Also, you can’t turn that into a catchy, appealing marketing phrase. That’s unfortunate, because catchy and appealing seems to be winning the day for the pods.
A “friend*” asks: “Is there a “nespresso” style coffee maker where I don’t have to use proprietary pods that make tons of garbage?
The answer is no. There are refillable pods, but they are a pain. They are also sold by Wayfair, the same company that benefits from the ICE raids in the US.
Search results for coffee pod garbage show that the industry is hiding the impact from us
Or, for less than the effort of the refillable pods, one can use an espresso machine.
For the record. There is no way to use a coffee pod machine that isn’t problematic if you want it to be convenient as well. They are either inconvenient (to fill), or they are an environmental problem.
I was told that pointing these things out constitutes harassment. This is a person who, when I took him to a food trade show refused to have such a coffee and shamed me for taking one.
To be very clear, I didn’t go out of my way to find someone who uses these and shame them. The question was asked if there was a responsible way to do this and I answered.
If you want both convenience and not to be totally self-absorbed about your impact on the environment get an all-in-one machine like this, which automatically measures and grinds your coffee (in the long run much cheaper and more convenient than the pointless pods.
Even if they were producing properly compostable pods, the industrial effort in making them is a shameful waste of resources in itself.
What one needs to do, is not shave 10 seconds off of coffee making time, but to shift ones mind so that this tiny effort isn’t magnified beyond reason.
Ultimately, if you want to do something and not feel bad about it, you have two options. Make defensible choices, or abandon your sense of responsibility.
“…so many fail to see the consumptive waste of having to have the single purpose machine in their house that can’t do anything but make a single pod of coffee, My kettle does everything in my house.”
~*~*~*~
*It feels odd to have to put quotes around that word, but obviously this person is not dedicated to a standard of friendship which has any real meaning.
When I posted this image to Facebook, my friend Kent said: “Cherry Stoner. That’d totally be my groupie name”
This style of cherry-pitter is the one-and-only proper use of slap-chop technology. There are many versions, this is the one that my partner already owned when I moved in. With this, I can pit 5lbs of cherries in less than 30 minutes.
It is more than worth the price (Between $24 – $40 unless you find it in a thrift shop),
By the way, if you aren’t a teetotaler DO NOT TOSS THE PITS. Fill a jar halfway with pits, pour a bit of sugar over them, and then fill to the brim with brandy, rum, or vodka (a quality version please, garbage in, garbage out). If you like, include a few whole cherries.
This will very quickly give you an almost irresistible result with a rich cherry flavour . If you can wait a few months however, it will gain a richness that is worth the wait. At this point, it tastes a lot like Cherry Herring
PS. This is not paid placement, I am not making any money on this post. It is a public service announcement to the cherry-pitting people inspired by this morning’s Facebook chat, below.
Raccoons are returning to the city after a long winter hibernation, bringing with them eager hands looking opportunities to render assistance in meal preparations.
As is well known, raccoons are able washers of food and with only a bit of coaxing can be trained to wash your dinner for you in exchange for a share of the bounty.
Occasionally, exceptionally adept animals can also be trained to wash the luncheon linens, but that is a task for experts.
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it is this:
Using the photographs at this link as your starting point, create palatable recipes, then style the presentation to replicate the original image. We’ll post more inspiring images as we find those worthy of the honour and effort.
Photograph the results, then share. You will win the admiration of your peers, and the envy of your culinary frenemies.
Use the hashtag #RetroRedemption and please tag @eatinscanada in your post.
By Arlene Bishop to her partner, Yawd Sylvester, formerly the chef at Toronto’s Lula Lounge.
Like you I’ve read articles on the inequality of household jobs but the job of making dinner has to be the most unbalanced gig in a household. The job of ‘making dinner’ is misleading because it actually contains a series of tasks: organizing, planning, shopping, stocking, prepping, cooking, preserving, storing, cleaning, and the earning required before any of it, and each one taking mental and physical energy, creativity, and time.
Granted, in this house our meals are made by a nurturing, thoughtful, creative multi-talented actual chef, but the tasks are the same from household to household, especially if anyone has special dietary needs.
In our house, Yawd makes at least two meals (gluten-free veggie for me and healthy teenager-friendly for the giant teen) and he does it on a very modest budget. Our fridge is always ready to fuel. For example, right now there are fixins’ prepped so that it would take me no more than 90 seconds to make myself a beautiful salad for lunch.
That 90 seconds is actually the point I’m trying to get to: because Yawd has taken on the role of running the kitchen, I have more time in my day to tend to other things like my creative career. And it’s not just a little time – a substantial span of continuous time where I’m free to start and complete tasks. It’s huge.
