chromedome

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/27/pompeii-fresco-find-possibly-depicts-2000-year-old-form-of-pizza

I'm in the "roll out of bed and eat immediately" camp, but my usual breakfast is already-prepared steel-cut oats so prep is 1 minute and 40 seconds in the microwave. Boring and not photogenic, which is why I seldom participate in the breakfast thread. My GF is a late sleeper by inclination and work schedule, so she's up at noon and ready to contemplate food by 8PM or thereabouts. So any kind of elaborate breakfast is a very occasional thing done with the grandkids. Waffles and suchlike.

Weirdly, here in Atlantic Canada, a significant minority insist that it's "just not chili" without olives in it. Usually the most generic, pimento-stuffed kind. I don't get it.

Inevitably, it's been memed.

Well, "hen in the yard" is as low as it can get, though it comes up a bit if you're feeding it store-bought feed and/or scraps from your kitchen. But that's not the point, or the target, because the cumulative number of hens in yards across the continent is less than a rounding error relative to the total number of chickens. If the lab-grown version can get its costs and carbon footprint below those of battery-raised, factory-farmed meat chickens, it'll be a net positive. (ETA: ...and of course chickens have a far lower carbon footprint than pork, lamb, beef, etc) That didn't work out with vertical farming (as Tamar Haspel put it, "Lettuce is cheap and power is expensive, why did anyone think this would work?") but potentially the questions of scale could be resolved for lab-grown meat. And yes, "potentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I actually posed that question somewhere here on the board a number of years ago, because I was genuinely interested to hear some differing viewpoints on the subject, but it seems vegans are in short supply on eG. I suppose it would weaken the ethical argument somewhat ("No animals were harmed in the preparation of this dish!") though not the health-related arguments. To be clear, I'm personally an omnivore so I have no skin in the game, I was just curious. Major players like Perdue are throwing significant funding into this research, on the basis that if it becomes "the next thing" they want to profit from it (just as, in an unrelated field, a Shell Oil subsidiary is the world's leading vendor of grid-scale battery storage for renewables). I'm just turning 60 this year, and have lots of nonagenarians on both sides of my family, so barring accidents I expect these products to come to market during my lifetime. As/if/when they do, I don't anticipate treating them any differently than I do "real" meats. I tend to shop opportunistically - looking for bargains and planning my meals accordingly, rather than planning a meal and then shopping for it - so, as always, I'll follow the deals. For anyone who's interested in a nuts-and-bolts look at the technology from the industry's perspective, here's a link I'd posted elsewhere a few days ago. https://www.crbgroup.com/insights/food-beverage/cultured-meat#:~:text=Cultured meat—also known as,a variety of meat products.

Whole Foods' 365 Organic frozen blackberries are being recalled for possible listeria contamination. The recall affects BC and Ontario. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/365-whole-foods-market-brand-organic-blackberries-frozen-recalled-due-possible?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Realized the other day that a year from now will be 45 for me. I doubt anyone will organize a reunion, though. There were only 12 in my graduating class, and I doubt any two of us live within 1000 km of each other these days.

I'm with Dave the Cook, the question lends itself to empirical verification. Two pieces of meat, identical cooking conditions, one with the additions and one without. Why get bogged down in theory, when you can resolve it in practice? I'd be curious to know the outcome, even if I never actually make use of the information.

Shades of the famous "stone soup" of yore.

Stealing a few minutes during my lunch for an update. One of our does has been a bit of an escape artist (her name is Aster, nicknamed "pain in my"), and what with one thing and another we'd never managed to get a litter out of her. Either she was AWL at the crucial moment, or her breeding didn't "take," or what have you (breeders can and do manually assist, but we're not that hard-core). Recently she did give us a small litter, but when we checked on them after 24 hours one had died and the remaining three were clearly hungry and weak. Whether she was rejecting them or just plain clueless is uncertain, but we transferred them to the next cage where the super-reliable Posey had just had her own litter. All of them are now fat and flourishing, so there was no issue with her accepting them. That's probably not universally true, but it worked for us in this instance. We'd also ordered up a quantity of watering containers for the cages. Last year, as I'd mentioned earlier, we had a gravity-fed system of hoses running to nipples attached to the cages. This wasn't ideal, and we thought individual waterers were probably a better solution than open dishes which can easily be fouled or spilled. So we brought in a bunch and put them on the outdoor cages (the youngsters) and a few of the indoor cages. We need to order more when cash flow permits, because the plan for winter is to have two sets and simply swap them out twice/day so there's a non-frozen source of water. A few days later we randomly had a dead adolescent, followed by a couple more on the ensuing days. After some panic, and a few sad morning burials, I eventually deduced that while most of the bunnies had successfully adapted to their new drinkers, a couple hadn't and were dying of dehydration. I've gone back to having an open dish in that one cage as a backup, and there were no more deaths after that. The two younger litters behind that one adapted with no issues, so it seems as long as they're exposed early in life they'll figure it out. Lesson learned. We're now at the point of actively advertising our current bucks for rehoming as pets or breeders, and Aster as a pet (though someone took on our other problematic doe to see if a change of scenery would help, so who knows?). The older adolescents hit harvest age last week but we didn't have time to do the deed, so that will have to happen this weekend before I go to NS for my monthly visit (my sister will be here from Vancouver, so it's this year's Really Big Deal visit). That in turn will free up a cage for the now-departed Silverbell's fast-growing litter to come outside and live on the grass in one of the larger cages. Our next-gen bucks are California/Rex and California/New Zealand crosses, so they'll be smaller when full-grown than our current Flemish Giants but they grow more quickly to harvest weight and have a better meat-to-bone ratio. We'll be breeding them into our current Flemish bloodlines, with the ultimate goal of having bunnies that grow somewhat larger than the California crosses but somewhat faster than the Flemish Giants. We'll see how that plays out.

