FauxPas
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Posts posted by FauxPas
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11 hours ago, Shelby said:
So, I'm doing it again. 🙃 This better be the best freaking ham and beans ever lol.
I bet both batches would have been way up at the top of the list! 🙂
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Back in October one of the local farms was selling off jalepenos and I bought a few pounds or so, without really thinking about what I wanted to do with them. Not wanting to let them sit around too long, I decided to do a quick pickle with them. So I sliced them and filled a 1-liter (1 qt) jar with them along with a bit of garlic and then topped that with a hot vinegar brine with some pickling salt and a tiny bit of added sugar.
Not wanting to process a single jar, I knew they would keep ok in the fridge for at least 2-3 months. But I kept thinking that we still might struggle to use them up, it seemed like an awful lot of jalapenos when I looked at them packed into the jar.
But here we are, 4-6 weeks later and our jar is seriously depleted. These were so good and just a nice amount of heat that we were using them on nachos and Mexican dishes but also on sandwiches and with cheese and crackers. And without the processing, they have retained a pleasant bit of crunch.
Almost gone!
And even fewer in the jar now. Yum.
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On 11/20/2022 at 8:05 PM, Smithy said:
My father used to reminisce on the chow-chow that his mother (my sainted Nana) made. Dad didn't know much about it, except that it involved the green tomatoes from the garden...and he liked it.
I've enjoyed cooking from Andrea Chesman's books, including Pickles & Relishes (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). She has quite a few recipes for green tomatoes, including Chow Chow and/or Piccalilli. It's one of those books that you can pick up for just a few dollars if you are ok with a used book. Not sure if you are interested in this, but thought I would mention it. 🙂
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Shop Generalist or Shop Multitasker. Maybe kinder versions of 'dogsbody'? 🙂
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Unable to face another night of cabbage, I made a quick tourtière. Went really well with some mango chutney that I made for an Indian meal we had a couple of weeks ago. A salad on the side. We'll have the same for dinner tonight and possibly for lunch tomorrow. 🙂
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2 hours ago, Shelby said:
I've been craving cabbage rolls for weeks. Yours look amazing!
I'd definitely make soup. Uses up a lot.
Yes! I was thinking of Marcella Hazan's Rice & Smothered Cabbage Soup. Did@weinoomention it recently? I think someone did. 🙂
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We got quite a lot of cabbage, carrots and onions from local CSA farm. I've made coleslaw of course. Also made some cabbage rolls that lasted a couple of days. And Molly Stevens' World's Best Braised Cabbage which lasted us for a few nights. And haluska/haluski, which I'm sure some people here will know, is an Eastern European dish of luscious slowly sautéed onion, cabbage and butter which is then mixed in with cooked egg noodles and sometimes served with sour cream.
All very good, but I have to admit to getting a bit tired of cabbage at this point. 🙂
Cabbage rolls.
Molly Stevens' cabbage and carrots leftovers on Day 2 or 3. I always use more carrot than she suggests and also more (homemade) chicken stock. We had some pork sausages on the side.
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Haluska/haluski with some sour cream on the side. Hard to see the cabbage, but there was a fair bit in there. My husband had some leftover striploin with his, I just had this on its own.
I have a bit of cabbage left. Maybe make some soup with it?
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NY Times has an article about a man who's dedicated to documenting cases of shrinkflation in the US. (Shareable NYT link.)
QuoteHe has dedicated much of his life to exposing what is one of the sneakier tricks in the modern consumer economy: “shrinkflation,” when products or packaging are subtly manipulated so that a person pays the same price, or even slightly more, for something but gets less of it.
Consumer product companies have been using this strategy for decades. And their nemesis, Mr. Dworsky, has been following it for decades. He writes up his discoveries on his website, mouseprint.org, a reference to the fine print often found on product packaging. Print so tiny “only a mouse could read,” he says.
He writes about shrinkflation in everything — tuna, mayonnaise, ice cream, deodorant, dish soap — alongside other consumer advocacy work on topics like misleading advertising, class-action lawsuits and exaggerated sale claims.
He spent much of his career in consumer education for the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation and as an assistant attorney general in consumer protection.
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Recently, Mr. Dworsky has been thinking about his legacy. He believes his biggest impact was writing the Massachusetts food store item pricing law in 1987, which set up rules around price transparency.
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This one has some food and drink associations. 🙂
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38 minutes ago, Sid Post said:
Shrink-flation is real for many products everywhere, not just Amazon.
