chromedome

Well, I once absent-mindedly licked the spoon after scooping freshly caramelized sugar out of a pot, so I'm not one to throw the first stone.

My classmates and I at culinary school constructed an entire lexicon of euphemisms for such occasions (or "alternate facts," if you will). Anything that turned out butt-ugly was, of course, "rustic," burnt translated to "deeply caramelized," and so on. As students, of course, we had ample opportunity to work on this vocabulary.

That. In my younger days I was a retail store manager. District office shared space with the Western regional office, which meant that the Regional Manager was there as well as the District Manager. Once a month, we trooped in for a DM's meeting. These ordinarily lasted two hours, and during the entire two hours we dreaded the sound of the door opening. If we were lucky, it was just the district secretary calling a manager to the phone. If we were unlucky, it was the Regional Manager poking his nose in to say "When you're done, Don, if I could just have a word with the troops for a moment?" The Regional Manager was a nice enough guy, but that meant you weren't going to be home for dinner. This was a man who could take 20 minutes just to tell you what time it was, so when he actually had a point or policy he wanted to convey it was excruciating. Typically his "few minutes" translated to anything from 90 minutes to 2 hours on top of the scheduled 2 hour meeting. Ugh.

I have to say I'm in much the same boat, even after following the thread from start to finish.

I got two confirmations...one immediately, and one about a week ago. Whatevs. I'll get it when I get it.

Almost every recipe on every food blog says it is "adapted from" or "inspired by" a recipe from a book or another blogger. Most of those that don't, should. It's how the principle of fair use works out with recipes: As long as you re-cast the instructional portion into your own words, it's not considered plagiarism.

No, like an egg roll. A square of dough, folded over to make a rectangle. Not quite as cylindrical as an egg roll, because one side was flattened/pinched like the ends. I guess "razor clam" might be a better comparison. Some of them would be slightly irregular, because nobody rolls dough perfectly square before cutting (though she was pretty good at that, too). The default filling was dry-curd cottage cheese, but she'd also do sweet ones with fruit fillings as desserts. Those tended to be smaller. She's still kicking, btw. She and her hubby are well into their 90s, and recently celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary.

I keep potato starch in my pantry for thickening purposes. Works pretty well, reheats better than flour-thickened or cornstarch-thickened.

My ex-wife's Mennonite grandmother made hers rectangular (like egg rolls) for the same reason.

I'm similarly ambivalent. I thought pull-out bottom drawers sounded wonderful until I actually had a fridge with the bottom-drawer freezer. Now that I have my big upright, of course, the fridge freezer holds just my gf's popsicles, several pounds of butter bought on sale, and a few containers of leftovers for quick reheating (the microwave is two feet away).

It's the essence of grandparenting, as well.

My only advancement over that is to use multiple pans, so the base of each melts its own little round on top of the rack. On one occasion, when I was moving and therefore in a real hurry, I put a catch-basin in the bottom and poured warm water over the frost until it yielded. It was messy and a royal PITA, but fast. Don't know I'd do it again except under similar duress.

LOL @Porthos When my son was in high school I taught him several fundamental cooking techniques, and also bought him a basic knife kit (chef knife, slicer and paring knife) in the industrial plastic-handled Henkels. He was thrilled, and -- since he was in the cooking module at his school -- exclaimed about taking his own knives to the next class. "Hey, Warren," I asked him, "Refresh my memory...why was it again that your school was on lockdown last Wednesday?" "Because some freakin' idiot brought a knife to scho-...oh."

Describing it as "slingshot bread" made me envision Ellie Mae hurling biscuits at Jethro.

I can't speak to that because I usually piped the fillings for mine. I can say that I usually had to use less filling than called for, otherwise I'd struggle to get them sealed. If I'm making them regularly (ie, when I had 'em on my menu at the restaurant) I eventually get to the point where they can be filled-to-the-brim, otherwise I'd just make the ravioli larger than necessary and then trim them down to size so the ratio of pasta to filling would be right.

Up here they sell 'em at the Dollarama chain of dollar stores. I keep meaning to buy some one of these days, but I never remember when I'm actually in the store.

I also use Finish pods. No rinsing, no pre-soak, no special treatment, no Jet-Dry, no problems. My dishwasher is an elderly Kenmore portable, so it's not as if the machine's raw power compensates for any shortcomings in the detergent.

Learning there's a clam species called the "incongruous ark" made me as happy as a clam.

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.