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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Sunday, September 22, 2002

Whew! Just cranked out an 8 pound batch of jalapeno cheddar sausage. I mixed in about a tablespoon of freshly ground cumin with this one. It's in the smoker now (checking remote...at 102F, on its way up to 132F) drying out so it takes the cherry smoke better - which will probably happen when I return from my afternoon beer at the Armadillo in Carrboro. Anyone who shows up at 4pm and tells me what the temperature in the smoker was, I'll buy you a beer. It's not my habit to go there on weekends, but I copied some vinyl albums for R&L and will be returning those: Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits, Neil Young's After The Gold Rush, and Firefall. Just raw files now, Cool Edit 2000 (with Audio Cleanup module) will make 'em passable. The covers were scanned and will make nice labels for the eventual CDs. The peach-banana jelly was an experiment in more ways than one. The juice yield was about a gallon and the Ball Blue Book recipe for plum jelly (closest thing to peach in there) called for only 5 1/2 cups. So I reduced it, slowly to preserve as much flavor as possible, just a simmer for most of yesterday afternoon. A mark on a gallon glass jar served as a measuring device, after calibration using water from a pyrex measuring cup. The juice was cool enough to add the pectin by 6pm. Then the standard jelly drill and by 8pm 10 jars had sealed. Three of them didn't seal the first attempt, so they went back into the canner to boil another 5 minutes. Then they sealed, without my having to resort to a change in policy statement. That's good, because basic canning principles have been pretty successful since their advent during the Napoleonic Wars. If it ain't broke... There was enough jelly left over to put into a bowl, where it looks better than in a sterile jar. The banana flavor is subtle, but it's there. This is good jelly. See ya' at the Armadillo! 1:56:49 PM    comment []

You wanna know who really knows their PLU codes? The guys in produce, like the one this morning who explained to me the differences between peaches from Georgia/South Carolina and California (also Chile), are pretty good. Normal checkout people know the common ones pretty good to, but the very best are the ones in the self checkout lanes. There you have 4 scanners that stop cold for say, savoy cabbage or beets (ugh), when the PLU code is missing. At first, I suppose, they have to use that spin index a lot but when the cashiered checkouts are queued 5 deep and the overflow gets a line in their area, they soon get them known by heart. Today, one girl looked at something I had, punched 4 numbers into an ethereal numeric keypad she visualized in the air before her and said "6691". PLU codes can be 4 or 5 digits now, you can even apply for one. They are maintained by the Produce Marketing Association and you can even download revisions at their website. However, if you want your own book of all the PLUs, you'll have to buy it unless you're a PMA member. 3:57:37 AM    comment []