chromedome

Ouch. That would make it tough to sleep, alright. We've been cold and rainy here, and the overnight low last night was 7°C/45°F.

I remember liking them as a kid, either just plopped into the milk or soaked briefly in boiling water as Kerry describes. We usually had the bigger Nabisco variety, but I seem to recall both Weetabix and Muffets occasionally cropping up in the stores.

It's cardamom. Two green, one black.

Somewhere on one of the USDA's multitudinous pages, you'll find test results for several grades of ground beef. They measured both the amount of fat lost during cooking and the amount of moisture lost during cooking. Reader's Digest version? The lower the fat level, the more moisture you lose from the beef. Eighty percent lean was a reasonably sweet spot on the continuum, with only modest fat left in the finished product but moisture loss also kept to a moderate level.

To me and my fellow "base brats," growing up, they were referred to as the Newfoundland Air Force GU-11. Yesterday as we were coming out of my local No Frills with my GF's wee granddaughter (age 2) in the basket of the cart, she laughed at the birds orbiting the parking lot and began chanting "It's not a eeeeaagull, it's a seeeeagull..."

I usually chop my own, but my "cheat" for rush jobs is the garlic paste in a squeeze tube, rather than the minced kind in the jar. I find the minced acquires a distinct off-taste (brand doesn't appear to matter, I've experienced several). The squeeze tube tastes much more like fresh, to my taste. YMMV.

The mall where I used to work in downtown Halifax had a Lebanese restaurant called Ray's in its food court. The local indie paper, The Coast, retired the "Best Falafel" category of its annual reader's choice poll because Ray's won every year, without fail. Visitors are usually surprised to find that falafel are right up there with pizza and donairs as the city's late night street food of choice.

I used to buy them at Superstore in BC and Alberta, years ago. Sobeys usually has them as well. It's basically a ham, but from the shoulder rather than the hip. A nice little cut, though you don't get the big slices like you do with an actual ham.

It's hard to tell from the very poor image, but the picture of the chuck tender on that link looks too flat to have generated the steaks I purchased. Humph...might need to inquire further.

Here in Atlantic Canada, No Frills (the discount brand of Loblaw's, the larger of our two national supermarket companies) is now selling "chuck tender" steaks. I don't know if they're the same, but they seem to be pretty good value. We had them the other night, as an experiment (inspired by this thread, natch) and they seemed quite tender at the price. Cooking method was plain old gas grill.

Mine was the kind that heated the water. For me, in my market, that was more cost-effective than the chemicals needed for the low-temp models.

You're right, my bad. Ferdzy's previous comment was the one above that. Obviously the blood level is still too high in my caffeine system.

...though I do note that, downthread, that poster says he's never grown potato onions and doesn't know what they taste like. It could be argued that this somewhat undercuts his credibility on the topic. Personally I have no axe to grind. If it looks like a shallot and tastes like a shallot, I'm okay with it being called a shallot.

I occasionally fantasize about having a small commercial dishwasher at home, like I had in my restaurant. A bit of warming-up time, yes, and buying the supplies would be inconvenient now that I'm not in the business, but that 2-minute cleaning cycle...ah, the luxury! The one I had was a relatively low-priced Fagor, which performed much better than the (more reputable) Moyer-Diebel in the kitchen where I do my cooking classes.

LOL

If Terry Pratchett hadn't been prematurely taken from us, I'd nominate you for inclusion in the Discworld pantheon as the Goddess of Carefully Calculated Excess. (For those unfamiliar with his work, fantasist/satirist Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels included a number of offbeat gods among its characters, including Anoia -- the goddess of stuck drawers -- and Bilious, the "oh-god" of hangovers.)

I've watched 2 1/2 of the three seasons. The episodes can be a bit precious at times, but they're mostly pretty interesting.

Not a super-duper deal, I suppose, but the Home Hardware near me had the KitchenAid pasta roller accessory kit marked down from its original $279 (CDN) to $179. I'd been looking at it for nearly two years, and it occurred to me a few days ago that the store's manager had been doing so as well. So I offered him $100 for it, and he whisked it off the shelf so quickly the underside practically scorched from the friction.

I learned to make polenta originally from an Italian friend, who hailed from Udine.* He used fine white corn, and was scathingly scornful of the coarse yellow variety used to make "peasant food" (his words) in other parts of Italy. *Not far from Venice, and in its sphere of influence.

I buy mine at Dollarama. I like them because they're not too sweet, and go equally well with coffee or tea.

I tried that out a couple of years ago, and found that it turned my 10 minutes/week pen & paper list into a 2 hours/week nightmare. The only thing more painful than making and keeping the lists was trying to actually use the damned thing when I was shopping. Happy it works for you and you like it, but...ugh. I write things down in a notebook as I think of them all week (GF adds to it as well, the notebook sits out) and then check the weekly flyers before shopping. In my neck of the woods the new flyer comes out on Thursday and there's often a batch of 2-day or 3-day doorcrasher specials, so I try to check my list against the sale flyers before I head out. If there's a hot sale on something I don't actually "need right now," but do use regularly, I'll add it to the list.

Some people have prep cooks. Some people outsource it. Pretty much the same result either way, and you don't have payroll taxes...that's a win/win from where I sit.

We'd get maybe one or two jars from relatives, and not necessarily every year. It was much, much too precious to be used this way. For those who don't know, bakeapples (also called cloudberries) are small and yellow-gold and somewhat the size and shape of a raspberry. They grow on very low plants in bogs, so a) harvesting them is slow and hard on the back, and b) it means you'll spend hours serving as lunch for every biting insect within several miles' radius. Newfoundland is renowned for the size, variety, number and ferocity of its biting insects, so that is no light thing (and DEET repellents were just hitting the market during my childhood). When you got a jar of bakeapple jam, you knew someone loved you very, very much.

As a kid who considered the jelly/jam du jour as more or less a condiment for the peanut butter, I experienced the same problem. I eventually arrived at the notion of stirring the jam (it was usually jam at my house) *into* the peanut butter, which immobilized it nicely. Soft white store-bought bread (aka "boughten bread," aka "baker's bread") was unknown in my house, so it was always on Mom's bread. That was white when I was a child, then became whole wheat around the mid-70s. The jam was usually either strawberry or raspberry, because that's what we had most often, but might also be blackberry, blueberry, or partridgeberry and apple (a Newfoundland favorite; partridgeberries are known elsewhere as lingonberries).

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Lasers were once a solution in search of a problem, and they turned out to be pretty useful.