chromedome

LOL Good catch, that went right past me. Clearly things did not go to plan.

Now there's a thing... Indian researchers have successfully created a seedless mango, it appears. https://www.andnowuknow.com/behind-greens/seedless-mangos-have-been-developed-indian-scientists/andrew-mcdaniel/42275

Well, one of my favorite (really simple) summer salads is thinly-shaved fennel, black olives and supremed orange segments, with a dressing of olive oil and the juice squeezed from the membranes and leftover pulp. I have tried adding other things to the bowl, but usually now I just stop at that. Maybe a grind of fresh pepper if I'm in the mood.

LOL Smoked salt might give an interesting two-tone effect, I suppose, but how much of that does one use?

That one always amuses me greatly. If you're consuming enough of it for the trace minerals to matter, you're eating WAY too much salt. I've also seen a food blogger extolling it as "the purest salt you can buy," and then rhapsodizing in the very next sentence about its high levels of trace minerals. Uh, gee... you mean "impurities"? Seriously, how do these people manage to tie their own shoes? That being said, I buy the stuff anyway just because it looks good in my white salt pig.

It's actually not even that much of a PITA. As mentioned I'd put it on inside-out the first time, so I've already had to do it twice. It'll take longer the next time just because I'll need to undo the tie-downs and velcro straps, but it still won't take long. It'll come down to how badly, and how long, I want to extend my growing season. And whether I get the wood-and-glass one built.

Oh yeahhhhh...

The study Scott linked, one of several cited in The Atlantic article, did in fact use the first and second Nurses' Health Studies, and the Health Professionals' Followup Study as its data sources. Well, I'm not a healthcare professional participating in a formal study, but I can tell you that I have a few tablespoons of milk in my oatmeal each morning, a half-cup of yogurt 5 or 6 times/week, a tablespoon or so of evaporated milk in my coffee a couple of times/day (I prefer it to cream) and maybe 4 or 5 portions of cheese in the run of a week. It doesn't require a lot of thought. We all know FFQs are deeply flawed, but we still use them because essentially every form of food-related research is deeply flawed. Applying those flawed tools as best we can, and finding the commonalities in the results/checking whether results with different methodologies cancel each other out, is what we've got to work with. Yup, two of the nine researchers on the paper (including the lead) had accepted honoraria to speak at dairy industry functions, and one of them (not the lead) has done research funded by the dairy industry. It's not exactly news that most industries seek input and insights from researchers, or that the bulk of research in most industries is funded by those industries. If our standard for all research is that it be untainted by funding from sources other than government or disinterested philanthropic bodies, there would be very little research carried out (and government and philanthropic funding are not without issues, either). I'll note in passing - for the benefit of those who haven't time to read the cited study - that it found yogurt to have a positive effect and cheese to have a negative effect, and the ice cream data were buried in the body of the text. Picking winners and losers from within the broad span of dairy products - "clear ties to big dairy" notwithstanding - isn't the behavior of an industry shill. So that leaves the reportage. My net takeaway from the reporting was that there's considerable institutional resistance to outcomes that run counter to the expected. Galileo's famous experiment at the Leaning Tower showed that the contemporary understanding of gravity was flawed, but the university there continued to teach Aristotle for another century and more, IIRC. Similarly the doctor who suggested that going from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing up was a bad idea, was hounded mercilessly by his colleagues. And more recently and pertinently, two large studies a few years ago showed that consumption of full-fat dairy correlated strongly with better (not worse) cardiovascular health than low-fat dairy, although one of them had been set up specifically to demonstrate the opposite (those results were lauded here on eG, among those of us who love butter, cream and full-fat cheese). Most dietary guidelines, of course, continue to promote low-fat dairy. Unfortunately every crackpot and grifter can claim to belong to that heritage, and most of them do ("Your doctor won't tell you this..."). Sad but true, and that's why we need to be discerning about this kind of thing (so while this is a rebuttal in the broad sense, I don't disagree with Scott on that point). I know a lot of diabetics, because there's a lot of diabetes in my family. Most of them would read an article like that, joke about it (or roll their eyes and snort "Yeah, whatever") and continue following their current eating plan. The relatively small number of "I'm gonna eat what I want to eat" diabetics might seize on reportage like that as an excuse, but in my (yes, personal) experience they're already on that course and would not be turned from it in any case. To name just the most recent example from my extended circle, that's why my mother-in-law passed away last spring: she fought tooth and nail to avoid any restrictions on what she ate, and her liver failed as a result.She was only in her mid-70s, and should have had many more years left in her. So yeah, focusing on ice cream (in the subtitle, mind you) was a way to get people interested enough to read the article. I guess I did the same by mentioning it in my summation of the article when I shared the link. But ice cream itself wasn't and isn't the point. At least, not until somebody manages to figure out what's behind the correlation, or conversely how the data pointed to an apparent correlation that wasn't there... and either of those outcomes is good and desirable.

