chromedome

Well, it's not especially clever, but... in the absence of oven-specific advice, wrapping the cake pan with insulating strips (Wilton sells them) is a universally-applicable option that helps keep the edges from over-baking before the middle's done.

I'm genuinely a bit surprised that, after a life spent wedded to a Dane, any herring preparation might strike you as intimidating.

A years-ago friend of mine (a physicist from Colorado) made what he called "Mexican shepherd's pie," which was chili with the cornbread baked on top. I don't know if it's common in those environs or was unique to his family, but I make it occasionally when the mood strikes.

FWIW I've seen it served with rice at many restaurants in Canada as well, though admittedly not within the past couple of decades. Must be just a reflexive pairing of rice & beans, 'cause chili is a bean dish, right? (Ducks and hides from the purists...)

It's just a marketing term. It's applied to ancestral wheats (khorasan/kamut, spelt, farro, emmer, einkorn, call 'em what you will...), as well as millet and some pseudograins like amaranth and quinoa that were historically used by specific cultures. Basically everything other than barley, rye, corn, oats, buckwheat and modern wheats.

Not a food recall, as such, but food-adjacent: three lines of vitamins/supplements, from the same manufacturer, are being recalled for possibly containing fragments of wire. https://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc/2021/75447a-eng.php

"Dressed flatbreads" is pretty much how I define pizza, as far as that goes.

LOL She drinks Carlo Rossi California Red, and others of that ilk. She'd be the first to tell you she has no palate (actually she'd say "I like what I like," but it nets out to be about the same).

Hmm. My GF favors them because she's clumsy (especially after the second or third glass). She finds the lower center of gravity means she's less likely to knock it over.

Perhaps you were attempting a novel approach to potato pancakes? I've occasionally been that innovative after a certain degree of alcohol...

Fair enough. I always loved the chevron pattern of orange and purple on the skin side of sturgeon fillets, it's so striking. Like their secret identity is standing guard at the Vatican.

Nothing like it, texturally. More of a humongous herring, though with a more delicate flavor.

Yes, but... If you click through and look at the actual study, they did three kinds of tests. One simply exposed the plastics to UV, intending to simulate exposure to sunlight or (in the case of baby products) a UV sterilizer. Another test heated the samples to 134C for 8 minutes in an autoclave (ie, a pressure cooker), to simulate a dishwasher (??). The third microwaved them for 2 minutes on High in a 1000 watt microwave. I can't find anywhere in the paper where it mentions how much saline they placed inside the test articles, but I can tell you for certain that mine will bring a cup of water to a full boil well before 2 minutes have passed. In either case, the temperatures will be much higher than you'd use in sous vide cookery. Does this necessarily mean they're 100 percent safe to use at sous vide temperatures? (shrug) I don't know, and I have too much work on my plate at the moment to dig into it. But the data from the study are probably (largely) invalidated by the differences in temperature.

Everything about that space speaks to an absence of children.

I mostly use it in pilafs, or instead of rice as the grain in stuffed vegetables. It works very well in both use-cases. If you own any middle-eastern cookbooks, you'll find lots of uses there. It's also pretty good as a porridge, and I once made a sort of faux-risotto with it that wasn't bad (if you think of it as just a savory "gruel," and don't sweat the conventions of what is or is not risotto).

I'm not a purist, I'll still call it a butter tart even without the raisins. The others, well...they're fun variations. I don't consider it a butter tart exactly under those circumstances, but my daughter loved rhubarb in hers (and I obliged her) so who am I to cast stones?

My father occasionally grew parsnips that big and chunky, but they were rare enough to be celebrated.

I had completely forgotten about them until I saw your photos, but I remembered it immediately (I had a real sweet tooth as a kid). Here in NB we have the Ganong Pal-o-Mine bar, which is chocolate fudge with peanuts. It's been around for over a century now, and they like to boast that it's one of the oldest candy bars to remain in continuous production (albeit with a pretty small distribution footprint).

A lesser-known Canadian tradition. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/sourtoe-cocktail-lives-on-at-yukon-bar-after-creator-wills-his-own-toes-1.4693551

Has he tried the ones from Superstore? I haven't had the ones from Costco or TJ's (or the ones from Superstore, for that matter) but President's Choice would be readily available for pretty much anyone in Canada.

