chromedome

My stepdaughter has a closely equivalent set from KitchenAid, except the drain/strain holes in the lid are only on one side. Hers work on induction. I'll take a look when I'm next upstairs in the kitchen and see if they have any kind of identifying mark so I can look them up, but I suspect you'd be able to find them on Amazon or KitchenAid's website.

I know, I know... but "morbidly funny" is appropriate in October. https://www.theonion.com/green-giant-introduces-new-frozen-death-cap-mushrooms-f-1850907505

At least one of the big old-school wineries in BC (Andres, maybe?) did that when I lived there in the 1980s. In fact, that was the wine we had at my wedding. Wine in single-serving cans is a big thing now in the liquor stores up here, but those aren't counted in liters.

I'm late seeing this. It's not entirely surprising - I had an inkling from her last handful of posts, and from the "radio silence" since - but it's deeply saddening nonetheless. In one of his Flashman novels George MacDonald Fraser had his anti-hero paraphrase Donne, to the effect that if indeed every death diminishes us, some diminish us a damned sight more than others. This is one of those.

Honestly, I think they'll get there. I expect texture will actually be a bigger challenge than flavor in the long term, because we're getting better at manipulating flavor molecules either directly or through manipulation of yeasts, bacteria, fungi etc. I don't feel a strong imperative to curb my dairy consumption for environmental or other reasons, because it's already pretty minimal, but I know a lot of people who are lactose-intolerant (and vegans are a steadily growing contingent as well). The market is absolutely there, if they get it right. Logic suggests we'll see an initial "artisanal" product to generate a halo effect while they're working out how to manufacture at scale (ie, Tesla's progression from Roadster to Model S to Model 3), though if somebody makes a breakthrough on the manufacturing side we may see a mass-market "good enough" product followed by niche specialty products afterward. I have no crystal ball, but I'm all in on having options. ETA: I actually popped for an "artisanal" vegan cheese at the supermarket a few months ago, simply because it was marked down to half price. It was a Boursin-ish soft, flavored cheese, with lime and jalapeno. The flavor was perfectly acceptable for what it was, but the texture was slightly wrong in a way that was difficult to articulate. The best I can get is that it had a hint of that cream-cheese gumminess about it, as opposed to the fine-grained smoothness of the real thing.

Some of the work that's going into the improvement of non-dairy cheeses. It's potentially a big market (as the rise in non-dairy milks attests) if they can get it right. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/plant-based-cheese-may-be-getting-more-appetizing/

A few months back I told @heidihthat when I get around to doing something other than stew with my homegrown rabbits, I'd post about it. So here we are. My GF found one of the many recipes out there for rabbit in mustard sauce, and sent it to me with a "Can we do this?" As it happened my stepdaughter and the grandkids were out last night, so it was a good time for me to monopolize the kitchen for a while. No prep shots, sadly, because in a typical example of my forward-planning skills I'd just returned my nearly-depleted phone to the charger before I came upstairs to cook. This is the end result. Please mentally insert all the appropriate disclaimers and apologies for the dreadful lighting, my lack of photography skills, and the slapdash "It's late and I'm hungry" plating. Those who saw my post yesterday afternoon in the garden thread will recognize that the broccolini, beans and carrots were among that haul, and the new potatoes also came from my garden. So aside from a few things like the capers and the grainy mustard, basically everything on the plate came from our own yard.

Haven't posted anything garden-related of late because I've been away, and busy, etc etc, but things are still humming along. Here's today's harvest: Clockwise from bottom left we have beans, tomatoes, cooking greens (chard and beet tops), zukes, broccolini,carrots, a "watermelon" radish, jalapenos, one ripe bell pepper, and salad greens. The tomatoes are still hanging in, suprisingly, with help from overnight covers. The beans are finally nearing their end, and I'm going to pull the zucchini out tomorrow because they've started to get downy mildew in the damp autumn weather. Don't want those spores around. The melon patch is done, and I didn't get any pictures of melons past that first watermelon, but overall it was a modest success. I got four little Sugar Baby watermelons and a half-dozen cantaloupes, the smallest of tennis-ball size and the largest about as big as the smallest size you'd find at the supermarket. The cantaloupes were not especially sweet (they began to ripen ad the weather got cool, and I'm pretty sure they needed more heat and sun) but they were juicy and fragrant. Overall, considering I wasn't sure I'd get even one melon, I'll call it a successful experiment.

