usually reliable Grand Rapids) didn't. Unfortunately, just as those new greens were getting to thumb size... chickens happened. All of that desolation in between the large heads was filled with neat lines of new growth, and in the few minutes it took me to spot them and chase them out the damage was done. They also trashed my other bed of peas, which I'd also had to re-seed to fill in the gaps. Post-chicken there were maybe a half-dozen plants left. I've got the garden chicken-fenced now, so there shouldn't be a repeat. It's a good thing peas are fast growers! My big bed of early-planted curly kale did exceptionally well, and is now a dense enough thicket that the chickens didn't manage to harm it. The more desirable lacinato kale didn't do as well in the early planting, so I reseeded that as well but (surprise!) the chickens got that one as well on the same day. Of course there's no inexpensive bulk pack of that kind at my local seed place, but I've bought more seed and will re-plant that one as well. What's going well? My tomatoes, peppers and cukes are all well established and thriving, and I should start to see tomatoes ripening in a few weeks (which is early in my location). We're growing luffa this year and those are doing well. Chard is starting to produce. The bush beans are well established, but it'll be another few weeks before this year's "jungle o' beans" starts to produce. I harvested my scapes a couple of weeks ago, and the garlic is starting to give me some yellowed leaves, so that won't be more than a few weeks now. I'm just to the end of last year's garlic, so the timing worked out pretty well. Here's a little curiosity that some of you may find interesting. I have Egyptian "walking onions" in a couple of my beds, where they help repel cabbage moths. They're just at the reproductive stage, so I grabbed a couple of snaps for the benefit of anyone who's not seen this before (they're not the best quality, but you]ll get the idea. They're a thin bunching onion, and at the top of their stems they produce very large, fat bulbils: The bulbils weigh down the stem, which bends over until it makes contact with the soil: At which point the bulbils sprout, and the whole cycle starts over. In this instance the place where it made contact was a good 20-ish inches from the parent plant's bulb, and if left to their own devices the onions will "walk" all the way across your garden over a period of a few years (hence the name). Most bunching onions are relatively mild, but these have a bold onion flavor. They're handy as a backup for those times when we run out of conventional onions (and the greens can still be used as scallions, if slightly punchier than the usual kind). This was my harvest from a few nights ago. The peas shelled out to be not quite 2 cups, and we got three meals from the kale. The mushrooms are the same winecaps (Stropharia rugosoannulata) that we'd spawned in a bed under the moribund apple tree last year. Winecaps grown on wood, and the roots of the apple tree are close to the surface, and we reckoned they'd establish themselves in the root system and persist for several years after the tree is taken out (which I still haven't gotten to just yet, but having missed doing it over the winter I'm going to try air-layering and see if I can get a few viable cuttings from it; it makes good apples). Last night's take included a larger quantity of kale (I still have a lot to harvest out of the bed, blanch and freeze), my first picking of chard, a big bowl of lettuce from the surviving plants, and a smaller quantity of peas (about a cup when shelled). I'm sure I'm leaving out lots of things, but that's all the time I have for this morning. I'll close with an entirely different photo. I've always focused on herbs and vegetables but now that we're settled in I need to up my ornamentals game. This is a flat of transplants from the local nursery awaiting installation, but as you see they're already attracting pollinators.

I remember an inflation-related joke from my 70s childhood (perhaps in a Reader's Digest) in which a robber stole $100 of groceries from a supermarket and made his escape in... (wait for it...) a VW. Oh, the hilarity! Here in Canada we had a legendary comedy duo named Wayne & Schuster (Americans of the correct age will remember their appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show), who did a sketch at around that same time on a similar theme. In their sketch straight man Frank Shuster is in a Rip van Winkle sort of scenario, finding himself living unexpectedly in the future. He walks into a supermarket, only to find that they've reverted to the old-school model of keeping all of the food behind the counter where it's safe from theft. The food is doled out by a haughty concierge, played by his partner Johnny Wayne. After balking at the price of his first few requests, he finally says "Well, maybe I'll just have $10 worth of cheese." The concierge looks down his nose in disgust (which takes some doing, because Shuster was the taller of the two) and says to an aide, "Marcel, wrap up three holes for the gentleman." (NB: this is a paraphrase drawn from memories 50 years past, so I probably have a few details wrong, but that was the gist of it)

Al'Fez brand "natural" tahini is being recalled nationally for salmonella. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/al-fez-brand-natural-tahini-recalled-due-salmonella?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Well, my daughter just turned 31 and she can quote extensively from that series. So there's that... (When she was 10, I saw here futzing at the computer one day with her little MP3 player plugged in; she was making a playlist of "a few of my favorite Cab Calloway songs" for her best friend to check out).

The solstice is almost upon us. Who's traveling to Sconehenge?

I'll be dining on Friday at Bessie North House in Canning, NS on Friday, thanks to the efforts of a cousin who lives in the area. It's a tough reservation to get: they do 12 covers, one seating, 3 nights/week, and the entire season typically books up in minutes. My cousin has been trying for three years to get a four-top and finally succeeded, and I'll be one of the party. Can't guarantee photos (or the quality of said photos, should they happen) but I'll do my best to offer up a description after the fact. https://www.bessienorthhouse.com/