chromedome

On the "mildly sarcastic" side of food funnies, a local chef Instragrammed his daily special recently. It was an artisan grilled cheese sandwich, smothered in cheese sauce, browned under the salamander, then topped with crispy Southern-fried chicken skin as a garnish. He hashtagged it with #dietfood and #beachbody.

I love it when stores flat-price meats and poultry that way. I've seen weight variance of up to 40%, and I'm not at all embarrassed to stand there at the display gondola and sift through EVERY FREAKIN' PACKAGE to find the one or two largest. Scots ancestry, doncha know.

LOL Have you ever seen the movie "The Accidental Tourist," with William Hurt and Geena Davis? He's a very uptight travel writer (who actually hates travelling) and she's the free-spirited dog groomer who inexplicably falls in love with him. In one scene she's helping his equally buttoned-up siblings (Kathleen Turner and David Ogden Stiers) put away the groceries, and is confounded to learn that they organize the dry goods alphabetically. She holds up a box of macaroni and asks them if it goes under P for Pasta or M for Macaroni, and is greeted by an uncomfortable and incredulous few moments of silence before Kathleen Turner says pointedly that it's E, for Elbow macaroni.

My parents used to buy it occasionally when I was a kid. I used to take tongue sandwiches (just "pot roast" style, not corned) in my school lunch, which was great for grossing out my classmates.

I made the mistake of taking the northern route once when I hitched through Ontario as a teen. Got dropped at the Pickle Lake turnoff, and got a lift 14 hours later from the *third* car to pass. I'm guessing from your description you're well to the north of even that neck of the woods.

LOL Yeah, personally I don't get the appeal. Aye, well.

For my daughter, "not the whole jar" actually means "I didn't take a spatula and scrape the sides."

Google owns Nest, so it's quite possible that some sort of cease-and-desist would be forthcoming.

It's physically beautiful, and the silicone liner for easy removal/fuss reduction is a stroke of genius. I think it would appeal to a large enough niche to be a viable product.

That's a shame, but knowing when to pull the plug is one of the most under-rated entrepreneurial skills.

I have the three rollers as well, and they work just fine. I've made pasta a few times now with the granddaughters, and they enjoyed it immensely.

One of the thrift shops where I live (the Habitat for Humanity "ReStore") has a policy that staff/volunteers can't buy anything until it's been priced and on the floor for (IIRC) two days.

Just for the sake of morbid curiosity, I have to ask...what constitutes bitter cold in your neck of the woods? I see Floridian tourists carrying sweaters here in mid-August, so you've piqued my interest.

BT:DT, wrapped my hand with the T-shirt.

I meant the lobsters, actually. I live on the East Coast, and lobstering is a significant part of the New Brunswick economy.

Just for the record, that's the price we have in the supermarket right here, where they're landed. There are a couple of small shops that undercut the supermarkets, but not by much (no sense leaving money on the table!).

I did a turkey for the benefit of my girlfriend and her family, who have that tradition. Nobody in my family is keen on turkey - I'll eat it but it's not a favorite, my parents just wouldn't eat it at all - so we always did something different at Christmas. This year, I did a leg of lamb as the second entree. For sides there was dressing for the turkey, mashed potatoes, whisky-glazed sweet potatoes, baked buttercup squash, carrots, steamed broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus (Sobey's had a great sale on the latter) and Brussels sprouts sauteed with bacon and caramelized onions. For dessert I had a spread of Christmas cookies, plus an apple pie with quick-and-dirty caramel sauce made by melting a bar of Macintosh toffee into a bit of hot cream. One of the cookies I made was meringues piped into rings with a star tip, so they'd resemble little wreaths, and then I topped them with green and red sprinkles to complete the resemblance. When my GF's little granddaughter saw them the next morning, she squealed "Sprinkle doughnuts!!!" and immediately wanted one for breakfast.

I looked it up in my copy of Bo Friberg's The Professional Pastrychef. He says that 1 pound of fresh beets, peeled and put through an actual juicer, will yield about 1 1/4 cups. If you don't have a juicing machine, he suggests shredding them as finely as possible and then press the juice through a sieve (I suppose muslin or cheesecloth would work, too). Yield will be lower if you do it manually, but he doesn't give any indication of how much. He does note that freshness makes a difference to the yield as well, so it's probably one of those "try it and see how much you get" kind of scenarios. It's springtime in SA right now, so I suspect any beets you find will have been in storage for some time. Perhaps start with 1 kg, then you're pretty likely to have enough when you're done.

So after a fashion, I suppose it's come full circle.

Apparently, that's exactly what they're getting.

I mentioned it in passing in the "What are you preserving?" thread. I went very basic for my first time, just the basic 2% brine and no additional flavorings. I was inspired by an unusually good special (local, freshly-harvested cabbage at $0.19/lb, prices typically range from $0.69 to $0.99 in my neck of the woods).

...though as for that, you're more than welcome to pass over the Nanaimo bars and opt for butter tarts instead. (...coughwithraisinscough...)

I'll second that, it's one of my cold-weather staples. Next batch will be even more fun, because it'll be my own home-fermented sauerkraut.

An innkeeper of my acquaintance had a traumatic six-month interaction with TripAdvisor shortly after she bought the inn in question from the original family. One of her customers apparently used the hotel's own wi-fi (gasp!) to post a positive review of the place. TripAdvisor immediately suspended the inn's listing (this, in the midst of her first tourism season after buying the place) because *obviously* this was a fake review posted by the inn itself. Because, you know, anybody receiving excellent service would automatically tell himself, "Geez, two days from now when I'm someplace else, I really should log onto TripAdvisor and says something nice about these folks." It took a great deal of back-and-forth before TripAdvisor finally backed down, and by then she'd been invisible on the site for most of her first season. They're flourishing now, due to some canny marketing decisions, but it was a stress she really didn't need as an introduction to the business. I know others in the hospitality industry (innkeepers and restaurateurs) who've had guests try to shake them down for freebies and/or discounts, lest they be hit with a negative TA or Yelp review. In a couple of cases the guest has made good on that threat, to the detriment of the operator. Yelp itself famously shakes down hospitality operators, surfacing positive reviews for those who spend to advertise with the site and negative reviews for those who refuse. That's not hearsay or an urban legend, that's been tried in court and Yelp has won. The courts essentially ruled that they could continue with their 21st-century take on the classic "protection racket" ("Nice reputation you've got there...it'd be a shame if it burnt down..."). I recognize that those sites, and similar operators such as Foursquare, provide a valuable service. Unfortunately they also exercise power that's disproportionate to their accountability.

Raw garlic in oil, because the oil creates an anaerobic environment where C. botulinum can flourish. Cooked rice because Bacillus cereus loves the stuff. B. cereus can produce enterotoxins directly in your gut, or in the rice itself before it's eaten. It's triply problematic, because 1) the toxin is heat-stable; 2) the bacterium itself "spores up" for protection and can survive high temperatures and emerge fully functional; and 3) once established, like Listeria monocytogenes, it can continue to flourish at refrigerator temperatures. Fortunately, for most people, B. cereus passes quickly with only 6 to 12 hours' misery in most cases. The usual disclaimers apply (it can be more serious for the elderly, the very young, those whose immune systems are already depressed, etc).