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Darienne

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Everything posted by Darienne

  1. We got it basically for French Fries. Today's were not a great success but with some room for improvement which I know. So I have that going for me.
  2. Finally gave up trying to figure out which would be the best buy for our first air fryer...already it has to be considered the 'first' because it might be a terrible mistake... and Ed bought the T-fal which was on sale this week at Canadian Tire (Canada). It had fairly good ratings, was half-price, and so we bit the bullet. And my apprehension level is currently sky-high. We'll try homemade French Fries today having no frozen ones and being too far to casually drive into town to pick some up. (Not only the time factor, but the cost of gasoline is beginning to impact our lives greatly.... )
  3. As noted above, I now get a daily American source, Food Safety News, and the levels of contaminated foods in the industries and the allowable levels of contamination are staggering. Today's outdid them all so far: Here's contaminated baby food. How on earth this situation can be permitted to exist is really beyond me.
  4. Hello @EQuinn. Welcome to eG. I am a constant home ice cream maker for a husband who lives for ice cream. And guests who always expect it. I don't eat it myself having now acquired dairy problems. Yes, I know I can use other liquid bases and have done so, but first of all I am not a fan of cold foods generally speaking. I could add that my Mother used a freezer plan back in the dark ages with endless really poor quality ice cream and I learned to despise the stuff. My basic ice cream recipe is far from the norm. @paulraphaelwas my first ice cream mentor on the forum, and although he's gone way beyond me in his methods, I have stuck with a very early one using simply corn starch. Now I've just recently been gifted with one of the newer refrigerated Cuisinart gelato/ice cream makers although I have quite happily used a basic ICE-100 for many years, having bought it second-hand in my home away from home, Moab, Utah, for $5.
  5. Ten pounds of dehydrated onions. My work here is done.
  6. I really don't know if I should post my foolish action in this thread. Of course I'm going to do it again. Many times. I wish I could keep from doing it again. But I know it's hopeless. That is, losing track of time when on the computer. I had some Blatjang which was too liquidy on the stove, and on a very low heat, trying to thicken it up. It's a recipe from @JohnTfor a quick chutney to eat with Bobotie, my South African meal which I am making for friends next week. So's the Bobotie recipe also. And the Malva Pudding for dessert. Then I sat down to answer a couple of emails. About 1 1/2 hours later I went into the kitchen to find what was left of the chutney, black, thick as well, I don't know what is this thick. I could not pry it off the side of the pan. It's stuck fast to the bottom of the pan like nobody's business. I hope the pan is not permanently ruined. The chutney sure is. Made it again. And looked it up online to see if by some chance I could use cornstarch to thicken it. Well, I could and this time I did. End of that story. But not the end of losing complete track of time while on the computer....
  7. I love limes. You must have put a fair amount of sugar with this. Do you have a recipe which you might share? Please? I have done a lot of apple leather, but I've always done it in the oven on top of Canadian Tire red silicone mats on cookie sheets. It's worked really well. For one thing, my dehydrator is one of those inexpensive Salton round thingies for leather. One thingy. Meantime in my oven, using two cooking racks with legs, one on top of a second cookie sheet, I can do four cookie sheet amounts at once. I've quit making it because after a few years, no one really wanted to bother eating it, including me.
  8. My manual says 130 but I've turned it up to 150. And it says 5-12 hours. But these onions seem quite wet and are taking somewhat longer. Not that I've ever noticed.
  9. I'm in the midst of my yearly...or sometimes twice yearly...onion dehydration. 10 pounds of onions for $2.99...last year it was $1.99...and then I throw them into everything without having to stop and peel and cut and so on. Of course, working on them right now is a pain...but that's the way it is. The garage smells like an onion. I'm half way through...
  10. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that Enoki mushrooms are contaminated more than their fair share of the time. Here we go again.
  11. After Ed retired from teaching, we completely changed our eating habits. We began to eat breakfast together every day...until the day I decided that I'd had enough of making THAT many meals. So now we eat separately, often the leftovers from the day before. Lunch has become dinner and it's at 12:30 when we don't have early afternoon appointments. And dinner turned into supper, salads alternating with soups. And at 6 pm.
  12. And then I signed onto another American-based food safety information website: Food Safety News. It's almost more than I can stand. The endlessness of the contamination of foods around the world is staggering. And now, even that beloved American staple, Krispy Kreme, has been fined a huge penalty for a sharp metal piece found in a donut.
  13. Welcome to eGullet. What are your special interests?
  14. On the other hand, ours was not a dying smoke alarm chip, but rather a cricket. We currently have a cricket somewhere in the kitchen. It chirps all night. And I do mean all night long.
  15. If I knew what BlueStar and Wolf were, I might respond to your post. As it is, I don't even know what Bluetooth is. ps. I Googled both of them. We don't live in that snack bracket to begin with.
  16. Terrifying article. Things we never knew. Ed was once many, many years ago, along with a few other 'liberal arts' types, seconded to the engineering department of the Bell. It proved to be quite an experience for all, needless to say with some unpleasantness at times. My Father was an aeronautical engineer, in part responsible for the invention and use of radar in WWII. My fingers stopped typing here. Least said...the better I guess.
