Nearly 50 years in IT, 25 years of baking and cooking. Follow me on instagram @mike_nolan_nebraska

Ketogenic Diets

My wife and I have been explor­ing the world of keto­genic diets, with mul­ti­ple goals in mind. One is weight loss, of course, but the oth­er is to see if this would have some impact on our Type II dia­betes. (Diane is tak­ing insulin, I am not–yet.) Heart and kid­ney issues com­pli­cate mat­ters fur­ther. And…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:February 6, 2024 View Post

Baking

Comments closed

Using Baker’s Math

Bread recipes writ­ten in bak­er’s math for­mat can be intim­i­dat­ing. How do you know how much of each ingre­di­ent to mea­sure out? I think recipes writ­ten in bak­er’s math for­mat are eas­i­er to use once you know how much dough you want to pro­duce, which is almost always the case in a com­mer­cial bak­ery. If they…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:October 28, 2022 View Post

Baking

Comments closed

The Pie (Dough) Chart

Or, How to make the right amount of pie dough regard­less of your pie pan size. If you’ve ever wound up with a bowl full of extra pie dough cut off the edge or had to roll your pie dough real­ly thin to get it to fill the entire pan, this arti­cle is for you. Pie dough…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:October 16, 2020 View Post

Baking

Comments closed

Measuring Pie Dough Thickness

How do you mea­sure the thick­ness of pie dough?

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Beginning the low-salt journey

A week ago my car­di­ol­o­gist put me on a low salt and restrict­ed liq­uids diet. Yes­ter­day was my first trip to the gro­cery store since this life-chang­ing event, and I have to say I’m both depressed and frus­trat­ed by the lim­it­ed options avail­able to me and the mil­lions of Amer­i­cans like me who need to reduce…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Getting Seeds to Stick to Bread

In a recent thread on My Nebras­ka Kitchen, the issue of how to get seeds to stick to bread came up. So, today I tried an exper­i­ment. I made a batch of Chi­ca­­go-style hot dog buns (the KAF recipe), mak­ing 12 buns. (We like our buns a lit­tle small­er than what the recipe sug­gests.) I divided…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:September 6, 2017 View Post

Baking

5 Responses

Aspen House Restaurant — Great Dining in the High Plains

Rawl­ins, Wyoming, is not the sort of place where you’d expect to find a great restau­rant, but we did. The Aspen House restau­rant is in an old Vic­­to­ri­an-style house built in 1905 that has been con­vert­ed into a restau­rant. The room we were in was prob­a­bly a par­lor or break­fast room, although it may have also…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:July 11, 2017 View Post

Uncategorized

1 Response

Gravy — the real Mother (and Father) sauce

Clas­si­cal­ly trained chefs, please stop read­ing this col­umn now. OK, you’ve been warned. In clas­sic French cook­ing there are five moth­er sauces, as first set forth by Marie-Antoine Carême and lat­er revised by Auguste Escoffi­er: Béchamel, Velouté, Espag­nol, Toma­to and Hol­landaise. These are called moth­er sauces because they’re the start­ing point for hun­dreds of sauces. James…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Uncle George and the (Pepper) Dragon

A Christ­mas tra­di­tion in my wife’s fam­i­ly is to serve oys­ter stew on Christ­mas Eve, with the men doing the cook­ing. For years, this task fell to my wife’s Uncle George. One year he was hum­ming along, the oys­ters had been but­ter poached, the milk was near­ly hot enough, and he reached for the ground…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:December 7, 2016 View Post

Cooking

2 Responses

The Butter Did it–The Art of Reading Cookbooks

Most peo­ple have a few authors or gen­res that they pre­fer to read, often read­ing the same book many times. I’m fond of the nov­els of Tom Clan­cy and Jean Auel’s Earth­’s Chil­dren series, for exam­ple, as well as the Emma Lath­en mys­ter­ies series and the works of Ayn Rand. But I’m also fond of reading…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

My Kind Of (Restaurant) Town

One of the best parts about spend­ing most of a week in Chica­go for Choco­late Boot Camp was that Chica­go has always been a town that I’ve enjoyed eat­ing in. It’s nev­er real­ly been a ‘fan­cy restau­rant’ town, even though it has two restau­rants that have earned the elu­sive three-star rat­ing from Miche­lin. Chicago’s more…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

