chromedome

Here you go...

A followup to my earlier post about garlic from my father's garden...I had occasion to fetch out a fresh bulb tonight while I was cooking. Here's the pictorial evidence:

I took my sweetie's oldest granddaughter (age 5) up the block to an abandoned apple tree, and filled a couple of shopping bags with small but surprisingly good apples. The young 'un, of course, wanted to throw away anything with the slightest imperfection. She decided we should make apple muffins out of them, so I obliged.

Yup. For me, this portion of the discussion could just as easily go in the "Never Again Will I..." thread.

I'm with you on the garlic thing. My father grows his own and has been selecting for size for 20-odd years, so one clove from his equals 2 to 3 (or more) from supermarket garlic. I've gotten up to 1/4 cup of finely minced garlic from one clove. Makes "far too much" far easier to achieve.

I should point out that not all hotel restaurants are run by the hotel. Company-owned spaces are often just there as an adjunct of the primary (room-renting) business. Independent operators leasing space in a hotel, as I was, are more motivated to turn a profit/attract a clientele in their own right.

Sometimes it's good to set a project aside for a little while, and come back to it with fresh eyes. You never know what your subconscious will come up with while you're working on other things.

I saw this in the news before it was posted here, and have been thinking about it ever since. Leaving aside the merits/question marks of this particular case, I have to think that at some point cases will go to trial. If a restaurant is informed of a potentially-lethal allergy, accepts responsibility for delivering a safe meal and then fails to do so, it seems likely to me that charges will be laid. I'd expect it to happen first in the US, where district attorneys are political animals, as opposed to Canada where prosecutors are simply government employees. I refer here to criminal trials, rather than civil liability issues. I'm sure there are already plenty of the latter.

Like eating beans, you build up to it. Back when I was eating hot chilies regularly, a habanero was no big deal. I likened it to meeting a stranger's large dog: No fear, as such, but a measure of respect. A Moruga Scorpion or a Carolina Reaper, now...those would be more akin to meeting a polar bear or a tiger. Major precautions required. I was eventually using roughly 1 habanero per cup of fresh salsa. I took some over to the neighbours' house one night, and still vividly remember the husband -- a drinker, and a very large man -- turning brick red and having to mop rivers of sweat from his brow. He didn't stop eating it, though. Life takes strange turns, sometimes. Those neighbours separated about six months before my wife died, and his former wife is now my girlfriend.

Back when my parents owned their bakery, they quickly discovered that the loss-leader price on flour at a supermarket was lower than the wholesale price for small establishments like theirs. So one day I trekked with my father to the local IGA (long since gone) to help load up their little Subaru wagon with 10kg sacks of flour, at a wicked-low doorcrasher price. One of the staff was waiting for an elderly lady to bring her car around, so he could load her groceries. He gave us that "too many trips to the buffet" look employees sometimes use, and asked snarkily "Doing a little baking, are we?" "No," I told him. "We're putting in a flour garden." My dad still laughs over that one, 20-odd years later.

As I read it, he tore a hole in his esophagus from vomiting. Presumably one might experience similarly evil effects from improperly-stored Thanksgiving leftovers, or a bottle or two of hooch.

I don't recall, off the top of my head. I'll check next time I'm in Sobey's and let you know.

LOL Yeah, I'll put that on my wish list right behind a Hobart.

I used to do a stuffed habanero appetizer. It sold pretty well.

No, not really. At my own place I was basically a one-man show, and if I didn't work my guests didn't get fed. So I worked. I'm sure in a union environment there would have been paperwork to do and suchlike, and possibly a workplace safety inquiry if the injury was serious, but in the case of those injuries they were of the "bandage will take care of it for now" variety. It did take almost 2 years to get full sensation back in that fingertip, but it was physically healed up in less than two weeks. As for the catering orders, I had a well-drilled and rather large team around me (we did a million in catering that year, and $3 million out of the storefront) so it was more a matter of assessing our stock of ingredients and what slack we had in our existing commitments. Mostly it amounted to more of the same (admittedly, rather a lot more of the same) but we had the production capacity to handle it.

LOL That would be like a garden having a plant filter.

(sigh) Today's breakfast? Lightly scorched steel-cut oats. Again. If I'm going to work while breakfast is cooking, I gotta remember to set timers.

