dtremit

@JoNorvelleWalker Technically no! 🤣 We're in a loft, so only one bedroom, and it's probably legally a studio since the walls don't go up to the ceiling. The shallow shelves on the staircase would be perfect -- my parents have something similar, though smaller. Unfortunately we are very short on wall space generally -- so no place to put something like that here. In the longer term we're going to be renovating our pantry and could integrate a pullout of some kind, but for now I think I need something that can go on a pantry or cabinet shelf. I am sort of intrigued by this variation on the shallow shelves: Sort of like @ElsieD's option on steroids. We don't have space next to our fridge like that, but I might be able to find someplace else for it -- behind a bookshelf or something.

Curious if anyone here has experience with racks for storing cans -- of the "tin" variety. It doesn't look like it's anything that's been discussed here before. We are overrun with the damn things and I can't make them fit well in our pantry -- the shelves are deep and the solutions I'm coming up with either waste a lot of space, or make it necessary to remove huge bins of cans and sort through them. We live in an apartment with no basement or garage, so everything needs to stay in or near the kitchen. Looking around I see two basic types of racks on the market -- simple gravity-fed shelves like these: and fancy "FIFO" racks like these: The latter seem better designed in a lot of ways -- but they also seem designed for people who have a huge quantity of a small variety of cans. (Also a lot of this is discussed on sites with...very different perspectives on society. I am not looking to equip a bunker, thank you.) With a very few exceptions, we have a small number of a huge variety of things. I'd thought about getting a FIFO rack for the few things we do stockpile in quantity (tomatoes and beans), but those come in different size cans (28oz/#2.5 vs 15oz/#30x). The other stuff we have is probably 80% smaller cans and 20% in larger #2.5 cans. So I feel like we'd end up needing two FIFO racks for the tomatoes and beans, and two non-FIFO for the other stuff... All of this is a long winded way of saying...does anyone have a solution that works? 😀

I am not an expert in such things, but my impression is that there's almost as much difference between some forms of low German and "Hochdeutsch" as there is between German and Dutch. My grandfather spoke a bit of Plattdeutsch (admittedly, learned secondhand in the US from his parents) and it was pretty hard to comprehend.

Make a pavlova and put them (well, their contents) on top! This is cause for celebration!

I think a lot of stores also just don't have enough stock room space to handle the higher volume of sales in this moment. Even with panic shopping behind us, people are buying more groceries than they were before, since they're eating more at home. And they're buying different things, making it harder for stores to predict what people will want. You know they're going to buy extra hand sanitizer, but it's harder to guess that they'll be eating more boxed mac and cheese, or when that trend will stop. There's also been a trend for grocery stores to keep less in back stock -- Whole Foods in particular switched to a "just in time" model a few years ago that resulted in a lot of stock issues when they first implemented it. @BeeZee, I think it makes a lot of sense for the dry goods to be out first -- those are things that are normally delivered less frequently, since they don't spoil. Produce has to come in every day anyway, so it's easier for them to adjust the orders.

I get the sense that a lot of the shortages now are rather fleeting -- nothing is truly unavailable, but everyone is understaffed and so things don't get restocked as frequently as they should be.

Thank you for this suggestion, by the way -- this method made quick work of a half bushel of peaches we recently procured. As long as one has enough pans, one can shuttle them in and out of the CSO faster than they can be cooled, peeled and sliced. The only issue I had was with the last tray that was half full -- those ended up being a little overdone. Will know to reduce the time for a partial tray next time. My sense was the batch I did on the "official" CSO pan -- the one with the ridges in the bottom -- was the most successful; the ones I did on a flat pan had a little ring of cooked peach where they made contact. Putting them on a rack would probably be ideal.

Strangest pandemic purchase to date -- we have a local restaurant that's transformed itself into a takeout + grocery operation. They're part of a small cluster of restaurants in the neighborhood run by the same group, one of which is a sort of hipster Jewish deli. So one of the pantry items when we ordered the other day was "pastrami fat" -- at $6 I couldn't resist trying it. "Use it like bacon fat," they said. Photo was of the top of a deli container. Turns out the deli container was a QUART. I was expecting, like, a half pint. Haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet, but probably will start with some breakfast potatoes. Other project has been dealing with a carton of peaches from the GA-based peach truck that popped up here recently. They really are quite tasty. Peeled and sliced them tonight after making a crostata last night; most will go in the freezer either as is or as a sort of jam I think.

I could have sworn she had a video with her visiting an artisanal palm sugar producer, but I can't find it. I might be conflating her coconut milk video and another video? HTK has been a fantastic resource for me for Thai cooking, though -- I can't recommend the channel enough. I have had tons of Thai cookbooks for years but it really took me being able to see the techniques (the curry paste is fried enough when it looks like this) to actually produce food I am happy with. I also like her segments on various home style Thai dishes and things that don't often make it out of Thailand. ETA, re @weinoo's haul -- we developed a love for Thai-style sriracha when visiting there a few years ago — and have found that we like Sriraja Panich better than any other brand, by a long, long shot. It has replaced Huy Fong entirely in our house (though I still keep their chili garlic and sambal around). Shark is very good in its own right, but isn't quite as craveable.

