chromedome

Just FYI barley, even pearled, is quite high in fibre.

Specialty of the house.

Probably, yeah. I think Vancouver was more diverse than most, from the sheer size of its Chinese-origin community, but I'm pretty sure it's predominantly Cantonese. I do remember Hunnan/Yunan places as well as the inevitable Sichuan, and also one Mongolian place before that term was subverted to mean "fried vaguely Asian mall food."

My knives are the Fibrox series, but I adhere to the same logic. A few swipes across the stone and steel, and I'm good to go. In the past I would occasionally sharpen knives for co-workers who lacked the skills, and found that hard-steel knives were an immense PITA.

...and now I know. Thanks for the info. It's been a long time since I lived in Vancouver, where I ate a lot of Chinese. Here in Atlantic Canada it's pretty much just the westernized stuff in sticky sauces, and if you're lucky the local buffet at least does it fairly well (best one in my city is a block away, as it happens). I really must make a point of re-stocking my pantry and revisiting some appropriate cookbooks.

She's in good company. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a recipe on...oh, Epicurious for example, but many other sites are the same...where a commenter recites a laundry-list of changes, then pronounces the recipe a failure and gives it one star.

I used to halve mine, squeeze out the seeds over a strainer, then finish slicing them. Speeded things quite a bit, I found, and I'd reclaim the juice from the bowl under the strainer when I was done (there usually wasn't much). I was using them in sauce quantities, not marmalade quantities, but I expect the principle's the same.

Cool. Cumin is one of my favorite spices, but I don't recall encountering it in Chinese food. Is it a regional thing?

I'd picked the Pats to win, but didn't watch most of the game (my GF has been feeling poorly, so we curled up on the couch under a blanket and binged Twin Peaks) and was shocked at how they got there when all was said and done. I *did* come back to check the score, and was in time to watch the winning touchdown. As you may guess from the above, SB food was minimal chez Chrome. Store-bought tortellini for dinner with caramelized onions and crumbled bacon (lunch was veg-centric, so I didn't miss 'em at dinner), and one piece of chocolate while watching TV.

Thanks.

Excellent. All three of those suggestions were new to me. The bulk foods section will probably account for at least a few of the products in the finished article.

I inherited my grandmother's copy of The American Woman's Cookbook when she died. It's the wartime "Victory" edition, with a full section of rationing-friendly recipes added at the end. It makes for interesting reading.

You'll see very much the same combination along the south shore of Nova Scotia, my home province. Lots of King George's German subjects came to his Canadian colony in the late 18th century, and many families still make their own sauerkraut (a few make black pudding, too, but that's rarer). Many settled around the town of Lunenburg (famous as the home port of the schooner Bluenose), so blood pudding and blood sausage are often called Lunenburg pudding or Lunenburg sausage.

That's kinda cool.

Canadian pricing wouldn't do me any good, alas, as the article is for a US client/audience. Thanks, though.

The instant soups and Fage yogurt are both good picks, I'll follow up and see how they stack up regionally. From what I've been seeing, WF is very competitive in organic products generally, and especially so with their store brand. I don't think I could successfully position chicken wings as any sort of "health food," unfortunately. Do you have WF there in Ontario, or are you border-hopping?

I've said on many occasions that if anyone is left to pronounce an elegy over our current culture/civilization, that will be it.

"Long Pig Longings" was my hypothetical title for an anthropophagical tome.

Thanks, I'll take a look at those.

I'll follow up on the seafood. I don't think I can plausibly put the cheeses forward as a health-food option, at least not in a way that would be accepted by the archetypal fad-driven health-conscious shopper.

Oddly, though we're a backwater in so many other ways, we have a number of very good cheeses here in southern New Brunswick. Armadale Dairy (a Dutch family) makes raw-milk gouda, edam, havarti, and other items such as butter, quark and yogurt. Au Fond des Bois does goat cheeses; no longer raw-milk (alas!) under the new owners but still very good. La Faim du Loup/Bergerie aux Quatre Vents makes raw-milk cheeses from sheep's milk and cow's milk, and Jolly Farmer does a dozen fairly mainstream (cheddar, mozza) but good raw-milk cheeses. Bergerie aux Quatre Vents is especially good, and you can find a few of theirs in specialty shops across the country.

How about groan-worthy company names or advertising slogans? One of my personal favourites comes from Bernardin, a Canadian manufacturer of Mason jars and related accessories. Their slogan? "Because you can."

I'm a big fan of marrow, but I prefer it on toast. The textural contrast moderates the richness nicely. FWIW, marrow fat is -- surprisingly -- largely unsaturated.

"Compound" chips, like the "chocolatey" coating on candy bars, often replace the cocoa butter with cheaper fats; some of those can help the chips hold their shape. As it happens, @Kerry Beal talks a bit about compound chocolate on her site.

You can always use chowder as a filling for bouchees, if you want to stick to finger foods but keep the New England theme.