Catie George

As a vague comment on calcite and it's transparency...

Are you using actual chalk (which is calcite formed in round balls, the shells of old creatures), or ground up calcium carbonate crystals? I would expect the latter to be more transparent.

Pure calcite, as a large crystal with few impurities, is very transparent. "Spar" calcite (very pure, very clear large crystals) is quite interesting, as it's known for double refractions - you see two images side by side if you look through it. I wonder if that would impact the apparent "glow"?

When you grind a mineral, it breaks along the existing impurities and weaker bonded sections that cause theoretically "clear" crystals like quartz and calcite to lose transparency. If you smear beach sand on a microscope plate, you'll see that the individual crystals of quartz are quite transparent even if the rocks it was made from are not.

Have you ever grabbed a piece of cloudy looking quartz from a beach, and then put it under water, and suddenly it's transparent? Or oiled a piece of pebble you REALLY like for similar reasons? When the water/oil smooths out the rough surface?

Basically - looking at the optical properties of pure calcite, i am not surpised that fine, pureground calcite would behave with a lot of transparency when added to oil. (And i wonder about silica dust, though likely less safe to work with).

Edit - After musing some more with respect to the transparency of calcium carbonate, i'd anticipate the SOURCE of calcium carbonate to make a big difference for transparency, possibly more than it's exact particle size/distribution, even with the same chemical formula, with a rough opacity scale of chalk (the kind from microscopic creatures) -> llimestone dust-> marble dust (ordered with increasing transparency). Marble is limestone after heat and pressure mushes it together and allows the crystals to rearrange themselves to be bigger and less flawed.

Getting way into the weeds - i wonder if particle size distribution also matters? For example, if the calcite crystals and the pigment crystals are both of consistent particle size, but have a gap between them (so the calcite is consistently smaller or bigger than the pigment) , i'd expect them to behave differently (smearing seperate, or settling from each other) in paint than if they were consistent.  I'd also expect if you have a wider range of particle sizes of calcite, smoothly graded between them, your paint will likely be better at holding it's shape.

My cheat to good mac and cheese with cheap cheese is adding nutritional yeast!

I make a roux, add milk, add cheap cheddar cheese, and flavour to taste with some of : pepper, salt, nutritional yeast, worchestershire sauce, mustard, lemon juice. I sometimes add tumeric and/or paprika for colour.  Sometimes cheap parmesan. Tapioca starch in the roux makes for a gooeyer more stretchy cheese sauce.

If i have better cheese, i probably am not cooking with it, though admit it makes a tasty mac and cheese without all the additives.

I think your son would enjoy my mom's "alfredo' recipe. Cook pasta. Mix with sour cream, pepper, salt, parsley. It was years before i tried alfredo elsewhere and realized what i was missing! Always thought alfredo was awful.

Edit, a week or so later-  Mom coincidentally made her alfredo for me. I forgot the Kraft parmesan! And apparently she adds a bit of butter.  I did figure out why i don't like it, despite it containing many of my favourite things (sour cream, parmesan, butter, salt, pepper, pasta)- apparently i dislike the taste of dry parsley. An easy fix for next time.

I am going on a camping trip i am remarkably unenthusiastic about, so have decided to reframe it as a "plein air painting and sketching trip".

Here's my little kit. I'd love to replace the ziploc at some point,  but it does need to be waterproof....

A few loose cut up sheets of inexpensive cellulose watecolour paper, a little sketch book i have been working on with pencil, an old pencil, an eraser, a water brush pen, and 5 pigments in an old tin. I tried to choose my least toxic and most versatile pigments. French ultramarine (pb23),  prussian blue, (pb27),carmine(pr 170:1), English red (PR101),  and a nickel azo yellow (py151). Ideally i'd have a non nickel yellow, but the pigments i have dont play as well as others.  The nice thing about a brush pen is you create WAY less waste water.

I am wishing i'd splurged on the surprisingly affordable mini watercolour sketchbook i saw when I was in an art store and told myself i didnt need!