That was the problem at the last place I worked for someone else as their chef de cuisine. The owners were amateurs, who -- to give them due credit -- had an excellent, well-thought out concept and a sound business plan. Their issue was that they expected the kitchen staff -- at 50 cents over minimum wage -- to work as if they had an ownership stake in the place. Even worse, failure to live up to this unrealistic expectation brought an almost-immediate storm of criticism and bitchiness, with the predictable result that cooks left very quickly. That's not a good thing at the best of times, but especially so in a small town where word spreads in a hurry. We were always short at least one body, and usually more. I told them when they hired me that I wasn't a new broom kind of guy, but more about incremental improvement. It'd take about three months, I told them, to get a solid feel for their operation and for the strengths and weaknesses of the kitchen staff (and them, though I didn't say that) and start to build some rapport. Promptly at the three-month mark, just when I was starting to get some buy-in from the cooks and turn things around, they canned me for not changing things fast enough. Also, they felt I should have fired the "losers" in the kitchen and hired better people. After all, that's why they were paying the big bucks (me: HA!) for an experienced chef.

You pretty much *have* to have food. Many guests will indeed want to explore the surrounding restaurants (assuming there are any) but many won't. Providing a "default option" means you don't lose 'em to a competitor up the road. My restaurant was in a small seaside hotel, and there was no other place to eat within 40 minutes' drive unless you count takeout pizza from the gas station. That's an extreme example, of course.

As an Atlantic Canadian, like @Peter the eater, I live in something of a molasses heartland. You know those great big storage tanks you see at oil refineries and suchlike? Here in Saint John, there's one of those full of molasses along the harbour front. Saint John is home to Crosby's, the major Canadian molasses producer. Stores here sell it in the 4 litre (ie, metric gallon) plastic jug, as well as the more common milk-carton format.

I've got the quintessential cheap-and-disposable single induction hob, a low-end Salton that goes up to 1800 watts. My father passed it along to me when he upgraded, and I've only just recently started to play with it. As it happens, my flat-bottomed wok was one of the first things I used with it. It heats very well, and in my case I mostly use it screaming-hot for stir fries so I don't need a lot of fine temperature control. So I'd say it's a "go," from that perspective. Bear in mind that a flat-bottomed wok can warp, like any other pan, and become less usable over time on the induction hob. My main issue is that I just plain hate working with a flat-bottomed wok. To me, it's not a wok at all but a goofy frying pan with a high sides. I've been looking for a "real" wok with a rounded bottom, but they're not easy to find in small-town Atlantic Canada. I have a small single-burner butane stove (this one), which can be used indoors as long as you've got even modest ventilation, and I plan to use that for work cookery once I find a replacement wok. In limited experimentation, I'm pretty pleased with the little induction hob. It brought 2 cups of water to a full rolling boil in 2 minutes and 20 seconds, while the same quantity of water in the same pot took 5 minutes and 30 seconds on my conventional electric range (ceramic cooktop). As always, YMMV.

No, I couldn't. I just told him I'd take it.

I had a prep cook in Edmonton who was a first-gen Canadian of Dutch parentage. He once described dinner at his grandparents' house to me as "everything mashed up together, with gravy on it." Now I know what to call that.

Paderno stuff is generally well-made, from what I've seen. I own a few pieces. The company's based in Atlantic Canada, so I see a lot of it up here. I'm not sure how familiar it is Stateside, but the workmanship and materials are good.

That's the desired end state for any "war story," and most pros have a few. There was the night I took the end off a pinkie finger with a mandoline (I was in fact using the grip, but the veg in question tipped over and I rammed my finger onto the blade)...got it bandaged up by the landlord's niece, an RN, and finished service with the aid of a larger-than-usual number of gloves. There was the weekend when I shucked 200 lbs of cooked lobster, and got an invisible scratch on my thumb that turned into a nasty infection and blew my thumb up to the size of a nice plum. Couldn't get in to the doctor (I was in a remote fishing town) until after dinner service needed to start, so I lanced and bandaged it myself and served dinner. I tried to work through lunch service the day I passed a kidney stone, too, but that didn't work out so well. Apparently it alarms the customers when you turn white and collapse to the floor, clutching your abdomen. Who knew? The two I was proudest of, though, didn't involve personal injury but last-minute panic. One was a lost catering order for 40 people, discovered exactly 23 minutes before the delivery was supposed to leave. Pulled that one together out of what we had on hand (luck was involved...I needed beef gravy to fill the order, and we happened to have a huge batch of beef stew as one of the lunch specials). The other was many (Canadian) Thanksgivings ago, at the same job, when we got a sheepish last-minute call from a local call centre, asking if we could do a full-on turkey meal with all the trimmings for 800 people...the very next day. They'd planned on just paying for everyone to eat at their building's cafeteria, you see, but didn't reckon on the cafeteria (like every business in the building except them) being closed because of the holiday. I checked my walk-ins, told 'em to take the order, and delivered it on time the next day. That was a proud moment, and management gave a nice little bonus to everyone involved in pulling it together. Apologies for derailing the thread, but it's at least somewhat related.