chromedome

My apologies to anyone who's already familiar with his work, but I tripped across blogger/author The Angry Chef earlier today, and thought many here would appreciate him as much as I now do. He's a longtime chef with a degree in microbiology, and spends his free time in a quixotic quest to debunk nutritional idiocy with solid scientific research and a degree of asperity. Or as he puts it, his blog is "the home of evidence-based profanity."

Lobsters were on at a relatively decent price for Father's Day ($7.88/ea for 1 to 1 1/4 pounds) so I bought a couple. More for my GF than for me...she's on day 6 of no tobacco, and I thought she deserved a bit of a treat. They were precooked at the store, so I just picked the meat and we had them with broad noodles and cream sauce and steamed veg.

That's very discouraging.

I guess that means the "greedy bastards" won. ETA: ...or at least, didn't do badly out of the transaction.

I'm partial to Terra Chips, though I don't splurge on 'em often. Their standard mix includes beetroot chips, but they also have a "Sweets & Beets" mix with just beets and sweet potatoes.

I dunno...unsolicited egg whites? Even on a "no good deed goes unpunished" basis, that's edging into Mother Teresa territory.

True enough. Though as far as that goes, I usually only go over 3 or 4 times a year. Having something to pick up pretty much determines when I'll go. I should clarify that it's not a true PO box but merely a disposable mailing address through ACE Hardware there, so it doesn't cost me anything.

I have a PO box in Calais, ME, for that very reason.

LOL Mine are just going in. Traditionally in these parts it's the May long weekend for planting from seed, and "full moon in June" (ie, this weekend) is the folkloric guideline to avoiding a late frost. To put that into perspective, I was at my mother's place last week and there were frost warnings on Monday and Tuesday. Admittedly it's been a cool spring even by local standards, but still...it shows the "old wives" had learned from bitter experience.

Usually the stricture against using a toaster oven is just because the heating element is too close, and scorches the top of the item being cooked. I think you're probably savvy enough to correct for that.

There's a fish called hoki? I would absolutely, positively, have to use it to make poke. Just 'cause.

The roots grow surprisingly large. When we moved my grandmother's plants up the hill from her old house (halfway from lake to road) to her new house (up closer to the road) some of the roots were larger than my leg. Mind you, that patch had been in its previous location for four decades or so, so you won't see that any time soon.

I found them at Pete Luckett's winery in Nova Scotia, where they were set out for sampling. I found them tasty, but a bit "seedy."

I love the cake. I knew someone who'd done a meatloaf cake with mashed potato "icing" for her meat-and-potatoes hubby one year, but this is definitely at a higher level.

I don't usually have par-cooked potatoes on hand. I start the potatoes when I decide on soup, then pull a container or two of the corresponding soup out of the freezer. Nuke it enough for the soup to come out of the container, then drop it in a pot on the stove to finish reheating. If you dice your potatoes to spoon size, they'll cook in about the length of time needed for the soup to reheat. If I'm on the ball I'll start a bit early so I can drain the potatoes and add them to the soup to finish cooking and absorb some of the flavor, but often I just don't bother.

Hmm. I did that when I bought my house in the 90s. By the end of the second summer it had extended to the neighbour's yard, and had colonized most of the lower part of mine. Admittedly, I'd been incautious enough to plant it in a place where the soil stayed damp because of the hillside's natural drainage. If you're in a dry climate (I don't remember your location) you might get away with it.

Ditto. I *do* make and freeze those soups, mind you, but w/o the potatoes. I cook those separately when I take the soup out of the freezer, and combine them at the end.

The place I used to work heated them in the salamander, then spread them with a paste made of sun-dried tomatoes and covered the paste with a slice of Swiss. We'd slide it back under the salamander to melt the cheese, then serve it on grilled sourdough. It was a good sandwich, I remember it very fondly and re-create it at home whenever I make meatloaf.

Son of a gun. I never knew that...looking forward to next spring, now. Plenty of hostas around the house, I could certainly sacrifice a few nice young shoots without making a dent in them.

Agreed. A palpable oxymoron.

I just set out my first plants, a few dozen garlic from the strain my father'd been hand-selecting for size. When plump and freshly harvested, individual cloves in the 20-30 g range (ie, about an ounce) are not unusual.

I have no authoritative answer to offer, but I believe it's just that they're small enough, and have the right texture, to crunch up nicely in your mortar and pestle with the other spices once they're toasted.

I was surprised that my tarragon (which is Mediterranean, after all) over-wintered so well in frigid Alberta. In the spring it was waist-high before even my radishes had come up.

An amazing piece of work, and an even better story.

I "more or less" clean as I go. Things I'll be re-using (ie, favorite knives) get washed right away. Small items I'm done with go to the dishwasher, large items get rinsed and stacked alongside the sink for later hand-washing. I wipe down and sanitize counters, and put away ingredients, as needed. The stack of stuff beside the sink may or may not get washed after the meal, depending on how I'm feeling. If I'm tired, or just plain have better things to do, I'll put off the hand-washing until after lunch the next day (mornings are writing time).