chromedome

It's baby quail time again, first batch from the new incubator (we've learned our lesson, and got the extended warranty). Forty-odd hatchlings at present, with more still coming.

Yup. That whole "follow your passion" thing is shitty career advice. I now tell younger people that "Your schooling will cost pretty much the same, no matter what. Find something that pays enough money to recoup your investment/pay off your student debt."

I thumbed from northern Newfoundland to Regina, SK in November of '81, with a duffle bag on my shoulder and $20 in my pocket, having by then flunked out of university after 3 semesters (technically they didn't give me the heave-ho, but I was cordially invited to find somewhere else to grow up) and been discharged from the military at the end of basic training (long story, but the TL;DR is family medical history rather than any misbehavior on my part). At that time unemployment in my part of NL was around 50% for sturdy grown-up men with, you know... actual skills and work experience. Saskatchewan then had both the lowest unemployment rate and highest minimum wage in the country, and that seemed like a good combination for a 17-yo with a very thin resume (one summer in a make-work job after high school, and then another in the small-boat fishery with my father and uncle). So, I hit the road. I spent my first night in Regina in a heated bus shelter on the city's little park/green space that took up a block or so in front of City Hall (did I mention it was November?), then the next morning went down to the federally-run employment office (then called Canada Manpower) and looked at the job listings. One of the ones that looked promising was for a pizza place in the south end of town that was looking for a cook's assistant, "no experience required." So I went down and interviewed with the manager, who basically just needed a warm body. I told him I'd worked for Ches' Fish & Chips for a couple of months in St. John's when I was at school, reckoning (correctly) that in those days of expensive long distance, he wasn't going to check. He hired me on the spot, and started taking my information for payroll. When we asked my address, I told him I didn't have one yet because I'd just arrived in town the night before. So he asked where I was staying, and what was a phone number where he could reach me. When I told him about the bus shelter he put down his pen and looked at me for a moment, then rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said "So you hitched 3000km with no money and no place to stay?" Yup, that was about the size of it. He sighed, and said "My kid joined the navy a little while ago. You can use his room for a few days until you find a place." (My mom sent him a Christmas card that year) That job was mostly prep: mixing the pizza sauce, slicing meats and veg, and also answering the phone if I happened to be closest when it rang. That was the first time I'd ever heard of this thing called "Hawaiian" pizza. A caller asked for it, and there it was on the order form, so I circled it and took the order in to the cook. I asked him what it was, and he thought I was kidding. So then he told me, and I thought he was kidding. Good times. I left amicably after several months, and parlayed that local reference plus my mythical time at Ches' into a job as third cook at a Fuller's restaurant (a Denny's-ish chain, the same family that owned/owns the higher-profile Earl's chain) that was closer to where I was living at the time, just across the downtown. I was in the Cathedral district, if any of you know Regina at all. I did that for several months as well, then went off to do other things for... oh, 20-ish years, I guess, before career-shifting and graduating from culinary school at 40.

I'm out of province at the moment, so here's a roundup of the past few days' ongoing pistachio-related carnage: https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-pistachio-containing-products-recalled-due-salmonella-6 https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-roasted-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella-0 https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-roasted-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-roasted-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella-0

...and in another fun little bit of analysis, cat-scat coffee gets detailed scrutiny. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/10/fermentation-is-key-to-coffee-beans-gleaned-from-civet-feces/

I know the knife mavens here will be tempted to snark about the "In further news, water proven wet!" aspect of it, but the whole food science movement over the past couple of decades has revolved around empirically examining things everybody "knows." In this case, the paper documents/validates the longstanding assertion that using a sharper knife is the way to keep onion-cutting from irritating your eyes. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2512779122

https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-pistachios-and-pistachio-containing-products-recalled-due-salmonella-3

Annnnnd, back to pistachios. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-pistachios-and-pistachio-containing-products-recalled-due-salmonella-2

There's an Ontario recall on ground beef (E. coli) but it's limited to one retailer in London. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-ground-beef-products-recalled-due-e-coli-o157h7 ETA: Ninja'd by ElsieD after opening this tab.

