chromedome

Turned 10 lbs of Cortlands into 5 trays of rings in my dehydrator and three vacuum-bagged portions of pie-ready apples (sliced, spiced, floured, lightly sweetened) in my freezer. I'll do this once or twice more over the next few weeks.

I enjoyed reading it in the interval between me pushing down my toaster's handle and it popping back up. Had enough spare time to muse on the animus against unitaskers in the kitchen...

Back in the 80s, one BC-based restaurant chain used to have a series of ads in which an animated chicken, pig and steer each respectively extolled the virtues of the other two protein choices. I remember the pig sounding amusingly Hitchcockian...

...for an empirically verifiable measurement that's more accurate than the venerable Scoville scale. Plus, it's shaped like a hot pepper. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/just-how-hot-is-that-pepper-new-chili-shaped-portable-device-could-tell-you/

I just did the final pick of my tomatoes, as well. My improvised shelter got me to the third week of October, which is really good for my neck of the woods and may be the latest I've kept mine going (don't really remember for sure). The end result was this: Black Krim on the left, San Marzano on the right. The ripe-ish Krims are in my fruit bowl now with a few apples, and should be quite nice by tomorrow or the next day. The green ones went for a big "feed" of fried green tomatoes. The San Marzanos I cooked down to make a faux salsa verde, which I will can tonight after running to the store for the cilantro I was really, really sure I had. Over the past week I've also harvested the one purple cabbage that survived the erratic spring weather, and a half-pound of Brussels sprouts from one of the stalks. Over this next week I'll take the rest of the sprouts, harvest my beets and the remaining few carrots, and take a final cutting of all of my greens. Peas are already done, I took the last handful of those a few days ago. The community garden closes at month-end, so that leaves me a few days to prep for spring and put things to bed.

England actually produced a fair bit of saffron domestically, back in the day. Hence Saffron Walden, in Essex.

Crackers with "marinated seafood salad" from the supermarket's olive/antipasto bar* or, as I like to think of it, "tentacles on Triscuits." *sold prepackaged in the Covid era, rather than in bulk.

Talk about Kohl in the stocking...

Ouch.

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but.. ml?

I haven't evaluated this in any large-scale way (I've only had my dehydrator for a couple of years) but so far I've gotten the best results with apples that would also bake well, as opposed to "cooking apples" like Macs or Dudleys or Paula Reds. Among the locally-grown apple varieties I find Cortland works very well for dehydrating, partly because it retains its texture well and partly because its snowy-white flesh stays pale as it dries (some varieties darken). Your local selection will be different from mine, and I can't speak to the main commercial cultivars because I haven't yet tried them (I go with local apples while they're cheap and plentiful) but hopefully that's at least a starting point for you to work from.

It's all about picking which battles, and when. I can knock out a crust readily enough, but some nights I'll just say "screw it" and drop a biscuit dough on top instead. And yeah, I'm not above using canned soup if I'm in that kind of a mood (my GF grew up with the canned-soup version, so for her it's even *more* comforting when it's made that way). Bottom line, if you can put it on the table and enjoy it and not have to think or work too hard, sometimes that's all that's required.

Everyone decides where to draw the line for themselves.

In fairness, the laser was once derided as "a problem in search of a solution." A few years before that, it was thought that the world market for computers might max out at 6 to 12 machines. They could be a mainstream product in a few years, who knows? The pineapple equivalent of a Honeycrisp apple, as opposed to this year's square watermelon.

Followed that batch with another dozen pints a few nights ago. My running tally of greens from the garden is up to 11.6 kg blanched and frozen for winter consumption. Locally grown buttercup squash were on for 25 cents/pound at a local indie grocer this past week, so I bought a LOT of those and have frozen several bags (didn't bother to weigh them) of the cooked squash for later use.

We had two nights in a row of seriously hard frost, and as expected my squashes have reached the end of the road. My improvised cover for the tomatoes seems to have done the job, though, and they still look to be doing fine. Several are on the verge of ripeness, and should be ready to go when I get home from NS on Friday. The peas are also hanging in just fine, and of course all of my sturdy greens (chard, beet tops, broccoli raab, kale) remain green and sturdy.

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/pink-pineapples-buy-online

Sounds about right. I have 6 in the same-sized bed, and that was pretty full. They'd have had more room to expand if I'd gone with 4 or 5 in larger cages. As it was, the two at the rear didn't get as much sun and stayed relatively smaller (next time I'll know to stagger them left-right just a few inches, so they'll have more equal exposure).

We've all been there with one or another piece of equipment. Often more than once.

It's unrelated to the current discussion of eggs, but every time my eye meets the title of this thread the (sizable) smart-alec side of my brain says "Oh, just salt and pepper usually..."

That's a Really Big Deal, 'cause those suckers are not lacking for bones.

I'm not a home-fermenting maven, but it sounds to me like you had incomplete fermentation. It shouldn't be salty-tasting after the bacteria have done their thing.

My late wife encouraged me to adapt to left-mousing, on the same premise of dementia-avoidance. I don't know how much help it'll be on the dementia front, but mousing ambidextrously certainly helps me avoid repetitive stress injuries and is also a great convenience when using multiple computers on the same desktop (as I sometimes do).

...but all the hexane is cooked out, we promise. When vegans ask me "You know what's really in those [chicken nuggets, hot dogs, etc]?" I invariably answer "Why yes, I do...do you know what's in your textured soy protein?" Just to be clear, I eat the stuff myself on occasion and have no (forgive me) beef with it. I just enjoy a good round of devil's advocate on occasion.

I'm with you on the bacon jam and caramelized onions. Never could get my taste buds wrapped around blue cheese on beef, though. To me, it's just a way to replicate the flavor of spoiled beef, without actually making yourself sick. Love all the pieces separately, just can't abide them together. I also have a bacon marmalade I scooped from the markdowns rack at Walmart one day, to the mental accompaniment of "where have you been all my life?" or some such. It's exactly as good as you'd think.