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[aaronatthedoublef]

Happy Birthday and congratulations on your 50th. That is fantastic!

I made challah on Friday. I was working on converting my recipe from volume to weight and calculated the hydration without thinking about the oil, eggs, or sugar so it started out super wet. I decided to see how it would turn out. I like the wetter bread. It's really soft. And I think it will be easier next time I'm teaching kids to make challah because they tend to add a ton of flour as they shape and this will absorb it and still be wet enough to stick together.

At the last minute I decided to make a four strand braid and obviously need some practice on that. I made rolls which were huge - 7 ounces - and we used them for hamburger buns. No egg wash since this was mostly practice. We had some people over photographing our house (long story) so I cut the loaf in half and gave them each a half.

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[Mike Nolan]

I'm planning to make a Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake later tonight, an 8x8 for tomorrow (my birthday) and a 10x10 for the 17th (our 50th wedding
anniversary.

[cwcdesign]

Will’s turn tonight - he’s making Basmati rice, chicken sausage and frozen broccoli with tomato and onion sauce(?) - it will be more flavors than sauce.

[BakerAunt]

Joan--Here's how I roasted them:

Trim off where the beet meets the root. Trim off most of the skinny tail. Take a large piece of aluminum foil, drizzle some olive oil in the middle, place beets in center, and sprinkle with 2 Tbs. water. Close the foil to make a packet. Place on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake in pre-heated oven at 400F for 50-75 minutes. The time depends on how large the beets are. They are done when pieced easily with a small sharp knife.

Remove from oven, open the foil, and allow to cool a bit. I use dry paper towels to rub off the skin (try to keep my fingers from changing color!). The beets can then be sliced.

As Len notes, if the beet greens are not wilted, they are nutritious and great to eat. When I buy good ones at the farmers' market, I immediately remove the green from the beets and store them separately in a bag in the refrigerator vegetable drawer.

It was a revelation when I made that Roasted Beet, Spinach [Beet Greens!], and Feta Cheese Flatbread, riffing off of Ken Haedrich's recipe.

[cwcdesign]

Joan, when you roast beets they have more flavor and are easier to peel than boiled ones. They are actually less messy and easier too. Basically, you cut most of the greens off, put them in a baking pan with a little bit of water, put foil on top and bake low (I think 325º-350º - I can't find my recipe from the Victory Garden Cookbook - for about an hour - if a sharp knife slides in easily, they're done. We always just peeled them under cold water - the skins slip off.

Beets are something I've always loved, my stepfather used to grow them. But, learning to roast them was a game changer.

[BakerAunt]

My kitchen does not have the wall space for a foldaway anything. I'm still vexed that the cabinetry is not more useful. I keep trying, but I wish my husband had acceded to my desire for open shelving in the back area. His rationale is that because we are on a lake, where the front of the house is, people enter at the back from the street, and the shelves would be on view.

However, we have an Annex--the new name for the apartment over the garage--that we are having renovated and will use as an extension of our house. (Our contractor works in fits and starts, so we are waiting for the window trim and then the siding, and a couple of little jobs inside.) The Annex has a small kitchen, with an electric stove and refrigerator, and more importantly, my beloved kitchen table with the kind of faux wood top that was popular in the 1950s. I remember dying Easter eggs on it as a child with my siblings. When I was single and bought my house, one non-negotiable was a kitchen that would accommodate the kitchen table. I've rolled a lot of dough on it and set out racks and racks for cookies.

To live where my husband wanted to live, in a house we could afford, I had to accept a smaller kitchen (improved when we remodeled although still small), but the Annex makes up for it, even though it alone still does not give me the storage I need. I do my jam making over there, since I can leave out my equipment between batches, and I'm planning to try pasta making over there. The sheeter looks small enough, and easy enough to set up that it would work on that table.

Of course, the sheeter is just a dream, especially since we must have a new well drilled, and while not as costly as we had feared, it is still a hefty price tag. We are being ultraconservative with water until then. We have applied for the permit, and now we wait to be put on the company's schedule.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Just saw this! BA - I have used our pasta maker to roll out cracker dough. It is only about six inches wide so I need to roll out six or more sheets of cracker dough as opposed to three bigger sheets. I think I started with 100 g of dough if I remember correctly.

Plus it needs extra flour to make sure the cracker dough didn't stick. Between the extra rolling and the extra clean up the pasta maker did not appear to offer me any benefit over my rolling pin.

Now a sheeter that is a foot or two wide could handle an entire batch at once!