I haven't had it in years, but ate a lot of it in childhood (Mom used to keep it around...she made her own sporadically through the year, but this was the backup). FWIW, it's the "reference" brand of pea soup up here, in the same way that Heinz is the "reference" brand of ketchup. You'd probably want to jazz it up a titch with your own bacon or ham, and/or any other garnishes you like, but the basic soup is...a good basic soup.

LOL I had difficulties getting the locals to try lamb...I can just imagine their response to "pig intestine rolls."

They sell the entire archive in USB form, updated every year (currently includes 51 years' issues). I ordered two copies of the the 50th-anniversary version, one for myself and one for my stepdaughter.

My father grew up in northern Newfoundland in the 40s and 50s, when the old-school "truck system" was still in place. Those of you from coal country would know it as the "company store/town" scenario: the merchant you sold your fish to was also the guy who brought in any/all supplies from outside, and set the prices for both fish and merchandise. The more you were able to grow yourself, the less likely you were to end up irretrievably indebted to the local merchant. We moved around a lot when I was a kid so my father never had much opportunity to live out his ideal of self-sufficiency (for one thing, he was at sea for months at a time and a big garden was a lot for my mom, my little sister and I to deal with). He subscribed to Organic Gardening & Farming (as it was then) in the late 60s and early 70s, before it became a lifestyle magazine, and Mother Earth News from about its second year right up until he died. OGF and Mother were literally some of my earliest reading, and I may have been the only 2nd-grader in the province who could have given you a detailed off-the-cuff explanation of, say, Ruth Stout's no-till gardening method. When he got out of the navy we moved to Newfoundland, and he took a serious run at the whole self-sufficiency game. When we moved in the only bits of our 7 acres that were cleared had a house and driveway on them, except for a few meters between the woodpile and the door. We cleared a couple of acres ourselves, and "hired" a pair of pigs to dig out a bunch of stumps for us in another section, and enlarged the little pond/large puddle that was already present not far behind the house. We had ducks in the pond, chickens up behind the pigs, and a pretty big garden. We grew enough potatoes for us and our extended family for the winter, with enough left over to feed the next year's pigs (Dad scaled back a bit, the second year...), as well as cabbages and sturdy root vegetables (carrots, rutabagas, parsnips, beets), and peas and beans and a few other random things. Dad quickly learned that northern Newfoundland is not necessarily the best place for subsistence homesteading, given that you can have a killing frost as late as early July or as early as, say, Labour Day weekend. Eventually he decided it wasn't the right time or place, so he put that notion on the back burner for a while. My folks moved to Calgary for several years, then back home to look after my grandmother in semi-rural Nova Scotia (it's now all subdivisions, but then it was still on the cusp). They gardened and kept a few chickens at this stage, and then bought themselves a property out in the central part of the province. It was part of what was once a large farm a century ago, and Dad built them a small off-grid shack which eventually morphed into a compact but fully-fitted on-grid house. They started gardening seriously again when they sold off their bakery to look after my grandmother full-time (she was well gone in dementia by then); they had relatives come in on the weekends so they could take a break and go to their property. They grew pretty much everything they needed except for pantry staples (flour, sugar, coffee, etc) and meats. They gave thought to having chickens again, but decided that animals were more work than they wanted to take on again at that point in life (hitting 60-ish). Also animals would have limited their ability to visit my mom's family elsewhere in NS, grandkids in Alberta, Dad's family in Newfoundland, and me in NB. They lived there until Dad passed away 4 years ago. Mom hung in through the summer and harvested the garden one last time, then moved into town. So this is the context for my own intentions (previously laid out elsewhere on the site) to build a home on a small acreage at some point over the next couple of years. Like my father I've picked away at gardening pretty much everywhere I've lived, without having the opportunity to really take it on in a serious way. I've learned from my father's various experiments (high tunnels and greenhouses, thank you very much) and hope to keep it up for a couple of decades, as he did, through some forethought and good design decisions. Nothing as formal as a family history of farming or a standalone family business (most of my immediate ancestors were fishermen and boat builders) but that's my legacy.