chromedome

Good one. Guests at my cooking classes are always amazed when I put the damp tea towel under my cutting board to keep it from moving...you can almost hear the cumulative sound of the pennies dropping. Inexpensive plastic cutting boards often have a textured back, in the pious belief that this helps keep them from slipping, but -- as the Gerswhins put it -- it ain't necessarily so.

That kind basically *is* regular pasta, with added fibre (inulin, IIRC). You don't get the various other benefits of true whole grain pasta (B-vitamins, etc) but it's at least a modest improvement nutritionally, and as you say the texture and flavor are unobjectionable. My late wife was a big fan.

I suspect you're in the right place. Coming to terms with the current owners of said freezers would be the issue.

Evidently there's a market for hamburgers that resemble dog turds. It's a wonderful world we live in.

They're in pretty much every Canadian supermarket. I suspect they're probably widespread in the US as well, but they're an easy product to overlook if you aren't specifically aware of them and looking for them.

As always, one's mileage and freezer may vary.

I would venture to guess that the early-adopter, food-geek demographic has some value in itself. Businesses are keen to target "influencers," and Anova has a well-established presence within the -- for lack of better terms -- enthusiast, avant-garde portion of the food loving community. For a stodgy, established brand such as Electrolux that's probably a large part of the equation. Dunno about the rest of you, but when I think of Electrolux I still visualize the Dachshund-shaped canister vacuum cleaner my daughter used to ride on as a toddler.

I would consider that a wash, at best, because they're also going to absorb off-flavors from the freezer. I used to do that with stock and opened bottles of wine, and quickly decided it was best to pop them from the tray to a Ziploc bag once they were frozen.

Do you make your own? If so, you could always introduce a puree or liquid in the dough.

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?