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Meanwhile, back in the "unfortunate typos" department....

So...Italian pierogi? Cool.

The purchaser was online media purveyor DotDash, the former About.com. https://www.axios.com/dotdash-simply-recipes-serious-eats-94ee70ac-01ad-41cb-85fa-98426a5daa43.html

In my own garden I have freed up a bed for my garlic to go into by scalping my early planting of kale. This is fine; my late planting is just about ready to begin harvesting and it's a variety I like better (Siberian was all I had this spring, the later planting is Tuscan). Some of my other late plantings are just coming into their own, as well. I've been getting a few peas and they'll hit full flood over the next week or so, my pattypans are hanging in, I've harvested a few cukes, and just today nabbed a 4-lb spaghetti squash. Looks like I'll have several more of those by the end of October, as long as I get some kind of row covers in place before the next frost. My running tally of greens blanched and frozen is up to 10kg (about 22 lbs), and I've had a few more ripe Black Krims. Still waiting on the first San Marzanos to ripen, but many of them have begun to change color. I have a reflector up to maximize the limited sun we're getting this late in the season, and will get a cover over those as well in the next day or two. Yellow beans are about done, chard and beet tops are still producing solidly.

It's not as big a deal with garlic as with, say, carrots or something else with a similarly small seed. You lay down the cover, you poke a clove into the ground pointy-side up, you cover it. Done deal. Even if you're a bit off-center, your plant will do the rest by heading toward the light.

Mine will be going in over the next few days, as opportunity permits.

In Canada we have two national chains, Loblaws and Sobeys, and a few regional players. Where I live I have a Sobeys nearby, a (Loblaws) Superstore a bit further away, and a No Frills (Loblaw's discount brand) across town. I tend to shop the specials and time-sensitive markdowns at the main supermarkets, while pantry items and bulk packs come from No Frills or Costco. Our local pharmacy (Loblaws-owned Shoppers Drug Mart) is usually cheapest for milk, eggs and butter, so that's where I buy those. I have three small independent outlets near me, and my produce largely comes from those. Two offer mainly local produce and are only open seasonally, while the third offers local products where possible and orders in whatever else it needs to fill in the blanks. It adds up to pretty frugal shopping, and wouldn't translate well to a remote-ordering kind of scenario. Thankfully, we've been minimally affected by COVID (so far) and I haven't had to work around it very much.

This recall has been updated and is now "possibly national." https://www.inspection.gc.ca/food-recall-warnings-and-allergy-alerts/2020-09-24/eng/1600987173845/1600987179781?utm_source=r_listserv

It's not your imagination. It's an unavoidable truth that the conditions required to help 'em sprout (ie, warmth and moisture) also favor bacterial growth.

Ontario only, some batches of Sunsprout brand sprouts and microgreens have been recalled for possible salmonella. https://www.inspection.gc.ca/food-recall-warnings-and-allergy-alerts/2020-09-22/eng/1600807598962/1600807605335?utm_source=r_listserv

I totally understand that feeling, but with what's already a niche product it would cost at least as much (probably more) to create a supply chain for two different (with/without phone) versions of the oven.

BC and Ontario, Manila clams from Evergreen Seafoods, risk of paralytic shellfish poisoning. These were sold in bulk, so there's a high likelihood of followup recalls as they trace them through the food system. https://www.inspection.gc.ca/food-recall-warnings-and-allergy-alerts/2020-09-22/eng/1600812242248/1600812248453?utm_source=r_listserv

Supposedly Ho Chi Minh spent time working in one of Escoffier's kitchens when he was a young man and living in Paris. I haven't actually researched that, so it may be apocryphal. Whether any of his countrymen were serving their own food during that era, as opposed to simply being line grunts, is a whole other question.

The only other one I've made was for my daughter, in 2015 (I know I have photos around here somewhere). I'm a fair baker, but cake decorating requires a whole host of skills that haven't been much exercised since I left culinary school. I have two more stepdaughters, and have already committed to do cakes for them should the day ever come. I also cherish the hope that my daughter will ditch the current husband at some point (long story, don't get me started) and I would be entirely delighted to do a "start fresh" cake for her as well. ETA: Found a photo. Not a good one, but such is life. I piped over 300 practice roses to get a couple of dozen "keepers" to go in the cake.

LOL That's crazy talk! In fairness, molasses is another of those polarizing flavors, like licorice. I love it (love them both, actually) but of course Atlantic Canada, like New England, is part of the traditional "molasses belt." The bit Crosby Molasses refinery is just a few blocks from where I currently live, in fact. You know those big storage tanks they have for oil, near petroleum-shipping ports? There's one of those on the Saint John waterfront that's full of Crosby's molasses. It's quite a thing to see. The refinery itself just has trains of tanker cars backed up to it, which is equally impressive after a moment's thought but not as visually striking.