My Week At Chocolate Boot Camp — Day 4

It’s day 4, the last day of Choco­late Boot Camp. (Most Choco­late Acad­e­my cours­es are three days long, but this is a four-day course, because there’s so much mate­r­i­al to cov­er. Click here to read the report on Day 1 and Days 2 and 3.) Today we need to fin­ish every­thing, and there’s a lot…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

My Week At Chocolate Boot Camp — Days 2 and 3

Day 2 of Choco­late Boot Camp start­ed out pret­ty much where day 1 left off, tem­per­ing dark choco­late. (Here’s Part 1 of this series.) On the table in the morn­ing, using the seed method in the after­noon. I fig­ured out what I did wrong with my seed method batch on Mon­day, I mis­read the scale, so I…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

My Week at Chocolate Boot Camp — Day 1

Choco­late is some­thing I’ve dab­bled with over the years, cov­er­ing home made can­dy (espe­cial­ly sponge can­dy) with milk choco­late, for exam­ple, but I real­ly did­n’t know any­thing about work­ing with choco­late, much less mak­ing items that would look pro­fes­sion­al­ly made. Well, to cor­rect that, I recent­ly attend­ed the course called ‘Choco­late 1.0 — Dis­cov­er­ing Choco­late’ at…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Cooking an Eye of Round Roast

If you do a search on how to cook eye of round, one of the most com­mon­ly sug­gest­ed meth­ods is to pre­heat the oven to 500, salt and pep­per the roast, drop the temp to 475 and cook it for 7 minutes/pound, then turn the heat off and let it coast for 2 1⁄2 hours…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:August 24, 2016 View Post

Cooking

11 Responses

The Cutting Edge or How Sharp is your Knife?

Take your best knife out and look at it close­ly. How sharp is it? Prob­a­bly not as sharp as you think it is. Here’s one of my favorite knives, a 7 1⁄2 inch Chi­nese cleaver: Looks pret­ty sharp, eh? Let’s look at it a bit clos­er, at about 3X pow­er: Still look pret­ty sharp? Let’s try it at 150X power:…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:July 16, 2016 View Post

Cooking

5 Responses

Delicious Liasons — the Science and Art of Thickening

Lia­son. The very word con­jures up images of entan­gle­ments, and well it should, since it comes from the French verb lier, to bind. In cook­ing, a lia­son is some­thing added to a liq­uid, like a sauce or a soup, to bind or thick­en it. There are two basic kinds of liasons–starches, like flour, and pro­teins, like egg. Both…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Vinagrettes — Traditional and not-so-traditional

The text­book def­i­n­i­tion of a vina­grette is a sus­pen­sion of an oil and vine­gar, an acid, pos­si­bly with oth­er sea­son­ings in it. Some­times, depend­ing on what you add, it becomes an emul­sion rather than a sus­pen­sion. (A sus­pen­sion usu­al­ly sep­a­rates, requir­ing it to be stirred or shak­en again, an emul­sion does­n’t, because there’s an emulsifier…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:June 13, 2016 View Post

Cooking

6 Responses

Things they don’t tell you about home grain milling

A few years ago I received a Nutrim­ill machine as a Christ­mas present from my old­er son, along with a big buck­et of soft red wheat berries. As Christ­mas presents go, it’s prob­a­bly been one of my favorites over the past 25 years, cer­tain­ly one that opened up a new world for me. Milling my own flour…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:May 27, 2016 View Post

Baking

4 Responses

No Garlic, Please!

“Hel­lo, my name is Jeff, I’ll be your serv­er today.” “Hi, Jeff. My wife has an aller­gy to gar­lic, can you tell me what’s safe for her to eat?” “Gee, I’ll have to check with the kitchen, what are you inter­est­ed in?” “Can you check on today’s soup, on the fish, on the chick­en and on today’s spe­cial?” A…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Welcome to My Nebraska Kitchen

Wel­come to My Nebras­ka Kitchen! We are a site for dis­cussing cook­ing and bak­ing that is func­tion­al, easy to use, enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive. Avail­able Now: A Dis­cus­sion Forums area. A num­ber of the peo­ple who were active in the King Arthur Flour Bak­ing Cir­cle are read­ing and post­ing on this forum, but it is open to any…

Date
Categories
Tags
Comments

Published:May 11, 2016 View Post

Administrative

Comments closed