chromedome

That's unhappy news. When I was a kid I read about the Kon-Tiki, and local boy Joshua Slocum, and thought it would be a grand adventure to live on a boat when I grew up. I quickly learned that it's not quite so straightforward (my father, a naval enlisted man, had little patience for "the romance of the sea"), but I still enjoyed reading his posts and vicariously living that childhood dream through him.

I don't actively follow US recalls, but I tripped across this one today. Canned tuna being recalled from Costco, Walmart and TJ's (among others) for potential botulism. Check those date codes, folks! https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2025/02/tuna-recalled-from-costco-trader-joes-walmart-and-more-retailers-because-of-potential-for-botulism-poisoning/

I can't tell you what a relief it is to see you post on this thread, and find that it's something innocuous...

Just to follow up on the foregoing, our new incubator has arrived and is now loaded with quail eggs. Also, on Friday and Saturday, we bred all four does: Hazel and Ivy with Carrot, and Hester and Hilda with Vimes. So our first batches of kits for the year are due in 28 and 27 days, respectively. The quail, IIRC, should start hatching shortly before then.

Just as a followup, I had a conversation about rats with a professional exterminator the other day. He informs me that the rodenticide they use is specific to critters that can't vomit (ie, mice and rats). He says that if a domestic pet, or a fox or coyote, should happen to snack on a recently-poisoned rodent, they'd simply throw it back up.

I'm working on it (he says forlornly, scratching at the crusty patch on the thigh of his just-washed jeans...).

It occurs to me that I'd never followed up on that post. In the event, we have abandoned the idea of the mixed-breed rabbits. Although there's a practical case to be made for their early maturation, in practice, it was... hard. They still feel like babies at that age, so neither of us had the heart to persevere with the project. Even before "the incident" we'd gone back to all giants, all the time, and we'll pay the "heirloom breed" penalty in terms of raw meat production. We still get plenty of meat for our freezer in the run of a year, and the slightly higher cost of doing it this way is something we'll just deal with. On that note, I've mentioned a few times that we've been haphazard in our record-keeping and that (to my frustration) we haven't had a really good grasp on our costs through the first couple of years. You can imagine how it grates on a trained chef's nerves to not know his food cost! So this year I've constructed a spreadsheet that tracks our income and expenses for the rabbits as well as the chickens, quail and garden. My rough math last year said that the rabbits we sold in spring, as breeders and pets, probably floated our little operation through the end of summer, so our costs per lb/kg should have been lower than in 2023. This year I'll be weighing our harvest as I go, and will have Actual Meaningful Figures (TM) to work from. Right now the quail are our stars, as far as productivity goes. They're generating the equivalent of roughly 2 dozen chicken eggs/week, or $40-odd worth of eggs/mo at our prevailing retail price of $4.69/doz. The chickens have been averaging just 1 egg/day (the freeloaders!) but as the days become longer again that seems to be picking up. In the meantime, our quail are paying for both, at least in a manner of speaking. In practice we're struggling to use up this many eggs, so we hope to sell some. She's been advertising fertilized quail eggs at $20/doz for incubation (competitive with online suppliers), and has sold a first dozen already and is beginning to see more inquiries. She's also hoping to sell some for culinary purposes. Counting the dollar value of the eggs, as described, we're breaking slightly better than even at this point. Currently we have just one small mixed flock, but as spring comes along she hopes to have separate flocks of some of the "fancy" breeds so we can sell eggs and live birds for each of them separately. She has just ordered a better incubator for our own use, because the original one her daughter bought was set to work for chicken eggs and didn't offer adjustable temperature or humidity levels (pretty crucial for good results). Live quail sell for $7/ea in our neck of the woods, so a small starter flock (say, a male and 6 hens) would bring in nearly $50. That's a pretty fair return when you don't have to pay for the eggs. She's hoping to expand our little flock of chickens in spring as well. We only really need a half-dozen hens to keep us in eggs in the summer, when they're laying consistently, and we already have more than that, but she's thinking in terms of birds in the freezer as well (which reminds me, gotta try to find out what's wrong with our big chest freezer...). As for the bunnies, to bring this back on point, we'll be breeding our does this upcoming weekend. Three of them will be bred with our new bucks here at home, and one will go into town with us for a "play date" with Samwise, a buck we sold as a pet last year. I expect it will be a real red letter day for him, though I'm less certain what the doe will think of it. I'll keep everyone posted sporadically as we go, and probably roll chicken/quail info into the same thread (because they're all part of "raising one's own meat"). We have a dozen quail in the freezer, since we culled the surplus males from our little flock, though I haven't cooked any of them yet. My GF has looked up some recipes but pulled a wry face and said "They're all gourmet stuff. Maybe just roast us a couple with Stovetop, and see what they're like?" I pointed out that she has a literal personal chef, but got her main point. We'll start with something she finds familiar and comfortable, and branch out from there (though I'll happily entertain any quail-recipe suggestions you may have).

