SLB

This. I find it downright wacky.

With an acknowledgment that this may be a separate thread -- what are you doing with alla that appleseauce? Do you eat a pint a week, straight?

This is really not true. Even the folks who published the original lone study have retreated from this. It's more like 2%. The total number of ruminants belching methane while roaming the earth has not changed all that much in the last 200 years, although the demographic shift from wild ones subject to political removal (namely, bison) to cows is significant. What has changed, of course, is the human-community's use of fossil fuels. When you compare it to the environmental impact of shipping fruits and vegetables to rich markets, the climate case against cows tends to fade. ETA: not to mention, it avoids the whole late-20th-century problem of so many human eaters thinking that eating "beef" means eating "steaks". Is whole-animal eating an environmental problem in a world where so many people insist on air-conditioning? Sorry if I'm coming across like a jerk. I think the marketing/messaging around environmentally impactful decisions is often un-scientific. People eating less beef and more year-round vine-ripened tomatoes . . . sigh. I find it very frustrating.

I am in something of a rut, which is weird because my freezer has just re-filled with pork, beef & lamb coming soon, spring veg, etc. So I poked my head in here for its reliable boost. It did not fail. Shelby, I somehow missed that you and Ronnie had been living this way for so long! I *really* wish I could read the blogs from those first years, girl. Anyway. Carry on, Shelby and all. Over here -- I found some cream cheese in the freezer, along with pimientos. I'm making me some [freezer-burnt] pimiento cheese.

Plain-sugar, upper right; Chili-sugar, upper-left; Sugar-sour, bottom.

Thank you!

[Dumb] question about candied citrus. I am dealing with all of the collected citrus peel in my freezer, finally. There is too much of it. People, I don't even eat all that much fruit, so I don't know what is happening here. But anyway, where was I. So -- the OLD-timey recipes have you candying the prepped peel in heavy syrup for several hours, followed by the final sugar-roll and whatever you're gonna do. The NEWfangled recipes have you candying the prepped peel for, like, 10 minutes. I assume that the former is a true preserve with a durable shelf-life, while the latter might . . . mold or something, after awhile; is this correct?

You're a good egg, liuzhou. Even with that thin membrane. 😊

Got it. I'll probably study the terrain for long past the time this pork will be in my freezer . . . . There are three different pork-based meatballs that are already in my regular rotation. One is from Marcella Hazan, it's tiny and gets fried, and then baked into a bech-pasta situation. Mine have never been as tiny as Ms. Hazan prescribed, I just lose my mind with that; but, still small enough to successfully fry. I also make a Mexican pork-beef meatball from Diana Kennedy for "albondiga" soup; this is possibly similar to what @Darienne mentioned upthread. And also a pork-forward meatball, which is ultimately flattened to thinner than a pancake for shallow-frying, called a "pachola'. I think this is also from Diana Kennedy, but I don't remember.

As I said, Chinese food is one of the cuisines that I eat almost exclusively out. Or did, anyway. I am hearing a clear direction for my 2021 cooking, I guess I better find me a good starter book.

That is some consolation, it really is. Thank you.

I eat a lot of eggs, them being a tasty and relatively cheap protein (I eat a lot of protein). But I struggle with one aspect of eggs -- the chalaza, that . . . thing that connects the yolk to the egg-white. I cannotCannotCANNOT tolerate having that thing in my mouth, it induces gagging or worse. I have never heard anyone make this complaint before, so I assume it really doesn't bother people. Which is so hard for me to understand. They are a LOT less thick and nasty in older grocery-store eggs than in farm-fresh eggs, so maybe that's why it's not a problem for the masses. They can be removed, but it is a pain in the butt. I hate it when I hate something that other people are fine to eat.

BACKONTOPIC!! I already have two meatloaves made up and back in the freezer, they are pork-heavy because I was running out of beef. And I realized, belatedly, that most of these pork-cube recipes in the Time Life Books can be converted to ground-pork, handily. Duh. . . . .

OFFTOPIC!!! Those stuffed bitter melon pieces reminded me of my one of my veryvery favorite dishes that I used to get in NYC's Chinatown, exactly once a month because I had business in the area exactly once a month. I believe it is Malay: curry-tasting soup with vegetables stuffed with fish cake. One of them was bitter melon stuffed with fish cake. Another one of them, the one I saved for last every.single.time, was tofu-skin stuffed with fish cake. I don't know what this was called, at one resto, it sounded like "Curry-Mee". Jesus. I have to get out of this pandemic life. I need tofu-skin-stuffed-fish-cake, for serious.

Chinese (or Chinese-style) food is one of the cuisines I never do at home. And, in fact, it's the food that I've been CRAVING from a restaurant since the pandemic has ended my life of going to restaurants. Maybe it's time. I certainly get irritable when it's eggplant season here and they're so cheap I can't help but to buy them, and then five weeks later I would give my kingdom for something that wasn't eggplant. So, eggplant and ground pork, on deck for late summer . . . . At a minimum, I can dive into this stuffed vegetable world. Particularly where I can stuff and then freeze. Thank you.

What are you doing with it? **Besides making sausage, I mean. My cookbooks and collected recipes seem to involve, exclusively: sausage and stuffing for other vegetables (cabbage, peppers. . .). I have a large array of meatballs I like, maybe I'll sub out the pork for beef. I'm nervous about that -- I once had a Nigel Slater pork ball forced on me that was an abomination, I don't know what went wrong there, because I certainly do like the meat. But I was kind of put off of the "pork ball" concept. I'm looking for ideas.

I made a Mexican meatball soup last night, which was nearly ruined due to too many chilis in it. Not ruined forever -- it can be fixed, but it couldn't be fixed in time to actually eat last night. But besides that, having dealt with all of the random bones in my freezer, I am now fully stocked, to wit: chicken stock; beef stock; smoked pork hock stock; smoked pork neckbone stock; and unsmoked pork bone stock. I've never made that last, but a whole lot of bones came with the side of pig I picked up last week. It reduced into a truly ghastly color, but tastes fine. So, I guess it's good that I'm one of these people who eats soup all summer, cause there's gonna be plenty of it up in here.

And I just love this thread title, it's perfect.

No -- it wasn't lighting at all. Turns out the new igniter was bad, see image below with strange white spots at the top. It did something weird when it was first installed -- sparked like it was burning off something -- which the tech noted, but then it smoothed out, and worked fine for about 2 weeks. Until yesterday, with a 10-egg frittata ready for some hear, no dice. Bluestar is sending me another new igniter. Squabble over the labor -- I see the problem as about the warranty of the latest igniter, and not any error on the part of the tech. So tech needs to be paid by them for the replacement work. I'm confident we'll work it out. But in the meantime, it's back to Stovetop Cooking.

Newsflash! Oven won't light! Sigh.

How did Chum handle it???

I have such a high-grease life, the idea of open shelving makes me nearly faint.

Seconding the request for photos.

Update: Bluestar had no idea what was going on. But they did offer 25% off the parts, so I appreciate the nudge from you folks. I pulled the records, that burner had been last replaced in 2015. I'll check with the tech if there isn't some humidity problem in my homemade kitchen plumbing . . . .

I did not know I needed this until recently, when I caught myself kneading on my tippy-toes. And mad about it.