chromedome

Doesn't quite have the same ring as "not my circus, not my monkeys." Under the circumstances, though, we'll definitely take it. Glad you're okay.

Search blogger Tara Calishain came up with a Google Custom Search...oh, 12 or so years ago...called "Cookin' With Google" that streamlines the process. I've used it off and on since day 1.

Wow, that's just...groovy. (I'd have loved it)

My ex-wife was a big help with things like that. Usually she left the kitchen to me (quite happily) but occasionally she'd have a fit of domesticity, and I'd come home to hear her say brightly that she'd "cleaned up." That often meant a carefully-hoarded Mason jar of duck or goose fat had gone bye-bye. She also once used my first-ever batch of goose stock to make a quick pot of "chicken" noodle soup, when my young 'un brought home a couple of friends at lunch time.

Cool. I'll give that one a try next time I'm heading to Nova Scotia, and see what my daughter thinks of it.

I'd never heard of it, not being a cocktail-drinker, but it sounds like a classic bit of Rat Pack-era kitsch.

On your "things to avoid" list, be sure to include popups that prompt me to subscribe, follow, sign up for the email list or take a survey about the site before I've actually had any opportunity to even read the page. I spend most of my day looking at websites in the line of duty (I'm a freelance writer, and spend 2-3 hours on research for every hour of writing), and few things are more infuriating. Actually bad site navigation tools irritate the heck out of me, too. There should be multiple ways to find anything on the site, and they should be clearly visible. Speaking of which, you know that style trend that uses dark grey lettering on pale grey backgrounds (or the polychromatic equivalent) rather than that tedious, old-fashioned black and white? Don't do it. Just don't. For anyone whose eyesight is even slightly impaired, it makes the site nearly illegible. I'm still blessed with excellent vision but this has become a real issue for some of my freelance colleagues. I know that's more of a general rant than food site-specific, but I offer it fwiw.

Because it kinda fits here (though I suppose "things the wee ones say" is a topic all its own), the other day my GF's 2-yo granddaughter told us solemnly that "bacon is her favorite colour."

My mother's longtime doctor, the one who delivered me (reaallllly longtime doctor) had a poster on his wall, with sentence of Latin in large type. Beneath it, in tiny letters, was the English translation: "If you can read this, you're over-educated."

I have two of those left over from my restaurant. It's very handy when one buys a used bar fridge from Kijiji, as I did this past week. I've also used it to scope out the refrigerators in potential rentals in the past. In one, the freezer portion of the fridge was at 51F. Not exactly auspicious...

I guess this is more farming than gardening, but it's an interesting read.

I have a few of the old Pillsbury contest cookbooks, in all their dump & stir glory. I look through them periodically with morbid fascination.

As with oil, there seems to be a serious disconnect in how price increases vs. price decreases are passed along to end users.

Indeed. It would seem from the limited information in those articles that it's simply...chocolate...perhaps with the signature fruity notes a bit more to the fore than they are in dark chocolate. I don't see it as being anything much to fuss over, but things are apparently rather desperate in Big Chocolate these days so I imagine they're grasping at straws.

I expect they'll be keen to showcase it.

It's always worth doing, even if the odds are low. When I was in the computer business, every once in a while I'd swap out a malfunctioning part and the computer still wouldn't work. Periodically, it was because the shiny-new replacement was also defective.

I looked at the Oster at Costco last week, and was somewhat tempted. I just don't have a use case for it at present.

My late wife bought a bread machine back when they were very new, and the manual was rather sketchy (this was long enough ago you'd still get that from relatively high-profile Japanese companies). She wrote them a letter explaining that "gas squeeze-out," while accurate in its way, was not the term native English-speakers used to describe punching down the dough. She ended up being hired to re-write the manual (she'd previously done technical writing, though in the computer industry).

Unlike some of the others on that list, strawberry spinach is not especially invasive. It self-seeds reliably, but isn't in a hurry to spread unless you help it along (at least in our climate).

Despite my misadventure I still use them regularly. Sure, they can be dangerous but I've also cut myself with knives (and countertops and piping tips...what can I say, I'm talented) and have burnt myself on any number of things. Cooking customarily involves heat and sharp edges, so the odd bit of ancillary damage to the cook is all but inescapable.

LOL Yes, language is important. My former employer told me once he'd tried rice pudding several times and was unable to sell it. I put it on the menu as "dessert risotto" and sold a bunch. One of my favorite examples was non-culinary. Many years ago a neighbour making a purchase at Dad's bakery (okay, not totally non-culinary) during a rare dry summer asked him "I never see you watering your lawn, but it's the only one around that's still green. How do you do it?" My father, straight-faced, told him he'd "landscaped with native species that required little maintenance," since he was self-employed and had no time for yard work. That sounds so much more impressive than "It's all weeds, dude..."

In a similar vein, you might want to give Strawberry Spinach a shot. My father planted it once and never had to again. The leaves are edible young or mature, and the berries -- while not sweet -- add color and texture to salads. It's quite an interesting plant.

I've done some pretty shameless things with pizza in the line of duty (ie, in the interest of using up odd bits left over from other parts of the operation). They mostly tasted okay, if you were able to wall off that part of your brain from any ideal image of what pizza is supposed to be. I think my proudest moment was when I stumbled across a case of squid in the freezer. The Athens Olympics were underway at the time, so I braised the squid and put it on a pizza with fresh tomatoes, black olives, red onion and feta. I called it "The Olympian." About half the people who came through said "OMG...squid? On a pizza?" and shuddered and moved on. The other half said "OMG!...Squid!...On a pizza!" and ordered it. To me, that was a pretty big win. We eventually ordered in more squid (smaller quantity) and put it on again, because people kept asking.

From The Food Lover's Companion: "A simple cooked pudding made of milk, cornstarch, sugar and vanilla. Gelatin may be substituted for the cornstarch. The hot mixture is poured into a mold, chilled, unmolded and served with a sweet sauce or fresh fruit. The original blancmange used pulverized almonds in lieu of cornstarch." IIRC the ancestral almond-based version was often savory, but that goes back centuries.

It's just a pudding thickened with cornstarch, basically.