Not gonna lie, ours mostly gets used these days for crushing up eggshells as a calcium supplement for the quail. It's a little battered, but still works great.

I'm impressed. Years ago when I lived in Edmonton the co-owner of the restaurant where I worked asked me if I wanted a half-dozen goose carcasses, with only the breasts removed. I accepted happily (four mouths to feed, small grocery budget) and found to my incredulity that the legs were still tough as shoe leather after a solid 8 hours in the slow cooker. I wound up letting them run overnight, and it took about 18 hours (IIRC) before they reached a tender, pot roast-ish consistency. We had a lot of good meals out of 'em, don't get me wrong, but I was really shocked at how long it took for them to cook.

I have a large collection of aprons, and an even larger collection of clothing with stubborn cooking/baking stains. From which you may accurately deduce that I usually only remember the former after adding to the latter.

I took a break from working late to hit the Gardening feed on Bluesky as a sort of mental palate cleanser. I encountered a post there which described that exact activity as "bloomscrolling," which utterly made my evening.

It's interesting how different we all are on these things. For me an underripe melon (ie, still with that hint of crispness you find appealing) is just an inferior cucumber, and a banana that's not leopard-spotted isn't worth wasting my time on. My sister, on the other hand, likes her bananas with just a faint flush of yellow over the green. (shrug) To each his/her/their own, right? I have to say, it works in my favor that bananas I consider to finally be ready to eat get marked down at most stores.

My parents used to buy tongue, kidney and other strange bits from an old-country German butcher who'd ended up (somehow) in our corner of rural Nova Scotia. I used to love taking tongue sandwiches to school in my lunch, just because the other kids were so grossed out by it.

Also Sweet Cream brand of mini pastries, because of salmonella (affects most provinces, 17 hospitalized). No email from the CFIA for this one, either. Gonna have to check my settings. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mini-pastries-salmonella-outbreak-1.7435691

There's a big recall of eggs in various provinces, for salmonella. Oddly I haven't gotten the CFIA email about it yet, so here's the CBC link. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/eggs-recall-salmonella-1.7435418

On a completely different note, here's a CT scan of a croissant baking from frozen. Kinda cool.

