chromedome

An interesting thread...I went back to the beginning and read it all. I grew up in Nova Scotia, and hot cereal of various kinds was our usual cold-weather breakfast. My sister and I favored oatmeal (always rolled oats, then) while my mother preferred Cream of Wheat. We also had multi-grain Red River or Vita-B (nobody's mentioned the latter, so it might have been an Eastern Canadian thing) as a change of pace. My ex-wife grew up with lumpy Cream of Wheat, so I had to learn to make it for her with just the right size and number of lumps. As an adult I discovered that I enjoyed steel-cut oats much more than rolled, so that's now my default breakfast year-round. My usual batch is one cup of oats to 4 cups of water, which gives me five mornings' breakfasts. I usually make it during the day, then glop it into a plastic container and refrigerate it after it cools. In the morning I microwave to reheat it while my toaster does its thing. A bowl of oatmeal and two small slices of homemade ww toast sees me through quite nicely until lunch (on those infrequent occasions when I have some variation of the Standard Egg Breakfast™ instead, I feel bloated for an hour or two and then ravenous for the rest of the morning).

Freeken: (v.) 1. The act of cooking freekeh. 2. A reaction to badly cooked freekeh.

The most "local" one I know of is in Fredericton, an hour or so away depending on the roads. For now, I'm perfectly happy with the cracked variety.

Sounds like you probably need to replace the seal. They do wear out over time.

I love the name, and the label. If I saw that in a store I'd have to try it. I recently brought home a bottle of this one for similar reasons...saw the label, and had to give it a try. Same thing with Shawinigan Handshake, though the name requires a bit of explanation for non-Canadians. Also a bit more.

We eat a lot of it, too, but I haven't seen it here in whole-kernel form. Bulk Barn and Superstore carry it in a cracked version.

That's the matchup I'd picked. If it goes that way, I'd take the Pats over Atlanta despite their high-octane offence.

One of my favorite SB memories is of my then-young daughter watching the Rolling Stones' halftime show with me. After watching Jagger dance and writhe across the stage for 20 minutes (or whatever it was) she opined gravely, "He's a wiggly person."

Yup, good matchups tonight. Packers would be an easier choice if their secondary was healthy, though. Tough to favor a banged-up unit against Matt R et al. That being said, Atlanta's secondary is less than stellar. Should be a wildly entertaining game, however it ends.

FWIW, I tried the one-ingredient banana ice cream with mango last year. I found that the combination was less than the sum of its parts...the woodsy, pine-like note in the mangos brought out the similar note in dead-ripe bananas, and somehow the whole thing was astringent like over-steeped tea. I've always found underripe bananas rather astringent as well, but I suspect you could probably make it work with just-ripe bananas and some kind of additional sweetening. I wasn't interested enough to pursue it further at that time.

No news to anyone here... http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/01/18/509675621/not-just-a-crock-the-viral-word-of-mouth-success-of-instant-pot?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

They're good when stuffed with sausage or lamb and baked. You'll find any number of recipes for savory stuffed apples (or quinces) if you poke around a bit.

It's a bilingual country..."ailes" and "poulet" are available options as well.

Yeah, it's more of a broad analogy than an equivalency.

There's a Chinese restaurant up the road in Fredericton that sets those out on its buffet. My late California-bred wife didn't know what they were called either, so we just referred to them as "Chinese tamales."

It was my late wife who finally taught me -- in my late forties -- to enjoy zucchini, as opposed to hiding it in sauces and suchlike. ...and, in one of life's little ironies, my current gf is allergic to them, so now that I actually like them (in some preparations) I never eat them.

Here in my neck of the woods, figures ("toys") of barley sugar have been a Christmas tradition for the best part of a century. One or two companies still make them...I have a couple of bags destined for my step-grandkids in California (I'm a bit late getting them in the mail).

You need a colander with fairly large holes to make it work properly. If the bits of batter dropping into the water are too small, I find they tend to just disperse and give you starchy water. An alternative is to pipe from a bag through a small tip. I found that worked better, so it's the method I used until I got the proper tool for the job (mine's a round plastic one, sized to fit on top of the pot, and you use a flexible scraper to force the batter through). You can also just cut the batter off a cutting board, but I never really got the hang of that technique.

When my restaurant was open, I had a wonderful local tea vendor...an elderly couple who sold at the city market, and imported directly from a distributor in China. They carried all the "10 famous teas" (actually 16 or 17 of them...I understand there's a lot of disagreement over exactly which teas belong on the list) as well as other noteworthy but more mainstream offerings. I didn't taste my way through them as systematically as you're doing here, and lacked the experience to brew and taste them this critically in any case, but they were remarkable.

My long-ago best friend in Vancouver, a first-generation Italian-Canadian from Friuli, insisted on fine-to-medium white cornmeal for polenta. Coarse yellow cornmeal, he sniffed, was fine for the coarse peasants of more southerly climes.

I favor good-quality canned whole tomatoes, because here in Atlantic Canada garden-fresh tomatoes come and go in a few weeks and store-bought are usually pretty blah. I use canned rather than diced, because diced tomatoes have calcium chloride added to firm up the cell walls and keep the chunks from breaking down. I look for a smooth rather than a chunky texture in mine, hence whole tomatoes (or even crushed, in a pinch).

It's not just the humane thing, it's the prudent long-term thing to do. Kids with full bellies learn better, focus better, behave better. Kids with full bellies are less likely to turn to illicit activities just to survive. There are lots of other moving parts there, too, but the old adage about the "ounce of prevention" still applies.

You mean the microwave technique in the link?

No, but staying functional without it is sometimes challenging. Especially if you're working multiple jobs, as many SNAP recipients are. Essentially, income supports subsidize employers who don't pay a living wage. Of course, that's a whole other discussion. I don't care for soft drinks myself, basically all I drink is water, tea and one cherished cup of strong coffee a day. Still, there's something to be said for that one little "luxury" that makes the rest bearable. A can of Coke wouldn't be that for me, but I always had butter for table use when my kids were growing up, even during times when I fed the family for a month on what most people considered a week's budget. It was worth it to me.

I was utterly boggled by some of my classmates' ignorance of food and cooking in the broad sense. One young lady in my class was incensed when the instructor told her she had to taste everything she cooked. Apparently -- I kid you not -- from earliest childhood onward, she'd eaten literally nothing but canned soup and boxed mac and cheese, and was livid at being told she would have to put other foods in her mouth. Apparently her reason for getting a culinary certificate was to work at a retirement home where she had an "in" due to nepotism. I feel for the residents, I really do.