Anna N

No fosters at present.

Wrote my first published essay on that theme. I was 16 years old.

I have a freezer in the basement which has some food in it, mostly meat that has been there since before my husband died in 2011. It is very difficult for me now to access that freezer and I have lived in fear that it was going to go belly up. So while I am up here my cleaning angel is going to empty it and defrost it. I may then find a way to store flour and bread in there. At least they will not cause the neighbours to think I have a rotting body in my basement! I have had one 21 ft.³ chest freezer full of meat defrost for days before anybody discovered it. I can still smell it to this day.

I can only say that if they were a dollar a bag I would probably be buried and the coroner would find the cause of death to be an overdose of Rainier cherries.

Nothing wrong with your sense of humour and nobody's feelings were hurt at this end of the game.

I love cherries. These were a treat for me and they check all the right boxes.

Here's the Problem. In theory you think it's gonna work. This asparagus, despite being pencil thin, really did not cook in the amount of time one would allow for the puff pastry. Fortunately we were not at a cocktail party trying to maintain our dignity as we found that the only way to eat it was to attempt to reach the end of a stalk of asparagus because it certainly wasn't going to bow down to any attempt to bite off dainty bits. So we ended up in an undignified situation where we were basically slurping asparagus stalks as you might spaghetti when you were six or seven years old! The salad called for a butter-type lettuce and the addition of some toasted walnuts. It needed both. The loose-leaf romaine was inapprpriate but might have worked a bit better had I been more "cheffy" in prepping the lettuce. But all in all we have both eaten far worse and for me it was a valuable learning experience.

Hoping that @BonVivant reads this! Quoting: SV rhubarb is great. It keeps its shape, texture and colour." love to know temperature and timing.

Looks ain't everything. I take full responsibility. The dressing was olive oil and lemon juice. The recipe called for 3 tablespoons of olive oil to 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. I tasted it and said "yuck" and added more lemon juice and tipped it over onto the other side. Kerry said it's stripped the enamel from her teeth. I think she's exaggerating just a bit but not too much. On a scale of 1-10 dinner was a 3.

That is quite the operation. Thanks for sharing.

It is challenging. But remember most of the baked goods leave here untouched and feed the starving staff at our emergency department. Some of the food we buy is simply pantry staples that we need to replenish. But on the other hand we are both growing girls and need our food. Not to mention that much of the pleasure of being on Manitoulin Island is cooking and eating whatever we fancy!

I would gladly swap a dozen fleas for all of these creepycrawlies anytime.

I sure hope not we have ambulances that need to get out and sometimes in. But Kerry says if she was up here sailing she should feel quite differently about the situation!

Really hate to tell you this but we still have no fleas. The market was closed. But we were in desperate need of a retail six so we went back to the grocery store and over to Pike Lake Farm, as one does. From the farm eggs in the back, rhubarb right front then looseleaf romaine and behind the looseleaf romaine, spinach. I am not a farm girl. I have to wash those greens. Those greens are full of creepy crawley things. I need Shelby up here to give me a hand. Much less intimidating. Bananas, mushrooms and cherries in the back. Asparagus scallions, chip dip and cream cheese in the front. More cocktail tomatoes, anjou pears, canned cherries and olive oil in the back. A top sirloin beef roast, 2 pounds of ground beef, a jar of stem ginger marmalade and a jar of seedless raspberry jam.

Good morning. Breakfast was cauliflower cake with Harissa mayonnaise and one of Kerry's cheese buns which she made for rounds this morning. After she has cleared the decks at the hospital I hear we will be heading out to the infamous Flee Market to restock our supply of fleas which appear to have died off over the winter.

Now this is interesting. The grocery delivery service that I use has teamed up with Weight Watchers to provide a meal delivery service.

