Pop quiz

Can you guess what this is?

http://pics.librarything.com/picsizes/58/4c/584c389fb8f7516636d6a506751434b41716...

easy.
Shall I hold off?

Why did you put it on the couch?

The couch was the most neutral background we could find. A family member took this quick photo with his iPhone, because I left my camera at the Northern California house.

2wonderY, since you know, tell us! (It's only easy if you recognize it right away ... the thrift shop owner that I bought it from had No Idea what it was.)

It's a bread slicing board, yes?

And a nice one!

It is a bread slicer, correct! In truth, this particular slicer is made of soft-looking wood. We'll see how much staying power it has. I bought it used at a thrift shop for $6.00.

For those who might consider buying a new bread slicer, steer clear of those $49.00 wonders on Amazon, especially the one with a plastic base (yecch).

It looks like it's maple.
If it were mine, I would insert another piece of material into the tray to raise the loaf up a bit, so that you knife doesn't need to hit the bottom of the slots.
Great find!

August 30, 2019: Here is a really tricky sustainability quiz from CNN, in conjunction with Project Drawdown. My own score was quite low, but I did learn a lot from the quiz.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/specials/climate-change-solutions-quiz/

I thought it's for storing records, LOL

I didn't even know that such a thing existed. I slice bread one slice at a time, and the non-uniformity of the slices is one of the attractions. We also rarely use artificially square loaves - most of the bread we eat is odd-shaped and it doesn't look as if it would fit neatly into that contraption.

Johnthefireman and everyone, I only found out a few years ago about bread slicers. The loaves of whole grain (3/4 levain) bread I buy at the Acme Bakery in Berkeley, California, are large round shapes that would never fit into any wooden bread slicer I have ever seen. Home bakers have the option of baking raised bread dough in a free-form natural-looking rounded shape or in a rectangular bread baking pan, which usually has sides that are about 4" or 5" high. When I bake desem bread dough, which uses a natural fermentation process without any added yeast, I use the high-sided rectangular bread baking pans, which hopefully encourages the loaf to rise to its maximum possible height. In that situation, I could use the bread slicer pictured above, but my family and I like cutting one slice at a time; each person can then create the thickness of slice that they most enjoy. The other advantage of the one-slice-at-a-time method is better retained moisture in the remaining portion of the loaf.

At our Northern California forest home, we have made some preparations for a group evacuation scenario where we have our extended family, and/or some of our neighbors, sheltering at our home during regional wildfire situations, for example. Part of that scenario involves baking larger batches of bread, and the bread slicer could then be used with the tall loaf-shaped breads to yield a maximum number of slices.

At some of the Northern California supermarkets that sell bakery bread, when you buy bread at their bakery counter, they ask if you want the bread sliced. At those bakery counters, they use huge metal industrial-looking bread slicers that could slice any possible shape of bread. I assume that their new employees get a formal on-the-job training on safe operation of those high-powered machines.

The other reason I bought the above bread slicer is that I like to test out kitchen tools that I have not used in the past, so that I can understand the general arguments for or against any such tools.

>10 MaureenRoy:. I’ll bet you’d enjoy the book I’m listening to now - Consider the Fork. It’s a full discussion of kitchen technologies.

>7 MaureenRoy: The "teaching moment" information after each round may be sound, but the questions are so open-ended as to be rubbish.

Rank "Harness wind energy on land", "Build solar farms", "Invest in nuclear power" and "Capture the power of the waves"???

And then click through to the Project Drawdown site to discover that CNN appear to be comparing investing $1.23t in wind, $80b in solar, $0.88b in nuclear, and who knows how much in waves. Comparing apples and pears doesn't come close. No wonder your score was low.

Cynfelyn and everyone, thank you for your critical thinking on the above CNN Q/A quiz on the climate crisis. I was mortified at my first score, so I decided to leave it at that point and retest myself on a hopefully "smarter" day later on. There is a lot of gaming of online offerings on the climate crisis, so I *should* have been more suspicious right away with that CNN "quiz."

Even the NYTimes, as of September 2019, sometimes refers to the "climate crisis," and sometimes still uses the phrase "climate change."

Today, Wednesday, September 4, 2019, CNN (not the CNN Headline News channel, but the original CNN channel) on cable TV will host a CNN Town Hall on the climate crisis for U.S. 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates to undergo Q/A on that subject. The televised show begins at 5:00pm PDT, so that's 8pm for viewers on the US East Coast. Some of tonight's CNN Town Hall may be viewable for free online on the CNN website afterwards.

2wonderY and everyone, I just finished reading the LT book reviews of Consider The Fork. Thanks for suggesting it. I will buy a copy, but I suspect that the author neglects the subject of naturally fermented foods (as in not cooked) except for yogurt. Time will tell.

>14 MaureenRoy: Kitchen technologies meaning equipment, more than techniques. For a better review of fermentation, have you read Michael Pollan's Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation?

PS: I see you have Doughnut Economics in your library. Have you read it yet? I've borrowed it, but haven't dipped in yet.

Books ordered, will read them in between packing to move our household.

