chromedome

As a rule, if it's gluten-free you can probably get it from Bob's. They were heavily entrenched in that market before it even was a cohesive market.

Welcome, SD. I venture to guess that you'll fit right in...

Metal particles in some Agropur ice cream sandwiches, recall is national. https://inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-07-20/eng/1563664949779/1563664951536

Same here. Even at my broke-est, when my kids were growing up, we always had butter for table use no matter how we scrimped on everything else. It was that one little luxury that made everything else bearable.

Some Pacific oysters, paralytic shellfish poisoning. Currently, the recall affects BC, Alberta and Ontario. https://inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-07-19/eng/1563582779479/1563582781500

As I see it, the differences between Honeycrisp and Cosmic Crisp are mostly logistical. CC will be easier/lower cost to grow, and will store for longer without losing quality. Both excellent things, as far as that goes, but so far I've been underwhelmed by most of this new generation of branded apples (Pazzazz, Juici, and even Honeycrisp). I do like Ambrosia, and have lucked into bags of them among the "Naturally Imperfect" produce at Superstore and No Frills. No Frills puts the 6-lb bag on for $4.97 pretty regularly, which is a smokin' deal for apples.

I'll be very interested to see everyone's input. My GF and I are in the very early stages of planning for what we sincerely hope will be our "forever" home (ie, live there until we die or no longer know/care where we *are* living) so I'm keen to see what everyone likes/dislikes about the main countertop options. My personal preferences run to end-grain butcher block and commercial stainless steel. I abominate tile in the kitchen, having spent far too many hours of my life scrubbing grout. I'm all about seamless surfaces...

It's a Honeycrisp hybrid, and will be marketed as the "Cosmic Crisp."

That would be the one, all right. They definitely played fast and loose with the liquor licensing laws...as long as you had one order of fries on the table, they considered that you'd met the requirement to order food. As I recall, they eventually got into trouble that way and ultimately had to re-license as a pub. Didn't they change their name eventually to The Brit, as well? (An aside: During my time there, some local wag wrote a Letter to the Editor in one of the local papers, which ran something like: "I'm sick and tired of immigrants coming here and not adapting to Canadian life. They band together in their own little cliques, refusing to take up a place in Canadian society and culture, and always going on and on about how things were so much better at home. I refer, of course, to the British.")

I add it by the handful even to regular green salads, just because I like to have it in my garden and it's a heavy producer. It's not overpowering. Over the years, whenever I've been in the type of restaurant that adds a sprig as the default garnish, I've always eaten the sprig: partly for its purported virtues as a breath freshener, and partly because (as my father liked to joke) "it's often the most nutritious thing on the plate."

Yup. The other expat hangout then was, IIRC, the Horse and Carriage. Lots of good memories, there. I even got to see Long John Baldry do a few songs, on his birthday (the party was in the upstairs, but he and Sybil Thrasher did a few numbers on the main stage by popular demand).

Ugh. Yeah, my new Panasonic microwave has one of those for setting time. I've gotten used to it, but use the "quick minute" button a lot instead. A classic example of design over function, to my mind.

Ol' Bill had, of all things, an English fish & chips place in Vancouver when I lived there in the 80s. It was called the Dover Arms, I think. I saw him there a couple of times, and was quite amused at how well the caricature on the perogie-maker label captured his features and personality. I remember the fish as being pretty good, and it was certainly a hangout for the expat Brit crowd at the time (my then-GF was part of that crew...she was South American mestizo by blood, and very exotic looking, but a cockney by upbringing).

I don't think a century or more is out of the question. My father and I dug up and relocated my grandmother's rhubarb patch after it had been in place for 60 years or so, and it was going STRONG despite an absolute lack of maintenance. There were roots in there that looked like tree stumps, about half the size of a grown man. The rhubarb continued to flourish in its new location for the next few years, and presumably still does. The house was sold after my grandmother died in 2008, and is no longer in the family. As/when my GF and I buy/build our place in the country, a rhubarb patch and a couple beds of asparagus will be among the first things to go in.

Though functioning AC in the midst of a muggy summer is certainly a worthy reward, in the end...

True enough. Though the net practical effect is the same.

https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/dining/mark-kurlyandchik/2019/07/07/loud-restaurants-noise-affects-taste/1638352001/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Unfortunately, all of those helpful suggestions assume that the building's owners/management will be rational and open-minded. That is a very, very large assumption.

When the supply of refurbs runs out, I expect they'll offer equivalent credit on other products. Not much else they *can* do.

There's a national recall of some bison products due to potential E. coli contamination. https://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/food-recall-warnings/complete-listing/2019-07-16/eng/1563315202785/1563315204824 I actually have a package of the Sensations brand extra-lean ground in my freezer, but the date codes are a couple of months removed from those in the recall.

If you care to take a deeper dive into the topic, you can download the FDA's Bad Bug Book as a free PDF, and have a read through the section on B. cereus. Speaking as something of a crank on the subject of food safety, I think everybody should have a copy.

A point of pedantry, perhaps, but you don't "buy" an ebook as a rule. You purchase the rights to use it, which may or may not remain yours with the passage of time. That's why my general feeling is that a book worth owning must be purchased in hardcopy form. This is a terrible inconvenience at moving day, I'll grant you, and at that I move more than most people, but I like having my own modest reference/entertainment library against the day when all the world is not a Google search away.

Yes, often they're store returns and are simply "new out of the box" as opposed to "new in the box." It is a peculiarity I often remarked upon as a retailer that everyone wants their store to have a liberal return policy, but nobody wants a product that has ever been out of its box. On one occasion I had a gentleman - old country German - ask to see a specific radio that was on sale. He took it out of the box, opened up everything, even took the earpiece out of the battery compartment, and then announced he'd take it. When I started to pack up the one I'd just brought out for inspection, he stopped me cold and said he'd like a new one. He truly did not understand why I was upset*, and was having none of my insistence that this *was* a sealed unit before he put his hands on it. It had been opened, and he wanted one that hadn't been. Simple. (* To clarify, this was relatively early in my retail career. By the time a few more years had passed this kind of thing was old hat to me...and I'd also become a past master of re-packing products so they were indistinguishable from new.)

FWIW, as a longtime retailer, I buy refurbs whenever possible. As a rule they're at least as reliable as new, and in some cases have been through additional testing processes/troubleshooting. Also, sometimes a "known-defective/problematic" part automatically gets replaced on refurbs, even if it hasn't failed yet. My current KA and the last one (currently still living with and working well for my ex-wife), and all but one of the computers in my house, were bought refurbished. So were my tablet and one of my two e-readers (the other was a gift).

LOL ...and here was I, thinking it's a good excuse to blow the dust off of my Instant Pot and cook up some chickpeas.