I went with (averts eyes) boxed mixes, just to eliminate a few variables that I really didn't want to deal with. The portion of the "show" cake that was actually cake was a DH lemon mix, tarted up (quite literally in this case) with lemon zest and fresh lemon juice, and with more in the buttercream between the layers. I also brushed lemon-scented simple syrup onto each layer before assembling it. The buttercream was French buttercream, as mentioned upthread, from the Serious Eats recipe, with just a splash of vanilla. I made 4 slab cakes (only 3 fit onto my itty-bitty counter for the photo), just to be sure there'd be lots of cake to go around. One was chocolate, brushed with simple syrup that had a bit of espresso powder in it, and filled in the middle with whipped ganache. One was butter-pecan, with added pecans (in the cake) and caramel buttercream between the layers. The syrup had a bit of local maple in it as well. One was carrot cake, with fresh-grated carrot and crushed pineapple added to the mix. No syrup on this one, it was super-moist already. One was plain ol' white cake, with a layer of tart raspberry preserves in the middle. Plain simple syrup. They all got milk and butter added, rather than water and vegetable oil, and a splash of decent vanilla extract. So...still box mixes, but with a few upgrades.

It turned out that my pink gel had gotten a bit lumpy after sitting since last year, and gave streaks through my buttercream. Ordinarily that would have had me fuming, but in this case streaks were consistent with the theme we were looking for so all was well (and I knew enough to microwave my red with a few drops of water before using it). Finished result: The bride had already changed out of her dress (temperature was dropping quickly) before they cut into it. The effect wasn't as neat as I'd hoped, but it looked okay. I even dressed up the complementary slab cakes in a similar color scheme. If I'd thought to do those first, I'd have had a better handle on how to do the main cakes. Aye, well...for someone who does only a few cakes a decade, they came out reasonably well.

Thanks to all of you for your input. The question of color accuracy was me getting sidetracked on nonessentials, the original point of concern with me was just making the colors vivid. I have purchased ribbon for the bottom of each layer, having caught that detail at about the 200th inspection of the photo ( ). I'm aware that the buttercream will have a yellow hue from the yolks; French is my go-to buttercream, and familiarity was part of the reason for doing it this way. As MokaPot suggested, getting the colors "accurate" is the last thing on my stepdaughter's mind right now (you schedule an outdoor wedding in Atlantic Canada in September at your peril...). So at this point the cakes are all baked, the "dummy" layer is assembled, and I have my first gallon of buttercream in hand and at working temperature. I expect I'll be incommunicado for the next several hours.

I was thinking French buttercream. The temperature on Saturday is forecast to be 15C/59F, so that shouldn't be a factor.

Yeah, that's pretty much how I saw it going. The smaller top portion (ie, the real cake) will be white blending to pale pink at the bottom; the larger bottom portion (the dummy) will have a pale pink base and I'll do a darker pink, a red and the burgundy. Each of those will have its own full-strength band, but also be mixed into some of the pale pink base coat so I can kind of ease into it.

My stepdaughter is getting married on Saturday, and asked me to do the cake. It's not going to be anything that really challenges my (modest) cake-decorating capabilities...they spotted this cake on Pinterest and sent it to me as a model: There aren't any really difficult techniques at play here, and the flowers are Somebody Else's Problem, so my question mostly pertains to the coloring. I already have a pink and a crimson Wilton gel color, which accounts for two of the three. There's a burgundy color available to me, if it's in stock at either of the local stores, but I don't know how close a match that will be. Can any of you tell me whether it's a reasonable approximation of this? If not, my elderly copy of Bo Friberg's Professional Pastry Chef has instructions for making magenta from beets (which I have in my garden) but I don't know how I'd go about incorporating that into my buttercream. Also I'm curious how to get those relatively bold tints. I assume it comes from using a great gob of the gel in a relatively small quantity of icing?

Yesterday on the radio I heard about a gent somewhere in the US who spray-painted a length of sonotube to make it orange, then secured it to his porch railing with black duct tape to make a "candy chute." He'll stay on the porch, masked and gloved, and the little ones will hold their bags and buckets under the chute while he drops in treats from his elevated perch.

(We won't discuss the day I spent two hours repeatedly disassembling and reassembling a computer, only to realize that I'd stepped on the power bar and turned the switch off...)

I do that. Largely because I don't care for icing, but without it the cupcake doesn't want to slide down. With cakes, I carefully wipe about 80% of the icing onto the side of my plate before eating the cake.