I cannot answer that since I have never tried to cook them for only four hours. If you are happy with the results then I would stick with it. If you think there might be some improvement then try the 24 hours once. (Now though I am beginning to question my notes and I don't have them here with me so it's possible either my notes or my memory are faulty.) I do hope someone else chimes in here. Edited it to say I just did a search on eG and 24 hours @ 56° is my standard treatment of a chuck eye.

@Dejah, I don't know what I admire the most – – your meals or your photographs of your meals! Either way I must remind myself not to lick my screen.

And do you want to cut it vertically so you get two half circles of jelly doughnut or do you want to cut it horizontally so you get two full circles of jelly doughnut?

I swear the hospital has a Spybot trained on the condo and as soon as dinner is about to be served they arrange for the phone to ring so Kerry has to head in there again! I know the chicken thighs will reheat just fine but I'm not sure about the curried sweet potatoes as they are already somewhat overcooked. The chicken thighs are very tiny and I gave them only 20 minutes and even that was perhaps too much. Cuisinart steam oven cooks active a lot faster than anything else.

And the thought of a sauce has inspired me to gather all the ingredients to make the romesco sauce from the Zuni Café cookbook. It is on my to-do list for Wednesday.

Gotcha! I wasn't sure if you were counting a meal kit as one serving or two servings and and I was curious if you were treating them as lunch or dinner. I, too, will frequently eat my main meal anywhere between noon and 3 PM and I can rarely ever deal with three meals a day. So I was just curious as to your take. I must say if I could get meals that look yours delivered I'd be right on it. We have a much smaller market here so we often miss out on the kind of variety that our neighbours to the south enjoy.

@SJMitch I am having difficulty understanding the mathematics of your meal plans. Can you tell me why nine meals? I am sure I am I missing something here. Some are dinners and some lunches?

So food and drink experiments we do good; meal planning not so good. Kerry is on call again today and I was racking my brain as to what I might make for dinner. Although there is much food here not too much of it lends itself to a dinner plate. There is meat here but either it needs defrosting and or it is something I would want to be sure Kerry would be here to enjoy a la minute. So on the theory that if you are hungry enough you will eat almost anything, I dug around in the freezer and found three small chicken thighs. I set them to swimming in the Sous Vide bath at 20°C with my beloved Joule to defrost and then we can pop them into the Cuisinart steam oven (CSO) for 20 or so minutes. They are very tiny so I expect they won't take much more than 20 minutes. We bought some teeny sweet potatoes on our last grocery shopping trip so I'm thinking of scrubbing a few of these, tossing them in some oil and curry powder with some salt and pepper and cooking them in the CSO. I'm thinking I might do those now and then reheat them when we are ready. Also because I wish we were better planners I rescued a beautiful rib cap from the freezer. A very large rib cap. Perhaps even a whole rib cap. Anyhoo I put it in the fridge on a tray and will let it thaw for a day or two before trimming it up into small steaks that we can sous vide and then barbecue. Kerry is anxious for the fat from around it so she can render it and have a handy source of beef fat. I am thinking that with a few sous-vided rib cap steaks I might be better able to produce a meal on demand.

So here is the finished product. It looks somewhat different from the one @blue_dolphin made. I suspect it has a lot to do with the ratio of cauliflower to egg mixture and since the scales here were acting up I was unable to weigh the cauliflower. I did not use all of the cauliflower I cooked but perhaps I still used too much relative to the amount of eggs. And because the yolk to white ratio in the eggs was off, this likely contributed some difference also. Mine could also have used a couple of minutes longer in the oven just to set that last little bit. If I were to make it again, and I might, I would definitely ditch the red onions on top. They make it challenging to cut and I don't think contribute very much to the end product anyway. Mine could certainly have benefitted from the addition of a side of a spicy tomato chutney which is not in evidence here. I think it has potential But I'm visualizing it with some sort of sauce napped over it once it is sliced. Perhaps a romesco or even a basil cream sauce which would pick up one of the flavours in there. Edited because I DO know the difference between yoke and yolk and various other misinterpretations by whatever system takes my dictation and mucks it up.