Darienne

Reading Smithy's testing of various ready-to-bake rolls, I am sorely tempted to get Ed to buy a few different ones. They sound like fun with some useful possibilities. Thanks for the posts, @Smithy.

Soup has no season with the McAuleys either. Soup is our every second night supper pretty much. And that's supper=soup and maybe a piece of bread and butter. And all the soups are homemade.

Lucky you if you have decent tomatoes. Our tomato season is long gone.

Made the Bean and Bacon soup again today. Without the bacon. Dumped a large spoonful of bacon fat into the soup for taste and at the end, after pureeing half the soup, I added chopped shredded pork. Very nice. On the other hand, the shredded pork was basically under-spiced (lazy!!!), unlike my usual Puerco Pibil shredded pork. I think I prefer the bits of bacon to the bits of pork, but in true Canadian sense I will soldier on and eat the soup with pork in it.

I've never tasted kimchi but I keep reading about how important it is in a diet. OK. So I'll buy some and try it. What grocery store in Ontario carries a brand which one of you favours? And where in the store is it likely to be? Please remember, that I am sending Ed to get it. (Please don't suggest Farm Boy. We do not have one in Peterborough.) Thanks.

I'm not. I do some things in Metric...and others in Imperial. And that's that. I think I personally was just too old when Metric was introduced to make a complete switch.

I laugh at your response because honestly, I don't have any plans. Perhaps they'll appear later. We live in hope.

Some of you might laugh at me, but please remember that I am an gardening virgin basically and still unorganized (family life is a bit chaotic right now). Last week I put three leek ends in small glasses of water in my south-facing window which will be covered in plants soon I hope and I am stunned at the growth of said leek ends. Nature is amazing! The pot on the right is my still un-repotted basil plant.

Oh, I could add that I sent the celery, carrots and onions through the large grater holes on the Cuisinart food processor attachment. And that worked out just fine. And I forgot the bay leaves.

The soup is done and I do think it's quite good. Of course it's been so many decades since I last tasted Campbell's Bean and Bacon, I really couldn't say whether it tasted like it or not. I did it in the crock-pot as noted and next time I would do a couple of things differently. For one thing, it needed more salt, but that's OK. I added it at the end. But I would not again put the bacon into the mixture for the entire cooking time...and I did mine on high because I started too late to do it on low. The bacon lost some/much/? of it 'baconess' and also I realized that I did not want to purée it. So I fished the pieces out as I went along. The end result was quite satisfying. Ed thought so too. Thanks again, @lindag.

So the Bean and Bacon soup is under way in a crock-pot, just for the heck of it. Went to the Rachel Cooks site to read the notes and learned that dried Cannellini beans must be boiled for a least 1/2 hour to kill the toxic lectins in them. Who knew? Also Ed cooked 8 oz of bacon for me to use in the soup...he was repackaging bacon today so I asked him to cook the bacon. Well, 8 oz of bacon from Costco gave me exactly 3.4 oz of cooked bacon. Now that was a shock. I'm using dried Great Northern beans so I'll report back. I love bean soup beyond sense I think. And I'm having already cooked mixed beans with Puerco Pibil shreds soup for supper, a kind of a no-name whatever was on hand soup. I guess I could add...as many of them are.

Actually I have some dried white beans and just might make this soup tomorrow. Thanks @lindag.

@lindag, it was a favorite of mine also...76 years ago. It goes back that far. Good luck with the recipe. Please report back. (Do they still make it? And does it taste the same?)

It is just digital. (I had to look it up to make sure.) No owner's manual but I found a video which showed me how to use it. Fortunately I don't have to deal with a 'lock' option.

So we are having Lasagne for Thanksgiving after all. The new kitchen stove is mostly installed but the oven door was taken apart to get the stove into the kitchen...don't ask...and until it's fixed, I still have no oven. And I refused to take the turkey out of the freezer until the oven was working and now it's just too late. I have no idea what the vegan daughter will eat. Oh, the Lasagne will be heated in the toaster oven. Speaking of the new oven...I could not find the knobs. What? Surprise! It has no knobs. It works by computer. No one warned me about this. I had no idea that there were stoves with computer-operated ovens.

