chromedome

Yup, good to see you! It's been too long. Easter dinner here was nothing out of the ordinary. Did a ham, scalloped potatoes, squash, veg, etc, and an apple crisp for dessert. My GF sadly can't eat pork anymore (especially cured pork) for medical reasons, but through cautious experimentation we've discovered that she can still eat foods infused with the ham's flavor. So I poached a chicken breast in the ham's drippings for her, and she got to have the (lightly) ham-infused chicken breast with the various side dishes and ham gravy. Then I popped the remainder of the ham into the Instant Pot the next day for 20 minutes, deboned it and put the bone back in for another 20 minutes, and made split pea soup. She can eat that as well, and had missed it sorely. I just dice up a bit of ham to go into my own bowl along with the soup, for the full experience. I also baked cookies and sent a box off to the grandkids in Alberta, since the postal strike had prevented me from sending their usual box at Christmas time.

I have the opposite problem with my range. The coil element periodically will have a "runaway" moment, when - no matter what setting the dial is turned to - it will suddenly go full blast, for no discernible reason. This appears to be a function of the wiring to that position, rather than the coil itself, because I've swapped them and it still recurs in the same spot (the much-used front large burner, of course...). I discovered this a couple of years ago when I left the room to rummage for something in the freezer, and came back to discover that the burner had actually melted a hole in the bottom of my multi-ply Paderno Dutch oven.* The burner itself had melted out in that spot, breaking the circuit and preventing any further damage. I haven't gotten around to looking this up online and doing some troubleshooting, so I use the less-convenient large burner in the back corner a lot more and only use the problematic one when I'll be in the room and giving it my full attention. *Some of you will remember that I'd watched the price on that specific set for several years before finally acquiring it at a blowout clearance price, so I was especially miffed.

I'm sure I've made a version of this post upthread somewhere, but... no matter what the news, or how stiff my back/joints happen to be, it's hard to not smile when I see these little faces greeting me in the morning. This is Ivy's litter (she's the sole survivor of "the incident," and our original bloodlines), and they're a remarkably inquisitive, cuddly little group, especially the light-brown at far right, closest to the camera. You'll note that the bowl behind them is full, they've already gotten their food and water. They're just looking for some petting. I may or may not have mentioned it in the past, but that strip of metal you see lining the door is a length of "corner bead," for making neat corners with drywall. Cutting a doorway in the mesh left small, sharp stumps of wire that I could never quite eliminate with my side cutters, and the stumps frequently sliced up my arm or my sleeves. So we hit on the idea of using these strips of thin, flexible metal to cover the cut ends of the wire and provide some small degree of reinforcement for the opening. I have since purchased a good, heavy file for putting an edge on my axe and hatchet, and now I'm using that to remove the burr from the cut edges. It's just as effective, and eliminates the need to purchase the strips of corner bead periodically as we upgrade and/or replace cages. As it turns out, our smaller-than-hoped litters haven't set us back as much as we'd feared, because we aren't selling as many bunnies this year as we had in the past. We sold a LOT more as pets and breeders last year, around Easter time. This year we've sold exactly two, so far, though we've had a few other sales fall through because the people who reached out to us thought we were in Kingston, Nova Scotia, rather than Kingston, New Brunswick. One couple literally didn't realize this until they'd hopped into their car, 15 minutes prior to their intended arrival, and punched the address into their GPS. So the upshot is that I'll be delivering bunnies to a couple of buyers in Nova Scotia when I run back down this weekend for my monthly visit. Two will go to someone in Truro (about an hour outside of Halifax, and an agricultural hub), and someone else will meet me in the parking lot at my mom's nursing home in Hammonds Plains (part of greater Halifax). We've sold several quail, though, and lots of quail eggs to people wanting to hatch their own flocks. Two of our egg-buyers turned out to be teachers, who will be hatching them out as a class activity (apparently teachers need to be creative to keep the kids focused, as the end of the school year looms). We also had an interesting visit from a home-schooling family: the mom brought her three kids to our place for a hands-on visit with the baby quail (we had adults, adolescents and day-old hatchlings, for a useful compare-and-contrast) and some bunny-cuddling time. They took home a dozen quail eggs to incubate, as well, but once they hatch she'll bring the hatchlings back to us to rear. She's kinda tempted to keep some, but hubby's not on board. So the quail have been our money-maker so far, but it's early enough in the season that we have time to sell a lot more bunnies to help defray our costs. As we build out our flock of chickens (they take a lot longer than quail, to become productive) we're hoping to establish a handful of "regulars" to buy fresh eggs from us and provide a small income, which will also help subsidize our costs. Currently there's nobody we know of in the Maritimes offering quail eggs for sale on a commercial basis, so my GF is thinking seriously that instead of our current mixed flock, we'll start keeping flocks of separate breeds and offering fertile eggs for sale. There seems to be at least a modest demand, and she's not able to work conventionally because of her illness(es), so it could be a useful little side income she could generate. It also opens the possibility of some tax breaks, if we can make even a small-scale business of our tiny acreage.

