chromedome

My grow light has just arrived...last year's seedlings were leggy and pathetic, because my lights weren't up to the task, but this year I should be in good shape. To my delight I discovered a local purveyor of pepper seeds that grow well here in Atlantic Canada, and have ordered - among other things - seeds for piments d'Espelette, which was a pleasant surprise. Going to start a few melons shortly, and the peppers once they arrive, and I already have some summer squash (pattypan, yellow, and heirloom green) planted but not yet germinated. My windowsill lettuces are coming along fine, and contributing a few leaves at a time to my lunchtime salads now (there'll be more later). I also had some onions and garlic that were sprouting in my cupboard, so I stuck them into a couple of planters. I have all the scallions I'll need for the next while, and will soon have new garlic to harvest and use (my own garlic is out in mulched beds at my two plots).

I almost clicked mackerel on that one as well, before my brain caught up to my finger. They look alike, but you wouldn't mistake a mackerel for any kind of tuna once it's on the plate. As for the hoki, well...that one was new to me, but I could rule out the other three.

There's been a thing for years about eating them to self-treat for cancer and a variety of other health issues (remember laetrile?). It's BS, of course, but the health/wellness field contains many similarly durable pieces of egregious foolishness.

Also, yet another update on the apricot kernel recall. Spoiler: Willfully consuming cyanide may have a negative impact on your health. Who knew? https://inspection.canada.ca/food-recall-warnings-and-allergy-alerts/2021-03-19/eng/1616214896326/1616214902366?utm_source=r_listserv

Not a recall as yet, but definitely worth knowing (especially if anyone you know is into the "alkaline" fad): https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/complaints-mount-after-5-kids-suffer-liver-failure-linked-to-alkaline-water/

Yeah, I know. But I've seen McGee's work on how to minimize that through long/slow cooking, and frankly...I eat a lot of beans already, so it's not that big a departure.

My father was curious about sunchokes, and secured some from a local grower to put into his garden. He asked the man "At harvest time, how much do I need to leave in the ground so they'll come back next year?" The grower's response? "Dig up every scrap you can find, and you'll still have twice as much the next year!" (I plan to grow them when I have my own place, because they make a big, bold perennial border)

Yup, straight out of the "sentences I never expected to read" dept...

A friend of mine - Newfoundland Irish - jokingly refers to the whole exercise as "cultural inappropriation."

You and my cousin Pat. (My uncle married into a very Catholic family; in fact when her parents died they donated their family property as the site for a church to be built for their growing community.) Happy birthday!

I'm assuming this one is related to the previous one in some fashion... https://inspection.canada.ca/food-recall-warnings-and-allergy-alerts/2021-03-16/eng/1615926621138/1615926621574?utm_source=r_listserv

I make that, sometimes. Usually with a scattering of caraway seeds added in while the cabbage braises.

When I was a kid, I found the trick was to fry it super-crisp on the outside as a complement to the soft inside, much like you get with a well-executed french fry. ...Well, maybe not "much" like...but you know what I mean.

A universal tip for getting heavy stuff out of boxes: 1) Open top 2) Fold flaps down the side 3) Flip box over 4) Lift box from product, rather than the other way around That way you're lifting the light stuff (cardboard and foam), and gravity is your friend. Doing it the conventional way means you're doing the heavy work, and gravity is decidedly *not* your friend. ETA: Waiting for helping hands with the final lift-into-place remains a wonderfully sound idea, of course...

Anything we watch that isn't just a random "oh hey, what's that?" is recorded. I hate sitting through commercials, so I don't. I've never been one for "appointment television"...for a couple of decades I just didn't watch TV, full stop. Now I do, thanks to streaming and full-season drops (yay, Netflix, boo Disney+). I don't mind watching the odd plot-free program (ie, home-reno shows) or movie that's recorded, so I can skip the commercial breaks. I only have so much time available, after all.

This is right up there with the "contains peanuts" warning on the peanut butter jar, but Health Matters organic apricot kernels are being recalled for containing higher-than-usual levels of cyanide. I can only assume that most here know better, but... https://www.inspection.gc.ca/food-recall-warnings-and-allergy-alerts/2021-03-11/eng/1615498625763/1615498631819?utm_source=r_listserv

https://www.eater.com/2021/3/1/22214044/fermented-foods-industry-whiteness-kimchi-miso-kombucha

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. Much of the difficulty in making conventional gnocchi lies in using a light hand to prevent gluten development, so I expect an all-purpose GF mix would work well. The singular GF flours (oat, rice, brown rice, quinoa) all have different characters, so you'd need to probably experiment a few times to see which of those was best-suited.

