chromedome

One of my uncles married a Filipina, so that was my first "authentic" ethnic food (as opposed to Chinese-Canadian).

If you haven't discovered it yet, David Leite gave a class in food writing here back in the day. Having done it myself at 40, I don't recommend going the culinary arts route unless you have specific reasons to believe it will aid your chosen career path. It ain't cheap, and probably won't open any doors that your existing experience won't.

LOL He has young children...I'm pretty sure when they're not filming the show, his pantry looks a lot more "lived in." He's a good egg, very generous with his time. I split my culinary training between schools in my native NS and my ex's native Alberta, and he came to both schools to speak to the students and participate in judging student competitions and/or fundraisers held at the schools for various community organizations.

We fried our corn tortillas to make a semi-hard shell, which I understand is very much now a niche thing. There's a story, there...my late wife was a few years older than me and she was born when her mom was already 40, so her mom and my grandmother were both born in the same year (1914). Her mom's family left Tennessee around 1920 and moved to Phoenix area in search of work (stealing a march on the next decade's Dust Bowl refugees). Since they were poor farm workers, they lived in the same places as their mostly-Mexican peers. So although her mom grew up to be a trained chef in the European tradition, she learned her Mexican cookery from the neighborhood grandmas and great-grandmas of the Phoenix area in the 1920s, who presumably would have learned from their grandmothers in the middle of the previous century. So it might be just a regional thing (I don't know what part of Mexico might have furnished Phoenix' field workers back in the day) or maybe it's just super old-school, but that's how she was taught, and my late wife was taught, and how she in turn taught me.

LOL If you put the halves of the loaf back-to-back they form a hyperbola, so I guess hyperbole is entirely appropriate in the context...

Just to follow up on my original post...there's a logic to the "slice in half, then cut crosswise" technique - for crusty artisan breads - that I hadn't explained adequately. When you leave the loaf flat, and slice through it vertically, you're compressing the bread in the direction that it's most "squishable." When you halve it first, then stand the half-loaf on its cut side, the crust makes a structural arch. As you slice, from start to finish, the pressure of your blade (however great or little) is transferred to your work surface by the relatively rigid crust. The only compression that's applied to the crumb of the bread itself comes from the blade's lateral motion, and is relatively minor. With soft loaves that doesn't apply, but of course with soft loaves any decent slicer works just fine and you don't need to play around with it.

FWIW, I have a couple of wire taco-holder racks that are supposed to be used to hold the tortillas while stuffing them. I found they were more of a hindrance than a help, so really the only thing they've ever been used for was holding the damned tacos upright so we could get pretty photos for our farmer's market website. A few years afterward, when fish tacos had become more common all the way over here (I'm told they originated somewhere along the California/Mexico border, and Atlantic Canada's about as far away as you can get without leaving the continent) I started seeing photos of them still laying flat with all the ingredients mounded artistically on top. Duh. ...not that the "flat technique" would work with your hard shells, of course.

Brandt brand mini farmer sausages, affects Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec. Listeria, in this case. https://www.inspection.gc.ca/food-recall-warnings-and-allergy-alerts/2020-06-15/eng/1592274864237/1592274870603?utm_source=r_listserv

Sadly mine lives in a box somewhere my storage locker, or I'd try it for you. I've been carrying it around unused for years, simply because it's such a "vintage" artifact...the knife handle itself and its base/wall mounting bracket are an impartial blend of avocado green and harvest gold, in order to fit with *any* kitchen decor. For my own bread I use a plain-jane serrated Victorinox. For a boule (not that I've made one recently) I generally slice it down the middle, then lay a half on its cut side and slice vertically to make individual slices at a right angle to the original cut.

Yeah, the inevitable segue from "kids and berries" is "kids and soapy water." Amusingly, our little Scuttle just loves berries (and watermelon). One of my cherished memories is watching the same granddaughter (then 3) and Scuttle (then just a puppy) both face-down and butt-up in the patch of wild strawberries under our deck, racing to see who could get the most. It was adorable.

LOL Our granddaughter did that a year or two ago. She's also incapable of eating raspberries without first putting them on her fingertips like little red hats.

Cool. Just harvested some yesterday, and this looks like a perfect use-case for the larger stems.