My GF just sent me this one:

I saw this four times in an hour this morning, which may say a great deal about the people I know.

I'll hazard a guess that it's a play on luosifen, with the springs, bolts and such in place of the snails... perhaps an etymological link based on the shared curliness of the ironmongery and the snails' shells?

Captain's Choice shredded coconut is being recalled for salmonella. Affects Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/captain-s-choice-brand-shredded-coconut-recalled-due-salmonella?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Ate the last of the beans and kale from last year's garden last night, unless there's an overlooked bag of tomatoes lurking in the freezer somewhere. Getting to mid-April isn't bad at all. We were able to have at least some of our own homegrown vegetables on the table most nights, to complement the store-bought.

Yesterday, deadline-motivated as always, I finished repairing the last two damaged cages so we could wean the baby bunnies and separate them from their mothers. After having their first opportunity in several weeks to enjoy an unhurried meal and a restful night, the mamas seemed pretty pleased this morning. The little ones are growing like weeds, of course, and the first buyer (a repeat customer from last year) is coming this afternoon to pick one up. At last count, IIRC, my GF has 7 or 8 sold. We've also sold a few quail, and several dozen quail eggs, to people wanting to start their own flocks. There's another clutch of quail eggs in the incubator, which have been hatching out since yesterday. There were 18 live hatchlings and two that exhausted themselves fatally while breaking free of the eggs; and as of this morning there seem to be another 4 or 5 (we're still hoping for more before the day's out). I was amused when I got up this morning to see Bixby, our ginger kitty, parked in front of the incubator and watching with great interest as the tiny hatchlings floundered around on the inside. One of the little ones was right there at the wall of the incubator, glaring back at Bixby, hauling itself up to its full height and flapping its stumpy little wings to look more intimidating, and pecking fiercely at the wall dividing them. I watched the little one offering violent defiance to a fanged, clawed predator 100X its size, and thought "Yup, that one's a male..."

I'm putting this here, instead of in the Cocktails thread, because of his approach, but it would fit just as well over there. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/is-there-a-grand-unified-theory-of-cocktails-maybe/

(Purely a joke, I'm basically a non-drinker at this point...)

Seems germane... (Cal-Maine is the largest of the five companies that control the US egg market, and makes a useful proxy for the industry at large) https://fortune.com/2025/04/10/egg-prices-profits-cal-maine-bird-flu/

I've previously shared articles about coffee research from a specific team of scientists. This time, they've turned their attention to improving pour-over coffee (link to the underlying study in the text, for those who want to geek out). https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/apr/08/secret-to-stronger-pour-over-coffee-with-no-extra-beans-unlocked-by-scientists

Seeing the first new shoots from our host o' hostas... ...and my autumn bulbs... ...not to mention the fall-blooming sedums I picked up late in the season last year, on clearance. The sedums and the hardy hibiscus (another late-season purchase, marked down from $40/ea to $10/ea) are both okay in my zone, but not necessarily in aboveground pots, so I sunk them both into empty spaces in my main garden for the winter while we considered where to put them on a more permanent basis.