Anyone who works at home doing creative work knows how important it is to be able to think and work something through. It means I can plan, batch, compile, edit, render, upload, tag, promote, research, write, edit, layout, download, upgrade, administrate….so many music business tasks that are made manageable only by being able to sit with them from start to finish.
This is new for me. When I became a mother my creative work got carved into 20-minute batches, sometimes longer but seldom more than two distracted, exhausted hours.
Now there are days when I can do what I need to do and a healthy dinner magically appears. What’s my point?
My point it is that whoever has a person in their life that manages meals from day-to-day has an advantage to further their career and earning stream.
They have more creative time. More leisure time. More time in their day. More control over meeting their deadlines. Yes, I also do the shopping, cleaning, and organization, and I have jobs in the house that are also time and energy consuming, but I’ve noticed that the heavy lifting of making the meals is a job that is under-valued and misrepresented. It’s a big time sucker. I’m grateful. I’m lucky. I don’t want to take that for granted.
@PTBO_SatMarket an ersatz (the polite term for fake) “farmer’s market” in Peterborough, On, recently featured in a @cbcmarketplace expose for falsely marketing commercial produce as locally farm grown. Rather than fix this, they’re threatening seven local farmers & artisanal producers with expulsion from the market, as of January 8, 2018.
One would think that the market would be aghast at the duplicity of the reselling vendors, but in fact, this practice is not only supported, but considered desirable. The goal is to present the market as fully stocked with farm produce even when most local farms would have little or no product left.
The market owners are using a tautological argument to obscure the general understanding of what a traditional farmer’s market represents. “All vegetables are grown in farms” “All produce is farmed”. Effectively, that argument leads to the assertion that any supermarket is also a farmer’s market.
This is an appalling practice. Farmer’s markets are a vital link to more than merely food. Seeing the ebb and flow of produce, becoming accustomed to natural availability, puts us closer to an understanding of how the world creates our sustenance.
Obviously, the consumers are also being taken advantage of.
Worse still, the fake farmers sell their produce for the same price as that available from local farmers, with none of the overhead or risk…effectively stealing from the pockets of both vendors and consumers. Literally stealing the reputation and ineffable contribution of farmers and wearing it like a sheepskin on a wolf.
The market’s board of directors are having a special meeting on Jan. 8 to vote on whether to dismiss Circle Organic, Otonabee Apiary, Necessitea Elixir, Chef Marshall, Finest Gourmet Fudge,
Ashburnham Farm Gaelic Garlic, and McLean Berry Farm, all selling items either grown, or made by them, locally.
*Update* This CBC article, published on May 5, 2018, details advances in the Peterborough Resellers Market case:
…With spring taking grip across Canada, farmers markets are returning to public spaces. But five agricultural producers have been kicked out of one of Ontario’s largest markets after speaking out about other vendors masquerading as growers of all the produce they sell.
Meanwhile, there is no indication that vendors who were exposed as misleading consumers faced any sanctions. They told CBC News that they will be returning to the market this season… (more)
As much as I enjoy recipe development, there are wonderful recipes from the web to try and enjoy. Have not made this one from Cooking With May Lynn yet, but it looks both interesting and delicious.
Found on a friend’s Facebook page today and will be tried this week. I’ll post pix when done and review the recipe.
Picked up a big bag of bananas for almost nothing back in June, so I decided to make this. It was pretty satisfying and is quite decadent tasting, despite the fact that the only non-nutritious ingredient is the sugar, of which there is not a lot per serving.
By the way, if you are tempted to reduce the amount of sugar, you’ll discover the ice-cream to be very difficult to serve. One of the things sugar does is restrict the freezing of the custard to a workable softness.
$5 case of sightly overripe bananas.
Made it a few more times after that, and then yesterday we picked up a full box of perfectly good, slightly frost-damaged bananas at The Old Farm Market on the Trans-Canada Highway, just inside of Duncan, BC., for only $5.
Mega dehydrator
We’ll be drying the bulk of them in our new (to us) jumbo food dryer (formerly a warming cabinet for the Hudson’s Bay catering department), but I think a few other things are in order, this being one of them.
Making a double-batch so that we can take some later for NYE, and also have some at home tomorrow. I was reminded in looking up the recipe, that I’d shared it on the Facebook page, but had not added it here as yet.
I first thought about making vinegar back in the early 80s when reading Craig Claibornes column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. It was an article about how he began using up old dribs and drabs of wine to make vinegar.