Pretty! I was given seeds for hairy and foxglove bearstongue this year and winter sowed them without ever looking at what i would be growing.

Now really looking forward to it blooming next year.

Anne Miller wrote:


The best way to save food waste is not to buy more than you will eat.

I don't buy gluten free so I have no experience with that.  There are ways to eat gluten free without those labels.

I have eaten 20 year old food from before "Best Buy" dates and have never gotten sick.

I was taught to scope mold off jelly and jam.  I cut mold off cheese.

I have started using my fridge and freezer to make foods last past the expiration date.

I bought some Nature Valley Blue Berry Muffin Bars.  I put them in the freezer when they got to the expiration date.  When I want one I just pop it out of the freezer for a few minutes to thaw.

I found an over looked Little Debbie Nutty Buddy, didn't look at the expiration date though probably long past.  Popped them into the fridge and enjoyed them till they were gone.

I'm glad you've never gotten sick from eating past date foods, food poisoning is not fun. And yes, of course freezing will dramatically slow food spoilage. I like to buy big bags of nuts and freeze them. I also know of people who do their own nitrogen flushing in storage bins to preserve food longer... Sadly that's not been done here..

Probably the major difference between gluten free products and conventional is things that are gluten free, labeled as gluten free or not, tend to be marketed as health foods.

No preservatives, and frequently use whole grain flours that "go off" far faster than a bleached wheat flour, and they're seldom in a convenient nitrogen flushed pouch for long storage without oxidization, and rarely include palm oil  or hydrogenated oils for a longer shelf life. I also think preservatives are generally less common in Canadian food in general - we ban several that are commonly used in the US, which likely decreases shelf life for some things.

I'm okay with accepting that food has a shelf life measured in years, not decades. I certainly wouldn't pour 5 year old gasoline into my car!  I can accept that other organic compounds degrade with time, too.

Anne Miller wrote:I would suggest doing experiments on " best buy" or "best use by" before tossing stuff in the  trash.

Pasta is still good though it might take longer to cook.

When it comes to food I really hate the "food police".

If you have unlimited monies supplies then go ahead and toss,  I don't.

I've kept my own pantry for well over a decade. Those experiments are long past me, I have a very good idea how long I can push expiry dates for.

My experience is that saving food long past it's expiry is throwing good money after bad.

Gluten free pasta comes in paper boxes. It absolutely is not still good 2+ years after the expiry date - it doesn't just take longer to cook, it tastes awful, and inevitably, when I use it, i end up tossing out good food because I was trying to be cheap and use it, so whatever I used to make the sauce for it gets wasted too after a few bites, and now suddenly I've spent half an hour cooking and have no dinner. I've done it by mistake before I started recording dates on my boxes, and fished the package out of the trash to figure out why my dinner is gross!

Rice, dry beans, flour, and packaged snacks are similar - they eventually go randid/stale and anything made with them tastes bad. Stale items with a lot of fat go rancid. And fruit/veg products slowly lose taste or colour though they are definitely the longest lasting.   Oh, the disappointment of opening a jar of jam you've been saving as "too good to eat the last one" to discover it's lost quality and is now just okay.  

I've known several older people who refuse to toss long expired food, who end up getting sick in their later years when they can no longer tell the taste of good food from bad, and end up constantly fighting diarrhea, stomach aches, etc until they finally move to a retirement home and their "bad digestion" mysteriously resolves itself. I hope never to reach that point.

In my experience, the best way to avoid food waste, save money, and keep yourself healthy,  is to keep a deep pantry where food is rotated, avoid stocking more than you can use, and avoid buying things you don't like, just because they are a good price, and make a plan to quickly use or share items that are close or stale dated.

My strategy is to  use a permanent marker to label my pantry items.

C. Letellier - you're much more organized than me! But agree, being able to keep things on shelves so you can push the oldest to the front makes keeping a pantry way easier, and yes, buying things in large quantities if you eat them, when on sale - my price for tuna is $1/can, and i buy 10-20. Regular non sale price is $1.50-$2.50. I keep prices in my head which is good until it isn't... Really like the idea of tracking on the can, though I have a hard enough time making myself write just 2 digits on it!