Just gonna do a screen-cap here, owing to the NYT paywall, but those of you who may be affected can always check the FDA's site for details and batch numbers.

Scientists in the kitchen:

My GF just sent me this video. I've seen some actual ads that were this off-kilter, so I suspect it's legit, though maybe one of our UK members can confirm? https://www.facebook.com/reel/690876749942364

...after baking a cake for a grandkid's birthday, forget to ask "Are you bringing a knife to slice this with, or am I?" Which resulted in my stepdaughter and I giving each other "Uh-oh" looks, as grandson and his friends and cousins gathered around the table. I ended up cutting the cake with my Swiss Army knife, which was not quite long enough, so today I need to carefully extricate the remainder of the chocolate icing from inside the handle. I'll note that planning an outdoor birthday party in April was a pretty gutsy call on my stepdaughter's part, and it ended up getting moved forward a day because the weather today is expected to be pretty poor.

As many of you will know, I raise rabbits for meat. I've done some back of the envelope math at one point or another and worked out that even a small establishment like mine (4-6 does) can put something on the order of 800 lbs of meat in the freezer in just one summer, depending how hard you want to work them (and a few other factors). That compares favorably to most forms of larger livestock, though of course (as I've often joked) you don't get many steaks or chops out of a rabbit. Having made that joke repeatedly, one day my GF challenged me on it. She really enjoys breaded schnitzel-style cutlets, and wanted to know if I could figure out how to make them from a rabbit. I gave it some thought and decided that hind legs or loin pieces were my best bet, so last night I thawed two saddles of rabbit (ie the two loins, and the piece of spine joining them) and gave it a shot. Here's the end result: Three of the loins I left intact, just removed the silverskin and pounded them out. One loin I cut diagonally in half, to make two smaller portions for the kids. There were also the tiny tenderloins, which I didn't bother to pound because they were already quite thin and (of course) tender. Finally, I had the four vaguely triangular pieces of thin belly meat which I'd left in place when I broke down the rabbits; those I pounded with the studded side of the meat mallet (you'll see two of those at the top of the plate). They were chewy, but not unpleasantly so. I served them with boiled potatoes, steamed cauliflower and broccoli, and gravy. No plated pictures, because I had hungry/impatient mouths to feed. (NB: I also roasted the pieces of backbone, with the bits and pieces of meat that weren't worth trimming off, and those are in the fridge as an agreeable nibble I can reheat and pick clean when the mood strikes.)

Basically the wheat version of pearled barley, I guess. I expect you could use it in recipes calling for wheat berries, but dial back the cooking time somewhat. I'll be curious to see what you think of it.

I don't have anything much to add that hasn't already been touched on, but (shrug) that's never stopped me before... I'll add a +1 to the possibility of it being attractive to people who live with a chronic illness or other disability. That's an under-appreciated market (a great many of the kitchen gizmos you've seen on late-night infomercials began with that market, and then expanded into the mass consumer sphere). Also, there are a lot more people with disabilities than most of us realize, not to mention how many of us will be temporarily sidelined by illness or injury at some point in our lives. The hotel breakfast-bar idea seems plausible to me as well, at least as a niche/novelty item. I doubt you'd place them at every Holiday Inn or Best Western, but as a very small company you night not need a large sales volume to do your 401(k) some good. Here in the Kitchen Consumer forum you'll see a very similar request for feedback (a precision cooker) by a European entrepreneur who has been successful in just such a modest fashion. That said - and far be it from me to throw cold water on anyone's dream - it could be argued (for reasons too obvious to require comment) that you've chosen the Very Worst Possible Moment to be prototyping a new electronic device, having it manufactured, and bringing it to market. ETA: Took the time to look up info on the prevalence of disabilities in the US, then forgot to include the link. https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents/disability-impacts-all-of-us-infographic.html