A look at improved/improving beef-cattle husbandry in Brazil.. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/cattle-are-a-huge-climate-threat-smarter-ranching-can-help

We already have a small solar-powered charger for our electric fence (currently deployed around the rabbits). There's another fence around my main garden area, and I plan one more of the compact solar chargers for the greenhouse (because raccoons). We'll have some low-voltage solar lights in there for our own convenience on those long summer evenings, but yeah...if I do opt to keep the greenhouse going in winter there'll need to be some supplementary light. Still considering my options on that front, because everything I do is necessarily on a shoestring budget. I have the framing from a friend's torn-down shed in a stack not far from this little greenhouse, and a hundred-odd salvaged windows in the barn, and plan to turn those into a second greenhouse/potting shed over the course of the summer as time permits. That one could support a small woodstove in it for heating purposes, and would be easier to insulate around the base and north wall, so if it comes to fruition that would certainly trump the hoop house as a winter option.

It came with a couple of corkscrew ground stakes and cords, but they're about the size of a kid's twisty-straw and probably not much good in a gale. I'm going to pick up four or six (maybe eight) larger ones, the kind people use to stake out a dog on a lead, and use those instead. In the interim - and for my main form of stabilization - I've filled a few of my hoard of feed sacks with stone, and draped those over the bottom of the frame. I figure if they weigh 50 lbs when filled with rabbit pellets (ie, pressed alfalfa) they're probably a couple of hundred at least when filled with stone. Improvised small-scale gabions, if you will. Between those to hold the frame down, and cords over top between the anchors to hold the cover in place, I think I'm good until late fall. Reinforcing it well enough to withstand snow load is a whole other project, of course, and I'm undecided between doing that or simply removing the cover for the winter and storing it. We'll see how ambitious I am as the year draws to a close.

It's what you would know as "Canadian bacon," but rolled in coarse cornmeal for reasons I cannot explain.

That's...pretty dubious. I'll watch the video later and see if I can find whatever source he's citing for that. Durum, for example, is a high-gluten wheat and it's been cultivated for about 10,000 years (in round numbers). Though I did find at least one study - comparing "ancient" wheats to modern wheats - which worked around that difficulty by simply classing durum among the modern wheats.

Yesterday was gloriously hot and sunny, and I finally blocked out a day to assemble the greenhouse I'd purchased last autumn. First I laid out sheets of cardboard to suppress weeds and serve as a temporary floor (there'll be gravel, later). The rest of the sequence more or less speaks for itself: ...and an interior shot. Those were the last photos I took, but there's now a line of folding tables down the left side (soon to be filled with starter pots) and a seating area in the back right for my sweetie to lounge and keep me company while I garden. The documentation calls this a 3-person project, and doubtless it would have been easier with extra hands, but I did the whole thing myself in about 5 hours' actual work (between feeding rabbits and myself, kibitzing with grandkids and girlfriend, etc). My handyman skills are more "Tim the Tool Man" than Bob Vila, but it wasn't a complicated build. I made things more difficult than they needed to be at a couple of points (putting the cover on inside-out, for example) but that's not the manufacturer's fault.

WaPo columnist Tamar Haspel is fond of pointing out that questions of food, agriculture and sustainability are "all compromises, all the time." We've all seen lots of heated (and inconclusive, and often bad-faith) arguments around things like faux meats and the relative environmental impact of different forms of agriculture ("It's not the cow, it's the how"), but few good ways to compare the impacts of foods on a broad basis. The Economist has come up with an intriguingly simple yardstick for evaluating the carbon cost of foods, which it calls The Banana Index. It uses the banana as a baseline, because it's middling in terms of its climate impact and nutrition, and evaluates other foodstuffs against that baseline. It ranks foods on their emissions impact by weight, by calorie, and by protein value (emissions/100g of protein). Reading the article itself (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/04/11/a-different-way-to-measure-the-climate-impact-of-food) requires registration or a subscription, but this Twitter thread gives you a look at the print version and also a few of the charts.

I think that may be one of the reasons for their current issues. When stuff lasts forever, you soon stop needing to buy any more.

The Atlantic has just published a story about "nutrition academia" and its response to persistent results across two decades of studies, indicating that - wait for it - ice cream, of all things, might be good for diabetics. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cream-bad-for-you-health-study/673487/

Okay, coconut beet puree catches my interest. I've done things with pureed beets, but "coconut" and "pureed" are words I seldom see together. How did you go about it? I've never paired them, but in my head it seems an interesting combination.

The snow has finally melted from (almost all of) my garden. The garlic is up, and I seem to have overwintered some kale without really meaning to. It should be going great guns by the time everything else is ready to plant, six weeks from now.

Rosemary and garlic is my default pairing with lamb (I dislike mint with lamb, so I'm an outlier), but you can absolutely use too much. There's a story that in the days of primitive microphones, Louis Armstrong stood several feet further back from the rest of his band because he played so loudly that he'd drown them out otherwise. That's how I approach rosemary...it needs to stand WAY back of everything else in order for the flavors to balance nicely.

I do it frequently. In my case I usually serve from a Pyrex measuring cup anyway (elegant tableware, I know...) so I just Saran it when I'm done and stick it in the fridge. Then when I want to reheat I'll scoop out the solidified block of Hollandaise, cut it into chunks for faster/easier melting, and put it back in the Pyrex in a gentle water bath. Stir regularly as it melts, then progress to whisking as the lumps become smaller. Lift it out of the water bath as needed, if it seems to be warm enough to threaten the emulsion. If it shows signs of breaking, just rescue it with a few drops of cold water as you would when making it fresh.