Baklava this time, just for a change of pace. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/baklava-recalled-due-salmonella

Huh. In my own kitchen I can assure you there's no difference, because I buy the big jar and use it to refill my squeeze bottle.

https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/green-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella

Pistachios, again/still. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/basha-foods-brand-raw-shelled-pistachio-kernal-recalled-due-salmonella https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella-1

"Big enough to swaddle a baby" spinach.

https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella-1

Seasonally macabre...

An update on one of the BC pistachio recalls. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-raw-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella

https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-raw-pistachios-recalled-due-salmonella

It's been a busy "killing small things" week, here on our little acreage. Not my favorite part of the exercise, as I've said before, but more or less inevitable when you decide to raise your own meat. We kicked things off by culling 11 male quail who were, as the Brits say, "surplus to requirements." We've also been picking away at our surplus roosters, and have so far culled 9 of the... 14 or so?... that are currently mature and badgering the hens. We have a couple more clutches that hatched out at intervals of a few weeks, so we'll be doing this all through the autumn. The 9 that we've harvested to date totaled 13.9kg/30.6 lbs, with the biggest (a barred rock, from our "barnyard mix" eggs) checking in at 2129g/4.7 lbs, and the smallest (one of the ones I showed in the photos above, with the green-black plumage and blond head feathers) at just 927g, or less than an ounce over 2 lbs. They were the same age, and the little guy had definitely hit sexual maturity, so it was just a question of either breed size/speed of growth or a combination thereof. Most have hit a relative "sweet spot" of 1600-1650g, or 3 1/2(ish) pounds. The big barred rock, dubbed "Spot" by the grandkids, will be the (ahem) "guest of honour" at today's Thanksgiving meal. Yesterday it was the rabbits' turn, and we harvested a batch of 8 which yielded just over 30 pounds, dressed weight. So they're averaging between 3 1/2 and 4 lbs, slightly larger than the chickens. I'm still keeping track of our income, expenses and yields from the critters. The first half of the year is when we do best in terms of actual money coming in to defray our expenses, and then the second half of the year is when we get most of the harvest. Part of what we'll be focusing on between now and year-end is deciding how to value our eggs, meat, etc for "accounting" purposes (in the personal sense, not in the tax sense, because we aren't selling enough to consider this a business). With quail eggs, for example, it's easy enough to work out their equivalent in chicken eggs at a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1. But for the ones we eat in-house, so to speak (as opposed to selling them for incubation or others' consumption), should I count them at the quantity we were habitually buying (a dozen every 5 days or so, barring Christmas baking season), or the actual quantity we're consuming? Because I use a lot more eggs when they're just adding up constantly, and I feel obligated to get through them. So that kind of thing is a tough call. The chickens are easier, of course, because we'll be able to sell hen's eggs more consistently once our flock starts producing properly (we have a number of hens just arriving at laying age, but only 2 or 3 currently laying for us; we currently get 2 eggs most days). Of course the days are getting shorter, and they lay less in winter, so we probably won't be hitting full stride with them until spring. The quail, otoh, are currently giving us 12-14/day and that will triple over the next few weeks as more of the females hit maturity. As for the chickens when considered as meat, there I have something else to consider: do I price their value at the supermarket $$ for whole chicken, or for the value of individual parts when I break them down into breasts, thighs, etc? So those are all things I need to talk through with my GF. In the final analysis, it's not about making or "losing" money at the end of the year. It's having a good enough grasp of our costs to calculate what we're out of pocket, respectively, for the rabbit meat/chicken/quail/eggs/garden produce, and then work backwards from that to how much each category cost us per kg of food produced. If that's at or below supermarket pricing, great! We've come out ahead. If it's above supermarket pricing, it tells us how much of a premium we've paid for the privilege of growing our own and having a measure of control over the process. I think we'll come out okay on most things, though we're for-sure "in the red" on our mushroom-growing kits over the past couple of years, and the garden certainly hasn't carried its weight this year (because reasons). Overall, for the first time, I have some reasonable degree of confidence that we're not in fact losing ground financially on this (compared to just aggressive/frugal grocery shopping).

Yeah, I missed posting that one and this one yesterday (was processing a batch of rabbits, and didn't finish until late). https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-pistachio-containing-products-recalled-due-salmonella-5

It did.