Lost in a Lost World (Page 32) ghostgeek: I've been hearing reports that Putin is a little sickly; like he's up and dying. Probably false but I suppose it's as good a reason to act mental as any other. ghostgeek: Something to remember: The most important thing to remember is to never sweep or vacuum rodent evidence including feces, urine and nesting material. When these substances are swept or vacuumed they can break up, forcing virus particles into the air where they can easily be inhaled, infecting the person doing the cleaning. Hantavirus and Arenavirus are transmitted in this manner. [ https://www.contracostamosquito.com/rodents_virus_risk.htm ]  Zanjan: Well, you can't sweep up urine. That waste must have been there for years if its breaking in to particles! Don't believe everything you read. The virus is transmitted from deer to mice so if you don't have deer in the area, its not likely your rodents will have the virus. Personally, I use gloves and a paper towel soaked in a bleach cleaner to swipe along droppings into the dustpan, then to the garbage pail. I finish with an anti-bacterial spray. We have to live with nature, out here in the sticks where deer are plentiful; I can tell you there's nothing to fear as long as you never touch the mouse or droppings with your bare hands. Also, if you're crawling around sniffing the floor or carpets I think you have more than a virus to worry about. ghostgeek: You can take it from me that I don't go around sniffing carpets. Also, there are no deer near where I live, thought I do get foxes making a commotion at night. I haven't proved it but I think one of my neighbours leaves out food for them. ghostgeek: Name a fast-food restaurant and the odds are the company has recently developed a branch without any restaurant at all. Chipotle’s first “Digital Kitchen,” which opened in upstate New York in 2020, has no dining room. A branch that opened last year in the Cleveland suburbs doesn’t even let customers inside the store. This summer, Taco Bell opened something it calls Taco Bell Defy, which is not a restaurant at all but a purple taco tollbooth powered by QR code readers and dumbwaiters that bring the food down from a second-story kitchen. The operation is, by most accounts, astoundingly efficient. Wingstop’s “restaurant of the future” doesn’t have seats or take cash. What’s driving this trend? Partly savings on real estate and labor. But mostly it’s a response to consumer preference. Pushed by pandemic restrictions and pulled by the increasing ease of mobile transactions, customers have rushed into drive-thrus, delivery, and mobile ordering. Even with coronavirus fears in most Americans’ rear-view mirror, Chipotle’s in-restaurant sales now account for just a third of its business. At Panera, which opened its first to-go-only locations this summer, that figure is under 20 percent. “It’s a way to cater to changing customer-order behaviors,” explains Emma Beckett, an editor at Restaurant Dive, an industry publication. While smaller store footprints and radical new designs are mostly reserved for new locations, she says, the arms race is on to remodel older stores with drive-thru lanes. “Everyone wants double or triple drive-thrus, so those parcels are becoming competitive, because there are only so many corner lots that can accommodate that.” [ https://slate.com/business/2022/09/fast-food-drive-thru-mobile-ordering-mcdonalds-taco-bell-starbucks-dunkin.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ] ghostgeek: Wherever Americans are eating, it isn’t inside fast-food joints. To meet this shift, some chains, like Wendy’s and Qdoba, have embraced “ghost kitchens,” unmapped, closed-door facilities where food for delivery might be prepared for a dozen different brands at once. Increasingly, the logic behind ghost kitchens is finding its way into public-facing retail design too. Last year, I wrote about how the rise in digital ordering was messing up the fast-casual experience, as restaurant workers struggled under a workload that depended little on the number of customers in the store. The good news is they are working on solving the problem. The bad news is: I am the problem. Like the parallel remote-work phenomenon, the rise of what McDonald’s calls the Three D’s—digital, drive-thru, and delivery—may reflect an ongoing social atomization as the shared spaces that emptied out during the pandemic are slow to fill back up, to the point that walk-up, dine-in customers like me are no longer the focus, and might even be a nuisance. Often lauded as a vital “third space” for seniors, teenagers, and families in communities that lack friendly public spaces, McDonald’s unveiled a concept store in 2020 that has no seating at all. [ https://slate.com/business/2022/09/fast-food-drive-thru-mobile-ordering-mcdonalds-taco-bell-starbucks-dunkin.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ] Zanjan: For you there are businesses that do the thinking - they do the grocery shopping for a meal and deliver the ingredients plus recipe to your home. You do the prep and cooking. I don't get it. They're doing the easiest part but you're paying extra. The treat is having somebody else cook for you (especially on a hot day), making dishes you'd never make yourself. In a dine-in restaurant, they do it with finesse and clean up the mess. You go home to a tidy house. If you're going to fork over extra money, make it worth your while! (Edited by Zanjan) ghostgeek: I'm not interested in anything fancy, I've got a supermarket a short walk away and I need to count the pennies, so I'm into home cooking big time. Get plenty of fliers pushed through the letterbox advertising takaways but it's all burgers, pizzas, Chinese and Indian. Not exactly enticing as the predominant colour seems to be variations on brown. Zanjan: "variations on brown"  I don't like cooking anymore - there's no one to share the meal so the dish has to be freezable as leftovers, making it taste.....meh. Sadly, I can't eat a whole cake or pie within 4 days, not that I haven't tried.  