chromedome

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.

More fuel for the nutritional flame wars: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45195474?

According to the FDA's Bad Bug Book 48C (131F) is the maximum growth temperature for B. cereus, though one 1983 paper reported growth at 55C (a result that's never been successfully duplicated). It's not quite that straightforward, because this particular pathogen produces a heat-stable toxin, but in a scenario where the Zo is holding the rice at a higher temperature until service there's no opportunity for the bacillus to get a toehold. For those of you who don't have it/didn't know, the Bad Bug Book is a free download in PDF form and well worth having on your computer, phone or Kindle for quick reference.

Realistically, for the (still debated) goitrogenic characteristics of millet to be a factor, you'd have to be eating it as your daily staple. Think pre-famine Ireland and potatoes, by way of context. That's from an interview from Dr. Jeffrey Garber, endocrinologist and lead author of the clinical practice guidelines for hypothyroidism. The quote is not from the guidelines (I know someone would go looking for it) but from an online interview focused primarily on the scare headlines from a few years ago about kale consumption. The same principle is at play, though.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/08/remembering-anthony-bourdain-as-only-his-fixers-could

...because people get curious about the strangest of things. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/mit-scientists-crack-the-case-of-breaking-spaghetti-in-two/

It's late and I'm tired, but I look at those wings and think "I could plate those so they looked like a giant spider..."

My ex-wife's parents and mine fell into the old-school "you'll sit there until it's gone" camp. My ex and I had the milder rule that they had to have at least two bites (real bites, not hold the fork to the mouth and make guppy-lips in the general direction of the food) before they decided whether or not they liked it. If they didn't, that was fine...but there was nothing else to come in its place. "Leave it" was a valid option, but "trade for something you like better" was not. My longtime best friend's wife takes a very clever tack with her grandkids, pointing out that they wouldn't know they liked ice cream or bacon if they'd just decided "I don't like it!" without that first taste. Apparently this works well at present, though it's capital she expends very selectively.

Many sites give you [x] free articles in a month. The site sets a cookie that contains a counter, which is how it keeps track. You can either go into your browser's cookie settings, search for anything related to the site (NYT, in this case) and manually delete them; or set your browser to reject cookies in the first place (what gfweb spoke of). Of course some sites will simply not work or not work properly if you set the browser to reject cookies out of hand, so the more useful option is to set your browser to allow cookies at time of use, but then to ditch them rather than saving them (ie, "allow for this session"). The exact setting and where to find it will vary by browser. In my case I have three computers I can use, so that's usually enough to see me through a given month without futzing around. ETA: X-posted simultaneously with gfweb...

My local daily charges $19.99/mo for a pure-digital subscription, less for a paper/digital (because then you see the print ads). It's written primarily by new j-school grads, with a few seasoned "lifers" to give the paper a bit of much-needed substance (the food writer who succeeded me, one of the aforementioned j-school grads, spoke of a chef using one or another savory ingredient to add a bit of "Oooo, mommy!" to a dish). Its sole purpose is to generate enough ad revenue to meet its own expenses. It (and the dailies of the other two major cities in the province, and some 30 or so smaller weeklies and community papers around the province) is owned by the local oligarchs, the billionaire Irving family, who purchased them primarily as a prophylactic measure to prevent even the slightest risk of negative press.

Loved all the names of the pies.