Plenty of Nothing

Cranberries And Olive Oil But No Wine

Pattypan Squash in the Pan

Cross Promotion

Nice piece of cross-promotion here.  The LCBO has loaded up on gift boxes for the holiday season, and one of them is this all-Edinburgh tandem of Deuchars IPA and Rankin's detective John Rebus.  The beer's all right, though more oaty than I'd expect from an India pale ale.  The novel is ... meh.  Maybe Rebus gets sharper in the sequels, but God he's a shitty detective in this one.  His only advantage as a cop is that he's sleeping with a coworker who knows what's going on.  The rest of the time he's drinking.    Here's the crucial moment for me, on page 194, just as Rebus has figured out the identity of the psychopath who is about to murder his daughter: "Rebus, shivering, entered a pub for the hell of it and ordered a triple whiskey."  Dude!  Catch the guy!  Douglas

Candy!

There's a new candy store in Westboro, and they specialize in imports, the stuff you can't get at Winks.  Anyone who has read Candy Freak knows that many candy bars have resisted the forces of globalisation to remain local and are common in their home country (if European) or state (if US) but relatively unknown elsewhere.  Here are five, including Heather's finger which indicates where the Cadbury Flake we ate as soon as we left the store would be.  Some notes:

Cadbury Flake.  Why these are not available everywhere I'll never know.  You get a multi-layered stick of crumbly thin milk chocolate, simple but excellent when stuck into an ice cream cone, as they do in Britain.

Boston Baked Beans.  From Illinois.  Peanuts in hard candy.  Five food dyes listed as ingredients.  Douglas would eat them again but Heather would pass.

Clark.  From New England.  High scores.

Charleston Chew.  Chewy vanilla marshmallow in chocolate.  Long.

Heath.  Heather's favorite.  Brittle toffee.

Heritage Carrots

Rad

What I Learned Today: Nearly Post-Flu Edition

After one miserable week and one draggy week, I'm approaching post-flu.  The two key signs of this are that my brain now thinks in sentences of more than five words and that my sense of smell is starting to come back.  I've never lost my sense of smell before and it's been more disconcerting than I would have predicted (see--long sentences).  And without smell it's almost impossible to cook well.

So today I learned two things.  The secret ingredients for any tasty meal are garlic and bacon fat.  This revelation brought to you by my laziness.  Yes, I know it's a shock, but I've been too lazy to clean out a  frying pan after cooking up our December treat of bacon.

The first bacon and garlic miracle was performed with kale--sauteed with garlic and a bit of bacon drippings. Amazing.

The second bacon and garlic miracle was performed this morning when I used the same (still unsoaped pan) to brown some stewing meat  which I plopped drippings and all into the crock pot with a lot of garlic, pureed tomatoes, and root veg.  Eight hours later very good stew was had.

The grannies with their cans of dripping were on to a good thing.

Heather

Another Reason to Avoid Meat

I'm an inconsistent vegetarian. Weeks go buy without any meat-eating. And then I get tired and there's meat cooking. But things like this make my non-meating self look more sensible than my meat-eating self.

What amazes me most is that the problem was reported only after the third empty syringe was found in the packing plant. Seems lax to me and doesn't encourage confidence in the industrial food chain.

Heather