chromedome

This has been going around for a while, but it seems apropos (and maybe some of you haven't seen it): Maybe Just Don't Drink Coffee

I mostly see the big jars used for things like pickled eggs and pickled sausages. They'd probably also be a convenient size for fermenting sauerkraut.

GF and I haven't discussed specific plans, but she's back to keto-ing (ugh) after Monday, so I expect it will be "Carbapalooza." I'm sure there will be something grilled as part of the mix, though.

I'd never even thought of growing okra, precisely because I thought of it as a hot-weather crop. That being said, I had to concede that it *does* grow in our climate, because the seeds I bought were locally produced (we have a great little seed company here that specializes in open-pollinated cultivars, mostly heirlooms). Part of the reason I'm excited to grow my own is that it's hard to get small and delicate okra pods in the stores here. They're usually 3 to 4 inches long, and I have to dig through the whole bin to find a fistful of smaller ones. Mind you, it's only been available at all for the past 8 or 10 years, so I'm not complaining. As for the lettuce, some years it does bolt by mid-summer even here. In this particular instance I planted late because of our wretched spring, which helped. Also I interplanted that particular bed of lettuce between my garlic plants, which (since they're a fall planting) were already tall and vigorous by the time the lettuce started to leaf out, and gave them some much-needed shade from the direct sun. The second planting is at little risk for bolting, because the hot summer weather has pretty much broken here. We're still getting daytime highs into the 20s (ie, 70s F) but our overnight lows this week will range from the mid-teens (ie, low 60s F) down as low as 7 (mid-40s F), and that really keeps the lettuces from getting too ambitious. I may splurge on some row covers to keep my greens going as long as possible this year, but I haven't decided for sure. I do have an enclosed front porch with lots of windows that get the afternoon light, so I've been toying with the notion of keeping some things out there in boxes over the winter. You know those "ladder" type shelves that lean back against the wall? I was thinking that one of those against the end wall of the porch, with a window box on each shelf, would probably work pretty well for growing some fresh lettuce and greens over the winter. As long as they're established before the cold weather sets in properly, and don't see a hard freeze (which they shouldn't, in the porch) they're surprisingly hardy.

It's the camera angle. That one in the foreground is about 1/4" long.

I finally got a few pictures yesterday while I was at my garden. This bed is chard interplanted with carrots, for space efficiency. I harvest individual leaves from the chard plants, so they keep going right until the frost. Here we have one of my okra plants. I'm guessing I'll have my first actual okra within the week, which I'm pretty excited about (that's a guess, as I'm a first-time okra grower). My lone surviving Mideast Prolific and the handful of Marketmore cucumbers are all just now hitting gear. The one in this photo was inhaled by our 3 year-old granddaughter for breakfast. It's a good thing she had healthy food this morning, as we're headed to the fair this afternoon. It looks like I'll have a few weeks of tomatoes, as they're on the verge right now and it's only just Labour Day weekend. I forgot to take a picture of the day's haul after I got home, but it included a couple pounds of carrots, a large bundle of mixed greens (chard, beet greens, turnip greens) for cooking, a spaghetti squash, some of the last lettuce from the first planting (second planting is almost ready to go), the first spaghetti squash and three good-sized cukes.

A lot of appliances/electronics have specially designated Canadian versions. There are two reasons for that: One is that many products must be approved by the Canadian Standards Association (for others, the American UL certification is adequate). The second is to identify versions sold in Canada - and therefore warrantied by the Canadian mfr/distributor - from versions sold in the US and brought into Canada as "grey market" units. A lot of Canadians border shop, and there's nothing at all wrong with this, but you need to take the unit Stateside to get it serviced. As for the tire company, Canadian Tire is a bit of an anomaly. Yes, it began as a tire and auto-parts/service vendor and is still the biggest in the country. However it's also the leading retailer of outdoor products, hockey gear and a number of other things, and its kitchenwares section is as good as you'll find in most retailers. They move a LOT of Instant Pots, for example. I almost bought one there last year during the Black Friday sale, but didn't pull the trigger (I have a strong suspicion it would just gather dust in my kitchen, like many another device).

You probably don't actually need to add quite that much gluten to your GF flour, because those are typically blended with some gums or other ingredients to provide the same kind of elasticity you'd get with conventional flour. I'd say you can probably treat it like a lower-gluten wheat flour and add a tablespoon per cup, then add more if you find you're not getting the result you want. I'd avoid using the mix for a yeasted bread, ideally, but for anything else it should work fine.

Kerry's right. In this context, it means In Search Of.

I can tell you, it had one *very* pronounced corner for a few hours after that particular incident. I do indeed have a rather magnificent dome (aka a big head) and because my eyes are somewhat deep-set, I have poor peripheral vision to the above/front. I'm forever banging my head on things. Thank goodness I'm only 5'7", or I shudder to think what a band of calluses I'd have across my forehead.

This is only tangentially culinary, but... I will never again, while loading my purchases at Costco (that's the food-related part) bounce the freakin' liftgate off the corner of my head while trying to close it. ...actually that's probably not true. I've owned the van for three months now, and I'm a bit surprised this is the first time it has happened.

