chromedome

It irks me greatly that all the nice braising cuts are so expensive now; easily twice the price of a steak (because there's *always* a steak on sale). I'll go years between steaks, but I love my braises. Of course it's all rather moot now, as my GF can't eat red meats for medical reasons.

LOL Who knew?

So there's a sequel, in which the chef replied with a rebuttal that was every bit as rambling and incoherent as the meal itself.

For me it wasn't the over-the-phone part, but the hastily-scrawled part. A partial O is automatically a C. I've done this more than once to myself, and my printed lower-case Rs, Ns, Us and Vs all look pretty much alike.

Funny how our minds work, isn't it? I was the opposite; I went straight to "olives" and never would have thought of cloves or chives.

We have those where I live, too. One chain (Sobeys) uses them, the other (Superstore) does not.

Having given their website a once-over, I'm pretty sure it is.

My "setup" is neither elaborate nor photogenic. I have two small windowsill planters on (...wait for it...) a windowsill, with a single Sun Blaster tube positioned over them. I grew some lettuce under it last winter. My other space is on top of a small buffet/sideboard sort of piece, with an inexpensive full-spectrum LED suspended over it. It's roughly 10"X13" and IIRC provides the equivalent of an old-school 1000-watt light but with much lower power consumption. They're all over Amazon under a hundred different brand names, with probably a half-dozen manufacturers turning out variations of the same design. Wedged into the corner between the buffet and the door is a corner shelf, which holds the ground cherry plant. It shares the LED with the plants on the buffet, which consist of six pots (the herbs, the tomato and the remaining greens) and my third windowsill planter. That's it. No tent, no reflectors, and no natural light to speak of. My office window faces roughly north, and the apartment's remaining windows face west and a bit north. They get afternoon sun for much of the year, but my office does not.

I was late starting my indoor winter garden this year (because life in general...) but things are finally underway. I already had a ground cherry plant, a miniature tomato (ie, a dwarf cherry tomato) and a pot with basil and rosemary. I have three small windowsill planters: one seeded with buttercrunch and Lola Rosso lettuces, one with spinach, and one with both radishes and golden purslane (an impulse buy from the seed catalogue). I also have four larger pots planted: one with broccoli raab, two with mixed varieties of chard, and one with a variety of beets (Early Wonder Tall Top) that I grow every year for its greens (the actual beetroots are just a bonus). I've thickly seeded the chard, beets, and raab because I harvest them (cut and come again) at the stage where they're about the size of a playing card, so I can get away with growing them close together. Ditto the radishes, which I'll thin for baby greens and then allow the roots to grow on the remaining plants.

I thought we had a thread around here somewhere dealing with accessibility issues and their corresponding adjustments, but I wasn't able to find it on a quick search. It may be that I'm remembering digressions spread across multiple threads, or just that I need to invest a bit more time in learning how to use the on-site search properly.

It comes down to individual preferences/situations, I think. In my case my first thought is always the continued impact of arthritis, but I'm also very prone to tendinitis and there are already days when handling a knife can be problematic for me (so as I type the words, it occurs to me that I'm probably approaching this backwards...). A mandoline would be the easier option for me in a lot of cases, and I also have a stack of yet-unused discs for my Cuisinart, which I'll need to dig into at some point. I've sacrificed the odd bit of knuckle or fingertip to a mandoline over the years, but a cut-resistant glove (in conjunction with the existing holder thingie) would greatly reduce the likelihood of injury. My GF also says she'd be comfortable using the mandoline if she had one, rather than conscripting me as needed to do her slicing. (shrug) It just seems like a reasonable adaptation/precaution, like buying voice dictation software against the day I can no longer type (which I've already done).

Do you favor the chain-mail type, or the Kevlar? As my arthritis worsens, I can see the probability that I'll use my mandolines more and have considered buying a glove.

Bumping this to provide a view from the other side. This is a writer I follow (her historical Queens of Infamy series on Longreads is great fun), who's in her 30s and just never...quite...got around to learning how to cook before the pandemic rolled around. How Meal Kits Changed My Mind about Cooking

All that's missing is the lengthy preamble and a few pictures, and it's a page from an inferior food blog.

https://thecounter.org/four-corners-potato-species-indigenous-crop-navajo-nation-usda-southwest-future/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-libraries-and-archives/2021/11/18/kitchen-essentials-from-centuries-past/

I'm sorry, I know it was just a typo, but "electric wench" makes me envision one of the frontiers-y androids from Westworld helping you gut your deer.

It's a feeling most of us must eventually come to terms with.

I've retained an oversized balloon whisk from my restaurant days for that express purpose, but only prepare them in that kind of quantity once every couple of years. It works pretty well. Most recently I used it to mash the chokecherries for our current batch of chokecherry wine.

Number 5 on that list - squishing excess water from greens - is what mine primarily gets used for, though I do use it occasionally for potatoes. For actual mashing I mostly use the kind with the S-shaped wires, unless I want 'em extra-smooth for a specific purpose (then the ricer comes out). I also have one of the other old-school variety with a flat face and square holes, which I use for mashing things like carrot and rutabaga (or a combination of the two mashed together, which is a common side dish here in Atlantic Canada).

...and another update on the same recall, advising people not to EAT ACTUAL POISON because, well... https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/one-tang-brand-sweet-apricot-kernels-may-cause-cyanide-poisoning?utm_source=r_listserv

Utilization of fire and cooked foods by non-humans species, with a side order of hominin and human behavior. https://aeon.co/essays/how-animal-uses-of-fire-help-to-illuminate-human-pyrocognition

According to the commercial I just saw, Burger King now offers chicken nuggets in... dill pickle flavor? I cannot envision a combination of intoxicants that would make this alluring to me.

Once again, the CFIA is recalling cyanide-containing apricot kernels because people keep eating the damned things despite their cyanide content. Because, you know... wellness. https://rsams.prod.cloud.openplus.ca/en/alert-recall/consumption-one-tang-brand-bitter-apricot-kernel-may-cause-cyanide-poisoning?utm_source=r_listserv