Pp

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Catie, please, before you toss "outdated" stuff contact your local food bank. They have specific and legally valid protocols for determining if stuff that is past "best before" is still safe for human consumption.

It would be a shame to compost something that a hungry neighbour could safely eat. My 2c.

Sadly, my local food bank is strict about zero past dated food. But, if we decide there's anything we don't want to eat ourselves, we have a few acquaintances who frequent food banks and scoff at the food bank date rules, and would cheerfully eat it.

So far all that's being tossed is pasta and rice dated to 2020 to 2023, and a few condiments of similar dates, and some  old canning that i made and didn't like, from 4+ years ago. I've tried stale pasta before, wouldn't give it to anyone to eat.

Everything else past date is in the "eat me soon" pile and will get dealt with in the next few months. The nice thing about keeping a pantry for a long time is that there's very little we won't eat - mostly just things that got pushed to the back and ignored while younger versions of the same thing were eaten.  Just going to take some focus and creative cooking.

There's not a ton to trash - pasta will be composed, and a couple cans of weird things like mango chutney and creamed coconut that are 4 years past date.

But lots in the "eat me soon" pile.

Musing about this as I sort - i think the change was when I moved out and she started having a lot of trades people working in her basement joking about "where they'll go when there's an apocalypse ".

She switched to keeping stuff in opaque totes instead of on open shelves in her basement. Way harder to keep things rotated so that the oldest items get eaten, and to know what you have to avoid overbuying. Previously we kept more of a "grocery store" style organization system, with shelves.

Probably a good reminder that I keep meaning to bujld shelves and start storing things in what was likely once the pantry instead of on open shelves in my utility room.

So far lessons learned : mark things with their dates, if buying close dated food, have a plan to use it soon, and avoid storing large amounts of food in plastic totes. Also avoid storing food in too many locations (like the pasta, which was stored in her kitchen, in her laundry room, and in the basement).

That's exactly what I do - past dated stuff normally gets sat on my counter until I use it.  Past dated rice, for example, is destined for my homemade dog food.

Right now I am sorting.

"REALLY past dated - garbage"
"past dated  - use soon - keep in kitchen"
"Close dated -  sit on my basement pantry shelves, and
"far dated - store in box"

Honestly, its unlike my mom to have this much out of date. Usually I recall her sorting her whole pantry once a year or so.

My mom has sent some of her pantry to my house. She's a bit of a food hoarder, with an even larger pantry than I have. I have instructions to shop her pantry before buying myself groceries.

I'm reminded of one of my biggest money saving hacks for keeping a large pantry.

A permanent marker!

I'm putting it away, and it is a reminder to me why I try to mark everything that goes into my pantry with its best before year.

Pasta that expired in 2020, and 2022.

Peanut butter that expired in 2025.

Etc. ...

Has she eaten these things, since ? Yes, lots! Thats why she has so many of them! She goes through a ton of peanut butter and pasta.

But things get pushed to the back, ignored,  and missed, and keeping a scrupulous first in first out system is challenging.

Neither of us are very choosy about past dated things, but I am tossing some expensive gluten free pasta and a few other odds and ends. Also annoying are things that we could have donated to a food bank since neither of us will ever eat them, but they're past dated.

I loathe food waste, and it sort of ruins the point of keeping a deep pantry to save money.

As I sort,  i write, in big permanent marker, "26" or "28"  or whatever the last 2 digits of the year are. I typically write on the top of cans, and the side of boxes.  When I rummage in my cupboards, looking for dinner, I tend to pull out things that are close or past dated, and use them begore they reach that stage where i no longer trust them or they don't taste as good as they once did.

Anyways - back to sorting and musing. Trying to figure out what I can make with past dated lemon juice, herring, pasta, coconut milk, and canned cherries.... !