Darienne

That's simple. Make lemonade.

I am winnowing. The books are all, so far, going to our local library and they'll either keep what they want and discard the others in the sale items. For me it was time. A factor perhaps of age. And also I find myself finding the occasional new and interesting recipe online. Plus I suppose we have pretty much settled down to a comfortable repetition of favorites.

Oh yes!!! and while our imported Poblanos in darkest Ontario are never huge, meaty and gorgeous, I do happen to have rather a large amount of recently gifted Poblanos from Toronto friends roasted into Rajas sitting in my freezer.

The 'whomp rolls'. I like that.

I've never bought enoki mushrooms...and I'm never going to either.

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.