The grocery store recognized we have an aging population so decided to sell individual slices of cake and pie - one prayer answered....... they cost $4 each - one call to hell. Some nights, my dinner is just a small plate of crackers and cheese with an apple for colour. Zanjan: Where did the large families go? Hardly ever did anyone have to live alone...singles lived in a room and board situation. I remember when dinner tables were long with lots of chairs. The TV set and radio were turned off, and some of us even had to dress for dinner. Didn't matter whether the dishes were simple or exotic - it was always a feast of consumption and conversation, regardless of age. I miss that. ghostgeek: Large families cost money, so in this age of plenty they had to go the way of the dinosaur. You can't pay off the morgage on a house, the payments on a car and the credit you've taken out for your holiday AND have kids. ghostgeek: As an aside, I never use a plate any more as it's just one more thing to wash up. So it's one pot cooking for me and maybe a bottle of cider. Zanjan: Would that be over a campfire? "You can't pay off the morgage on a house, the payments on a car and the credit you've taken out for your holiday AND have kids. " You forgot setting money aside each month for the kids' future post secondary education. Indeed, you'd need a childless married couple both working steadily full time with high paying salaries plus 15 years to resolve the debt. My son and his wife did it. Then what? By then, it's time to make repairs, upgrades, replace all appliances and buy a new vehicle. Fortunately, they were able to pay cash for all that, still young enough for another run at the hamster wheel. They say our country is rich. The truth is the banks own us - THEY are rich. ghostgeek: It never crossed my mind that people would be putting money aside for their kids' shot at university. When I first toddled off to the gleaming halls of academe the government paid us students a grant. Not a princely sum but I managed to save something out of it. All changed now so it shows how long in the tooth I am. ghostgeek: When I cook something, I cook it and wash the pot afterwards. Seems not everyone follows the same routine: Pot-au-feu is peppered in medieval texts as being popular in the dining rooms of European inns. British food historian Reay Tannahill described this culinary practice in her book Food in History: “Bread, water or ale, and a companaticum (‘that which goes with the bread’) from the cauldron, that provided an ever-changing broth enriched daily with whatever was available. The cauldron was rarely emptied except in preparation for the meatless weeks of Lent, so that while a hare, hen, or pigeon would give it a fine, meaty flavor, the taste of salted pork or cabbage would linger for days, even weeks.” She also describes rumors about long-simmering pots in France, such as one particular batch in Normandy that simmered constantly for over 300 years, while an even older pot, in Perpignan, had been bubbling since the 1400s until it finally met its demise in 1945 during World War II bombing raids. On the other side of the world, a star of perpetual cuisine lives in a cauldron at Wattana Panich, a multi-generational family owned restaurant in Bangkok’s Ekkamai neighborhood. Most customers come for the restaurant’s rich beef noodle soup, made with stewed and raw beef, tripe, meatballs, organs, and spices. But the most important ingredient is the broth, which has been simmering for over 45 years. At the end of business each day, third-generation chef Nattapong Kaweenuntawong, assisted by his wife and mother, carefully strains and stores it to be used as the base for the next day’s batch of soup. Its flavor is said to have an almost ethereal depth and richness. Another famous batch of soup lives at Otafuku, a restaurant located in Tokyo’s historic Asakusa quarter. This broth has been reheated every day since 1945, with cooks adding more water to it as it evaporates. The broth is the base of their oden, a traditional Japanese stew that can contain all sorts of ingredients, from eggs, tofu, and vegetables to shark meat, beef, fish balls, and whale tongue. The broth would be going on 100 today, but the previous batch was lost in 1945 during World War II bombing. [ https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/perpetual-broth?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ] ghostgeek: For those who want to maintain their own perpetual broth, here’s how to play it safe. “There’s a fine line between fermented and spoiled,” says Adaeze Okafor, a food safety expert at the Institute of Food Science and Technology in Cambridge, England. She says a broth should simmer at a temperature of 200°F at all times. Any lower, and bacteria may be able to survive, which is why a stock or broth should be promptly cooled and stored in the fridge when not on the stove. “Freezing it after is safer still,” says Okafor “But it’s not difficult to keep it safe for consumption.” Properly maintained, a broth, stock, or soup can become part of the family, similar to sourdough starters passed down through generations. “I have fond memories of a cassoulet that I enjoyed in Languedoc when I was a girl,” says Perrotte. “That pot of bean stew had been simmering since 1948, my mother said. I marvel at the fact that I could still go there and enjoy a bowl from the same cauldron. What history!” [ https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/perpetual-broth?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ] Zanjan: And you wonder why people always had "summer complaint". I can't imagine there being any nutrition left at all in that brew but am sure it was enjoyed by many a toothless wench and swain. Mind you, the bread used to be very nutritious, dense and heavy; it was called the staff of life. Now, it's just cotton. ghostgeek: Mmm, talking of cotton, just saw this: Bryan Szabo and his team have spent hours poring over photos of well-worn jeans, including vintage fades with swathes of bleached fabric and high-contrast fades with knee-pit patterns of honeycomb as well as whiskers around the crotch area. Online, the team praises the community's top faders. "This crotch repair is crazy good!" they exclaim. Or: "Subtle and even shades... A near-perfect balancing of... fade patterns with spectacular blue tones." This last one is the winner. For this is the judging of a competition; the Indigo Invitational, where people from across the world wear raw denim jeans for a year. But the competitors are not only the top jeans faders in the world. They are also champions of something else: The denim low-wash. Since denim becomes softer when it’s soapy and wet, one of the keys to achieving high-contrast patterns is to avoid washing them. The strategy is followed by everyone from the members of a no-wash club to the CEO of Levi's. [ https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230529-the-people-who-dont-wash-their-clothes?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ] Seems I'm not alone!  Account Closed: I imagine it depends on what someone does for a living. I'd have to move out if hubby wore his jeans for an entire year without having them washed Cow poop smells. | Politics Chat Room 72 People Chatting Similar Conversations |