chromedome

Many of my freelance colleagues have long and impressive histories in print media, either magazines or newspapers (up to and including NYT and WaPo). Now they grind out content (or copyedit said content) for relative peanuts, without benefits, for a random collection of websites. You do what you have to.

I can't find the actual strip, but one of my favorite Sherman's Lagoon strips was also food-related (after a fashion): Sherman: You ever have one of those moments when you eat something you haven't tasted in years, and it brings back a whole flood of memories? Fillmore: It's a well-known phenomenon. In fact, Marcel Proust wrote a whole series of novels about that. Sherman: Boogers?

BT:DT. It took two years to get full sensation back in the fingertip.

Or one high-end iPhone. I guess there *are* people who would get more use out of the phone...

I've often idly wondered whether your username spoke to ERB fandom.

It's an outright necessity, we lose drivers every year across the region in moose collisions. For people in areas where the highway isn't fenced yet, it's a significant issue in election years (like this one).

They're not enclosures as such...what they enclose is the highway. The fence makes it difficult/near-impossible for a moose to get onto the road, where vehicles might impact one at 120km/h to the detriment of both moose and driver.

My parents dabbled in wholesale for a few months when they had their bakery. It didn't take them long to realize it was a losing proposition (for them, in that particular time and place) because it took them below the price point that made it worth their while. It didn't help that their biggest wholesale customer (proprietor of three coffee-shop franchises) was a complete a$$hat. Finally my father got tired of his BS, and told the customer (who was twice his size) that if he ever darkened their door again he would be ejected physically, and with plenty of top-spin. Wisely, if uncharacteristically, the customer took him at his word.

A former co-worker of mine, from New Zealand, made the same complaint about the difficulty of sourcing good lamb when he's back home. Apparently it is (or was, then...this is 30-odd years ago now) all exported, unless you have an "in" with a farmer or butcher somewhere.

Well, in the last few decades poutine has traveled from small-town Quebec all the way across Canada, and made hesitant inroads into the States. Quebec to Vancouver is...I dunno, 4000km? Pretty far, from my perspective.

To paraphrase: [Book] love means never having to say you're sorry.

LOL Up here, on the infrequent occasions we can get 'em, they sell for $1.50/ea. That's Canadian dollars, I'll grant you, but still...

Nice. I'm waiting for the Italian-style plums to hit, where I live. They're usually only available for a couple of weeks, so I always try to bake a couple of plum tarts of some soft while they're around.

PODS isn't in Canada, though there are similar services. It's a fairly pricey option, I should think. Not that the distances involved are large, but the moving company would bill from the nearest depot where they keep the small containers.

I'll agree to the first of those, as the generally accepted average (per CDC, FDA, et al) is 1 infected egg per 20,000. Mind you they tend to come in bunches, so you can also have several thousand infected eggs showing up in a relatively small sample in a limited geographic time and space, which can be really inconvenient if you've already eaten your homemade mayo before the recall notice went out. The second of those statements is less accurate, unfortunately. Yes, the shells are where you're likeliest to get contamination (everything comes out the same hole) but in an infected bird, the bacterium is present in the egg from day 1, well before the shell is formed. So you can't really count on sanitizing or blanching the shell to do the job. That being said, I absolutely do use raw, unpasteurized yolks myself. I'm just careful about who's eating them, and of course I'm only serving family and friends these days so that's a non-commercial scenario.

Heck, you can raise your own tilapia in a garbage can.

Here in Saint John, the Weight Watchers storefront is located in a strip mall, right between a Mary Brown's Chicken and a Harvey's (a burger chain, for those of you Stateside). I keep meaning to take a pic of that...

I can't say for sure that it has *never* happened, but I can say for sure that in two or three deep dives I've been unable to locate any kind of authoritative source that names a specific instance of it happening and/or being verified. It's always been someone's brother, or a restaurant in the next county, or a guy who used to work with a guy who said... It's quite astounding, really. You'll even see it in a chart of common substitutions posted on the FDA's website, but you'll prowl the site in vain for any actual documentation to back that up. Or at least I have.

That's an enduring urban legend, but one that never holds up under scrutiny. For one thing, the muscles of a skate wing run the wrong way, so that particular piece of fakery would stick out like a sore thumb. Also, given the price of skate and the cost of additional processing, it wouldn't really be worthwhile. You certainly can find scallop surimi, though, if you want it.

When I lived in Edmonton several years ago, there was a pilot project using old fryer oil to run transit buses. I don't know whatever happened with that, but I'm pretty sure they sold a lot of french fries for restaurants along those bus routes.

LOL @ "theft shop"...I spent enough years in retail, and busted enough shoplifters, to find that typo hilarious. I really used to really resent the people who would steal a pair of wirecutters, which they'd then use to snip our tie-down restraints. If you're going to steal from me, dammit, bring your own frikkin' tools!

When I lived in Newfoundland as a teen, crabs were a nuisance for the gillnetters because they'd get tangled in the nets and create a scalloped effect at the bottom of the net, like a tablecloth. That gets expensive in a hurry, because it's a part of your net fish swim under instead of getting caught. The standard answer for this was to have one crewmember standing by the "Gertie" (a small Briggs & Stratton engine used to haul the head rope of the net) with an axe handle in his hand. When a crab came over the gunwales, he'd stop the Gertie for a moment, smash the crab, throw the bits overboard, then re-start the puller. At that time (40 years ago) their actual catch was usually worth 12 to 15 cents/lb at the fish plant, so if you went up to ol' "Skipper Eli" or "H'uncle George" and offered him 10 cents/lb for all the crab he wanted to bring in, you'd get a WHOLE lot of crab. We'd eat ourselves comatose (my immediate family, plus aunts, uncles and cousins), then spend the next day picking and freezing the leftover crab. Fast forward to my 20s, in Vancouver. A restaurant in Gastown called The Meat Market advertised a big crab promotion, all-you-can-eat Alaskan king crab (plus soup and salad bar) for what was even then the absurd price of $12.99/person. To me, that seemed like the perfect opportunity for a Newfoundland-sized "good scoff" of crab. I went with my girlfriend, and my best friend and his girlfriend, and between us we ate our way through seven platters of crab legs. Of that total, I was the only one still eating after the fourth (I could really pack it away, as a youngster). As we left the restaurant my girlfriend (a Central American mestizo by blood, very exotic, but 100% Cockney by upbringing) was giving me an odd look. When I asked what she was thinking, she replied "I'd much rather clothe than feed you..."

I think of that as the "Spinal Tap moment," from the scene near the end of the movie where they're second-billed to (IIRC) a kids' puppet show. When I was living in Edmonton there was a glorious example of that...A new chiropractic clinic opened on Jasper Ave, right downtown, and the chiropractor brought in Trooper to play at the grand opening. This won't mean anything to non-Canadians, because Trooper didn't get much cross-border airplay, but in the 70s and the beginning of the 80s they were among out biggest homegrown hitmakers.

I laughed out loud when the manager and board of my former farmer's market chose a cartoon mouse as the market's mascot. Because what could possibly represent agriculture in the abstract better than a pestilential, crop-defiling rodent?

There's a Humble Bundle offer underway for cookbook enthusiasts. If you're unfamiliar with the Humble Bundle concept, it's a "pay what you want" bundle of programs or books, with a sliding scale of content vs. price. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/chronicle-cook-books?partner=extech