He’d kept one culture of vinegar mother going for years, which he swore made a superior vinegar. Unfortunately, one sad day a house sitter, while doing some well meaning tidying up, had tamped the ground-glass lid down on the vinegar vessel so tightly that “he smothered Mother”.
Then, last year in Cowichan I heard the story of a neighbour who had made delicious apple cider vinegar, and spoke with another who infused vinegar with blackberries, and boiling it into a thin syrup, created a superior vinaigrette.
In late summer our front yard apple tree began dropping more fruit than we could keep up on trimming for freezing and drying, and the piles of cores and peels started to look like something I could work with. Even though the bulk of the fruit was cut away, there was still a good amount of juice and flavour in what was left, which was expressed when water and a bit of sugar were added.
Topped with a bit of wine yeast, this fermented into a fairly nice tasting cider. Since cider wasn’t what I was after, this was followed by a few spoonfuls of cloudy vinegar mother from a purchased bottle of organic cider vinegar.
Apple cider vinegar, mid ferment
Fascinated by this process, I also began a batch of plum wine/vinegar but didn’t pay enough attention to this ferment. The yeast was old, and the ferment went sideways, making a sizeable addition to the compost. This was followed by more successful batches of blackberry and pear, and in the end, I made 2 – 3 gallons of apple cider vinegar, 1/2 gallon of blackberry (blue ribbon at the Cowichan Exhibition), and one gallon of pear.
The results were outstanding. Each has a unique character and I’ve enjoyed them so much that the year was nearly done before I realized that I haven’t even considered using anything else for months. Naturally, I’m making more this year and in larger quantities.
Most instructions for vinegar suggest that you are done in 5 weeks. It is true that there is at this point a definite vinegar formation, but it’s really not finished. You will be better off making double your needs in the first year, so that you can wait a full year before using it in the future, as there seems to be a significant maturation of the vinegar flavour between 6 and 12 months, at least in my observation.
You will want to aerate the vinegar as it develops, in order to prevent it from developing an acetone finish and other unpleasant aromas. Ideally have an empty vessel into which you can pour the vinegar, and then transfer it back to the original.
Tomatoes with yeast, Sept 17
After aging last year’s batch for about 4 months, I decanted most of the clear elements of the vinegars from the original aging vessels into smaller jars, setting the filtered sediment aside in a new vessel to sit.
Over time, this sediment settled at the bottom, eventually developing into the mother, floating at the top until disturbed, whereupon it would drift to rest at the bottom; and a beautiful amber and powerfully pungent vinegar, floating above the remaining settled sediment and mother.
As this occurred, I decanted the pure vinegar, and set the remainder aside to see what would happen with the remaining sediment, then set the mother aside, collecting it into a separate jar with enough vinegar to keep it active, until time to use it in the next batch, where it now is, fermenting.
Currently fermenting into cider in 4 gallon containers are 16 gallons of apples (which will be about 8-10 gallons of cider), and one with about 2 gallons of tomatoes, and on the second stage fermentation to vinegar, are eight gallons of apple cider, three of plum, three of rice vinegar, two of blackberry and a gallon jar of mixed plum/Oregon grape (a berry which is not a grape, but grows in clusters, and tastes similar to currant, but with hideously bitter seeds).
Tomato vinegar. Oct 21
Looking for a good supply of large food grade buckets? Stop by your local supermarket and ask at the deli/bread counter if they have any buckets with lids, and you’ll likely find them happy to help. This will also help keep some of our plastics from being discarded too soon.
The “recipe” for making vinegar is simple:
Fruit juice, sugar (optional depending on the sweetness of the fruit), yeast, time.
That’s essentially it.
Strictly speaking, the yeast and the vinegar culture can be obtained from the air, but that’s a trickier process, and at least with yeast, the flavours obtained from them can vary greatly from yeast to yeast. I use a good commercial wine yeast to begin.
Even though the recipe is simple, I’m providing it below with the “steps” showing how a rice vinegar I made this past summer aged over time.
Vinegar on shelf
It’s a bit different with rice vinegar, since you use a grain rather than fruit. Also in the making of rice vinegar, there are two methods for the first stage. In the simple method, the rice liquid is sweetened with the addition of sugar. The more complex method uses amylase, an enzyme, which converts the starches in the grain to sugar before the fermentation is begun.
I’ll do another batch in the next few months and will add that to this then, along with a comparison of results.
Here is a lovely video: Brewing Korea’s Hanega Vinegar for 35 Generationsfrom great Big Story & Korean Air
It’s a very short, pretty story, about traditional rice vinegar making in Korea, where they leave the rice in throughout the fermentation…another thing I mean to try in the next batch.
