Darienne

Real Food, Fake Food by Larry Olmsted is an excellent book, well researched and documented and I do recommend it. Not a book to read straight through for me. I read the more broadly based chapters and those which touched upon our own situation vis-a-vis what we eat, skimmed through a couple of others and ignored a few. Truthfully it didn't engage me as much as did all those books about chocolate which I have read.

And it all comes around, doesn't it? Our parents' belonging that we discarded along the way...and now we wish we had kept them.

Sorry @Tropicalsenior I can't find my little metal recipe box which contains this recipe and Ed is having a severe Tourtière ingredients memory loss. The only thing I recall was the use of some soda pop in the crusts.

Ed (whose Mom actually was French Canadian) makes an excellent Tourtière. I think we need one for this Christmas. Ed got the recipe from his French teacher when we lived in Quebec.

Our daughter is here this weekend and I pressed her into taking some photos on my behalf. Mug on the left bears a photo of the drive shed, Ed's lair...which is strictly enter at own risk, preferably wearing sturdy boots with steel-capped toes. Ed's sister gave the mug to Ed as a Christmas present one year. Mug on the right is a Rottie of course, a mainstay of our lives for almost forty years now, and only one of many Rottie mugs and stuffies and plaques and t-shirts and nighties and you name it (and Hummingbird things also) we have been given by the wonderful friends from the States and Ontario and Quebec who attended 20 years of Annual Dog Weekends (and I use the term loosely...from Thursday to Tuesday for the Delaware folks) at the farm. What incredible memories of those times. The mug on the left says Moab, our home away from home and it's been 8 years since we last were there. 1985-2017. I still miss it and when I see Facebook short reel videos of the area, my heart clenches sometimes. The graphic is of course Kokopelli. Kokopelli and southwest lizards were our late son Steve's favorites. In fact, one of our upstairs bedroom is the Kokopelli Room (yes, our bedrooms have names...we are nothing if not pretentious) filled with Kokopelli bits and bobs we brought back over the years for him. We did take Steve with us to Moab one year. The blue glass mug is just that, blue glass, one of my favorites. The first years on the farm I bought a complete set of blue glass plates and glasses and bowls and mugs. They're almost all gone now, except for some mugs and two large serving bowls, but I still have and use the blue handled cutlery ...which Ed hated...said they were too light and small. So I use it and everyone else has a heavier, more conventional set to use. It's hard to believe but we've been on the farm 35 years. Of course it's hard to believe that we are in our mid-80s and have been together since I was 15 and he was 16. Sorry, I'm old and I tend to ramble...

Pistachios are back on Canadian governmental recalls this morning. So I finally went to Mr. Google for more in-depth reporting on the endless announcements of salmonella carrying pistachios. And it is indeed a continuing item on the news. "As of early December 2025, 155 people have been reported sick with Salmonella linked to an outbreak involving pistachios and pistachio products in Canada, with 24 hospitalizations but no deaths, primarily affecting Ontario and Quebec, though the actual number is likely higher as not everyone seeks testing. The outbreak involves various brands from Iran and has led to multiple recalls, with people falling ill from March to November 2025. " What I don't understand is why this continues on and on and on. Why can't all pistachio items from Iran be pulled off the shelves?

I'm reading Real Food, Fake Food by Larry Olmsted. But seeing as I'm also reading three other books, I haven't gotten all that far. One of the other books is Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life which I am really enjoying.

Dark chocolate is it for me. I eat some every day but I do not overindulge. Well, once in a while... I make a gluten-free chocolate cake with a dark chocolate ganache topping every week and we eat small pieces once a day. (We finally came to the conclusion that Ed does not have a gluten intolerance, but I really like the recipe.)

Hard to believe that I started this topic with an article from my Smithsonian daily download and here I am back again with yet another Smithsonian download from today: Gas Stoves Are Poisoning Americans by Releasing Toxic Fumes Associated With Asthma and Lung Cancer

I LOVE bean soup and yours sounds delicious!!! The smoked sausage and Rotel tomatoes...yummm. Can you name all 15 kinds of beans?

Pistachios are back on the Canadian food recall list again today. Is there no end to the contaminated pistachios? Why don't they just haul them all away? I don't understand.

Placed a hold on it at the local city library immediately.

Christmas dishes!!!! I love the gnome decorated plates that our daughter gave us many years ago. They are up at the Drive Shed, somewhere only Ed knows where. I'll get him to bring them to the house today.

We have a number of favorite mugs but my camera does not do close-ups. If our daughter comes this weekend, I'll get her to take the photos.

I believe I might kill for that counter.

Wonderful, as usual. I am so taken by what you are doing!! And I just happen to have a green cabbage on hand.

Interesting point. As a Canadian I thought I'd look up my country's rules. According to Mr. Google: In Canada, "feta" can refer to authentic Greek feta with a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) label or cheese from Canadian producers that can be called feta if they started using the name before October 2013. New Canadian feta-style products must use terms like "feta-style," "feta-type," or "imitation feta" and cannot include images that evoke Greece

I'm with Smithy.

Interesting question. Takes me back a long time. Ed and I were married 65 years ago...soon to be 66...and dirt poor. Two very foolish university students and soon to be parents. Where on earth were our brains? (No answers, please!) About the lamb. Back then, in the 'olden' days, lamb was the very cheapest meat you could buy in Ontario, Canada. And so I bought lamb. And although I could happily eat a bit of lamb every now and then, Ed has categorically refused to eat lamb for forever!!! Good luck in your search.

We had steamed broccoli with cheese sauce for supper last night. Ed prepared it (a first for him). I'll look in the garbage to see if our broccoli, purchased on Thursday, had any identification marks on it. We are both fine gut-wise today. According to Mr. Google: Salmonella symptoms typically appear between 6 hours and 6 days after infection, though the onset can sometimes be between 8 and 72 hours. Aha. Ed bought broccoli heads...not florets. So we are in the clear. Added: The etymology of Salmonella comes from Daniel Elmer Salmon, an American veterinarian who, along with his colleague Theobald Smith, isolated the bacterium in the late 1800s.

World’s best braised cabbage from C. sapidus . I had Ed buy some cabbage this week to make that very recipe.

Famous last words!!!

I just googled 'hard cooked fried egg'. To be honest, I was not really clear about what the "hard cooked" part meant. Well,duh... Of course, it's what in East Central Ontario at least, we would call 'over hard'. And something I would never ever order. Ruins the entire egg experience for me. So therein lies the complete answer for me. I'm officially disqualified from having an opinion on your fried egg question.

What exactly is your time frame from a) finished meals at home and ready to go to b)be placed in the community fridge to c) pick up by eating public? No, there is no rush on this question. Just trying to get it all straight.

That's the choice? Of course, so many choices would not work as the bread would get so soggy. Hmmm... I've never really given it much thought before. I googled the topic to see what I could find and the vast majority of them are too 'wet'to last the time frame required or too costly for your budget. The only one I could see using is a pulled meat. But then you've obviously done your homework.