  17. I do like the option on our Black and Decker coffee pot to have the coffee turn itself on at 6:15 am so that when I get up at 6:30 am the coffee is fresh...well, as fresh as it can be seeing as we don't grind beans and so on. So it's not all doom and gloom. But then rants are not supposed to contain good news, are they?
  18. I am very old. Older than dirt, as the T-shirt says. And like many old people, I like it when things stay the same. Which they don't. Hence the rant. The ceramic innards of my big crock pot broke last year and of course I had to get a newer model. What happened to a simple temperature guide and the choice of low or high heat? Well, most of you know. It was replaced by a long pathway of choices which I don't want and which, if you don't get the sequence correct, you have to start all over again. And over and over. Then the food processor on/off switch went. Buy a new one? Not likely. They don't make them with the same number of discs which I depended on for slicing and grating. The ones, which do have a slicer, have only one choice on the slicer...mine has many. So Ed, He Who Can Fix Anything whether he understands the mechanism or not, fixed the on/off part of the machine. I think he used a wooden popsicle stick. Of course, the safety mechanism no longer works so don't stick your hand into the machine when the blades are in there. I do have a large attached warning sticker. Oh yes and then the garage fridge was next. And we were expecting company, the first Annual Dog Weekend since the start of Covid. (Oh, did I mention that our well water turned up contaminated for the first time in 27 years of testing and that the septic tank backed up into my bathtub and the upstairs shower wasn't working properly? And the front windshield of the Sienna had to be replaced?) So Ed found a very good deal on a Maytag Plus at the Restore, his store of stores. And it was much newer than our kitchen fridge which was bought in 1980 (which makes it 42 years old, still newer than our cellar freezer bought in 1975, 47 years ago, and still going strong.) So after the company left, we switched fridges. But fridges have changed quite a lot and for us, not for the better. I simply assumed it would be better. Rule #3 of the Toltec Wisdom...don't make assumptions. The freezer compartment is much larger,...which I don't need...while the actual fridge compartment is smaller, and more restrictive with all its fancy plastic shelves and drawers, than our old model. I think we are going to have to go through the painful fridge switch again. Next the microwave broke down while we had company. Ed went out and bought a new LG microwave, ranked top of the line by Consumers Report. I hated it. No number buttons...you either have to slide your finger along a + line or tap the line until you reached your setting. Of course you have to switch on a light. At 6:30 am? I think not. The entire front is glass so you leave fingerprint smudges on it each time unless you are careful and use the front door edge. Which I didn't remember to do. I did not want to learn how to use it. End of discussion. Wonderful Best Buy took it back after a week and a half trial. I'll just end this rant with a mention of our new LG washing machine. Yes, it works well. Has enormous capacity. Twice that of our old model. Has a thousand options but you are at liberty to ignore them with impunity. It even plays a cute little song when it is finished. BUT...the drum is so deep that I can scarcely reach the clothes at the bottom. I have longer than normal arms so I just can manage. My S-i-L is shorter than I am with shorter arms and she simply can't reach to the bottom. These machines are made for the taller folk of the current generation...not for those of us who were the regular height of women in the 40s and 50s. Enuff. More than enuff I think.
  19. Thanks for all the advice. I have no idea if the cell phone will work in the cellar or not. Here I go..... Just as I thought...no service. There are still places on the first floor where there is no service also. When I say we live in the middle of nowhere, I am not exaggerating. (Well, maybe just a tad.) And seeing as Ed doesn't carry a phone with him up at the Drive Shed...or anywhere else unless he's off in the car...which is where he was...I am out of luck. We do have a portable phone which is tied into our land line but no one carries it. I did go down into the cellar and did clean up the freezer. And now I'm as up to date again as I'm going to be. And not making any soup as we currently have 34 containers already. And I found strange bags of unmarked stuff...we're having one for lunch tomorrow. Frozen foods are sometimes impossible to identify with many finished casserole packages looking approximately the same. They fall out of their identified holding bags. And a few packages of skinless boneless chicken breasts. And a plethora of frozen spinach for something I was going to make and never did and now can't recall. Didn't get back to this any earlier...Ed's now trying to do something about the quagmire the garage has become over the summer. I'm called in to identify 'stuff' and what we should do about it. What a fun day!
  20. Good for you. Still strange you should post this today when I am finally going to force myself to go to the cellar and tear apart the freezer and see just what on earth is in it now. The past two months of our lives have been extremely chaotic...I'd actually say the worst I've ever lived through in terms of chaos (not in terms of life threatening things or anything dire)...and I've let all kinds of things slide...including keeping track of what's in the main freezer. I don't have a smart phone to keep track of my life...it's all on hard copy. Which I have been ignoring. At my peril. In fact, I don't have a smart anything, including a smart brain which now seems to be missing. I'm now off to the cellar...
  21. And where would such a thing be available please.
  22. I think I'd go hungry before I ate a canned soup of the regular Campbell's type. Especially the 'creamed' variety. Memories of childhood....
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