chromedome

I have the catalog, a gift from a few Christmases ago. It's a fun read.

He's getting so big... (Yeah, they do that. My baby girl will be 30 in a few months.)

I loved them when I was a kid, but as an adult I find that a lot of Pillsbury products have a distinctive flavor note that I'm not especially keen on. It's a sort of lower-key counterpart to the distinctive pong of a Subway.

My father used to roast them head-on occasionally and then eat the head, though I suspect that was more for the amusement of watching my mom react than for its gustatory pleasure.

Just a thought, but have you checked with local potters? You could probably have something made to order for a reasonable price (and I'm confident you have plenty of potters in your neck of the woods). I'd spent years looking for a salt pig I liked, and then realized one day that a working potter was my immediate downstairs neighbour. We put our heads together, and - ta-da! - I had my custom-tailored salt pig in just a couple of days.

Unpacked one of my last boxes of jars (but by no means the absolute last) just last night, after it taking up space on the floor of my office since the beginning of August when we moved. I'll need 20-ish pints soon for a big batch of applesauce, so it was time.

When I was a kid, ours had many colorful names depending what they were doing at the time.

I would love it if the owner of the syndication rights pulled together a book of just restaurant-related Hermans (there were a lot of those). I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

The only one I would ever conceivably contemplate doing that with is my grandmother's handwritten recipe notebooks, scanned and converted to PDF format by one of my cousins and subsequently distributed to any family member who wanted a copy. It would be something of a sentimental journey, but realistically it's one I'm not likely to undertake.

Not seeing confirmation yet, but Ruth Reichl has posted on Twitter.

Not "funny, funny," as such, but a couple of days ago I saw someone post on Twitter about a collapsible electric kettle, which the OP described as being perfect for travelers who wanted to make tea or coffee in their hotel rooms. A commenter asked "Don't the hotel rooms have kettles, where you are?" The wordless response was a TikTok "travel hack" video, of an enthusiastic 20-something using the hotel's kettle to boil his socks and underwear during a long stay.

It's been a few years since I looked into that for my daughter, but tonight I'll try to block out time to go searching. Ultimately in my case I went with a by-hand recipe, but I'm sure there are usable machine-bread recipes as well. As an interim stopgap, I can affirm that the "Promise" brand of GF breads (sold at Sobeys and its affiliated brands, perhaps elsewhere) is palatable and has that "soft, fluffy store-bought bread" texture that many people like.

In person it runs to "dad jokes," bad puns, and finding things to laugh about in the worst moments. Fortuitously my GF finds me amusing, which was not necessarily the case in previous relationships.

Okay, it's only "kinda" food-related from a very narrow perspective, but it's definitely seasonal:

I had it in my hand not five minutes ago, where the hell is it?

Kind of a cool overview of the science underlying nutrition. https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-food-powers-your-body-metabolism-calories

Sent to me by my GF (who, coincidentally, has a Panda onesie...)

A new product from Beyond, and a more nuanced take on the slowdown in demand. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/10/24/23416694/beyond-meat-steak-tips-vegan-plant-based We've actually bought a rival product from a small producer, because my poor sweetie is jonesing hard for beef and can't have it. It was okay in a stir-fry, if a bit disappointing in a steak-sandwich scenario. When the Beyond product arrives here in Canada, we'll certainly try it out. On a related note the third iteration of their hamburger recently hit the stores, and I can report that they have indeed improved the flavor again. Would I be buying these if my GF could still eat real beef? Maybe, albeit less often. I'd been curious about this specific niche since well before she was diagnosed, and tried both Beyond and Impossible for the sake of my own curiosity as they became available in Atlantic Canada. Neither a hater nor an evangelist, just an interested third party.

Not a podcast as such, but a CBC Radio interview with Naomi Duguid about her new book The Miracle of Salt. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/15944210-food-writer-naomi-duguid-history-versatility-salt

There's nothing "elaborate" about it. If the squashes are sound I roast them, and if they have soft/moldy spots I cut those out, cut what's left into wedges, peel them, and then cut them into rough dice (about 1cm, but I'm not overly fussy about it). Then I give 'em a minute or so in boiling water before I dip them out with a slotted spoon or a spider and shock them. Once they're well-drained I'll freeze them on a parchment-lined sheet pan, and then transfer them to a freezer bag or vacuum sealer bag for storage (vacuum sealing is best, but sometimes I'm lazy). Delicatas are relatively smaller and thinner, so they'd necessarily make for smaller dice and would probably need less blanching time. I usually cook those or Sweet Dumplings in real time as part of a meal. A favorite of mine is to use them as a container for shirred eggs: Halve and scoop the squash and then cook it until tender, line it with thin-sliced ham of some sort, then crack in your eggs and add a splash of cream and pop 'em back into the oven. For a less time-intensive version, poach the eggs separately and just spoon them into the squash (or simply make a mound of squash on your plate, press a well into it with the back of a spoon, and add the egg). It's the same kind of sweet-and-savory thing you'd get from having a waffle or pancake along with your egg and ham, but skewed more to savory than sweet (because squash is sweet, but not sugary-sweet if you know what I mean). Also, the yolk oozing into the squash makes it very rich, especially if you melt a pat of butter into the squash first as I do.

Harold Hill would be proud of you.

Buttercup is my default winter squash, because it's widely grown in my area. I like it because it (usually) bakes up dry and fluffy, like a baked russet. I can buy a 50-pound bag here directly from the farm gate for $25 or so (I share out a few with the extended family). I generally freeze some as blanched chunks, and keep some whole for a couple of months for cooking fresh. The rest I bake off in one marathon session, scoop from the shells, and bag flat in ziplocs with the air squeezed out. Some smaller bags for use as side dishes, some larger bags which become soups or my "pumpkin" cheesecake at holiday meals (my stepdaughter wants that each time, rather than a pumpkin pie).

In my neck of the woods a popular fast food is the Halifax-style "donair," a localization of doner kebab with a distinctive milk-based sweet-and-garlicky sauce. Its popularity has inspired donair pizza, donair egg rolls and donair perogies, and probably many similar things that I haven't actually noticed on my way through the supermarket. A friend of mine picked up the package of donair egg rolls one day, pulled a disgusted face, and pronounced that this was "just WRONG!" She was very surprised when I told her that egg rolls (and sweet-and-sour chicken balls, and many of her favorites) were bastardized pastiches to begin with, so it was rather akin to being upset over a novel flavor of Cheez Whiz.

I go the opposite direction. I seldom reuse my (off-brand, not Ziploc) zipper-seal bags, but always reuse my sealer bags until they stop holding a seal or become too small to hold anything meaningful. Those things are expensive! I usually cut them rather longer than needed, for the first use, and then cut them open as neatly and as close to the seal as I can manage. After washing and drying they're ready to go again. With the full-sized bags, when they become too short to use conventionally, I'll leave the seal in place on the long edge and open the bag from one of the factory-sealed sides. That way I can use it a few more times as a small bag. It's a silly and probably pointless frugality (I'm sure I waste more elsewhere than I save on sealer bags) but it's what I do.