Mine's just hitting its stride, now that the summer is over (it was a difficult spring, with several late frosts, so most of my transplants didn't make it). On the upside, September can sometimes be a pretty good growing month here so there's lots of harvesting to come. No recent pictures, because my garden plot is out in the boonies, so cell coverage there defaults to analog and drains my battery in a trice. My greens are going great guns, though, my second batch of peas is leaping from the soil with enthusiasm, and my tomatoes, squashes, pumpkins and cabbages all look like giving a good, hard push before the growing season is over. It'll be nice if some of my tomatoes can ripen on the vine, given my late start. I'm heading to Nova Scotia for a few days, but expect to harvest my first okra when I return. I'm pretty excited about that, because (as noted upthread) I'd only just discovered this past winter that it can be grown here.

Almond milk goes back many centuries, which is perhaps why it took the dairy industry so many years' lobbying to finally get the U.S. FDA on its side ("Does an almond lactate?" is a disingenuous question, under the circumstances). With lab-grown meat on the horizon, though, it's certainly clear why traditional producers are making an earnest effort at staking out their territory.

Last night as I was getting my growler filled (a repeat on the IPA) I commented to the server - sorry, "Brand Ambassador" - that the taproom was a solid success. He told me that at this point, just shy of three full months since they'd opened, they're already on the verge of hitting their original sales target for the year. That's pretty definitively a success. I'm sure it's the smallest of drops in the bucket, considered as a percentage of the company's total revenues, but it's nice to have a good loyalty-builder in your home market.

Yeah, that's a classic "lemonade" moment.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/08/24/640511068/fad-or-the-future-robot-made-burgers-wow-the-crowds-in-san-francisco

What part of PEI are you in?

LOL Yup. It's still early in my time zone, and the blood level is unreasonably high in my caffeine system.

I've done the "hickory sticks" with the julienne blade on my spiralizer, which makes them long and curly and therefore a bit cooler. I just added a pinch or two of smoked paprika to the brown paper bag along with fine salt, and shook them vigorously. Not exactly the same flavor profile, of course, but very tasty nonetheless.

LOL Sounds like the fun we had with Ninja, trying to get a replacement blender jar for my daughter. We read them all the necessary numbers off the unit (one was, oddly, on the electrical plug) and they sent us...a blender jar that was about an inch shorter than the original. Not an issue with most blenders, but the Ninja has this weirdly tall blade stack with multiple blades. So we called back, and they said "That's weird, the shorter one is an entirely different part number. Just throw that one out, and we'll send you the right one." So, a week later, my daughter received...another of the too-short jars. So we called back and said, "You know what? Obviously there's some kind of issue in the warehouse. Just send us the shorter blade stack that fits the jar we *do* have, and it'll all be good." They saw the logic in that, and sent us - wait for it - the same taller blade stack she already has. At this point my daughter got fed up and decided to just save her pennies for a new blender instead.

I currently have the Black & Decker, and in the past have owned the Rival, Toastess and Walmart generic (Durabrand?) equivalents. Cheap pieces of crap, in short. I've used them all for brown rice, red rice, multigrain blends, quinoa, millet, freekeh and whatever else I've had on hand. Some rices require a great deal of rinsing for a good result, but that's not the cooker's fault (the generic store brand from Sobey's was especially bad, I had to rinse it maybe a dozen times before the water began to run clear). Basically, as long as it cooks by absorption and you've measured accurately, you're good to go. The pot will continue cooking until all the water is absorbed, at which point the temperature rises above the boiling point and the pot switches to "keep warm" mode. Easy-peasy.

From one of my cousins' kids: Q: What kind of bugs live in a spice rack? A: Thyme flies...

Glad to hear it worked out so well for you. I think the occasional misadventure with produce or fresh meats (the things we really, really like to pick for ourselves) would be unavoidable with any such service, but on the whole it can only be a boon for anyone with mobility issues. I would like to think that over time, if you deal consistently with the same store, they'll come to know your preferences and be able to provide a bit of customization.

The unfortunate thing about nutritional studies in general is that it's basically impossible to design one that meets the same standards of scientific rigor we'd apply to other fields. For starters, you'd ideally need two complete, separate human populations of statistically significant size that you could feed with completely controlled diets over a period of decades, ideally with regular monitoring by medical professionals. That's not going to happen any time soon (unless, say, an autocrat like Kim Jong Un takes an interest in nutrition) so the best we're left with is the usual cohort studies and meta studies. In other words, whatever your prejudices and predilections, you're likely to find studies backing them. In my own specific case I've cooked Atkins/keto for my GF, who paddles in that pool occasionally, but I can't do it myself. Whole grains are my personal staple, from my morning steel-cut oats onward, and I'd probably find it easier to go vegan than to go keto. My feeling is that most people need to eat a *wider* variety of foods, not to arbitrarily cut out whole classes of them, and (of course) I could cite any number of studies to support that as well.

Yup, I snicker over that every single time.