Tri2Cook

Wouldn't it be nice if people could do that without the fear of a potentially deadly virus forcing them to? I think the staff there knows what we know... if you had nothing but 3 cotton balls, a clean rectal thermometer and a half eaten cheeseburger in the room, some tasty cookies would somehow come out.

That's fair, something I didn't take into account. The "food in the time of a pandemic" thing has me thinking from a different angle. I figure if a shelter-in-place order happens, I'm not gonna be able to be pioneer man and go out hunting and gathering so I'll have to embrace the spirit of the pioneer woman. Which, I assume, means they used whatever source they had to make the bread rise. I am in no way a bread historian so I could be way off but I've always assumed before the availability of commercial yeast or easy access to baking powder, a sourdough starter was just a bread starter. The means to make the bread rise without need for the sour distinction since there wasn't an alternative. I realize this situation isn't likely to put us anywhere near that point but that's the approach I'm taking with my preparations. It's a small point of fun for me during a bad situation, thinking about how I'll keep us fed if running to the store becomes a non-option.

She's a little old for me to write these things off as "from the mouths of kids"... she asked if the veggie could be homemade mac & cheese. 😆 Dessert is definitely the sugar pie, they're in the oven right now.

Just me and the kid so I told her to decide... steaks on the grill, baked spuds and an as yet undecided veggie. Also, mushrooms for me (she's not a fan). I'm gonna put the sourdough starter to work and make some form of bread as well. Probably a Quebec style sugar pie for dessert.

I'm not going to say your sources are incorrect but I started my sourdough starter with commercial yeast after having difficulty getting one going with natural yeast in the colder climate I live in. I pull it from the fridge, give it a couple feedings and I can bake bread without adding additional yeast.

Or get a starter going using a small amount of whatever yeast you have and keep it fed so you've always got a healthy colony of yeast farting away for your bread making pleasure.

I was worried about the same thing and didn't go ahead. Now I kinda wish I had. Maybe I'll do some "isolation relief chocolates" sometime in the near future and see what happens. And those look absolutely amazing, by the way. Brings back good memories, my mom used to do painting on actual emptied egg shells when she was still alive.

The local store limiting the number allowed inside at a time combined with a monetary supplement that many received yesterday from the government and knowing the store was going to be closed today meant there wasn't a chance in hell I was going near the place yesterday. As I expected, they were lined up along the entire outside of the building for most of the day. I know this isn't a laughing matter but I still chuckled a bit about how nothing really changes the core of how we think. Everybody has been buying everything on the shelves for the last month and they still had to do a panic shop because the store was going to be closed for one day. I've been preparing for a while now for last night's meal. I've wanted to do it for the past couple years but this was the first year I started planning far enough ahead to pull it off. So, despite the fact that I'm still not sheltering in place, it was indeed food in the time of a pandemic. The late start it got after work meant it was really late when it got done so there's no plated picture, I just plopped some in a bowl and sucked it down. I'll get a better picture today when I can enjoy it properly at a decent hour. Holy Thursday gumbo z'herbes on the stove cooking...

I don't even want to think about managing my recipes at this point, it needed to happen years ago to be tempting. I think they'd have to issue a prolonged shelter-in-place order for me to stand a chance. I'd need at least a couple weeks to get bored enough to be able to make myself try it and another couple weeks to gather it all together and organize it. I have stuff everywhere. Files on my laptop, bookmarks on my laptop, backup folders on my external hard drive, notes in books, papers piled in boxes, papers tucked in books, etc. The only thing that works somewhat in my favor is, I tend to be very good at remembering which of those formats a particular recipe can be found in. The time it takes to find it is another story...

Amazing... but I've come to expect nothing less from you. Butterfinger is probably in my top 3 for commercial bars but I've never attempted to make them. When you say the filling was folded in, do you mean similar to doing a laminated dough?

I know we're all our own worst critic but I'm not seeing anything to be embarrassed about in that picture. All I see is a nice, shiny tasty-looking cake.

Yep... if a child has a difficult time opening it, there's almost zero chance an adult can. I'm curious myself what the actual rules are regarding what's considered child proof. It's not something I've ever thought of in terms of chocolate but with the legalization of the cannabis market, it suddenly becomes a factor for some.

Looks good! I love banana bread. I'm not the biggest fan of chocolate chips in my banana bread but my love of banana bread far outweighs that so I'd happily scarf it down.

Still not isolating, still working, still no known cases within several hours of where I live. That's not being flippant, I consider that fortunate. I'm appreciative and very much hope it continues to be the case. That said, since my plan if mandatory isolation does hit my area is to bake my own bread as needed, I pulled my sourdough starter out of the fridge to get it active again. It's been going for almost a year and been untouched for a while but there are no signs of evil and it seems to be waking up from its hibernation just fine.

