chromedome

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

Absolutely.

Regrettably I don't have access to a chamber sealer, just the regular ol' Food Saver. Also, perhaps I'm being obtuse, but I've read what you wrote five or six times and I'm not getting where the sealer comes in.

Returning this to the subject of the thread, it occurs to me that my cousin in NS has two massive oak trees, which fill her lawn ankle-deep with acorns each autumn (she fills her municipal green bin with them several times over, while exercising the nether reaches of her vocabulary). I'm pretty sure I can bespeak as many as I want to experiment with. No idea of their tannin levels, but when you're just playing it doesn't matter if they need longer processing.

Aside from all those considerations, it's also where I harvest my dandelions and sorrel.

I've seen numerous salads over the years that were built on braised meats (usually beef). I would have to think something like that could be worked into a jellied consomme.

Finally got the opportunity to get back out and tend my garden a bit...had hoped/intended to do that on Monday, but life happens. It ain't much, but my time for digging soil and removing stones is limited. The beds in the middle are from last year, the closest and further ones are from this spring. A different angle: As you can tell, there's plenty of (ahem) natural habitat between the beds. I plan to cover it with corrugated cardboard, held down by the plentiful stones, to keep the weeds in check. Those big ol' garlic plants are getting close to harvest. I took a couple today just to evaluate how much longer they need to stay in the ground. Here are a couple of my itty-bitty okra plants. I didn't get really good germination from them, only about a half-dozen plants, but what the heck. This is my first time growing okra; until this past winter I hadn't realized it could be grown this far north. ...and, my first pickin's. Some baby lettuces, a half-dozen pods of peas, and a mess of mixed greens (mostly turnip, but also radish greens, baby kohlrabi that I was thinning, and plenty of dandelions). My garden as a whole is heavy on the greens: I grow turnips and beets largely for the greens, and also have broccoli raab, collards, chard and lots of kale in there. I've got a few beans (most of my seedlings didn't make it, regrettably), some shell peas, a few kinds of carrots, some potatoes, red and green cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, tomatoes, cucumbers, and doubtless a few other things that elude my recollection just at the moment.

The unglazed interior of the pig wicks moisture out of the salt continuously. The salt will "set up" slightly, but not cake solid. You'll still be able to pinch it, or just give the sides a tap to loosen it for measuring with a spoon. My own is very simple, and somewhat resembles the ones Nigella flogs. I commissioned it from my former downstairs neighbour, a working potter with a farmer's market business and a standalone studio, so it's custom-sized to my hand. It's a nicely ivory-ish white, and I fill it with pink salt for purely aesthetic reasons.

I'm pretty easy to please, too. Jumped in many a puddle with my own kids, back in the day. That was before Peppa Pig made "muddy puddles" even more of an obsession for tots. She's a sweet kid, cracks us up constantly. A couple of weeks ago I was working in my garden, and chit-chatting with her idly (she wanted to help me weed, so I let her pull daisies and clovers because she could clearly identify those) when she spotted a butterfly. She asked me what butterflies eat, so I explained about nectar and told her that's whey she would usually see butterflies perched on flowers. I even explained about how their tongues curl up when they're not in use, like the noisemakers she'd enjoyed at birthday parties. A few minutes later she ran past the garden, ringlets flailing in the sun, with a bunch of wildflowers clutched in her fist. She was chasing the butterfly, yelling "SNACK TIME!!!!"

Really it's going to come down to the math. If the time, effort and cost involved in making his own couverture are less than the time, effort and cost of sourcing something acceptable from outside, then there's no reason for Jamal not to do so. If there's a difference in cost, but he can charge a premium for his own bean to bar product (or "bean to bon bon," as the case may be) he still comes out ahead. As long as there's profit to be made, it's not so much a question of "worth it" as "is this the most pragmatic option for me in my circumstances?" I once ran an in-store bakery, and - because I could - I experimented with hand-made ham and cheese croissants. They were very good, the customers loved them, and we could charge enough for them to make a buck out of it. Unfortunately my night bakers never got the hang of proofing and baking them correctly, so they were always either under-proofed and tiny, or over-proofed and sadly deflated, or under-baked, or over-baked...with all that waste we lost money, and I dropped them.* The bottom line (and the point of that digression) is that you have to be flexible and adapt to the facts on the ground. *If you're curious, I replaced them with a ham-and-cheese pocket made with the same commercial all-butter puff we were using for other products. They were a lot less work, and went straight from freezer to oven without proofing, so they gave us a lot more profit for a lot less effort. As good a product in the abstract? No. More practical and profitable? You betcha. And the customers liked them just fine...in fact we sold more, perhaps because we seldom actually had a full complement of the ill-fated croissants to put out.

I eventually switched to a salt pig, because I got tired of chiselling bricks of rice and salt out of my shakers. A grinder works well in my humid coastal climate, and I keep those for table use with both salt and pepper, but for cooking I like grabbing as big or little a pinch as I want.

Just for the record, she was mud from top to bottom and proclaimed it "the best day ever." She's three, she's pretty easy to please.

I'm knee deep in it now. Took a day off work (I'm a freelancer, I try to make a point of doing that at least once every couple of months) and plan to read through it in the course of the day. Housework will feature in there too, of course. Also, possibly some jumping in puddles with a grand-kid. Because that's what life is made of.