Darienne

In another thread, I think it was Andie who suggested that you can verify your scale's accuracy with a US quarter or nickel. I'll google that point. Thanks.

Two excellent points. Thanks. ...that assumes my scales are correct...

We have that at our bulk food stores also...I just never remember the containers. I should put some into our Rubbermaid containers!!! Duh...

Just got the shock of my life...well, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration...when for some unknown reason I decided to check one set of spoons against another. They don't match! What do I do to find out which is accurate? I thought of the pharmacist and DH said no, that won't work. This is Canada so our scientific types don't use Imperial measures. In fact, we are officially on the Metric system. Which I have trouble with still. Who should I ask? Where should I run? Well, walk. Thanks. Five minutes later: OK. I called the pharmacist, thinking he might have metric measures as in one teaspoon is also 15 ml. Nope, it's all by weight.

One more: lacquer thinner, my go-to sticker remover. Of course, it's toxic as can be but I have it handy in my studio where I used to use it with regularity. Can't use it on some plastics...it takes the plastic too.

Am lovin' this, Heidi. Using all those garden goodies: I will cook and freeze anything which seems to be likely to go beyond its best use time. Colored peppers were on special last week at an unbelievable low price here and so we bought a passel. I roasted them all and into the freezer they went. A dozen uses spring to mind. Also I envy your having neighbors who are also interested in food, preparation and eating. The best part of living in Moab two years ago for 6 months was sharing with my next-door neighbor/landlady/friend our interests in just this. First and only time in my life to have a next door friend. (I really don't even have next door neighbors now.) Actually, I suppose that's why eG is so important to me.

Kitchenmom's reply brought to mind one of my conservative favorites: tabbouleh. Bulgar, green onions, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, parsley and mint...lots of mint. Nothing else. This dish with tomatoes, etc, etc, or with a couscous base may be something, but it sure h'ain't tabbouleh. And I don't want it. And I won't eat it.

I never thought of bringing small/medium plastic bags to a bulk food store, and we usually forget to bring clean re-usable small plastic containers into which you put tahini, peanut butter, honey, etc. Shame on us, but no plastic container of that size ever seems to go to waste in this household. I have a couple of 'shopping' bags in my purse...the kind which fold into themselves. Love those little goodies. Moreover, we always have two large Rubbermaid containers in the back of our Focus and our full size van. They either go right into the store with us and sit in our cart as we shop or Ed wheels the groceries out in the shopping cart and then fills the containers which are in the back of the vehicle. Thus we never have to buy plastic shopping bags (which are extra charges in almost every store now). Gosh, I feel virtuous. Of course we NEED plastic bins with secure-fitting covers with two large snoopy dogs everywhere we go.

So interesting about soap stone...and I wonder if it includes marble and other stones which are carved. When I went for one year to art school, we carved soapstone and I recall the instructor saying that when soapstone is newly mined, it is much softer than after some exposure to the air. It wasn't quite like butter, but it was so easy to carve the unexposed surfaces. So your soapstone counters would have already been cut and exposed to the air to harden before installation, I guess. (But I really have no idea.)

Odd you should mention Calamondins. I just finished a post in Heidi's blog about my Calamondin saplings. They come from an area friend who has two bearing trees. If I live another 25 years (ha!) I should get fruit. Otherwise, you cannot buy them here. Ever.

Good new word. Deserved to be invented. I have a shamefuf secret: because we can't get blood oranges most of the time, I am going to try this recipe with Navel oranges which I have on hand all the time.

I have a photo of the cake, but it doesn't look like anything really. Just a one layer round cake in my case. And my cut piece is not 'plated'. (I did add more sauce subsequently, but I didn't make enough and wanted our guests to have enough first.) I've never plated anything in my life. (For you only am I including this photo.) But the taste of the cake had me waxing poetic at length.

I am, as the British would say, gobsmacked by your photos of your house and garden as always. Now I can't decide whether to fly directly to your house for a week or two, or to cut you completely out of my life because of soul-destroying envy. Do you at least have a mat you stand on in front of your sink? I have two thriving calamansi seedlings in my front window now in the great frozen north...although not as frozen as Brandon Manitoba...and if I live another 25 years I might get a crop. Blog on, Heidi. I hang on your every word.

