chromedome

Have you tried with a pre-gelatinized flour like Wondra? Haven't done so myself, but it might make a difference. Especially if the roux isn't getting cooked out for 20-ish minutes before assembling the sauce.

I really like those "watermelon" radishes. I found some seed last year and grew them in my garden, and plan to again this year.

I'd be lying if I said I followed every thread in the explanation, because a) I don't have the training, and b) don't need to know (I am not, and do not plan to become, an endocrinologist). As an interested lay person it's enough to follow the main thread, knowing that if I should later want to take a deeper dive on any part of the cycle, well...that too can be Googled. It's more or less a job skill. On some of the sites I write for, I actually need to take this kind of information and boil it down into something anyone can grasp ("...your liver normally makes fuel for your cells from the foods you eat, but if you're fasting it has a backup plan..."). Hence my usual response when someone asks what I do for a living: "Look sh*t up on the internet and explain it to people." My big irritation/regret right now is that I don't have the math skills to follow the statistical analysis in a lot of papers, so I have to rely on the opinion of others as to whether there's been any p-hacking. Years ago I had a friend who taught stats courses but I didn't avail myself of his skills. (sigh) I suppose there's always Khan Academy or something...

https://longreads.com/2020/04/16/my-body-is-not-a-temple/

It is indeed a dense read, but manageable. I've gotten as far as section 1.5 after last night, and so far it's fascinating. My GF's mother has NAFLD and my daughter has some sort of esoteric, as-yet-undetermined form of insulin resistance (further testing, of course, is on hold for the duration of COVID) so it's a subject I've intended to take up seriously for a while. Also T1 diabetes runs on one side of my family, which raises the urgency level just a bit. The broad strokes are easy enough to manage (healthy diet, moderate excercise) but I like knowing the details as well.

LOL Yes, that's one distinctive you'll find if you ever travel in Canada. Here the default egg is always over-easy, and there are few places (basically just southern Ontario) where sunny-side eggs have a foothold. The comment you'll typically hear is "I don't like 'em looking back at me."

We'll agree to disagree. It *is* important if you're a breakfast person, and it's not if you aren't a breakfast person. As HeidiH said upthread, "we are all unique" and there is vanishingly little about food that is truly "one size fits all."

Tom Colicchio, on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851778405/table-for-none-tom-colicchio-explains-what-restaurants-need-to-survive

I have used a switched power bar and a long extension (for the lamp) in similar circumstances, but of course not every apartment lends itself to that scenario. A tripping hazard (and potential injury) is a somewhat higher priority than the occasional waste of food.

No worries, this is exactly the kind of thing I geek out on in my (vanishingly rare) free time. I was the kid who read his Britannica from cover to cover (admittedly, my eyes glazed over from time to time). When I see an interesting article at one of the many science/tech/nutrition sites I visit regularly, I'll usually click through to the underlying studies. Just for the record, I'm not at all averse to a nice plate of bacon and eggs, or an omelette (and for that matter, eggs Bennie in various forms is one of my GF's favorites, and therefore crops up frequently in our home). I just don't usually eat them at breakfast time.

Cool links, OC, I'll give 'em a read when I'm done for the day. I also fall into the immediate-breakfast camp. That may be in part because I settle in to do "brain work" ASAP, as the morning is my most-productive writing time. My almost-invariable breakfast, year-round, is steel-cut oats with a splash of milk and a topping of homemade applesauce; and a couple of toasted slices of my usual (100% whole wheat, home-baked) sandwich bread, one of which will have peanut butter on it. As you may gather, low-carbing holds no allure for me at all! I don't find the high-protein egg breakfast appeals to me at all in the mornings. I feel greasy and bloated until mid-morning, and then I'm abruptly ravenous. My oatmeal 'n' toast combo, OTOH, keeps my belly happy until lunchtime. The only time I *don't* eat this in the morning is if I've forgotten to make a batch the evening before: I do a full cup of oats to a litre of water, and then reheat a portion each morning in the microwave.

The corresponding date here is the Victoria Day weekend, which comes a week before your Memorial Day. That would be roughly a week later than where you live, give or take.

