dtremit

A lot of pet stores are doing curbside pickup -- order on the website, pull up to the store, and they'll put it in your trunk. The big chains (PetSmart and Petco) are both doing it, as are some of the smaller stores around us. Glad to see downthread you found wipes. In terms of finding them online, I have had the best luck at Walmart -- who I literally never ordered from prior to the pandemic. The key is that if you see they have them, you have to check out fast before they disappear. So when we are starting to need another pack, I put $35 of other stuff in my cart on walmart.com (to ensure free shipping), search for wipes, filter by "ship to home," and refresh that page a few times a day. If they come in stock -- I add to cart and check out immediately. I read an article a while back saying that wipe manufacturers were ramping up production but because of the retooling time it was going to take until summer. Think this is legitimately an area where demand has increased severalfold (as opposed to things like flour or toilet paper where it's package sizes and product mix that have held things up).

Yeah -- I don't mind the markup either (and we have been glad to have Wegmans pickup as an option) -- but the lack of transparency and consistency drives me nuts. At least Wegmans does have the in-store prices online so we can check -- at other stores around us that's not a possibility. (Some stuff, like bacon, has indeed gone up in price -- the bacon we used to get for I think $7 is closer to $10 even in store.) At this point, we are trying to get stuff from not-Wegmans whenever we can, and use it to fill in the gaps. We've been pretty happy with boxes from Imperfect Foods, oddly especially for meat and dairy options. We have less need for the produce now that our CSA has started up, but I think we may do a fruit and grocery box every other week from them going forward. I've also found Target curbside pickup to be a godsend for pantry items. They won't do it for anything perishable (which includes some odd items -- bread is unavailable, but tortillas are fine). But for canned / dried jarred goods, there's no markup above in-store prices, their website makes it easy to see what's in stock -- and in the odd case that something you ordered ends up being out of stock, they'll ship it from another store. And no time slots -- just a four hour turnaround window that often ends up being two or less.

The delivery markup with Wegmans can be really variable -- and it's hidden in the item prices. Blame Instacart, who they partner with for pickup and delivery. You can actually switch your cart between in-store, pickup, and delivery to see the price difference. At the Wegmans near us, the "basic" eggs are $1.39/dz and the organic cage free are $3.49/dz, in store, which I think is pretty much what we've always paid. For pickup or delivery, they jump to $1.59 and $4.09. You also occasionally get stuck with a big markup on substitutions -- e.g., fresh squeezed OJ subbed for the normal stuff. If you follow your order when it's being shopped, you can reject any that seem crazy before the shopper checks out.

The cost of "free shipping" is not well hidden on a lot of Amazon grocery items. Really it's $3.99 for the yeast and $6.50 to get it to you. Not always a bad deal for a single item, but if you can scrape together a minimum order other outlets are almost always cheaper.

Yes -- have one and love it. (Well, it's a different brand, with a steel handle.) Was sort of shocked at how effective it is -- does a good job scraping the bowl to incorporate the last bits of flour, but almost never seems to get caked with dough.

That kind of makes sense to me -- I feel like McMuffins are always better when they've had a chance to steam in the wrapper a little bit and the cheese melts everything together. (And now I want a McMuffin!)

Didn't think to snap a picture, but managed to use up some freezer meat tonight along with a related project. Turned a little package of lamb "shish kebab" into a quick Instant Pot dum biryani, and made saag paneer from a variety of greens (turnip, baby kale, and some komatsuna nearing the end of its run). The paneer was homemade, from the gallon of milk I tackled yesterday to clear room for the half-thawed meat. Also cooked two packages of locally-made sausages in the CSO, but didn't use them for anything yet -- just cooked and chilled. They'll be good in breakfasts and lunches for a few days. I think I have the rest of the dishes mapped out: the pork shoulder will become kalua pork tomorrow, and I'll probably cook off the beef stew into either stew or the Texas-style chili from the Food Lab. Leaning more towards stew as I have a bunch of roots to use up. I have a couple of steak cuts I'd normally sous vide to medium rare; I don't think I want to serve them anything less than thoroughly cooked under the circumstances, but am thinking they might do well in a Stroganoff. Have at least some oyster mushrooms lurking in the fridge.

Sooo jealous of the rhubarb! That is one thing I have tried to get on three different orders, and at the Union Square market, but to no avail. Might have to splurge on a delivery from BPM. Our summer CSA pickups started this as well -- we are doing a market style CSA out in Concord. Very heavy on leafy things, of course; I grabbed mizuna, bok choy, arugula, and Yukina savoy, which is spinach-adjacent; they also had lettuces. Also grabbed a bag of baby kale by accident — figured if I touched it, I had to take it, under the circumstances! But they had green garlic (one of my faves!), hakurei turnips, and the cutest baby daikons, which I loaded up on for some easy pickling. U-Pick was strawberries and sugar snap peas.

Hah! Given what must be in @andiesenji's freezer I can hardly blame the dogs for trying 😀 We're lucky that our dog is a saint when it comes to food -- if we don't put it on the floor, she won't touch it. The pasta filling isn't a bad idea -- though I don't have a pasta machine to make ravioli or the like. I could do a lasagne, though; I have a few cheese options that would be good for that. Actually the first thing I did was make a few fresh cheeses to use up a gallon of milk I'd bought for that purpose; I needed the fridge space for the freezer meat! Thinking of trying to turn the frozen black cherries into a sorbet.

The freezer was pretty packed -- my guess is that when my partner checked the freezer for soup at lunchtime, he put something back in a precarious position, and said item ended up working up enough momentum as it fell to knock the door open. I have a vague recollection of hearing a weird noise as we were watching TV last night, but figured it was something outside our apartment door (which is very close to the freezer). Wish I'd remembered to check. Sigh.

