chromedome

You can add me to the "sympathy" list. Where I live, I only have to endure that kind of heat for a couple of days each summer. And even then, we can get a fog rolling in off the bay on any given day that drops the temperature by about 20 degrees F in a heartbeat. Yesterday was a perfect spring day, sunny and 10 degrees (50 F). Took a nice, long walk around the lake to celebrate.

Tough call. I've joked for years that "I don't want a counter-depth fridge, I want a fridge-depth counter" but it's not easy to balance the esthetics/practicality of a fridge that protrudes into your working spaces. I'm a couple of years away from facing that dilemma myself, but fwiw I'll note that I have a smaller-capacity fridge in my current rental and have a 3.3 cu ft mini fridge nearby for extra storage (and an upright freezer). It's just the two of us, so you'd think even a modest refrigerator would work, but in practice that's not the case.

This skews more to agriculture than food science in the direct sense, but "ag science" is basically food science on a macro scale so I'm putting it here rather than in one of our discussions of how food is grown. Short version is that the OP will be writing regularly about the intersection of agricultural and environmental issues.

Kids do have a way of rearranging one's priorities.

The heart is just a large and tough muscle. You can slow-cook it to tenderness, slice and pound it for schnitzel-y treatment (chicken-fried "steak," I suppose) or slice it very thin while half-frozen and flash-cook it over a smokin' hot grill or in a preheated pan. I'm sure you could SV it to tenderness as well, though I don't SV so I can't really speak to that. As for the kidney (a lifelong favorite of mine) there are lots of recipes available online, with steak & kidney pie being an obvious starting point.

She gets into that in some of the sub-threads, if you follow it through. The gist of it is that the full-time grain traders engage in a fairly standard-issue form of profit-taking and fleecing the rubes, but the big panics happen when mainstream investors (ie, Wall Street) create a self-perpetuating panic that drives investors out of conventional vehicles (in unsettled times) and into commodities. If you follow back through her threads on the subject you'll see a link to a study of this kind of bubble, as it happened in the 2008-2009 meltdown.

One for the ice cream mavens: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/plant-based-nanocrystals-could-be-the-secret-to-preventing-crunchy-ice-cream/

Dr. Taber, my favorite follow on the agricultural side, was on MSNBC last night to address the gap between the grain panic and the reality:

It may be a bit late, and may not contain anything you haven't already learned by now, but I found a link to this pamphlet in the materials I was given while prepping for my own treatments. Eating Well When You Have Cancer

Exsanguination is such a lovely-sounding word for such an inconvenient occurrence. ...and I'll be hearing it all morning, as sung by Carly Simon (to the tune of "Anticipation," of course).

Praise to Anoia!* *For those who haven't read Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, his idiosyncratic pantheon includes Anoia, the goddess of stuck drawers.

My GF is currently on medical leave and spends a lot of time scrolling, so I benefit from her as a "research assistant." Some of 'em I find on Twitter while I'm waking up in the mornings.

Stellar Bay oysters are being recalled for norovirus. They've been sold from BC to Quebec and may have been redistributed to other provinces. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-stellar-bay-shellfish-brand-oysters-recalled-due-norovirus?utm_source=r_listserv

My GF's version, God love her, is lean ground beef mixed with dry onion soup (and nothing else!) and then topped with ketchup as a sauce. It bakes to a dry brick. I made her a more conventional meatloaf the first year we were together, following the classic pattern, and she only ate a few bites. She likes hers better.

We buy a lot of faux-meat products because my poor sweetie can't eat red meat anymore for medical reasons. Had I known, I could have saved you the trouble of testing them for yourself. We've had other faux-sausage products that were passable, but these were just vile and disgusting in every respect.

I feel you. When I had my restaurants, lobster prices in this neck of the woods had cratered and I was getting them for $3.50/lb.

You'll see it used a few ways in @gfron1's cookbook, if you have a copy.

From the inimitable Dr. Sarah Taber:

Just saw this. If there's a Sobeys anywhere within range, they stock the GF Bisquick in their natural/health foods section. Of course, your Superstore may now have it back in stock as well.