chromedome

I have two lower-end units - a Salton and a Kuraidori - and the fan runs pretty constantly on both, once they've been on for a couple of minutes (and for a while after they're shut off, if they're really hot). Unless you're in a position to try a few head-to-head and see which one is subjectively quieter for you personally (because we all have frequencies we hear better than others*) then it's basically 6:5 and pick 'em. As you say, you might have to just put up with it. (*In my case my hearing has been in rapid decline for the past couple of years, but I find the HVAC in a large store deafening even when people with better hearing barely notice it at all. Go figure.)

In other news: Sky remains blue, ocean still wet. Film at 11. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/27/revealed-industry-figures-declaration-scientists-backing-meat-eating

Huh. I didn't know there were landlocked shad. Go figure! Shad were one of my favorite fish when I was a kid, because a) it was the largest thing I could expect to catch from the bank with a spinning rod; and b) as a smart-alec little kid, they gave me an opportunity to casually drop the word "anadromous" into conversation.

Girlfriend had a hankering, so I made Completely Non-Authentic Chili (TM) last night. There was a pack of Impossible faux-ground in our freezer (she can't eat beef for medical reasons, and we both find the Beyond to taste better, but when Impossible's on sale I buy it for casseroles and such), and some cut-up tomatoes from our garden in the freezer, so those and some kidney beans and some homegrown jalapenos were the base ingredients. Cooked the beans first in my IP, then used it again to to cook the frozen tomatoes. I also pulled out a smaller quantity of pan-roasted tomatoes, because I thought those would add some depth of flavor. I aimed to reproduce more or less the kind of fast-food chili you'd find at a Wendy's or a Tim Horton's, because that's what she likes (she'd be the first to tell you she has plebian tastes in many respects, or more accurately she'd say "I like what I like" and leave it at that). It came out just about right, and I have a bit of bean broth left over to put into a soup or something. No photo because a) chili isn't especially photogenic; and b) I never think of it in time.

Like a couple of others here, I have a similar 2-pound Zojirushi. I also have one of the big 6-quart high-power KitchenAids with the good spiral dough hook, and use them both regularly. I very seldom bake in my Zo, though, like Elsie D I just use the dough cycle and then transfer it to conventional pans for oven-baking. It's "no fuss, no muss," I load the machine, walk away for 1 hour and 50 minutes, and then come back. I use the KitchenAid for a couple of specific recipes that are too big for the Zo, like the oatmeal raisin brown bread my GF is currently obsessed with. I've found that it's a really fine line with the stand mixer, because I've had to cut down other recipes to make them work. KitchenAid claims you can make bread recipes calling for up to 14 cups of flour, but I've found this to be unreliable. Once I get beyond 8 cups it's really hit or miss, depending on the texture of the dough, and it often still climbs the dough hook and gets wrapped around the head unit. Given that your problem with the big Zo is the death of its time clock, I presume you use timed baking a lot, which of course you won't get with a stand mixer. The current version of the Virtuoso appears to have a slightly brighter display, but it's still the same old-school LED. The thing is, despite the age of the base design, it's still by broad consensus the best bread machine out there. I've looked at a lot of comparative reviews lately for an article I was writing, and nothing's as consistently good across the board. Breville's Custom Loaf has a bigger, more informative backlit display, and is broadly comparable to the Zo, but by all accounts is noisier and its gimmicky folding paddle (it gets out of the way when you bake) is prone to failure. The lower-priced KBS Pro has a backlit display that's decent, and the nonstick surface on the pan is ceramic rather than teflon for durability, but it's a single-paddle design so the bread pan isn't as long and "conventional"-looking if you bake in the machine. Like your Virtuoso it has two heating elements, though they wrap around the bread pan rather than the Zo's top-and-bottom orientation. Said to be very good for sandwich-style breads (some reviewers say it's better than the Zo for those) but struggles with dense or slack doughs. Make of all this what you will. A big stand mixer will certainly do any kind of bread you want (in moderate-sized batches), but you lose the convenience. Other machines exist with somewhat better displays, but there are tradeoffs that limit their usefulness. It's all going to come down to what you prioritize.

Thought we'd get through a month without another enoki mushroom recall? Not so! Affects Ontario and Quebec. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/lian-teng-brand-enoki-mushroom-recalled-due-listeria-monocytogenes?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

You may also know them as "walking" onions. They're a bunching cultivar, but unlike most bunching onions (ie scallions) they have a strong onion flavor. They're called walking onions because they grow long green tops, which late in the season grow a thick crown of bulbils. The greens bend over, the bulbils put down roots in the soil over the winter, and then the next year you get a ring of new onions all bunched together. If you give them a nudge, so the tops all fall in one direction, they'll literally "walk" across your garden in the course of several growing seasons. Alliums in general are considered a useful companion planting for keeping many insect pests at bay, and I use Egyptian onions for that purpose because they're self-replenishing and I never need to buy sets or collect seed. Also, of course, they're good in soups, salads etc. Everything I'd covered seems to have survived last night's hard frost, pending a closer look this afternoon after things have warmed up. I'll probably call time on the beans this week anyway, just because I doubt there are many pollinators left and I've already got 50-odd pounds of them in the freezer. There are still enough immature beans on the plants to be worth waiting for one more "pick," though. I have a few days before the next risk-of-frost night to assess how everything else is looking.