All the replies to this topic have been interesting. And I have been thinking about what my own reply will be. OK. Macaroni and cheese for one. Grilled cheese sandwiches...only cheese...for another. Hot dogs in cheap buns with cheap relish and mustard. Probably there are a good dozen dishes if I really put my mind to it. However, I wonder how many of the dishes about which we are conservative hearken back to our childhoods. Comfort or semi-comfort foods. Foods we ate growing up. Foods our Mothers or Grandmothers made. Foods we ate at the country fairs. Foods which were featured a number of years ago when most menus...here I am speaking of those born of Anglo origin or western European in the USA, Australia or Canada mainly...did not encompass the foods of the world, like Thai and Indian for examples. My Mother never made foods which were not strictly "North American" at the time: meat, potato and vegetable. Or at a time when we made foods which were from at most one or two other non-North American diets. Please, I am not encompassing all families, all diets, all menus here. Just skimming across the top of the subject...

Hooray for Heidi. I am so looking forward to reading your blog.

Hi runwestierun and Panaderia Canadiense (interesting name), Thanks for the suggestions. Will try the muffins very soon. And yes, my pans are fairly dark. And no, I might not have remembered about flouring the nuts.

Thanks for this reply, RG. Epazote: I didn't see any when I was in Toronto, but I shall look and ask for it next time. Does it come in a dried form? or is it fresh only. Cheeses: There were some cheeses available, but not many more than the ones I purchased: queso panela, queso fresco, Oaxaca cheese. There were one or two more, but that's about all. I'll try some of the other nearby stores, but Panela's is definitely the largest.

Indy Rob, there is no doubt, your trash can is prettier than our trash can. However, your trash can also costs a lot more than our many trash cans which are everywhere in the house now. Plus we got them on sale. So far, so good with Kyra, the canine 'raccoon' Rottie in her quests. She will outgrow this, yes?

Smitten Kitchen's (adapted from A Good Appetite) "Blood Orange Olive Oil Cake" with Honey-blood orange compote and thick cream. Compote and cream are added later to the finished cake. The cake was nothing short of fantastic. So moist, such a wonderful crumb, delicious. I was in heaven and 5 of us for lunch ate almost the entire cake. Now I would like to make this cake into muffins. Currently in a 9x5" loaf pan at 350 degrees F, it bakes for 50 to 55 minutes. So I would bake it at the same 350 degrees? in large muffin tins with papers for roughly how many minutes? 35? (That's the timing for large Morning Glory Muffins.) Anything else of import that I should know before I set off to do this thing? Oh, right, I am going to add chopped walnuts to the batter.

Posted on this topic very early...post #2...that we had similar setups and that come the summer, you may hate yours also. The door is shut: all is well. The door is opened and WHAMO the garbage smell is released into the kitchen. We did have lids on ours which also helped, but not enough. Now we have other garbage units...not because I loathed them...but because we have a new youngish pup who gets into everything and we needed a more secure lidded unit. Actually everywhere in the house now has secure lidded units. Never had a dog like this before, but then her very sad background might explain it. Good luck with yours. Maybe your garbage will smell less than ours does.

That was an amazing score! I despair of our poor second-hand stores around Peterpatch. 90% microwave cooking books. Your quesadilla looks HUGE. I cannot imagine scarfing down a whole one. And we would kill...well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration...for a decent Chinese restaurant in our area. As it is, DH likes to have Chinese at least twice a week, which means...making it ourselves. He does sous-chef for me, so I can't complain. Too much.

What? They're easy on the feet, easy on the back, easy on dropped items, and they take a bit of water much better than a lot of people worry about. Reiteration of BIG POINT. They don't show the dirt. And they really look nice!

OK. Asked the DH who replied that some of our floors are semi-gloss and others are satin finish. We have pine plank floors throughout the house...the replacement boards are all roof planking...and I assure you that the urethane is not a factor. Perhaps it's because the level of distress in 100plus year old boards. Ed has made all the new boards look as old as the old. When we redid the floors...boy were they in ROUGH shape with holes and huge gaps and some floors almost 5" lower on one side of the room to the other...the real estate agent whom we asked about what to do...Ed wanted the modern 'stuff' and I wanted planking...(I was right. Ha! Ha! ) said definitely go with the planking. Keep the place looking old and "charming". Kiss the hem of her robe, I did. ps. I guess I forgot to mention that the farmhouse was like a garbage dump (and I have the photos to prove it) when we moved in and that Ed, master and obsessive renovator that he is, has spent much of the last 16 years rebuilding the house from the inside. He had to rewire the house before the insurance people would even insure it.

Our wood floors...ours is a century farmhouse so wide-planked wood floors are almost de regueur...are finished in non-18th century urethane, quite a number of coats and so they are fine with water. The best feature is that they don't show dirt!!! (DH says 5 or 6 coats now on pine floors, not tongue-in-groove.) The worst floors in the world for me are a greyish-white vinyl (or whatever it is) flooring. In Moab our floors were a terra-cotta vinyl (or whatever), the very dirt color of the area. East Central Ontario dirt is brown.