Tri2Cook

I've found references to replacing all or part of the sugar with isomalt to reduce sweetness. It's on my list of things to get around to trying but that's becoming a pretty long list so who knows when I'll do it.

That's pretty much my system too.

I'll have what she's having!

That's not a favorite for me either if it's too prominent in the mix. When it showed up on the LCBO site years ago, I got the local store to order two bottles for me and I haven't even made a decent dent in the first bottle. I got a little carried away in the early part of my booze collecting and would overstock stuff I was afraid I'd never see again locally. Then I discovered I'm not the drinker I aspired to be and don't really go through a whole lot of it. So I guess I've set things up for the family and friends to have one hell of a party to see me off if something happens to me.

Then their stance on the sharing doesn't make sense regardless of how they do with booth sales. Do they give a reason why they have a problem with sharing a double wide?

That would bug me. Unless they're usually stuck with a lot of unsold booths... then it would still bug me but at least I'd understand why they were doing it.

I'm the scourge of proper list people everywhere. I wait until the one and only local grocery store posts it's flyer for the week on it's facebook page, look through it to see if anything I need is on sale (which is a bit silly really since it's the only store and I'll have to buy it there regardless), and make an unorganized list on a text file on my laptop. Shopping day usually leads to things being crossed off and things being added and my mind being changed about things I want to make at the last second (frequently brought on by a sudden bout of laziness telling me I really don't want to do whatever it is I wanted to do). Then I write it on whatever scrap of paper is handy and head to the store where invariably, they'll be out of some key item on my list for whatever I decided to make or I'll forget something despite it being on the list. Happened this very weekend. Went to make the jerk seasoning paste for the chicken and pork I wanted to do in the smoker and realized I forgot to grab the onions... which was the first thing on the list I took with me.

Yes, we do that and nobody is suggesting you shouldn't. There's just generally some bit of information to go along with the pictures. No information being given leads to questions. Frequently, even when information is given, there are still questions. Discussion is kinda the whole point of an interactive online community. eGullet is particularly skewed towards discussion and sharing of information. You might be amazed at what can be learned here when you're willing to accept questions and critique. I learn something or have my curiosity aroused to want to learn about something almost every day here. I'd be willing to put the combined food (including chocolate) and drink knowledge of eGullet members up against any course available all for the low, low price of being willing to discuss, ask questions and listen with a receptive mind.

My wife used to brown the sausages, dump a little maple syrup and a little water in the pan, then cook it and toss them around until a maple glaze coated them. The first time she did it, I questioned why she would do that to some perfectly good sausage but it was actually pretty tasty. Not something I often do myself but it's nice now and then.

That looks tasty. I made a mango habanero sauce to go with the jerk pork and chicken that's currently residing in my smoker and have plenty of mango left that I thought might find a good home in something like what's in that picture. Went straight to google and found absolutely nothing no matter how I typed it in.

It's good without the sage and with maple syrup instead of the brown sugar but I wouldn't skip the larb and gyoza and all that just to make breakfast sausage even if you both did like sage.

Breakfast sausage is my favorite use. I use sage, brown sugar, salt, cayenne, red chile flakes, black pepper, marjoram, grd. coriander and MSG. I like the heat and sage at higher levels than most probably would and sometimes I replace the brown sugar with a larger amount of maple syrup just for a change of taste. Sorry for the double. It didn't show that it posted when I hit the post button. Just left everything right where it was with the button still active so I thought it failed.

Breakfast sausage is my favorite use. I use sage, brown sugar, salt, cayenne, red chile flakes, black pepper, marjoram, grd. coriander and MSG. I like the heat and sage at higher levels than most probably would and sometimes I replace the brown sugar with a larger amount of maple syrup just for a change of taste.

I'd pick them myself and ship them to you for free every summer for the rest of my life if it would bring her back so she could go with me. But I don't think they'd ship all that well regardless. Her customers from the US took them frozen and packed them in coolers with lots of ice that they replaced regularly on the drive home.