TV Schedule Change: The CNN Climate Crisis Town Hall just started, at 2pm PDT, 5pm Eastern Daylight Time. First debater (now) is Julian Castro.

The book Consider the fork is a historical review of world cooking and kitchens, from a personal point of view. The author, Bee Wilson, is evidently a British woman who has lived some years in the USA before returning to the UK. She makes a good point about the ecological waste of disposable chopsticks; my family and I always save wooden single-use chopsticks for starting fires in our wood-burning stove, which is equipped with a catalytic converter.

This subject matter is too vast and deep to be fully explored in a 320-page book. I was surprised at how little attention, for example, was given by Wilson to the subject of modern baking. On the other hand, it is sobering to read that fewer than 1/3 of US residents cook their meals from scratch. That explains the surprising amount of barely used kitchen and serving equipment I often see in larger thrift shops.

Wilson questions the recent kitchen design trend of placing an island counter in the middle of the kitchen, where it isolates the person cooking at the stove. I have used some kitchens that have islands, and some that have a kitchen table. I agree with Wilson that a kitchen table is more versatile and less confining than a kitchen island.

Wilson quotes some authorities who recently recommended that cooktop burners be as wide as the cooking pot used there. Since we plan to buy an induction cooktop, I will have to check on what burner widths are available for induction stoves and cooktops.

It is also interesting to see that before the 20th century, US access to green vegetables was rare for families unless they grew their own produce. In our Zeitgeist thread, I listed some references to the pre-20th century US term of "market gardening;" the use of that term suggests that there was also some growing of produce for sale in regional cities, especially after the railroad system expanded.

The book's main limitation is its almost complete lack of information on the human health implications of cooking and food preservation methods. It gives a brief summary of deaths globally associated with the lifelong use of cooking fires, but does not mention air particle pollution, which has always been the cause of many illnesses and deaths worldwide for the people exposed to those cooking fires. In her 5 page section on frozen foods, Wilson does not discuss the almost total destruction of Vitamin E that occurs when food is stored in a freezer. In the several pages she devotes to the recent development of sous vide high-tech cooking methods, Wilson describes the plastic food bags that such foods are cooked in, as if that's a good thing. Worst of all, there is only passing mention of ventilating the cooking area by opening a window. In many US areas, home stoves and cooktops are required to have ventilation hoods over the heat-producing surfaces. Tragically, many US kitchen supply stores have begun selling wall-mounted microwave ovens for use over the stove, with built in air filters, yet those filters have no exit fans for removing cooking air from the kitchen. According to air pollution research in recent years, one of the greatest sources of air particle production in the kitchen is the toaster. Stove burners and ovens are the second greatest source of unhealthy air particles in kitchens, but be aware that the cooking process itself (I'm looking at you, microwave ovens) also creates some air particles. To quote one US air pollution researcher in 2018, unhealthy air particles "are created by any form of combustion."

For carrots, Wilson recommends avoiding cooking them for 45-60 minutes, but in my experience, it depends on the type of carrots and the type of meal. Smaller, more tender carrots that are thinly sliced can be cooked in a few minutes, but I often prepare homemade vegetable broth using full-grown carrots that are sliced into fairly thick half-moons and contribute their best flavor after at least 45 minutes of cooking, so your results may vary from her vegetable cooking recommendations.

Wilson makes hardly any mention of green kitchens, and dwells at length on cooking methods for red meat, poultry, swans, and even veal, which most writers nowadays avoid discussing. She recommends Pyrex glass, but her book was published in 2012 before most US readers became aware that the US company making Pyrex was sold to a corporation which cheapened the glass-making process for Pyrex, with the result that more US residents are making visits to hospital emergency rooms for injuries caused by exploding Pyrex containers subjected to heat in the kitchen. Consumer Reports has placed some video evidence online of the explosion risk of recently manufactured Pyrex glass baking dishes.

I'm with you and Wilson on table versus island. So much more versatile. Daughter and SIL are renovating their kitchen just now and inserted their new induction stove into the center of the island. She loves it and it's new location.

I didn't know that about Pyrex! How horrible.

Old-style Pyrex baking dishes can still be bought at some thrift shops ... keep an eye out for the occasional bargain of that kind.

Here is a link to the US Consumer Reports video that warns about newer Pyrex and Anchor Hocking glass bakeware that is very prone to exploding when a hot piece of that bakeware is placed on a cold or wet surface:

https://www.consumerreports.org/video/view/home-garden/safety/694686244001/glass...

The first 3 chapters of Doughnut Economics are what I was hoping they would be -- far-seeing, lucid, and visually memorable. Among others of the author's professional roles, Kate Raworth teaches on the Economics for Transition programme at Schumacher College, that's as in E.F. Schumacher, author of the landmark 20th century economics book, Small is beautiful.

Here is a story about sliced bread that goes with the pop quiz photo at the top of this page. I had no idea that sliced bread was outlawed in the USA during World War II. Link:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-time-the-u-s-government-banned-sliced-bre...

So, can someone develop a LibraryThing game? As in, build a (whatever) library:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-invasion-of-the-german-board-games?