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[BakerAunt]

King Arthur's special dry milk cannot be rehydrated. Try to do so, and you will end up with a mess. It has to be mixed in with the flour and other dry ingredients.

Most regular milk powder can be rehydrated in liquid.

Mike--I also come from a large family (eight kids), and my mother also mixed powdered milk with regular milk, in part to stretch it, and she also had the idea it was more nutritious. I, too, hated the taste.

[chocomouse]

We had tuna fish sandwiches for a late supper, on fresh (made this morning) white buttermilk maple oatmeal bread, a Beth Hensperger recipe.

[BakerAunt]

Mike, maybe your note to Brod and Taylor will give them the idea of selling extra sheeter boards. After all, they began offering the sheeter after they saw the groundswell response in social media--maybe even here at Nebraska Kitchen!

I'm eager to hear how your sheeter works on cracker doughs.

On Wednesday, I baked two large (9x5) loaves of my Pumpkin-Rye-Whole Wheat Bread, which is a complete re-working of a recipe in Jane Brody's Good Food Gourmet. The recipe calls for two cups of pumpkin, and one cup of puree was the last of the pumpkin-squash hybrid that we had in our garden last year. The other was a cup of frozen peanut pumpkin puree. As pumpkin differs in consistency, I have to adjust the flour amount when I bake it. I look forward to slicing one loaf at lunch tomorrow and freezing the other.

[Mike Nolan]

Having a second sheeter board would be convenient at times, for example, if I decide to do a bi-color laminated pastry (look at the cover of Jimmy Griffin's book.)

I've written Brod and Taylor, they don't currently have extra sheeter boards available.

I really want to start playing around with other doughs soon, carta di musica, maybe even strudel or phyllo dough.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not sure I'm going to find any winesap apples this fall, the place I usually get them at lost their entire apple crop to a storm earlier this year, at least the 2nd time they've had storm-related crop failures.

Two of the orchards in Nebraska City (50 miles away) have winesaps, but one of them says they aren't ripe yet, probably another 10-14 days if the weather holds up. Neither offers u-pick except on weekends, for insurance reasons, I guess.

Farming is the ultimate expression of optimism. You prepare, plant, tend and hope for a marketable crop.

[BakerAunt]

I baked an apple pie on Tuesday. When we were in Michigan last week, I picked four apples from a solitary tree near where we were staying. I added them to 2.5 lbs. of Spy Gold apples (seconds), which are a cross between Northern Spy and Golden Delicious from the farmers' market. I peeled the Michigan apples because they had some mildew on the skin, and the skin is also rather thick. I did not peel the Spy Golds. We will slice into it at lunch tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

A while back I bought a copy of Recipes into Type, a style handbook for cookbook writers and editors. It got set aside and somewhat forgotten, but I picked it up last night and started reading it. (I still have a long term goal of coming up with a recipe format/structure that works better for baking, especially resizing recipes.)

It was written in 1993, long before the Internet and blogs, but a lot of what it says about how to phrase the listing of ingredients and preparations is still worthwhile. I do disagree with the authors when they recommend against including the weight of flour in a bread recipe, just the volumetric amount. As we all know, the weight of a cup of flour can vary by 25% or more, depending on how it is measured and, of course, the accuracy of your measuring cups. (I have one that is is terribly inaccurate, no matter how I measure flour, what it says is a cup of flour is always at least 6 ounces.)

It is interesting how it uses The Joy of Cooking as examples of both good and bad recipe writing practices.

[Mike Nolan]

I may have to try a little cinnamon sugar in some, too (in addition to the chocolate, of course.)

I made the chocolate sticks using a mold I bought online, it appears they're a bit larger than the Callebaut ones (which appear to be available in two sizes, ones around 5.6 grams each and ones around 10 grams each, mine are around 11 grams.) But I think the chocolate I used (Callebaut 811) is the same for both sizes.

It's about time to gear up to make chocolate candies for an Advent calendar for our granddaughter, I think each time I make a batch of chocolate I'll pour what's left into the stick mold, I used up about 2/3 of the ones I had today, and these are definitely on the 'make again soon' list.

[Mike Nolan]

I made 16 small chocolatines (5x7.5 cm dough pieces), some with one stick of chocolate in the middle, some with two sticks. I think my chocolate sticks are a little thicker and heavier than the ones they sell to bakeries.

I think I like the singles better than the doubles, but they're both tasty. I think Diane prefers the double-chocolate ones.

Next time I'll make the dough pieces a bit wider (and a little longer, too) so the chocolate doesn't stick out the end and they roll up better, you're supposed to cut the dough to the same width as the chocolate stick (5cm), but the dough kind of shrinks after you cut it and it stuck out the end of most of them. Didn't seem to hurt how they baked, though.

I don't know how well they keep, but they'll probably be gone by tomorrow evening anyway. 🙂

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[Mike Nolan]

I am making a 600g batch of croissant dough using the manual sheeter today.