I sincerely hope I'm misunderstanding what you're suggesting. I know intent can be difficult sometimes via text-based communication.

I just bend at the waist. The back suffers the first trip or two of the season and then gets used to it. It was more Ann's thing with her sister though, I didn't go often. Except one year when they were exceptionally abundant in an area we knew about that nobody else seemed to want to mess with because it was rugged terrain to drive back to where they were. I went out with her quite a bit that year because she took on more orders than she was going to be able to fill just going out with her sister. Figured if she was working that hard to make the money it wouldn't kill me to help out when I could.

I don't find blueberries particularly difficult to pick other than it taking a lot of berries to fill a pail... it's dealing with being the main course for every bug within 100 km of where I'm picking that drives me out of the blueberry patch.

Those are frowned upon by the local pickers here. It adds a lot of debris to the berries and, I'm told, if not used properly, can damage or pull up the plants. Unless they're picking out the leaves, green berries and assorted other detritus before selling them, that job falls to the buyer. At that price, I better not have to do anything except eat them. Most pickers here hand pick and it's very rare to find anything in the pail other than nice ripe berries. Takes longer to hand pick but you don't have to pick through them before selling or using so it ends up pretty even time-wise in the end.

Yep. They hit $30 for a 4 liter ice cream pail here about 4 years ago and haven't moved since so I'm expecting to see it go up. Ann always felt guilty about charging that much. I told her not to worry over it, if they didn't want to pay it nobody would stop them from going out and picking them. She had a regular that ordered 10 - 12 pails every September packed in big ziplocs and frozen. They were from the US and came here for a vacation every year then took the berries back home with them. She refused to charge them $30 a pail. I'm curious to see what they're going for this year, the annual blueberry festival starts in 2 weeks and I haven't seen adds for people selling them so they may be running late or just a bad year. I have about 16 liters or so still in the freezer that she picked. I guess when they're gone, I'll be joining the "pay it or pick it myself" crowd. Unfortunately, I don't particularly enjoy picking... or rather, all of the bugs eating me alive that goes along with it.

Looking at that stash, no matter how you go at it, I suspect there's going to be a lot to haul home or two very tired livers when you get home.

I know it's originally the basic tenet of the chocolate truffle but even with that in mind, that particular piece looks amazingly organic. I'm not a big fan of matcha myself but I love the look of what appears to be a little moss covered nugget of something found on the forest floor. I've walked over a lot of ground that looked almost exactly like that while out picking wild blueberries. And I mean organic, forest floor and ground in the blueberry patch in the best possible good-memories way.

The first picture captioned by the first quote above had me thinking that while everything looks tasty, those burgers seemed a tad anemic looking. But I didn't want to be rude and mention it. Then you posted another picture captioned by the second quote above and all became clear... so it felt alright to mention my initial thought since it was simply a case of mistaken identity.

Sounds pretty nice to me. If you can get the environment you need to do what you need to do, that's all that really matters.

I understand completely that sometimes you do what you have to do but I think I would find it very difficult to convince myself to rent a space for chocolate work where I have no control over the temperature. As I'm sure you're well aware, trying to do chocolate work in temps too far above or below ideal can be an exercise in frustration and I don't want to pay somebody a bunch of money to be frustrated. But as pastrygirl said above, you can find ways to make it work if your situation requires it. I wasn't doing chocolate work in the sense being discussed here but at a former restaurant where I worked, I was working with chocolate on a somewhat regular basis for desserts and catering jobs and that kitchen was always much hotter than ideal in the summer. So I generally wound up trying to schedule most of the summer chocolate work I needed to do for one or two nights and I'd stay until very late in the night when the equipment was off and the kitchen had time to cool down and then get it done as quickly as possible so I could at least put in an appearance at home before the next day's work began. Which leads to another possible option, have you looked into a space that would allow you to come in during their down time at night to do your thing?

Yes you were!