Sooooo....thin-sliced lengthwise on a mandoline? I might have to try that. Did you blanch in syrup or par-roast or anything to make it flexible?

You may also want to sub baking soda for part of the baking powder. You'll have some acidity there from the yogurt, and acidity inhibits browning. The soda will correct for that.

For the benefit of any Canadian peeps, when I was in Sobeys last night they'd clearly gone outside their normal channels to fill up the flour section....most of it was packed with bags of 00 flour (sorry, I don't remember the brand). If anyone's been meaning to grab some, it might be a good time to do so.

I don't find a whole lot of change, though admittedly I've mostly used it dried. I don't rehydrate. If I'm using it in something liquid - as you say, soups, stews, pasta dishes - I'll just throw it in as-is. Sometimes I pulverize it a bit in my mortar & pestle or spice grinder, depending what I'm doing with it. I treat it mainly as a celery alternative, so I use it ground-up in things like marinades and dry rubs where I'd like a bit of celery flavor. More or less the way people use celery seed, I suppose. I haven't grown it myself (because reasons) and therefore have never really had enough to use freely and experiment widely with, hence my excitement to take full advantage now. I'll certainly be using the fresh as well, but we were on the topic of dehydrating so that's what I led with. A dehydrator is something I'd often thought of getting, but somehow it had never gotten to the top of the "things to buy for my kitchen" list. This one was a gift from the in-laws: It's a Salton, and I can pretty much guarantee it's about the cheapest and lowest-end model available in my neck of the woods, but it's perfectly adequate for my (modest) needs. I've made several batches of jerky in it, dried two autumns' worth of apples, and put up a fair quantity of herbs (some I don't dry, of course...for things like cilantro I'll puree with a smidge of oil and freeze). It's a handy tool, and mine makes a low-profile stack about the size of a Dutch oven when it's in use, so it doesn't take up a lot of space (the trays can stack "tight" or "tall" depending on usage..."tight" keeps your herbs from blowing around but it's also good for storage purposes).

To clarify, I'd forgotten that it was someone's hot button. It was pretty predictable that I'd miss one or two, regardless.

LOL One day I'm going to make something with eggplant, green bell papers, raisins, celery, corn and cilantro...just to push everybody's buttons.

Even tomato and potato flowers are pretty, though small. A few of my potatoes fruited last year. I've had the fruit in my fridge over the winter to preserve and vernalize them, and I'm going to see if I can grow potatoes from actual seed this year. Just because I think it'd be cool.

I used mine a lot last autumn for apple rings, rose hips and homemade "craisins," and I also turned some of my applesauce into fruit leather (to the delight of the grandkids). Might have it out again as early as this evening, because the lovage is going gangbusters in the "community" bed at the community garden and I plan to dry it all summer long. Also I bought a marked-down can of mango puree, some of which will become my next batch of fruit leather (the rest will become a wee batch of sorbet, I think).

Two of our grandkids, a brother and sister (boy 2, girl 5) had birthdays five days apart back in April but their joint party was delayed because of the virus. It finally took place this past weekend, and I made up a dinosaur cake for the little guy (his sister held out for an ice cream cake from DQ). Neither cake decorating nor photography is exactly my forte, but here it is FWIW. Somewhere about midnight I realized that the main part of the body was supposed to have been done in rosettes, rather than the "gloop and spread" method, but by then I wasn't ready to go back and redo it. The little guy didn't mind, and I felt a lot less tired listening to his excited bellows of "DINO CAKE!!!" Apparently after my holiday baking binge I gave away or discarded a bunch of things from my decorating tote, including the cake board and dome, several of the food colorings I thought I'd had, and several colors of prepared decorating icing. Whoopsie...

I got all the blades as well when I bought the (still-unused) backup for my 80s-vintage Cuisinart. They came with some sort of wall-mountable plexiglass holder/display unit/organizer, which I thought was kinda cool. I have yet to use one or even remove any from the holder, but I reckon some day my arthritic knuckles will militate against knife usage. On that day, I'll pull 'em down and be grateful to have them.

https://www.theverge.com/21267669/instacart-shoppers-sick-extended-pay-quarantine-leave-coronavirus

Goes down smoooooothhhh... I do love poking around similar stores, though my options here are more limited. Very much enjoyed the spicy smoked duck necks I found on one trip, and I couldn't resist "strange taste horse beans."