The challenge still seems to be to find a folding/rolling pattern that produces easily usable final shapes. I would up doing a standard English encapsulation, followed by a 3 fold (letter turn) then a 2 fold then a final 3 fold. That should give me a total of 36 layers in the final dough. But right now I've got dough that's about 3 x 10 and due to be rolled out along its length, and I really don't know if I want one that's 3 x (at least) 30.

I think what I'll probably do is divide the dough into two or more parts during the final rollout, so that I can turn it a couple of times to get it into a rectangle I can work with for cutting.

My hope is to make about a half dozen medium croissants and perhaps a dozen small chocolatines (rolled chocolate croissants).

[cwcdesign]

I have a pasta salad recipe that I got from a friend years ago. I pulled it out this summer when Will had asked for some salad ideas. I had remembered that it made a LOT and was also time intensive. When I reread the recipe, I noted that all of the vegetables were sautéed in batches, hence the time.I decided the next time I made the recipe, I'd roast the vegetables.

So, today I wanted to make a farro salad and I thought I could adapt the pasta salad to the farro. I had to go shopping so I picked up some vegetables from the recipe. I roasted portobello mushrooms, red and green peppers, onion, asparagus and zucchini. I ended up not adding all the veggies to the farro (saved them for another time) but the salad was good and filling. I'll have it for a couple more days.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't eat a lot of squash (spaghetti squash is one of the few I'll eat), I may not have been aware that a turban squash was even edible, I'm pretty sure my wife has never made one for herself. Having to cut the cap off seems like a waste, especially when they sell them by the pound.

[Mike Nolan]

We have roll out shelves in all our lower cabinets and in the full height kitchen pantry. Stuff still gets lost at the back of the shelf, though. We recently threw out several boxes of cereal that expired in 2019. (My wife changed her breakfast pattern after her heart surgery, she used to eat cereal, now she eats cottage cheese with fruit.)

[BakerAunt]

Our house came with a separate apartment over the garage that was used as a rental, so it has a small kitchen, and I do mean small. We had to locate our second refrigerator right outside it. It has an older (no digital electronics) electric stove that is on the verge of too large for the space. I would have liked to have gotten rid of the separating peninsula, but that would have required all new cabinets and the loss of some cabinet space. We remodeled the apartment, which we refer to as The Annex, so that it is an extension of our living space and can double as a more private place for guests. At first, my husband did not want to do anything with the kitchen, but we both hated the orange countertops, not to mention the linoleum walls that had absorbed grease from various renters. We settled on red cedar paneling for the kitchen walls and a light Formica countertop, as well as a new single, as opposed to double sink. It is quite nice as a place to do canning and to roast meats when the other oven is occupied. I have my large kitchen table in the dining area right next to it, and I am looking forward to assembling some complicated projects--maybe pasta making--out there.

For canning, I use a large electric Ball canner, which can set on the counter next to the sink, and then be drained into it from the spigot.

Our house kitchen was part of the remodeling of three years ago. The biggest issue is that because we have a longer than wider house, people come in the back door (front door of house is on the lake), so they walk through the kitchen. As a result, my husband did not want my flour, sugar, etc. sitting on the counters where I have always kept them. I wanted shelves across the back, across from the nook for the washer and dryer, but again, those would be open to people coming in, so I agreed to utility cabinets, which have turned out to be a not-so-great idea, as they are too deep, and have too few shelves to be useful storage, and I have to dig stuff out by taking stuff out. Because the cabinets are so deep, I am not sure more shelves would help.

I do have some wire racks in the Annex where I store some of my specialty pans, but I would have liked more cabinet space in the kitchen--and FULL shelves in all the lower cabinets rather than this half-shelf nonsense. My husband did put two nice long shelves in one open area, and I have my beans and pastas in glass jars arrayed on the lower one, along with my small recipe binders, and my various kitchen tins on the upper one.

We were mostly stuck with this kitchen footprint because we wanted to preserve the downstairs bedroom. We did sacrifice one of the two bedroom closets and the closet that was in the entryway to make space for the washer and dryer, as well as the utility cabinets. We had to keep the footprint of the house, or I would have pushed for a mud room, as there is a lot of stuff piled up next to the door by my husband--yes, he who does not want my flour containers out!

I agree with Aaron about not putting away appliances that get used frequently. My stand mixer stays out, as do my large, medium, and small food processors and the larger bread machine. (The latter was added after the remodel, but there was a nook too small for anything else that holds it nicely, even though I have to move it to use it.

[Mike Nolan]

We have a butler's pantry with lots of cabinets for storing china (we have a very large collection of Fiesta, for example) and some other kitchen items.
Recently I added a 4 foot high metal shelving unit there to hold flour containers. I can't say it has created significantly more working space in the kitchen, though. Kitchen space is like Parkinson's law, stuff expands to fill the space--and then some.