Getting our first properly cold night of the fall tonight, with temperatures dropping down below freezing and a bit of a wind chill as well. There's still a lot going on in the garden, despite the lateness of the season. Today I harvested a couple more ripe bell peppers, lots of salad greens, a handful of tomatoes, my sole surviving pumpkin (Godiva, a cultivar that's grown for its less seeds), a goodly handful of broccolini, and yet more bush beans. I'm almost as shocked about the beans as I am the peppers and tomatoes. I've never had them run this late in the season before, but I'm still getting a few meals' worth (for just the two of us) every week. We'll typically eat portion while they're fresh-picked, and then blanch and freeze the rest. The kale, chard and beet tops of course are still cruising along quite happily as the days grow shorter. I expect to pull the plug on my jalapenos and tomatoes soon (we'll see how they do under their covers tonight) and when I do I'll transfer those row covers to my beds of greens. I already have the baby kale and baby spinach under covers, because while they'll tolerate some cold they certainly don't thrive. I'm hoping, with those covers, to keep them going until the snow arrives in earnest (typically around year-end). We'll see, but I think it's a worthy ambition. In any case, with spring being so erratic and unproductive, I'm inclined to stretch autumn to the max just on principle. Still going: Several herbs, curly and lacinato kale, chard, spinach, Early Wonder beets (for the tops, but I'll get the beetroots as a bonus), roma tomatoes, Black Krim tomatoes, cocktail tomatoes, Egyptian onions, carrots, bell peppers, jalapenos, and one more bed of potatoes that are finished for the year but still need to be harvested. If the tomatoes look like goners after tonight I'll harvest them tomorrow and do... something with them. Probably finish ripening the half-ripe ones, make a batch of fried green tomatoes (and coat and freeze several more for another day, hat-tip to whoever let us know that this actually works) and probably do a batch of green tomato salsa as well. I like green tomato chow, but we probably won't eat enough of it to justify making a batch.

A friend of mine explained it this way: "Prepared one way, they're a fine edible. Prepared another way, they'll make you see God. Eat 'em raw, and they'll introduce you in person!"

I was pretty confident it'd been Photoshopped that way as a joke.

The sausage place near me in Vancouver, years ago, told me it's more or less a (North-) Americanized debrecziner, if that helps.

Thanks to a shout-out from Tamar Haspel on social media, I've just discovered the writing of a UK-based chef, food writer and food product developer named Anthony Warner (aka "The Angry Chef). I haven't explored much of his blog yet, but I've just finished reading through a really fascinating six-parter (and counting) on the role of dietary fibre (or "fiber," for the Americans). Money quote is early in Part 5: "...food is complicated, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something." I'd have appreciated some explicit links to sources (because I'm "That Guy") but this is his everyday work and area of expertise, and I've read enough of the basic research to be confident in the broad accuracy of what he's passing along. Here's a link to the first part: https://www.the-angry-chef.com/blog/7qmkvuzn0i90vq4xei5t4crinjxy3q You can just keep clicking through at the bottom to get the rest.

Oh, unquestionably. I suppose this application of technology could be construed as the reductio ad absurdam of the aphorism that "we eat with our eyes first". But I feel the same about many of the showier aspects of molecular gastronomy, which nonetheless have been taken seriously by critics and diners alike. I suppose it's my blue-collar upbringing showing through (..."maybe so, but I eat with my mouth most!").

I'm not sure how I feel about this as a physical reality on the table, but the technology is certainly interesting. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/go-ahead-and-play-with-your-food-with-this-electrode-enhanced-3d-printed-plate/

Reportedly it does indeed taste something like chicken, though you should probably consider all the other things that have been described that way and take it with a grain of salt. Sadly I haven't had the opportunity yet to try that one for myself, but I can tell you confidently that lobster mushrooms (a plain ol' bland russula or lactarius mushroom that's been parasitized by another fungus called hypomyces lactifluorum) does indeed have a whiff of lobster-like flavor about it, and its red exterior and white interior even recall the appearance of cooked lobster meat. That ability to form flavor interesting flavor compounds is part of the reason why several faux-meat startups are focused on fungi (usually mycelium, as opposed to the actual mushroom itself). Another, of course, is that the filaments of mycelium can be tweaked to mimic the muscle fibers in whole-cut meats, which is frequently described as the "holy grail" of faux-meatery.

Yes, I probably should have phrased it as "difficult to cultivate at commercial scale in a controlled environment." We actually tried COTW this year, as part of our mushroom experiment. The ganoderma and trametes versicolor (reishi and turkey tail) produced moderately, the winecaps went gangbusters, but the shiitake, oysters and chicken did not give us anything past a few false starts. Those we'll try again next year in slightly different conditions.

Well, they're a bugger to cultivate for one. Also their preferred substrate is oak trees, and those have LOTS of other commercial uses. Somebody will crack the code one of these days, I suppose, but some mushrooms are just not well suited to cultivation and they may prove to be one of them (a discussion of the difficulties here... https://chickenmushrooms.wordpress.com/about/). The do turn up from time to time at farmer's markets and such. I thought I'd finally spotted one on our little acreage here, but it turned out that our mastiff (or perhaps one of the grandkids) had left her rubber chicken chew toy on a rotting stump. Which you could almost kinda-sorta call similarly themed, I suppose, but it wasn't at all the same thing.

I read his earlier book on cod; I rather suspect the research for that one inspired the salt book as well.

I stand corrected, her pots are also Cuisinart. Her exact ones don't appear to be currently on the site (may have been a Canadian variation, I suppose) but this one is pretty close to what we have here, and also to what you currently have. I expect they would perform similarly. https://www.cuisinart.com/shopping/cookware/saucepans/719-18/

That's Kurlansky's book, is it? A great read.

My first four thoughts were the exact three suggestions you'd floated in the original post, plus the obvious "too much thyme on my hands" Dad joke. (Sorry... but I restrained myself for three hours...) As Christmas gifts go, perhaps put the thyme together with other dried herbs in a suitable mixture, and put them into attractively decorated and labeled jars? Or perhaps a herb jelly that straddles the sweet/savory line?

Ugh. Probably what inspired The Onion piece.