1) It was a "birds, stone" sort of thing...we already had these pieces, and were paying to store a lot of our stuff because we'd downsized from a large house to a small apartment, so shoehorning as much of our existing furniture into this space as possible was a solution to both problems. The situation is similar in the tiny "master" bedroom, where the oversized suite of furniture she and her ex had chosen (he was 6'5") leaves just enough floor space to squeeze through and get to the door. 2) Organized? No, not so much. There's a reason I didn't show the inside of any of those spaces. They're overdue for a sweeping (re)organization, but it hasn't happened yet. The things I use most often are readily discoverable, but finding ingredients I use less often sometimes takes longer than it should. 3) As I mentioned above, I've already done several purges. At one point I could have equipped a small restaurant with what I had in my own kitchen. I know this to be true without hyperbole, because it was the stuff I *had* used in my restaurant (including a full-sized deep fryer, rigged for mobile use). There are some things that may yet get weeded out, but others see minimal use by their nature (like the serving trays that only get used at holiday meals, or the fondue pots my GF cherishes which have been used just once in our six years together) and are likely to remain with us. 4) The timeline is pretty nebulous at this point, but probably 2-5 years. My GF leans to the former, I think the latter is more likely. I'll have finally put the financial hangover of my restaurant closure to rest by next year, at which point we can begin saving seriously. Right now we're only two months into having an actual account dedicated to saving for a down payment. Land and housing are cheap here, but unconventional building methods and energy efficiency drive up the cost and make many things harder/more time consuming than they might otherwise be. In the short term, our plan is to budget for periodic purchases of cabinetry (probably from IKEA) which can be used as a coherent, freestanding replacement for the existing, mismatched flat-pack furniture while we're still here in the apartment. Then they can be built into the kitchen, once we construct the house. Remember that buffet/sideboard I'd mentioned, to the left of the standup pantry? We plan to replace that and our current TV stand with a bunch of IKEA stuff that will later become the lowers for much of the kitchen. Basically we're trying to make sure that the short-term choices we make to improve our apartment feed into the longer-term vision.

My personal nadir was a little apartment in Regina, upstairs in a 1920s-vintage house. My choice of prep areas consisted of the counter occupied by the two-burner hotplate (settings: Off/Max) or the slanted dish-drainer built into the sink, or alternatively I could just use the top of the (folding) table. I had two cupboards over the sink but none below, because of the plumbing. The entire affair would have fit into a decent half-bath in a modern home.

It was actually built as a bar for the ex-teacher's basement. Getting it out of said basement was a real challenge, because it went in before the basement was finished. As you can imagine, he installed a lot of decorative woodwork which we needed to navigate around in order to get the piece out. You can't really tell from that photo, but it has an L-shaped upper counter as well as the main counter. It's roughly 5 feet wide, 2 feet deep and 4 1/2 feet high, and it's made mostly of inch-thick plywood. It's a beast.