I think you could just use a WiFi or similar door sensor for this along with something like IFTTT (without going too far down a rabbit hole, protocols like Zigbee have better sensor battery life but require a hub). I ended up just ordering two ThermoWorks dual fridge/freezer thermometers -- the kind that sits outside the fridge and has a temperature probe on a wire. One will go on the fridge/freezer in the kitchen, and the other will split duties between the upright freezer and the small dorm fridge above it we use for drinks. Our apartment is a 1000 square foot loft, so the audible alarm will be plenty of warning.

I don't strain mine, though I tend to only save grease from bacon I cook for eating in slices. That is most often made in the oven, which produces a lot fewer "bits." In terms of how long it keeps, I tend to have two jars in the fridge, one marked "fill" and one marked "use up." New grease goes into the "fill" jar. When the "use up" jar is depleted, its lid goes on the "fill" jar, and the "fill" lid goes on a clean, empty jar. One use case not mentioned upthread -- certain stir fries. Fuchsia Dunlop mentions here and there that lard was very traditionally used for stir-frying in many Chinese recipes -- and given the difficulty in getting "wok hei" on my radiant electric stove, I find the smokiness of the bacon fat to be a nice reinforcement.

Oh, boy. As I was starting to shake off the cobwebs this morning, I heard my better half make a sound of dread from across the apartment -- looks like something knocked the door to our upright freezer ajar, probably late last night. It's not a total loss, but a whole lot got pitched. To be fair, some of it had been in there far too long. Two freezer thermometers with audible alarms have been ordered to prevent future occurrences. Trying to figure out now what to do with a lot of stuff that was still partially frozen and thus still salvageable -- as well as making room in the fridge for the resulting creations. Mostly meat -- a big pork shoulder roast, some locally raised beef stew meat, a little thing of lamb stew, a bit of pork belly, and a few steak cuts, plus two packages of sausages. Also managed to save some (formerly) frozen fruit and some tomatoes I roasted and froze from the farm last year. Thinking I can make some big batches of things — stew, chile, etc — and then refreeze in portions. Inspiration very welcome...

Would you generally recommend them as a shopping source? I have been curious but haven't pulled the trigger yet.

I get this reaction sometimes to buying Rancho Gordo beans at $6-8/lb -- but we probably get ten servings out of each bag! And they're really good enough to eat with just olive oil and onion, unlike the $2 beans from the store.

Might be worth seeing if any restaurants near you have "pantry" takeout menus -- I know of at least a half dozen near here who do, and they *all* have yeast, repackaged from commercial containers. (Most have flour, too.)

I had the same discovery recently -- but with Restaurant Depot. They will sell to non-members via Instacart -- but they don't deliver quite far enough.

Yeah -- I only speak (a bit of) German but obviously there's a lot of similarities, particularly in "everyday" vocabulary. I was just curious if the parallel could shed some light on the original use of the knife -- it seems like it might have been something very useful for making minced meat in the days before grinders.

"Hockmesser" is awfully close to "hackmesser" which I think is generally used in German for a cleaver -- though literally it's just "chop knife." Also cf. "hackfleisch" for ground meat.

Nice read. I am a little sorry I didn't sign up for their spring CSA when it was available (wasn't sure I wanted to make the commitment at the time, plus we have a summer CSA starting in early June). I wish I could actually figure out how to buy stuff from Eva's Garden (which is mentioned in the article) -- their products look fantastic! Nothing useful on their website or Instagram.

For canned goods the "best by" date is generally the date to which they can guarantee the product won't change texture / flavor / color / etc. It's still safe past that, but might be less enjoyable. E.g., I've had expired cans of beans where the beans kind of aggressively settled to the bottom and smooshed together.

So glad it was helpful! It was a bit of a shot in the dark based on a few experiments I've done recently. I can sadly not offer much advice on the banneton -- I struggle with that myself, and had a similar mishap on my last loaf! For the dark crust and Dutch oven, though, I've found that flipping the loaf onto parchment and using that as a sling to lower it into the pot helps a lot. It also lets me pull it *out* of the pot really easily to do the last ~10 minutes of the bake directly on the oven rack; that has helped me get a darker top crust without a tough/burnt bottom. I say this as a frequent sourdough baker, but I often question how much of the sourdough flavor is actually unique to the starter vs just coming from a forced, repeated, slow fermentation in the starter. If you built a "starter" with a tiny quantity of commercial yeast, I wonder how different the results would be?

First off, that looks really tasty! A lot of anadama seems super dense, but that looks nice and light. It looks like the anadama variation is actually slightly lower hydration than the basic white dough -- the two flours plus the cornmeal come out weighing a little more. But beyond that, soaking the cornmeal in boiling water would gelatinize the starches in the corn, meaning I suspect some of that first cup of water is going to be locked away in amylopectin and unavailable by the time it's added to the wheat flour. Fortunately I feel like a sandwich/toast loaf like this would look just right as a "split top" loaf with a score down the middle!

Is the artisan whole wheat flour particularly coarsely milled? Sometimes flour like that can make it really hard to develop gluten, especially if it's a high percentage of the loaf. One suggestion I've seen is to autolyse the bread flour and wheat flour separately, and then knead them together; that way the bread flour can form stronger gluten on its own. Haven't tried it, though. I've also started doing a longer autolyse *before* adding the starter; that way I don't have to worry about having the bread overproof while I'm waiting for gluten to develop.

Given (as you say) the texture of the KAF crumpets is already different from an English muffin, I suspect that if you cooked them longer on the first side (and way less on the second) they'd turn out more like the ones in the picture.