chromedome

Archaeologists have pushed back the date of the earliest known bread to over 14,000 years ago. Gizmodo drew an obvious, and not entirely tongue-in-cheek, inference.

When my kids were little, waffles and ice cream were sometimes the hot-weather dinner. Without the kids, sometimes it's just a beer.

Really? I always find it slices better when still cold from the fridge. It's softer at room temp, but doesn't slice as neatly for exactly that reason (at least for me...you may be defter with your slicer).

I've tried that. It turned out my Cuise was too big for the quantities I was working with (it'd be different if I was doing a whole bag at a time, but that's more sifting than I want to deal with) so I used my little spice grinder (aka twirling-blade cheap-ass coffee grinder). That worked well, but only for a tablespoon or two at a time. So...I wound up just using the coarse and fine separately. Not an issue, really, just a bit of a PITA.

FWIW, most - I'd venture to guess almost all - of us have done similar things.

I have the same blue cornmeal in my freezer. It's taking forever to use up, because the inconsistent grind (which apparently is a characteristic of the stone-ground) makes me crazy. I usually sift it into fine and coarse, the fine to bake with and the coarse to cook for polenta. If I use it un-sifted for polenta, it gets stodgy and sticky before the coarse-ground is fully cooked (basically, it takes away that grace period you normally get before the corn starts to stick and scorch). Baked un-sifted, it yields a cornmeal with irritatingly coarse crunchy bits in it that make the finished cornbread tooth-grittingly unpleasant to eat. Pretty, though.

You can grow your own, quite easily. Easily to a fault, in fact...As with mint, the difficulty is to limit how much you grow. Ordinarily they'll be the size of a large "hand" of ginger, and you just snap off the bits you want to cook at a given moment.

As it was explained to me by an Italian friend, coarse yellow polenta is eaten in the southern parts of Italy, while in the north they favor white corn and a finer grind. He was from the north (Udine, to be precise) and the way he said "finer," with a distinct sniff and tilt of the head, conveyed clearly that in his view the southern variety was not fit for civilized people.

Mine just went in a couple of weeks ago.

Here in New Brunswick, a deer actually got into the provincial legislature building in Fredericton a few years back and caused quite a commotion. In my neighbourhood they seem rather partial to hostas. In a month or so (presumably as other foods become coarser in the late-summer heat) the hostas up and down my street will all have a perfect crew cut, thanks to the deer. Small herds routinely cross the schoolyard opposite my house in the early evening, then look both ways (I kid you not) before crossing the street and continuing down the hill. One morning as my GF's daughter was sitting on the front steps having a coffee and a cigarette, a yearling actually walked right up to her and sniffed at her coffee to see if it was anything interesting. She was pretty freaked out. My favorite deer moment came about six years ago, when I lived in the pretty little resort town of St. Andrews. It was December, and I watched in some amusement as a small herd of deer wandered the streets rubbernecking at the Christmas decorations, for all the world like the busloads of tourists we'd get in summer.

One thing to be aware of with Epson inkjet printers is that most of them have fixed print nozzles. Most other brands include the nozzles in the ink cartridge, so when you change cartridges you get a new set. Epson in its wisdom went the other direction, which means that if you leave it sit for a while and don't print anything, the ink will clog your PERMANENT, NON-REPLACEABLE print nozzles. It is theoretically possible to clean those successfully, especially if they've only just begun to gum up, but in practice it often means junking an otherwise usable printer. I've just taken my parents' former printer, a $300 Epson multifunction unit, to the recyclers for exactly that reason. As you may gather they're not my favorite brand of inkjet. That being said, portable printers of any variety are scarce and when you need one, you need one. Just remember to print a page on it every few weeks, and you should be okay.

I make up five mornings' worth of oatmeal at a time (because steel-cut oats take a while to cook, and I'm not fond of the quick oats anymore). In the morning I heat it in the microwave while making my tea and my GF's coffee, and then I'm good to go.

Fryers in the 2 1/2 to 3lb range are pretty standard up here. Bigger birds are actually quite difficult to find in supermarkets; if you want a large roasting chicken they often have to come from the farmer's market or equivalent.

Mine is steel-cut oats, usually with raisins. The bog-standard egg breakfast with toast, some form of cured pork and (perhaps) potatoes leaves me feeling bloated and greasy until mid-morning, and then ravenous until lunch.

I've often wondered what it is with porcupines and the middle of the road. When I lived in a more rural area I would see three or four every evening, trundling down different stretches of the highway (and if ever there was a creature that locomotes by "trundling," it's a porcupine) but always in the middle. Predictably, the local ravens ate "porcupine panini" most mornings for breakfast.

Those can be for Father's Day.

Ugh. I'm sure.

Lisa pretty much covered it. If you haven't baked much before culinary school, or have only baked from mixes, you'll be expecting your batters and doughs to look smooth. A lot of the time, that's a mistake. With muffins and coffee cakes, for example, they're pretty much just "dump and stir": You want the dry ingredients to be moistened and that's about it. Cakes are more variable, depending on the recipe and the method, but as a rule you don't want to mix them very much either. If you're making a cake that relies on beaten eggs or egg whites for its volume, you'll need to just fold the eggs and the rest of the batter very gently until they're...not incorporated, as such, but "well acquainted." A common trick is to tip 1/4 to 1/3 of the eggs into the batter and stir them in, which lightens and softens the main batter and makes it easier to fold in the fluff without losing most of your air. For more specific assistance, you can ask about individual recipes. A high-ratio cake is different from a coffee cake, which is different from biscuits and so on, so generalized advice will only get you so far. I leaned on the collective wisdom at eG occasionally, back when I was in culinary school, and will happily pay it forward.

As a physician, I'm guessing you found a modicum of wry amusement in making the capsules.

I've just set it up to record as well. I don't actually watch much food-related TV anymore (most of it's pretty poor) but this one looks like a winner.

As an aging punk rocker, I'm inclined to suggest stringing some beads on the monofilament and calling it jewelry.

You have no idea... https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust

Sounds like a perfect summer day to me...

It's basically the same idea as running pasta dough through the rollers. You can't go from the lump of dough to a finished sheet in one pass, you have to take it through multiple steps.

Here in Canada, the result made the main page of our primary sports site, TSN (the equivalent of ESPN). I don't understand why, but...they also broadcast poker tournaments. I don't "get" that as being in any way a sport, either.