Okay, here's some followup. This is Real Life, unvarnished, so please excuse the daily detritus in various places. It's also an exercise in cramming Far Too Much Stuff into a small space. First, we have something approximating the above shot. The IP is currently turning the carcass of a Costco chicken into broth for tonight's meal. In the near front left you'll see a whiteboard where I keep my shopping list, and then there are two purely decorative copper pans (a pretty feeble effort, but it was that or storage...). Up top you'll make out some cast iron, a paella, various roasting pans and baking dishes, and my KitchenAid pasta accessories. Below, the aforementioned jumble of stove-side stuff, plus a random phone charger, Motley Assortment o' Knives (TM), and some magnetic spice tins. Here we have the small space between sink and microwave, and the microwave itself. Cleaning stuff on a lazy susan atop the microwave, because grandkids. Mason jars, lids and other assorted clutter, because me. Beside the fridge you'll see a standup freezer, and we've put flat-pack cupboards on top of the fridge and freezer to create more storage. Those contain a Food Saver machine, a Zojirushi breadmaker, a Vitamix and a few other odds and ends. In behind, past the random clutter of pet and human meds, spare fuses and such, sharp eyes will spot the Cuisinart toaster oven I scored at Value Village for $9.95 a couple of weeks ago. Continuing our tour, this is actually a flat-pack wardrobe I bought from Walmart a couple of years ago. It has been repurposed, and now contains my KitchenAid, the Cuise, the IP when it's at home, a number of lesser appliances, several plastic totes containing baking supplies/equipment, and hanging mesh bags of garlic and onions. Please note that we will not be looking inside any of these pieces of furniture, because even my candor has a limit. Next we come to The Awkward Corner. The metal rack you see there was intended to straddle a toilet, but it's an equally good fit over our blue bin. Those tubs mostly contain coffees, teas, and treats for the grandkids, though in the top left you'll note the styrofoam cake forms I used for my stepdaughter's wedding cake back in October. The island you see with the breakfast station on it was built for a retiring high school wood-shop teacher by his students, and it weighs a FREAKIN' TON. Have I mentioned that we live on the third floor of a building with no elevator? The Calphalon-branded toaster works well, but may be giving up its spot to the newly-purchased toaster oven. We'll see. The cupboards under the island hold grains, pulses and noodles of various kinds (on the left) and an assortment of vinegars, condiments and such (on the right). Yes, that's a bar fridge sitting up on top (we had no other convenient spot for it after the last redistribution of furniture). It contains mostly condiments, pickles and jams. The salmon on the wall behind is an original artwork, purchased from a fellow vendor at the farmer's market. He bought up panel doors from old houses, painted his fish on the actual panel, and then painted the beveled edge in a contrasting colour. Boom! Canvas and frame, all in one. Now we're looking the opposite direction, away from the wall containing the breakfast station. This is an actual freestanding pantry I bought at Walmart a few years and addresses ago, and it's holding up well (much better than the wardrobe). The upper half contains further baking ingredients, a selection of cereals and crackers, dried fruit and other healthy snacks for the grandkids, and my steel-cut oats. The bottom half contains the remaining spices and seasonings, mostly. Sitting on top you'll discern one of my two waffle makers (the other is a 60s-vintage Sears model), a brown box with some of my Christmas baking paraphernalia, a dehydrator, a (gifted) French fry cutter, and (just visible behind everything else, in the blue box) a big honkin' cabbage shredder for making sauerkraut. Just to the left and out of the frame is a buffet/sideboard sort of affair, holding a large mirror and vase of cut flowers on top and two cupboards of canned and dry goods underneath. Disclosure: I also have an armoire in the spare bedroom filled with home-canned pickles and applesauce, as well as the rest of my empty Mason jars and lids (the ones on the counter in the earlier picture are newly washed and waiting to migrate back to that room). Also several boxes of kitchen stuff still in the basement storage locker(s). ...and that's after donating a pile of stuff, and setting up our respective daughters a few times with enough gear to outfit their kitchens. There you have it. Not the worst kitchen I've ever had in a rental, not by a long shot, and it's actually reasonably functional for what it is. Things are usually within reach!

I don't have any current ones, but I took this before move-in: The little space to the left of the stove now holds two small tubs with utensils in them, a bottle of olive oil and a bottle of vegetable oil, a mortar and pestle, and my salt pig and a terra cotta garlic storage pot. The space to the right of the stove now holds my cheapie induction hob, since the range has only one full-sized burner. The fridge has shifted one fridge-width to the right, and my portable dishwasher occupies the space where it used to be. My microwave lives on top of the dishwasher. The shelves in the cupboards are of course fixed and only 9 inches high, so they won't accommodate most appliances or large pots. They're also quite high, with the bottom edge being five feet from the floor. On the plus side, that means I have lots of clearance between the countertop and the cupboards. The space above the cupboards is now filled with serving trays, Kitchenaid attachments and Cuisinart discs, currently-unneeded freezer packs, and various other detritus. Working space between the sink and the induction hob is sufficient for a cutting board, a few ingredients and a bowl or some other container to accumulate the trim and suchlike. There is no under-cupboard lighting (though I could put in the stick-on kind) and no natural light. The builder-grade fixture you see is what I've got, and there's another in the small dining area behind where I stood when I took this shot. There's also no active ventilation, just a passive chimney-type flue which you can barely see in the ceiling over the stove.

Not quite that bad, no. I'm in a mid-60s vintage, on-a-budget building not unlike the base married quarters where I spent part of my childhood. It's basically a half-galley kitchen, except where the other half of the galley should be I have instead a blank wall filled with plumbing and electrical. There's about 20 inches of counter to the right of my sink, and a few more feet to the left, then an apartment-sized range at the end with another small hunk of countertop (and corresponding cupboard below) taking up the space between the range and the blank wall. Fill in the blanks with ugly laminate countertop, vintage 60s cabinetry with many coats of landlord-grade paint on them, and cheap vinyl flooring.