Went to my community garden plot last night with the intention of using the communal rototiller, but it's apparently not back from its spring tuneup yet. So I dug a perimeter around my plot(s) - actually three adjoining 8' X 8' plots - since you generally need to do that after tilling anyway. Also, it gave me a chance to take a look at the soil. It seems decent...reasonably rich and friable, even after spring rains and a couple of years' disuse and compaction. Also I took a knife and made my ritual first harvest, of dandelion greens. Brought home a very full shopping bag, about 3 pounds or so, which translated to about 1 1/2 pounds when trimmed and cleaned and rinsed and spun dry. ...and, greens being greens, further translated to about 2 cups when cooked down for the freezer. I'd covered part of the plot with corrugated cardboard last autumn for weed suppression (didn't get the whole area covered, because it snowed) so some of the dandelions were beautifully blanched, with a nice yellow-green color (shading to pale yellow-white), a mild flavor and a lettuce-crisp texture. Those went into last night's salad. If you've never blanched dandelions, and have an unsprayed yard, give it a go. The flavor's much like Belgian endive.

I'm no GF maven, but tapioca flour is a purified starch and cassava flour is the whole root (the same root, mind you) dried and powdered. It's basically the difference between potato starch and instant potatoes. I'm guessing the fiber makes it more absorbent, and is the reason you had a stodgy consistency. Cutting back a bit on the flour probably would have given you a better result, though I'll stress once more that this is not drawn from a lot of hands-on GF baking experience.

I haven't used one, but I *did* have a standard-issue restaurant-type fryer rigged for portable use with a propane tank. My biggest piece of advice is to have a REALLY stable place to use it, and to keep kids, pets, and the chronically clumsy or infirm as far away from it as humanly possible. If that means barricading yourself with tables or other obstructions, so be it. Amusingly, when I got out of the farmer's market gig and sold the fryer to a colleague, he called me in a panic because it wasn't coming up to temperature. I walked the couple of blocks to his house, to see what assistance I could offer. Turned out he was testing it with water rather than oil, because...you know...oil's expensive. He literally facepalmed when I reminded him of the boiling point of water.

A woman here where I live lost her teacup terrier to a gull this past summer. The pup rushed the bird in a territorial frenzy, as they do, and the gull nonchalantly snapped him up in its bill and flew away, to the horror of the dog's watching owner.

I ended up putting my single induction hob (a cheapie Kuraidori unit) alongside my diminutive apartment-sized stove where I can use it as a second full-sized burner. Of course the tradeoff is giving up a part of my (not plentiful) countertop space.

Yes. Without it my now-widowed mother would be in rather straitened circumstances.

Yup. That's why my father left Newfoundland and joined the navy.

Do give 'em the "magnet test" before buying. Not all stainless works on induction, as I learned the hard way.

Sheesh. I'd missed the first bit when you posted it, but after reading lemniscate's post the penny dropped. Keeping your potatoes in the fridge forces the potato to turn its starches back into sugars (ie, antifreeze). This used to be a real PITA for me when I was doing fresh-cut fries at my restaurant, because it takes a couple of weeks before they're fit to use for french fries after they come out of the cooler. If my supplier shipped me recently-refrigerated spuds, my fries would over-brown when I cooked them. I eventually learned how to blanch them at an extra-low temperature for a longer time, to compensate. I don't know whether/to what extent this is a factor, but that's why I never keep potatoes in the fridge (though I'll make an exception for baby potatoes, which don't seem to be much affected).

As it happens, my GF's daughter had a grouse volunteer itself a couple of days ago. Flew into their living room window with a resounding smack and fell to the ground, dead of a broken neck. Sadly they were uncertain about cleaning and cooking it (and didn't call me, which says the "eww" factor predominated) so they left it at the edge of the woods for the local critters to enjoy.

LOL A couple of days ago I saw a meme on a friend's timeline that had the cover image of the Very Hungry Caterpillar, but said something along the lines of "The caterpillar wasn't really hungry. He was just bored, and ate to have something to do while he was quarantined." I'd intended to share it here, but couldn't find it again.

Are your canned tomatoes whole, or diced? Diced tomatoes contain calcium chloride to reinforce their cell walls and keep 'em from cooking to mush during the canning process. It's possible that's what keeps the potatoes from softening as expected. In fact, if you sometimes use whole and sometimes use diced, that may explain the inconsistency. ...there's also the acidity, of course. You may just need to hold off on adding the tomatoes until the spuds have cooked, which would eliminate both variables.