Honestly, comfort has been a minor consideration with my just-in-case food prep. Being sure there's something to eat to cover me and my kid for an extended amount of time if necessary has been the idea so far. But I've gone about as far as I'm going with it at this point so maybe it's a good time to think about a few just-in-case comforts. If nothing else, I have probably somewhere in the 20 or so different bottles range of rum and all the assorted accompaniments that a decent tiki bar would have so that could provide a lot of comfort.

Yeah, I jumped the gun a little there. I think I was equating tempering the chocolate and tempering the ganache. Two different stages but for some reason I lumped them together in my head. It's the finished ganache that I (ez)temper, not the chocolate I'm using to make the ganache. Whoops.

I'm gonna leave the whys and wherefores to those better qualified and just agree to disagree. Not so much that it's necessary to temper the chocolate, more the part about "tempering the chocolate won't effect nothing".

Insurance is the sketchiest business in existence. They offer coverage to help you in a time of need right after figuring out every loophole and backdoor they can use to avoid helping you in a time of need. A coworker purchased cancellation insurance for a flight he was supposed to take from Minnesota to Florida. The trip was planned and payed for months before coronavirus was a thing of public knowledge. He was going to drive across the border from here in Ontario, Canada to catch the flight in Minnesota. With the arrival of coronavirus, the event the trip was for was cancelled and driving across the border to catch the flight was officially removed from being an option. But even though he can't legally cross the border to catch the flight, the cancellation insurance is null and void because the flight wasn't actually cancelled. Only his ability to catch the flight was cancelled. Stories like that make me root for the company involved to be one of the casualties of this event.

Sounds good to me. I'll see what I can get my hands on as far as a replacement for the mustard greens goes and give it a shot. I've made khao soi plenty of times and just ate it without the mustard greens and enjoyed it, just thought it'd be fun to give it a try with all the traditional stuff in the bowl.

Ok, I'll have to do some more googling. The pickled mustard green recipes I found basically said to salt the greens, put them in a jar with any desired flavoring ingredients, cover with water and let sit until sour.

Thanks! That's something I can play around with. Wouldn't that end up pretty much like sauerkraut though? Turnip greens probably won't be an option but I'll check. Radish tops are a possibility. I have lots of collards but they've already been blanched and frozen. They're never available here fresh, I had to order them at work and don't really want to buy another 20 bunch box for this. I can get kale here. I'm not a kale expert but I'm 99% sure it's not that type.

Pulling this from the depths to ask a question... no pickled mustard greens available where I live, no luck finding a Canadian mail order source and fresh mustard greens to pickle myself aren't an option here either. Any suggestions for another green I can pickle that would make a viable, even if imperfect, substitute?

Yes it has. Who knew hermit chic would become fashionable? I decided to take a break from just in case prep for a couple days, just didn't feel like shopping again. I'm not of the tinfoil hat variety but it seems a bit odd when the hospital suddenly brings in more beds and starts setting up an assessment area outside of the actual hospital building and people who work there say things like "we're expecting the virus to be here in two weeks" like they spoke with it's agent and there was room on it's schedule to stop here on it's way west or something. So I'll continue what prepping I plan to do next week just in case that isn't just pessimism and they know something the rest of us in town haven't been told yet.

It's been getting above freezing during the day every day for over a week now so I worked to get the last of the ice and snow off of the back deck and tossed some burgers on the grill for me and the kid tonight. Still not isolating but, since my normal lifestyle is largely go to work, go to the store when necessary, go home, I've been preparing for this for years. Plus, my closest neighbor's house can't even be seen from my house once the leaves are on the trees so maintaining distance doesn't require any special effort from anywhere on the property. So really, the only difference to my lifestyle if they were to go to full lockdown is I wouldn't be going to work.

After the initial panic-shop hit, the local store has recovered pretty well. They implemented limits on some items when they restocked and still don't have toilet paper but for the most part, you can get anything you normally could. The difficulty they were having getting certain things in didn't seem to last long but those are the things that now have limits. Toilet paper isn't an issue for me. I keep a small stock in the house anyway, daughter in house, but when everything disappeared from the shelves locally about 3 weeks ago and still hadn't reappeared as of this week, I ordered a case (48 rolls) through one of our suppliers at work and tucked it in a closet. Strangely, one of the things that was entirely cleaned out is canned coconut milk. Plenty of cow, soy and rice milk and even a hefty amount of evap on the shelf but not a single can of coconut milk. Fortunately, whoever grabbed all the cans didn't notice the 1 liter cartons on the next shelf over so I was still able to make my Massaman curry. I'd send Anna some frozen veggies if that was possible, those don't look like they've been touched at all.