Bumping this ancient topic -- wondering if anyone has a preferred pectin/method for jam that will be frozen? We are about to acquire an absurd quantity of peaches, and in addition to freezing some in slices, I'd like to make some jam. It'll be a fairly small quantity and I figure it will be easier to freeze than can. I see there's a Ball pectin for no-cook freezer jams, but I also see a lot of freezer jam recipes that cook the pectin prior to adding it to the fruit.

I suspect this means they are getting very low on stock -- I bought mine from RC Willey and at the time they were happy to ship it out.

The white sauce could be toum: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2018/01/toum.html It has a kind of mayonnaise consistency, most of the time.

Worth keeping an eye out for the Knorr (or Maggi) caldo de pollo mentioned upthread, as well, which usually comes granulated (and in smaller, more manageable containers).

So true! We are really trying to minimize store trips, though -- and I was growing wary of repeatedly feeding my sourdough starter without baking anything. Most of our bread, of late, has come out of the trusty Zojirushi, which barely seems to produce any excess heat.

I have been craving corned beef hash for a couple of months now, but I've been afraid to pull the trigger on the canned stuff. I know I've had it plenty of times in restaurants and liked it, but somehow couldn't work up the courage. I think all your encouragement is helping!

I will have to give it a try on my next batch of dough. Finding something workable would be very welcome in these temperatures, to say the least! Sadly most of my collection of heavy steel or iron objects don't fit in the CSO, but for these purposes I can probably do a test loaf in a 7" skillet. I don't see why it wouldn't scale up. I *started* a boule on Super Steam yesterday but only left it in for 15 minutes but transferred it to a cast iron skillet in the Breville to finish. Didn't get a ton of oven spring but I think that was just the dough, I was experimenting with that too!

@JoNorvelleWalker - I think the boules I've had trouble with were closer to that 850g size. I really do wonder if there was some kind of production change at some point that altered how the top heating elements cycle. I have been meaning to see how far I can push the thing on the SuperSteam setting, where it only heats from below.

I know there is disagreement about this, but I would also think carefully about the size of the loaves you want to bake, the pans you want to bake them in, etc. and make sure that the CSO is *big* enough for what you want to do. I bought mine originally intending to use it for bread, and I have more or less given up on that; anything more than about 3" tall burns, in my CSO, as there's no shielding on the top heating elements. I know there's a few other people here who feel similarly. That said, others here love it for bread, and if you make smaller loaves more frequently, it may be perfect. It turns out I love mine for non-bread use cases, so I don't regret buying it one bit. As for alternatives -- I think several of us have high hopes for the Anova oven — *if* it ever ships. I think someone else upthread was trying another alternative as well, but I can't recall which or who. That said, countertop steam ovens are pretty common in other countries, so I'm hopeful that a good alternative will emerge over time.

In the realm of "weird but the year is weirder" -- we made a sort-of Thanksgiving dinner last night. Had a turkey breast in the freezer I wanted to use up — and a loaf of bread going stale, so why not stuffing? And hey, a can of cranberry sauce. Did have it with some baby beets and Hakurei turnips for a hint of spring. Main purpose was for cooked meat for "chicken" salad, which the better half has been craving; will probably also make some kind of turkey pie.

Any chance you can recommend a brand of swatter? We have low-level fruit flies occasionally and it drives my partner *crazy* — me, I just put up a vinegar trap and cover the fruit bowl, but he just hates them. I think an electric fly swatter would be very cathartic for him.

Some vegetables have a way of smelling to high heaven even when they're *not* bad. I left some mixed cooking greens (turnip, beet, chard) in a covered bowl of water to wash them last week and I lifted the lid to a cloud of odor that spread across the apartment. The greens were delicious once cooked, though!

I imagine dealing with a holiday weekend in the midst of all of this is a headache for stores, too -- shipments focused on BBQ stuff at the end of last week, delays getting in new stuff this week due to the long weekend, and probably lower staffing levels across the board. We did a small-ish pickup order on Saturday and it seemed there was a lot out of stock, even up here where the COVID situation is improving.

A halved jalapeño isn't a bad addition when cooking a pot of dried beans -- adds an aromatic note. Would work just as well with a previously frozen pepper, since you take it out at the end anyway. I think a lot of the non-traditional things I use jalapeños for (shredded in slaw, or mixed into herby salad dressings) might not translate for someone who doesn't like them, but I'm not entirely sure. In general I find that the grassiness of the pepper pairs well with herbs.

Probably they just didn't care, but I will say that keeping track of the million variations between inside preorder pickup vs. curbside pickup at the store vs. curbside delivery to your car does sometimes make my head spin. This may be less of an issue in less populous areas, but a lot of stores around here don't have dedicated parking, so "curbside pickup" can mean anything from "park nearby and we'll find your car and walk it to you" to "we'll put it outside the door of the shop, you come and get it."

You're reminding me that I grabbed one of those on sale and have barely done anything with it. I wonder what would be a good temperature for caramelizing onions without risk of burning them? ETA I'm assuming it would be target onion temperature + some pan delta, using the mat. I don't think the probe would get a good read on sliced onions.