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chromedome

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Everything posted by chromedome

  1. I buy mine at Dollarama. I like them because they're not too sweet, and go equally well with coffee or tea.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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).
  6. 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.
  7. Honestly I doubt I'd buy one of these gizmos either (my phone gets used mostly as a backup e-reader, for when I don't have my Kobo to hand) but it seemed an interesting application of the technology. I'm sure it will turn out to be useful in some niches.
  8. I use my nose for that. If it doesn't smell like anything much, it won't taste like anything much. The unfortunate reality is that sometimes, there just *isn't* a good melon in the whole store.
  9. That's the short road to having two freezers to empty...
  10. An interesting device, soon to hit the US market... http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/start-ups/israeli-startup-consumer-physics-says-its-scio-food-analyzer-is-finally-ready-for-prime-timeso-we-took-it-grocery-shopping
  11. I have a set of heavy-duty Wearever aluminum that I accumulated over time through thrift shops. No idea what their colors used to be, they're all bare aluminum now. /highjack
  12. ...but never anything stronger than gin before breakfast.
  13. chromedome

    Fish Cake Herb

    It's usually sold in dried form, though you might find it fresh at a farmer's market.
  14. I did that last year, and it seemed to work fine. I made sorbet with some, and the rest went into watermelon lemonade.
  15. chromedome

    Fish Cake Herb

    FWIW, in my neck of the woods the herb of choice for such things is summer savory. It's not one of the more common herbs, but it's nice to have on hand...it has hints of thyme and sage, but with a pleasantly peppery bite.
  16. One further point I'll mention is that a gloved hand provides a perfect environment (closed, warm, humid) for bacterial growth. Many training programs don't adequately address the necessity of scrupulous handwashing after glove use, and between glove changes.
  17. I'm familiar with the study you cite. Another, conducted more recently, tested numerous hand dryers to assess how far they distribute pathogen-containing droplets. If you're interested, the Dyson AirBlade is the current champ. IIRC, it could transport pathogens up to 30 m/100ft, though there are relatively few pathogens that can survive long on inorganic surfaces in the open air. Either way, I'm a big fan of paper towels as opposed to the huff-and-puff machines. Just to be clear, I'm not anti-glove and don't advocate for their non-use. My primary point was that in the absence of closer scrutiny (and mandatory glove laws), "glove/no glove" tells you little about how safely the kitchen is run. As for your last point, well yeah...absent a mandatory glove law, keeping a given food off your hands is a perfectly good and valid reason for using them. At home, for me personally, it's often the deciding factor.
  18. When I closed my second restaurant I had about 200 pounds of haddock left, and neighbours (actually my now-GF and her now-ex) offered to store it for me in a spare chest freezer in their barn. At some point that spring somebody accidentally shut off the wrong breaker, and by the time I went around to retrieve some of my fish it had all liquefied. That was not a happy day for any of us.
  19. Gloves are clean until they leave the box (the first time, that is...I've seen soiled gloves put back *into* the box). After that, a gloved hand or a bare hand is exactly as sanitary as that person's training and work habits dictate. Glove laws are popular because they give the appearance of sanitation, but they do not ensure the reality.
  20. LOL Yup. The chef I worked with when I was going to culinary school had a saying: "We may eat with the eyes first, but we eat with the mouth *most.*" She was not one for prettifying plates with frills and furbelows, needless to say.
  21. ...and hotly anticipated, I don't doubt.
  22. They're pretty unpredictable here in my neck of the woods, where there's always a high risk of someone sticking 'em in a walk-in cooler at some point along their path to my local supermarket. ...and of course for several months of the year they can get way too cold just sitting on a loading dock.
  23. I used to serve grilled sturgeon at my restaurant. The river here has a healthy wild population of Atlantic shortnosed sturgeon, and a couple of local entrepreneurs captured breeding stock from the river and farmed them. The primary goal was caviar, but sturgeon comes as a side product of that.
  24. I was excited to learn I could get such things through my library, but in practice I mainly use it to view papers in academic journals.
  25. chromedome

    Fruit

    I've found them in Superstore.
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