For you guys that watch YouTube. The channel is Mass Spec Everything. Here are a couple of interesting videos he did on various honey brands and regions. Pretty interesting stuff.
I went to my local grocery store (small West Texas town)last week and bought the last 6 remaining cans.
I've never once seen the sardine shelf empty until last week.
I've been eating sardines for years. My grandfather used to eat them and I somehow acquired a taste for them.
Instead of looking for sardines with sauces, just buy them in water and put your own sauce on them.
A good brown mustard or just plain ol Tabasco are great on them. I even use quality olive oil sometimes. They actually taste way better doing it this way.
You're the third person to suggest this post-canning mustard treatment. But you are polite and cordial about it instead of outwardly dismissive, and this is appreciated.
I'm no stranger to mustards. I've got a few varieties on-hand at any time. My favorite American yellow mustard is in rotation at all times, along with at least one bottle of backup mustard in the pantry. There's also always a tickly sort of Dijon in the fridge and I keep a random-brand discount store jar of coarse-ground imported mustard (usually from Poland) available.
I'm out of the extra hot version of Löwensenf, from Germany, at the moment. I need to fix this, but it's hard to find at a reasonable price. I'll find more of it soon enough.
When my favorite mustard once became impossible to buy in sane quantities, I found myself ordering an insane quantity: A box of six one-gallon jugs was easy to order from a local food service supplier and it was surprisingly quick and inexpensive to get it done. (Yes, six entire gallons -- nearly 30 liters -- of mustard, all at once. I bought extra pumps and made a couple of kits to give away to some people I know; the rest was for me.)
Anyway, sardines: I don't know if my grandparents ate sardines or not, but I doubt it. Out of countless meals and snacks, I don't really recall ever eating fish with them at all.
I cut my teeth on sardines at the kitchen table with my dad: He always kept a few tins of Brunswick-branded sardines (always in mustard sauce) in the cabinet. One day, when I was very small, he talked me into trying some, which started with a lesson in winding open a can with a key. After getting them open and overcoming a moment or two of confusion about the strong scents and flavors along with the texture (edible bones? wtf?), I found that I liked them quite a lot. We then frequently shared a tin of sardines together, just picking out little bits of fish with our own forks, which was lovely until things changed as I became a ravenous and disdainful teenager.
And of course I've tried putting mustard on more-plain varieties of sardines. I've tried it over and over again.
Mostly, I've previously experimented with this technique with sardines from Aldi: There, 3 or 4 varieties share the same SKU and arrive packed together in equal quantities, all in one box. This leads to the most-popular kinds disappearing from shelves while the less-popular kinds can become a sort of permanently-annoying surplus. My observations while digging through stock at Aldi suggests that mustard sardines are the most popular in my neck of the woods, because those are the ones that are always hardest to buy here.
So, thus: They historically have always had a ton of sardines in water and/or oil. And they were always priced right, because Aldi. And I always have (what I consider to be) good mustard available. It was obvious to try putting the two things together.
It makes me happy to hear that you think it's better this way, and I do wish that my own tastes were so easily placated.
For my part, I think it's far better when the mustard sauce and the sardines have both spent a lot of quality time together while sealed up together inside of the same can. I find that the flavors meld together beautifully, with the flesh of the fish becoming deeply mustard-flavored while the mustard goo becoming strongly sardine-flavored and a bit gelatinous. I enjoy this quite a lot as I scrape the last gloppy bits of canned mustard and fish out of the tin with a fork.
I find that this experience can't be sufficiently replicated by buying the two things separately and then combining them at serving. The packaged whole is greater than the post-purchase sum of its parts.
But, again: I'm pleased that it works for you and that it sounds like it might even be preferable.
It's always good to find ways to maximize one's enjoyment of sardines, and I think I'm doing pretty well on maximizing my own enjoyment.
The distribution SNAFU will either sort itself out, or it won't. :)
In Texas, you have to go outside of the city limits. South Carolina you can get them year round. There are other states that are legal year round, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.
There are some states where you can still buy them year round. Holiday or not.
South Carolina comes to mind because I was there a few months ago. They have giant stores all over the state.
As a Canadian, the earliest memories I have of driving into the United States were seeing the giant "fireworks" billboards lining the interstate. I know it depends on the state, but it's one of those things you notice as an outsider.
Back around 1982, fireworks were a big no in my neighborhood.
My friend across the street had some bottle rockets and he decided to shoot one off in the middle of the street. We didn't have a bottle to put it in to light it, so we wedged it between two bricks. He lit it and a split second before it went off, it tilted to point directly down the street. It fired off blazing down the middle of the road. At the same time a cop car just happened to turn the corner and that damn thing popped on the hood of the cop car.
We scattered like ants. My friend that lit it ran inside, I hid in his garage under his moms car and the other two hauled ass home.
Well the cop parked out front and knocked on his door. His dad answered and they spent which felt like an hour (probably 10-15 minutes) talking about what happened. He got in big trouble and grounded. I stayed in the garage until the smoke cleared, then ran home. I didn't see him for at least a week.