I'm pretty sure that's a typo, but it's a very amusing one. The headlines would just write themselves.

Nope. In my family we never did turkey because none of us are especially fond of it, but my GF and her family would feel cheated if we had anything else.

At bottom Thanksgiving is a harvest festival (that's why ours is a month earlier than the US version, our climate is mostly harsher and the crops are gathered in several weeks earlier), and those are both universal and much older than North America's colonization . I opted to lean into that theme this year - because I can - so the potatoes, carrots, cabbage, chard, green and yellow beans and summer squash (everything, in short, but the bird and the bread for the stuffing) will be from my garden. There will also be apple pie, made with the apples from our own tree's final crop (as I've mentioned elsewhere it blew over earlier in the year, but has stubbornly hung on and pushed out one last yield of apples). I'll figure out a way to incorporate some of the wine cap mushrooms we grew, as well. Holiday meals at my place are always veggie-palooza. We usually get our turkey from a farm a few km away but we were late reaching out to them this year, so it'll be a supermarket bird instead.

I visited that museum as a kid, and loved it. One of the displays was a prototype propeller he'd made from a wooden venetian blind his wife had ordered for their house. Apparently it arrived while he was going through one of his fits of aeronautic experimentation (some of you Stateside may not know it, but Bell was an aviation pioneer - his aircraft the Silver Dart made the first powered flight in the British Empire - and also tested the first hydrofoil boats on the idyllic lake shown in SSK's photo above), and he thought the slats were an interesting alternative to carving a prop out of laminated wood. The part that made it stick in my childhood memory was a dry observation on the plaque that "it is not recorded what Mrs. Bell thought of the experiment..."

That's more or less my son-in-law as well, who is a fussy eater in the second-grader mold. Essentially his preferred diet consists of things that can be unwrapped and microwaved, which is a constant issue for my daughter given that they live on a fixed income and her medical issues already strain their grocery budget. I struggle ongoingly with the desire to growl at him to grow [multiple expletives] up, but in fairness he's on the autism spectrum so it's only partially under his control. For context he used to indignantly reject any hints in that direction (his brother is more severely affected, so that was his benchmark) until he realized it gave him license to be a complete jerk. Then he embraced it.

They won't be quite as sweet as the days grow shorter, and they won't be quite as sweet if they're picked more than a couple of days before peak ripeness (the best you can expect from a commercial grower). I have some 10 lbs or so ripening off the vine in a sunny spot right now, simply because they've fallen off the vine of their own accord or when I've brushed them in passing (the Romas seem really prone to doing both). Still have lots on the vines, so we'll see how they make out. Currently the 7-day forecast looks good, but I'll be in NS for a few days past that so it'll be tense.

I bring them home occasionally from Costco for the grandkids (strictly by request, if they don't ask they don't get 'em). Their mom generally tries for slightly healthier snacks like granola bars (just as much sugar, but some good stuff sneaking in there as well).

Those look very like what I know as a "Wagon Wheel" here in Canada, though I'm sure there are plenty of international equivalents.

My GF and I have a variation of this disagreement, in that she only likes thick soups: purees, cream soups, etc. I like them well enough, but eat broth-y soups more often than thick ones, by a ratio of maybe 5 or 6 to 1. So I'll often make a base soup, then remove 1/4 to 1/3 and puree it (and thicken further as needed) for her. I eat soup a lot more often than she does, because she eats just twice a day and her breakfast-time corresponds with my dinnertime, so that ratio works for us. Early in our relationship, when discussing meal options, I'd suggested soup and was stupefied by her response that "Soup isn't a meal!" Eventually I came to understand that this is because she grew up in a non-cooking family and "soup" was automatically Campbell's, divided between three siblings. So for her it was something you ate with a sandwich, or before the main dish; whereas for me hearty homemade soups (accompanied by nothing more than a slice of homemade bread) were a standard weekday meal.

At first glance my eye interpreted the cat-cutout and the toy truck as a chainsaw, which struck me as an odd decor choice. Then I blinked and it all came properly into focus. I've been dealing with our winter's firewood lately, so I'll blame it on that!

Doing it because you have to is a great motivator.

Ararat brand tahina/tahini is being recalled for salmonella, in Ontario and Quebec. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/ararat-brand-tahina-recalled-due-salmonella?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23