chromedome

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.

I must have missed that one amid the flood of non-food recalls this past couple of days. There's also an update to the recall on Saladitos lupini that I'd posted earlier, they're now known to have been sold in Ontario and Nova Scotia as well.

I've read a few of her books, and found them excellent and well-written. Used a couple of her recipes in cooking classes, and they turned out as they were supposed to. IMO, that's the desired combination in a cookbook writer.

Apparently Netflix is opening a limited-time popup with chefs from some of its cooking shows. That's...interesting. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/13/netflix-is-opening-its-first-restaurant.html

When making eggs for the grandkids, I'll often follow the same basic procedure but add a food coloring of their choice to the whites. The original point of departure for this was, unsurprisingly, Green Eggs and Ham. It's a fun little thing to do.

What they really needed was for one of their other products to be a hit. By all accounts their heated blender was a perfectly decent product, and they had their own sous vide circulator, etc, but nothing else they'd come up with really filled a gap the way the IP did. Adding an air fryer lid to the IP was at most an evolutionary step, but otherwise it was all "me too-ism."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/instant-brands-bankruptcy-1.6874487

It wasn't, for me. Maybe they have a limit on free articles/month? Obviously I don't trip across Pennsylvanian publications very often.

Found this article about three tweets deep in a discussion somewhere or other, and found it quite fascinating (having been basically a one-man show at my own rather less-exalted place). https://www.phillymag.com/foobooz/2023/05/13/alexandra-holt-roxanne/

Having said that, mind you, if you care to post (or DM me) links to her papers, GF and I would be keen to have a look at 'em. I don't know how much is applicable to rabbits, but it would still be interesting.

Oy. Yeah, I don't plan on gaining that level of expertise. I just feed 'em.

There is a saying that "the dosage makes the poison;" meaning that some things can be ingested safely, or even have beneficial results, in a given quantity. That last phrase is key: "...in a given quantity." As Pastrygirl said upthread, an excess of perfectly good potable water can kill you (this is not a hypothetical, it's happened). Most of the world's medicines, herbs, etc are toxic at levels in excess of their recommended dosage, even familiar ones like Tylenol (and in fact, Canada recently lowered its maximum allowable dosage for Tylenol). In the case of botulinum toxin - which is what you're dicing with in this particular instance - a lethal dose for humans is considered to be in the range of 2 billionths of a gram per kilo of body weight. It's considered to be the most potent toxin yet identified by science. It is, to be blunt, not something to fuck around with. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/there-s-toxicity-and-there-s-toxicity

Oh, we've already learned that breeding for color is an exercise in randomness. We bred our grey doe to our white buck, for example, and got 2 grey, 1 black and 5 white kits. I haven't looked into the genetics of it myself but my GF has. If I understand the scenario correctly, it takes a few generations of selecting for color-dominance before you consistently get uniform litters. In our case, for example, white doe Sugar consistently gives us all-white litters when bred with white buck Snowball, but her littermate Salt did not. So make of that what you will.

Well, now. This is a line of research I hadn't stumbled across before, and it's certainly intriguing. If they can figure it out, it will provide a new path to hybridization that could create stable crops with seeds that can be saved for reuse. https://www.science.org/content/article/game-changer-scientists-are-genetically-engineering-crops-clone-themselves

I believe I've mentioned a time or two that our white buck, Snowball, is a big fella even by Flemish Giant standards. Here's the photographic evidence:

I suspect we may be related...

The notion of a Spam-carving contest put me in mind of this comedy about butter-carving competitions from a decade or so ago. Well worth watching, btw, if your sense of humor skews just that little bit dark. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1349451/

My daughter sent me this one (c/o the "Dubious Restaurant Design" office):