Christopher Weeks

Sometimes it's twice a day and sometimes it's every three days. And sometimes I fill the dishwasher and let it do its thing and other times I handwash. When handwashing, I might only wash four things instead of the whole backlog, so I can't count that as "washing dishes" but enough instances like that must add up. It's complicated! (I chose every other day as my best guess.)

Bob Tretick wrote:

r ransom wrote:We are talking specifically about the requirements for PEP bb submissions.

I was looking at the PEP BB cook soup,... submission from this this morning. The first three pages of this topic have food being prepared on plastic cutting boards in 11 pictures with the first instance being approved by paul wheaton? Does this mean food can be prepared on plastic cutting boards but not used anywhere else?  

No.

paul wheaton wrote:Apparently there are a lot of submissions that have plastic.  We will be going through and un-approving those.  And for the people that errantly approved them there will be a BBV penalty.  

I've kept perpetual stew going for over a month having never been refrigerated and there are commercial joints that do so for years on end. Right now, it's chili that has enough sweet potato in it that some folks might balk at calling it chili. Anyway, we do the same thing keeping soup or stew around all winter, at least.

We also go through a pot of beans every week starting with a pound or pound and a half of dry beans. Sometimes that goes into the soup, sometimes it becomes a fresh chili or frijoles or beans-n-rice. Occasionally it's chikpeas and becomes hummus or curry instead.

We cook good food for all our meals and don't really seem to have a problem keeping that healthy. Our problem and it's true for everyone in my family is between meal snacks. I've been buying a lot of celery so that I have something crunchy to go after. If I cut it up on the weekend and put it in a tub of water in the fridge, it stays good all week.

Oh, onions are a good weird case! I often will find mold between two layers of the onion and I'm comfortable peeling those two out and tossing them but eating the rest.

Foods grow mold colonies. It's one of the primary ways that our foods spoil. When that happens, what do you do about it?

I grew up being taught that when a block of cheese grows mold, you cut it off -- careful to get it all and you eat the rest. But if an orange in the fruit bowl has a patch of green mold, you toss it. If there's a small amount of mold on top of a batch of yogurt, I spoon it into the compost and as long as there's no off flavor, I eat the rest.

When I read Sandor Katz' Wild Fermentation, over twenty years ago, he talked about the tradition of lifting the mat of mold from the top of the kraut barrel and serving the good stuff underneath. But in the online fermentation groups I've been part of, it's pretty common for people to declaim that if there's a speck of mold, it has riddled the kraut (or whatever) with invisible mold roots that will kill you. I don't really know the microbiological truth, but guessing it's somewhere in the middle seems safe.

Among permies, it seems like there would be two impulses in tension: Thrift drives us not to waste. And food purity drives us to seek wellness.

So, where do you land?

Just for context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relish wrote:A relish (a pickle-based condiment) is a cooked and pickled culinary dish made of chopped vegetables, fruits or herbs, typically used as a condiment to enhance a staple. Examples are chutneys and the North American relish, a pickled cucumber jam eaten with hot dogs. In North America, the word "relish" is frequently used to describe a single variety of finely chopped pickled cucumber relish, such as pickle, dill and sweet relishes.

Relish generally consists of discernible vegetable or fruit pieces in a sauce, although the sauce is subordinate in character to the vegetable or fruit pieces. Herbs and seeds may also be used, and some relishes, such as chermoula, are prepared entirely using herbs and spices. Relish can consist of a single type or a combination of vegetables and fruit, which may be coarsely or finely chopped; its texture will vary depending on the slicing style used for these solid ingredients, but generally a relish is not as smooth as a sauce-type condiment such as ketchup. Relish typically has a strong flavor that complements or adds to the primary food item with which it is served.

I sometimes use sweet cucumber relish (usually boughten because I haven't cracked the growing of cukes) in egg- or pasta-salad sometimes.

I like all the south Asian relishes that I've tried, particularly chile-coriander pickle.

The most common relish I use is made by finely dicing kimchi -- it's a staple on dogs and makes appearances lots of other places like scrambled eggs, etc.

When recounting a conversation: "And I'm like blah de blah blah, blah!"

Really? You're *like* that?

Nancy Reading wrote:I'm assuming you have something similar in the US.

I think it varies by venue. When I've lived in/around cities, they had variable rates -- but it was never so different that it changed our behavior. Where I live now, they just have an opt-in system where they have the right to cut you off completely during peak load periods, though they rarely have done so historically.

Where I live, the electric co-op encourages you to get a giant, super-insulated water heater and use that as a battery. You can enroll your main power into the program where they can turn you off during peak demand times or get a second meter for just the water heater and maybe a few other things that are OK to turn off during the day and on at night. The electricity is something like half price.

Hey Esteban, I'm one of the people following along -- thanks for the great documentation! Why do some of your long picture-rich work-summary posts get a BEL # assigned and some don't? They don't really seem different to me.