I remember a "Good Eats" where Alton Brown used a pasta maker attached to an ironing board to roll out strudel. It was long and strudel dough is not wide so it was perfect. We just installed an ironing board that folds away into the wall - like a Murphy Bed ironing board so maybe something like that for Mike's fold-away sheeter? The problem with the foldaway ironing board for this is that it is smaller than a standard model - shorter & narrower. Plus with the cabinet it weighs over 100 pounds so installation is not trivial.

I have a milestone birthday next month and while I might be able to justify the cost, I have not place to put it and if it is a big project to take it out it won't be used very often. My family gave me a panini press that I am not allowed to leave on the counter so it is almost never used. Take it out, set it up, wait for it to heat up, make panino (or panini), then wait for cool down, clean up, put away... it's easier to just make hot sandwiches in a pan on the stove. Not as good, but much easier.

But a Murphy Bed sheeter arrangement would be cool. You would still need to be able to break it down and clean it easily.

I went to a local bakery for the first time and she rolls out all her croissants by hand. She said it takes her four days to make them.

[BakerAunt]

Aaron--What are the Webstaurant's store's shipping prices? I was looking there recently, and they do not tell you until you have put the items in the basket and entered the credit card. (I despise that system.) I know that they have a membership that for a price ($99 per month) gives free shipping. Way too high for regular people.

I was looking at catering bags at Webstaurant. I am thinking of taking one or two pumpkin pies to my husband's family reunion in September. It is only about a 90-minute drive, but I think that pumpkin pie needs to be kept cold. I'm trying to decide which size would fit pie containers with 9-inch pies inside.

[BakerAunt]

I am impressed with Navlys' and Chocomouse's dinners!

I recently treated myself to freezer containers from Lehman's. I like their products, but shipping is expensive, so I wait to order until I have a list. The freezer containers were half price if you bought three or more, and I did. On Wednesday, I blanched some green beans and filled a 1-quart and a 1 1/2-pint container for freezing. I used a 1-pint container to freeze about 1 1/2 cups of grated zucchini that I can use for my zucchini loaf in the winter. As the containers stack nicely, unlike the various yogurt and butter containers I have been using (and will still use for some items), I'm hoping to avoid the scenario where my husband goes into the freezer, items spill out, and containers or lids crack.

Dinner on Wednesday was the Turkey-Zucchini Loaf with Peach-Dijon Mustard glaze. I added a red bell pepper from our garden. We had it with leftover bulgur stir-fry and more microwaved green beans. These beans are the fatter ones that I rejected for freezing.

[cwcdesign]

We needed same KAF AP, it was $6.99 at HT and $4.49 at Target - neither store had any today. But they both had bread and WWW. Harris Teeter also carries the organic types (up to $8 per bag)

[Mike Nolan]

There was a story a few weeks back about foreign sellers on Amazon, one garlic peeler had something like 24 PAGES of listings, most with the same picture but 'different' sellers, most of them at similar prices.

I've pretty much given up on both Amazon and walmart.com for things like flour. I can get 12 pound bags of KAF AP flour at Costco and 25 pound bags of semolina from places like webstauarant.com

Google searches are getting near useless, too, the first page is full of advertised things that may not even be what you were searching for. I haven't used duck duck go enough to know if they've got the same problem.

But buying local is fraught with problems as well, so many things are out of stock and really expensive if they have them (and you can't trust website 'inventories') and what's 'local' anyway? Is WalMart local?

[BakerAunt]

Thanks, Aaron. I looked at the Vitacost website, and their BRM selection is impressive and reasonably priced. I may give them a try, especially since there is a coupon. The prices seem better than what I have found at Walmart.com

I checked out BRM at our semi-local Kroger. The 5 lb. bags of whole wheat flour were priced ok at $4.99 each (what GM whole wheat flour was selling for at Walmart), but the other products were priced high, probably because they sell lower volume.

[chocomouse]

Aaron, if your Weber is big enough, you can still put the veggies on a sheet pan, drizzle with oil and whatever seasonings, and grill them at the same time as the chicken. Just use an old sheet pan (or buy an old one at a yard sale or thrift shop) because it will probably warp and not look so great when done. Or, you could buy what I call a "grill wok", with holes in it, made special for grilling.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I barbecued a chicken Sunday. It was a cooler morning and I have not used the Weber in a long time but it still works! I had a little too much smoke, I think. And when I grill it I cannot throw the vegetables in the pan with the chicken.

Not sure what else I'll make this week. And school lunches start tomorrow (Wednesday).

[BakerAunt]

Dinner on Saturday was Baked Crispy Oven Fish and Chips with Dill Tartar Sauce (recipe is here at Nebraska Kitchen), which we had with coleslaw. I have not made the fish and chips for a while because cod was not available in the stores. It now seems to be back, so perhaps it is seasonal.