I hadn't intended to continue with this thread, having said more or less everything I'd intended to during the year or so it was active. But things changed just before Christmas, when (as some of you will already know) aggressive free-running dogs from a feckless neighbour on a road running parallel to ours came into the yard while I was away, and killed all but one of our rabbits. We'd kept out our eight breeders for the upcoming season, two bucks and three does per buck. Sadly we'd already lost one doe to a sudden illness, and now we were down to just one (rather skittish and traumatized) survivor of our two bloodlines, the accumulated result of three years' selective breeding. Recently I'd been in the habit of leaving the door to our rabbits' enclosure open during the day, because the sliding bolt we use to latch it is difficult to use during cold weather (the ground heaves a little bit, and you need to hoick up the door with a toe while sliding the bolt). I wasn't concerned about it, because our bunnies' cages are suspended waist-high and made of sturdy 14-gauge wire. Also (first and foremost) we'd been thinking in terms of wild predators at night, not others' pets during the daytime. To compound matters we've begun keeping our mastiff indoors during the day, because she's not entirely trustworthy herself around our chickens, who currently roam free. When spring rolls around we'll construct an enclosed run for them, but for now with the ground frozen (and a few large obstacles frozen to the ground) that's not an option. Thankfully the dogs missed the henhouse entirely, or the whole scenario could have been worse. Here's an example of the damage: As you can see, the dogs tore at the doors until their spring latches overextended, and the doors themselves were wrenched and bent out of shape. If rabbits were smarter they'd have known to cower in the back corner of their cages behind their wooden shelters (called "hides"), but that's not how they're wired. They're wired to run from attacks, and in a cage that means running in circles. So the dog just had to time their frantic sprints past the door, and... well, that's all she wrote. Our one survivor was in a corner cage, and I think the reason her cage held out is that the other cage at right angles to hers prevented the larger and more aggressive dog from getting a clean jump at the door. So now we're at the rebuilding phase. The owners of the dogs paid us for the loss of our bunnies, and an unexpectedly generous offer of help from a fellow eG'er defrayed a bunch of associated costs (gas to pick up the new bunnies, and such materials as I'll need to enhance the cages and enclosure). So we're back in the saddle now, with two replacement bucks and three replacement does to complement our survivor. One of the families who adopted a bunny of ours as a pet (he's now known as Samwise) has agreed to let us use him as a stud with one of our does, so we'll get back that bloodline. We also still have two more cages available, should we manage to connect with any of our previous buyers and secure a doe from our other main bloodline. So, here's the new crew. These two, in their amusingly mirrored poses, are littermates my GF has named Hester and Hazel. They'd shared a cage in their old home, so I put them side-by-side in the same cages shown above (doors now returned to serviceable condition). The third new doe, slightly younger than the others, is Hilda. She's very cuddly already, while Hazel and Hester remain a bit skittish and hand-shy. ...and this is Ivy, our survivor. She's still a bit traumatized by her experience, and is only just now beginning to let me get close to her again while I'm feeding and watering the critters. Our black buck from last year, poor Jett, always gave us a few of these pretty brindled babies in each litter regardless of whether we bred him with a white or a black doe (his own parents were both brown, so go figure). She mostly looks brown in this picture, but in person the pattern of grey on her face and body is quite fetching. My GF likes to give the critters' names a theme, as I've mentioned before. Our lost does were named Eve, Ava and Opal, and you'll have noted that the new ones all have names starting with H. As for our bucks, she named them after two important characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. The black one is named Vimes, after the commander of the Watch, and the brown one is named Carrot after another watchman, a strapping 2 meter/6'6" redheaded dwarf named Carrot Ironfoundersson (he's adopted). True to the nature of the characters themselves, Vimes proves to be gravely suspicious of everyone while Carrot is everybody's friend. As mentioned upthread we sell rabbits to defray our costs, and we've learned over the past couple of seasons that 90% of our sales will happen in early spring. People who want bunnies as pets tend to buy them at around Eastertime, and people who want them as breeders like to start breeding in spring. So we'll be breeding our does in early February, so the kits will be at the right age when Easter rolls around. I'll probably hop back onto this thread and post some baby pics for everyone when the time comes, because they are awfully cute.

Might be of interest to some, here. Researchers took 500 samples from 28 restaurants, evaluating the apparent cleanliness of various surfaces (and kitchen staffs' hands) vs actual cleanliness when subjected to laboratory testing. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that old-school visual restaurant inspections were wildly inaccurate relative to actual testing. This goes both ways, as some visual scores were actually worse than the lab-tested scores. Nothing earth-shaking (and few jurisdictions are going to put any serious money into restaurant inspections), but there are a few interesting nuggets if anyone wants to dig through the details. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-86017-8#Sec11

I did take a look yesterday while I was out, and a dozen large eggs run $4.69 in my neck of the woods. That's in CAD, so at today's exchange rate you could call it roughly $3.25 USD.