Your post reminded me about that incident. They were regulated in Fort Worth Texas 44 years ago. I haven't thought about that day in years! LOL!
Thanks for the fun memory.
Yea, I think OP is wearing rose-colored glasses. I'm 50 and I don't remember any time in my life when anything bigger than sparklers or tiny firecrackers were legal. To my young eyes, they've always been illegal. The differences now are 1. a more belligerent and careless population and 2. plummeting police enforcement. You can read a lot of comments here from places (mostly CA) where people care to do the right thing and enforcement is actually happening, and lo and behold it's at least helping. Fireworks bans are not any more "culturally unenforceable" than masking during COVID was.
It helps when your local culture is respectful, cooperative, and intelligent enough to understand why we don't light fires when every tree and blade of grass within 200 miles is dry as a bone. It hurts when your local culture is "Fuck everyone else, I'm going to do what I want!"
I'm in my late 40s. I grew up on an island in Washington state. Truly commercial-grade fireworks (the kind that professionals would launch for an audience of thousands) were banned by that time, but plenty of fireworks that would be categorized as "commercial-grade" today were sold publicly by multiple vendors every year.
I love fireworks now, but my first memory of them was terrifying. I would have been about 3 to 5. My parents drove our VW bus to a nearby beach to watch the local display. It was total madness. Teenagers threw explosive fireworks onto and underneath our car.
Even a lot of the smaller home-use fireworks back then had hilariously unsafe behaviour. I remember in particular one called something like "Saturn Missile Battery". It was a box that launched a 10x10 grid of 100 whistling, finless plastic rockets (each about 4-5cm x 5-6mm), with each rocket exploding when their propellant ran out. Because they had no stabilization, they would fly in all directions, change direction in flight, etc. When my dad set it off, one of them literally flew right over our heads into the house and exploded in the basement.
My experience is that outside of Seattle, enforcement of fireworks restrictions is pretty lax. For example, if one watches the professional display in Tacoma, one will also see most of Dash Point / Browns Point continuously lit up by fireworks that are unambiguously well outside the legal restrictions.
I agree that a lot of people are reckless, and it's just a matter of time before it causes a high-profile disaster somewhere in the state. But I also agree with the parent comment that it's such an ingrained part of American culture that it would be very hard to change - at least until there's a local disaster that gives people a visceral feeling for the danger.
In the mid-90s I had a brief but enjoyable hobby of model rocketry. I guess the #1 obstacle in this pastime is finding a safe launch site.
I had assembled a gorgeous SR-71 Blackbird rocket. I took it to a vast lawn space at Warren College, UCSD, on a quiet weekend, and set it on its maiden voyage. The very lopsided SR-71 immediately went horizontal and landed softly within a swimming pool fence where I had no access.
Some time later, I chose the neighborhood public school yard on a weekend. Nevertheless, the preparations drew a curious crowd of unaccompanied minor children who were younger than me. I told them to be careful and stay clear, and set off the rocket. By the time its parachute deployed, a security guard was driving his car around the field to meet us all at the landing site and give us all a stern warning.
So I abandoned that hobby forever and found less explosive things to tinker with. This week I grabbed two boxes of glow-sticks at the hardware store, and had myself a very glowy 4th.
That’s what I remember too. Fireworks in the city limits was a no-no. People would do it but you were risking a visit from the local police car. In my neighborhood (OakCliff in Dallas) the police have completely given up, people cruise Jefferson Ave shooting AR15s out of the back of their trucks every Sunday night. July 4th and New Years is completely out of control, it’s going to take a house getting burned down or some other horrible tragedy to change it.
We were setting off fireworks in the street in the middle of the afternoon (cause you'd buy a bunch and gradually deploy in the days leading up to the event). We shot off a rocket, which was one of mine. There were fire trucks shortly after putting out a blaze in an open lot. 1980s, I was <10 years, my older brother and his friend were pretty sure we caused it.
I have no way to know if we started that fire, but regulations exist for a reason and people who live in at-risk areas understand that they could lose their homes.
Some friends and I lit a wheat field on fire with Roman candles in Oklahoma when I was 18.
We were having a blast driving down the road shooting candles out of the car window when we topped the crest of a small hill and looked back to see smoke. We drove back and the field was on fire. Fortunately we were able to put it out before it spread any further and the area was so isolated no one saw us.
Yes heat pumps move heat that already existed from the cold side to the hot side, but they also consume some energy to fight entropy, meaning they pump more heat to the hot side than they remove from the cold side. This is a net heat gain, equivalent to the energy consumed in running the AC. The value may be considered negligible compared to other sources, but it can still be on the order of 500w per room, which adds up quickly if everyone is doing it.
Of course air conditioning is reasonably well suited to be a solar load during peak hours, but in most parts of the world if everyone just installed AC units like are common in many parts of the US it would mean a huge amount of extra fossil fuels burnt.
https://youtu.be/FTaRFX4bKhI
https://youtu.be/FCFtVu6hFdw