Absolutely! I wasn't implying that this was an Amazon thing. The above examples are due to choices in manufacturing and packaging made by the Campbell Soup Company, Barilla Group, etc.
In general, I think shipping costs to ship to Canada or even within Canada are very high, some of it valid and some questionable. 🙂
When gas prices went way up, it was a good excuse for raising some shipping costs but even though oil/gas prices have fallen a lot, the fuel surcharges stay on some goods and services.
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This is more about shady marketing and pricing than sale prices, but I think it's pretty closely related. It's not new, but it seems to be picking up steam lately - shrinkflation, or reducing the amount of goods or quality in a product yet still charging the same price or near that.
Campbell's soup did this recently in a pretty obvious way - their can size shrunk. Barelli Pasta packaging is sneakier - the same size but now only contains 410 g instead of 454 g.
I thought it very interesting that Brazil requires manufacturers to show these changes on the packaging.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-shrinkflation-1.6654780
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Here's another Amazon pricing study. I'm assuming it's based on the US site.
I haven't time to go through it in detail today or look for more studies. But:
- As it turns out, some of those impressive discounts we saw during the hottest sales seasons aren’t that real: some vendors artificially spike the original price quoted, just to show a more staggering discount.
And:
The biggest sales seasons—Black Friday and Christmas—actually don’t come with significant price drops.
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2 minutes ago, liuzhou said:
The list price has to be the actual price the product is offered at over a specified extended period. You can't go making stuff up.
@lemniscate and this study (I believe) were referring to Amazon US. I'm not confident about talking about consumer law in the US, but I do see that Canada has this:
QuoteOrdinary Selling Price
When is a sale really a sale? If someone puts a fake regular price on a product and then crosses it out, claiming the item is marked down, the consumer might not be saving anything at all. The Competition Act requires that when a business advertises a sale price by relating it to a higher regular price (the full price of the product without any discounts), the business must be able to validate the regular price.
Businesses use two types of regular prices as a reference for claiming savings:
a seller's own regular price, for example: “Our regular price $100, Now $50”
a market price, for example: “List price $100, Our price $50”
Whether businesses reference their own regular price, or a market price, the Act requires that they validate the regular price by satisfying one of two tests:
Volume test: A substantial volume of the product was sold at that price or a higher price within a reasonable period of time before or after the making of the representation.
Time test: The product was offered for sale, in good faith, for a substantial period of time, at that price or a higher price recently before or immediately after the making of the representation.
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5 minutes ago, liuzhou said:
Goodness. Is that legal?
It wouldn't be in the UK or China, for that matter.
I'm not au fait with the details of China, but in the UK, goods must have been offered at only a higher price for a specified number of days before any 'sale' price can be advertised. The details of that prior price and dates must also be included in the advertisement.
Unless if they've changed it since I've stopped paying attention.
It shouldn't be legal!
Well, the "list price" is really a made up number. The actual selling price is a different thing. Does the "list price" stuff come into play in UK?
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2 hours ago, lemniscate said:
Some sketchy stuff going on for some Amazon Black Friday offerings. I regularly shop Amazon Warehouse for better deals on specific things I want. Usually on Black Friday extended weekend there's a discount on quite a few things in the Warehouse area, which makes them more of a deal. This year it's 20% off, not everything, and you have to put it in your cart to see if it's a 20% off item. I had put a long wok spatula in my cart for $7.99, I was going to let it sit to see what discount it may get on BF WH. Overnight, it went up to $9.49, with a 20% off. When is a sale not a sale?
Just a testimonial, I haven't checked many other items, but my skepticism is pretty high for some of A's BF discounts.
There was a study done a few years ago that showed that Amazon was hiking up the "list prices" of items so that a percentage discount seemed like a deal, when in fact the item's final price might even be higher than the original regular price. Does that make sense? Study summary linked above but here's the gist of it:
QuoteResearchers analyzed Amazon listings from 2016-2017 and found that sellers often raise prices while displaying a previously unadvertised "list price." The gap between the list price and lower asking price can give the false impression of a deal, when in fact the price might be the same or higher than it was just days prior, they found.
"When you see this list-price comparison, you naturally assume you are getting a discount. It's not just that you didn't get a discount. You actually paid a higher price than before the seller displayed the discount claim," Jinhong Xie, a professor in the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida, said in a statement.
When you consider vacuum cleaners, for example, the addition of a list price was accompanied by a price hike 22% of the time. Seventy-five percent of price hikes were followed by a price cut within days.