I'm not sure what we are having. Turkey was planned and I would have taken it out of the freezer for thawing today...except that our oven refused to work yesterday. And then I wrenched horribly my right wrist in the middle of last night and wondered how I would do anything. The pain seems to be lessening and we live in hope. I have yet to make a dessert. So Ed and daughter Carolyn have just returned with a used stove...all our stoves for the last 15 years have been used and have been a good saving. $150.00 this one at the Restore. It's now sitting in the middle of the kitchen...and now we wait. I do have a frozen Lasagne and a Moussaka and Spanakopita, all made within the last two months, so we won't go hungry. Except that Carolyn is a vegan. Oh well...

Thank you for the additional information. Except that I won't be reconfiguring David Soo Hoo's recipe for brioche and I will use your Char Siu recipe. All I need now is some more pork butt.

Question from a rank beginner: when you say bread dough or any of the other 'doughs', are you speaking of frozen doughs purchased at a grocery store? My thoughts about making filled pastries come long after I have been in a grocery store to search out these items. I'll have to ask Ed to pick up any frozen doughs for me and no doubt I'll also have to ask him to ask to find these items. ...that is, if that's what you are referring to... Thanks. (and I would be on a plane to come to your place if invited...)

Wow. I never knew about this cook-off. I've never made a stuffed pastry, but how useful they would be in our lives. I'm going back to page one and reading this topic for sure. And @Tropicalsenior, your pastries look and sound divine. Please come to visit and make some for us. PS. Certainly did know about this topic as I posted to it several times and even made some of the prescribed pastries. Duh.

A question about growing tomatoes and how they taste. My dirt bag tomatoes were delicious and of course this non-gardener was thrilled. Then the tomatoes from a local farm were goodish but not like mine. OK. @chromedomeexplained about different tomatoes having different tastes. However, today's lunch tomatoes from the ones our neighbors gave us were not only tasteless...and we ate two different types of tomatoes...but had a very slight unpleasant taste to them both. Do tomatoes ripened off the vine not fare as well as those ripened on the vine? Or was it that these tomatoes are the last of the season? The donor lady is an excellent vegetable gardener so that's one factor. I still have two tomatoes on my vines and I'm hoping they'll ripen before the frost hits. It was some miles north of us last night and we are higher up than most of the surrounding land.

I agree with you, CD, on the liquid aspect of soups, whereas Ed likes thick...the thicker the better. But he likes malted milks (not that he's had one in the last 60 years) and I can't stand them. And I could go on...but won't...at great length about how we seem to like quite a number of our foods not in the same way. Might explain why I NEVER cook anything his Mother ever cooked. As for soup as a meal. I grew up with Campbell's (yechhh) also whereas Ed's Mother was a terrific cook although I don't think Ed ever ate soup as a meal. We do constantly as I have become an inveterate soup maker...not @FeChef would consider the vast majority of them 'soup'.

Seeing Senior Sea Kayaker's post on his wonderful Split Pea soup reminds me that I've made so many soups lately. The best of the lot was a Tomato Basil Soup. It was truly a 'died and gone to heaven' experience, made with real tomatoes. Other soups were made with overabundances of all sort of vegetables...cabbage, spinach, carrots, etc. I'm going to quit for a while.

Mine is not recent, but when I was pregnant for our daughter and first son, it was the Chinese Almond Cookies from the Canton Inn in Ottawa. The Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, used to eat there. The restaurant is long gone. Those cookies were the best. I do sometimes have a hankering for Miss Vickie's® Original Recipe kettle cooked potato chips. But then we always have in the house...so to speak...Kirkland's potato chips. I say 'so to speak' because they are hidden from me somewhere in the garage.

Good heavens. We buy a fair amount of pork for Chinese food cooking and also for the pup. And I have never ever noticed such a smell...and I am very picky about such things. I mean...very picky... (best emoticon I could find...)

Here's one of a set of one of the most wonderful food-related gifts I have ever been given. A friend from Delaware brought these mesh food savers as a gift during one of the many Dog Weekends we put on in a former life. So many women have asked me about them and could I get them a set...there are three of this size, two larger and one huge elongate oval one. I asked my friend in Delaware but she said she never saw them again. Alas.... This summer has been amazingly free of fruit flies and I haven't actually used them for the first time since I got them. Then this week, Ed brought the apple remains from making apple cider in the cellar up into the kitchen and left them there for a short time which is all it took for 6,000,000 of the little you-know-what's to appear and now I had a fight on my hands. Out came the mesh fruit covers. (Wow! Looking for the appropriate name to call them and found the Lee Valley website which carries them. mesh fruit covers )