I'm mildly surprised the allium flavors/aromas don't penetrate the corks. Though I suppose the bottles in your wine fridge are probably the ones earmarked for near-term consumption, so it probably doesn't much matter.

It's good to have answers, however unpalatable they may be (not to mention the food).

Ours are just coming, and I'll probably hit a U-Pick at some point in the next little while. In my neck of the woods, a biscuit is considered the correct base for "real" strawberry shortcake. Ordinarily it's plain ol' whipped cream rather than sour cream, but I like how you roll.

Evidently I'm forgiven, she came out for pets when I got home from the doctor (and all is well on the urology front, if anyone wondered).

We've trying to rehome our little house bunny, Tina, for a couple of weeks but haven't yet been successful. I've recently upgraded our fenced-in back yard to make it more critter-proof in both directions (ie, Wembley can go out to use the facilities but not carry on down to the road to race the cars), so yesterday we decided to give her the opportunity to live a larger life out there (she's gotten pretty big for that indoor cage). So she has a large and comfy nest box filled with straw, and a yard filled with all the clover and dandelions she can eat, and lots of sunshine and fresh air. There's a marginal risk from birds of prey but our cats come and go unscathed, so it seems that any raptor large enough to be problematic gives the immediate area of the house a wide berth. Overall she seems happy, but this morning when I went out to feed the rest of the rabbits and stopped to give her some pets and some sweet words (our usual morning routine), she flounced away. Clearly she's Not Speaking To Me Right Now, which amused me greatly. It was just like watching my 8-yo granddaughter when she's gotten steamed about something. I'll post more later; just stole a few minutes before heading into town for a medical appointment (just routine followup with the urologist, there'll be a similar one with the oncologist in September).

Right? Wouldn't have been much good to me had the garden been upwind, of course. My late wife wouldn't have stood for that.

Yeah, they get marked up a time or two before they hit Canadian shelves.

When I closed my restaurants I had a couple of hundred pounds of frozen haddock left over, and no place to store it. A friend who lived nearby offered me the use of her spare chest freezer, out in the barn, At some point that spring somebody shut off the wrong breaker, cutting off power to the freezer. It was late spring before I'd run through the haddock in my fridge freezer, and went to retrieve a couple of bags from hers. The haddock had, by then, molded and liquefied. The freezer was a write-off, and the barn was pretty whiffy as well (and let me just say that cleaning out the freezer and disposing of the fish was one of the most disgusting things I've ever had to do in my life). Amazingly, she didn't hold it against me. In fact, she's now my GF. (Disclaimer: I absolutely do NOT endorse leaving fish to rot in a woman's freezer as a courtship technique)

An industry-facing view of the challenges facing the "cell-cultured meat" industry, for anyone who's interested in seeing how it's perceived from that side of the counter. https://www.crbgroup.com/insights/food-beverage/cultured-meat#:~:text=Cultured meat—also known as,a variety of meat products.

I share a house with three grandkids. Most recent incident was a tall bottle of apple juice, with the lid cross-threaded, and then replaced on its side on a shelf because the pockets on the door were full. Sigh. I also check the kitchen frequently to make sure the French-door fridge has been properly closed.

There's an interesting new study been published in Nature Communications. The authors have done something that's unusual and difficult in dietary research; they've constructed a controlled experiment comparing and contrasting two very specific diets. One was a version of the much-maligned "standard Western diet," the other was a diet high in fiber and resistant starches. The result, after analysis, was that the high-fiber diet resulted in fewer calories being consumed by the host (ie, the human) and more being consumed by the gut's microbiota. Here are links to the study itself, and to a layperson-friendly explanation on WaPO: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38778-x https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/13/weight-loss-calories-fiber-microbiome/ A number of caveats apply, including the small number of test subjects (17 total) and the short duration of the study (22 days), but given the inherent difficulty in getting volunteers to live in confinement and eat a measured diet, those are probably unavoidable. Given the constraints, the researchers did a pretty remarkable job of identifying and coping with potentially confounding factors (the research equivalent of HACCP, if you will). It's at most a foundation for future research to build on, but it's a good foundation methodologically.

I can't answer for anyone else's experience, but I have personally seen a teen eat 2 packages of instant noodles (not Momofuku, mind you) before dinner "just to hold me over." And then polish off a fair-sized meal afterwards.