In the real world, it might play out something like this: A Dyson vacuum is listed for $250. One day, a "List Price" of $300 pops up on the page with a slash through it. Simultaneously, the seller bumps the asking price to $275. In the end, buyers think they're getting a deal when the opposite is true.
Researchers observed the same price increases 3% of the time for books and more than 13% of the time for digital cameras, blenders, and drones. Although the study focuses on the 2016-2017 period, the researchers told Insider they have found evidence of similar price hikes more recently.
I suspect Amazon may do the same thing for Black Friday sales.
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1 hour ago, Shelby said:
I have a delicata squash I could do something with.......last minute ideas welcome...
You've already got a lovely menu there, but if you wanted to use the delicata, you could possibly use it in a kale salad. I had that once and it was quite good. Someone else made it but it was roasted slices of squash on top of kale with some dried cranberries, goat cheese and some kind of nuts (might have been pepitas but I think walnuts or pecans or sunflower would also work). Not sure what kind of vinaigrette but I think it was citrus, maybe some orange in it?
Or make some chips with the squash, like this, which I am definitely going to try some day.
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I'm interested in "The Menu", a new film which is billed as "black comedy horror". The horrors of rich-people food. 🙂
QuoteIn interviews with the people who dreamed up the food in the film, the consensus was that the tropes of modern fine dining are so extreme that there’s little need to exaggerate them.
“The more serious you are about something that seems silly, the funnier the work gets,” said the film’s co-writer, Will Tracy, who knows something about parody, having written for “The Onion” for many years with his creative partner Seth Reiss.
[ ... ]
The possibility of controlling every detail of a meal feeds the genius, the worship and the madness of the chef, Mr. Gelb said. “That’s both the comedy — and the horror — of the film.”
Also, review here along with review of "Fresh" which really sounds like a horror film!
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51 minutes ago, blue_dolphin said:
I used to stop into the Archie McPhee store for grins when I was in Seattle for work so I went to their website to see if this was real. Indeed, they also offer candy canes in flavors that range from hot dog, ketchup and bacon (all kind of alarming as they look like regular red & white stripe canes), sardine, kale, pho, brisket, and more.
Looks like a fun store, though the candy canes don't really appeal to me. (Mac 'n cheese, for example, ha) But as they say, "We make weird." 🙂
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On 11/19/2022 at 3:32 PM, MaryIsobel said:
Because I didn't have a plan B, I just paid 5.99 Cdn for a head of romaine. Not organic and not huge.
California had drought and a spot virus in the crop. Bad combination. We're just starting to see some of the AZ lettuce growers coming online now and I hope that means the prices will drop. I see one of our local stores is offering both CA and AZ lettuce. Right now, both are still $5 Cdn but I hope that will change soon! I am kicking myself for not planting some in my raised bed which has a greenhouse cover. I did hear that it would be a bad year for lettuce. Some of our local farms are still offering various greens but I wonder if they are trying to charge what the market will bear, not what their real costs are. Sigh.
Edited to add: It may still be too soon for the AZ lettuce. I just noticed that product listing said CA/AZ lettuce. So could be either. But I do believe prices will come down here in BC once AZ production ramps up. Hoping they don't have any big issues! 🙂
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Aw, sounds like a lovely time with your daughters and the food looks lovely. What breads did they serve? The bisque sounds dreamy.
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Like others here, I don't think it's tacky if you are discreet. And I'd love to see your pics! Sounds like a lovely evening. 🙂
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@Shelbyand @Katie Meadow, thank you both! I will do some digging around and see what I can find. Appreciate your help! 🙂
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15 hours ago, liuzhou said:
青椒牛肉 (qīng jiāo niú ròu) - Green Chili Beef (except it had more red, my preference anyway)
This looks so tasty! Are the red chilis hot and the green ones sweet? How hot/spicy is the finished dish overall?
Edited to add: Do you have any idea of how much longer you will stay in hospital? Whatever the underlying issues, I hope you are getting answers and some good news.
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10 hours ago, Duvel said:
We cleared the car, put everything to dry and headed out to Inverness …
I read those words and had an awful premonition that it would pour down while you were away and you would return to a flooded tent and soaking wet gear. I was so pleased to follow along and find that was NOT the case! 🙂 🙂
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Camping, Princess Style
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
It's been a long time since we've had an update, @Smithy. Hope to hear some details soon and hope all has gone well!