Search Results for '("C'

[BakerAunt]

On Monday, I made beef and vegetable stew for dinner. The stew meat and the potatoes came from vendors at our farmers' market. It has been a cold, rainy day, so the stew was perfect.

I also finally had the chance to try out my Weston Deluxe Electric Food Mill on a double recipe of applesauce today. The instructions that come with it are minimal, so I watched a few You Tube videos to get some tips on working with apples and on how to set it up so that the sauce can flow more easily into my container. I ended up putting a large bowl on a couple of boxes on a stool next to the counter. While I did have to cut the apples into pieces (my recipe does not peel, core, or remove any seeds) so that it would work with the mill, the processing of each 5 lb. and 3 oz. of apples was amazingly quick. It does leave small pieces of skin, but they are too small to be a problem, and I like the chunkier texture. I have at least 10 lbs. more apples to process, but those will wait until after Christmas. I froze three quarts and set one aside for Christmas dinner.

[Mike Nolan]

Still working on the Christmas dinner plans, probably steak Diane rather than a bird or a big roast, in large part due to refrigerator space. We have a guest coming who has issues with butterfat and cheese (but apparently not with milk itself), so that will impact dinner planning as well.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making ladyfingers tonight, because I can't find any soft ones in town. (They're usually in the freezer section.) I can find hard ones, but they don't taste the same, even if you soak in something to soften them.

We'll use them in a trifle for Christmas.

[BakerAunt]

Italian Cook--I'm glad that you liked the peanut butter oatmeal cookie recipe.

Wow, Joan! You had a busy day of baking, too!

What I really want is a taste of what Mike is baking.

On Saturday, I baked a double batch of King Arthur's Spiced Rye Ginger Cookies. My only changes are to add 1 Tbs. milk powder per recipe and to halve the salt. I used a #40 scoop, which gave me 47 cookies. I rolled them in equal parts of white, red, and green sparkling sugar. (King Arthur used to sell the sparkling sugar in colors other than white but stopped doing so.) A dozen of these will be a gift to our neighbors. These cookies are delectably spicy.

After baking the cookies, I experimented with making Eggnog scones by adapting a King Arthur recipe so that I used canola oil rather than butter. I was able to find a low-fat eggnog at the grocery when we did our shopping run, but I had to buy lactose-free to get it and to avoid eggnog with high-fructose corn syrup. I splurged and used 90 g of cinnamon chips and added ½ cup of chopped pecans. I will try a couple for breakfast tomorrow.

Next Day Update: I had two of the scones for breakfast. They are firmer than butter scones but still delicious. I used half whole wheat pastry flour and half King Arthur AP. I might try replacing the AP with white pastry flour next time.

[Italiancook]

I baked a recipe BakerAunt had posted about: Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies. Thanks for telling us about this recipe, BA. I'll make them again. Because I had leftovers from a neighbor's fudge gift, I used 1/4 cup milk chocolate chips, 1/4 cup semi-sweet chips & 1/4 cup bittersweet chips. I also used the recipe amount of peanut butter chips. I don't stock old fashioned oats, so I used the quick-cooking (not instant) oats. Perhaps that's the reason, I found that I had to use my fingers to form some of the dough balls that collapsed a little after scooping. I used an Endurance 18/8 scoop and it made 36 cookies. They're a little bigger than I prefer, but I didn't complain when I ate two while watching an historical movie tonight. My husband? He complained. He wants oatmeal raisin cookies.

[Mike Nolan]

I wound up with 24 chocolatines, I used a somewhat different process for preparing and enrobing the butter block, at first I was afraid it was going to be a total mess, but as I did additional turns (4 in all) it got better looking with each turn. I will probably try the previous method again when I make another batch of croissant dough over the weekend (requested by my son), it's a bit more work up front but that probably pays off during lamination. There were a few left over after the party, I bagged them and put them in the freezer. That should keep them from getting stale between now and Sunday.

[BakerAunt]

On Thursday, I finally had time to use the spaghetti squash that I had roasted last week to bake my adaptation of Ken Haedrich's Spaghetti Squash and Parmesan Cheese Quiche for lunch today and for the next five days. I have adapted it to replace butter with olive oil, heavy cream with low-fat evaporated milk, and an oil crust. For my crust recipe, I replaced the whole wheat pastry flour with fine cornmeal (by weight). I used 1/3 cup of canola with enough olive oil for half a cup, because I did not know how the cornmeal would work with the oil. I like the flavor. Back when I was making butter crusts, I used a cornmeal butter crust recipe, so it was great to know that I can adapt my oil recipe to make a cornmeal crust.

[chocomouse]

That's a good deal, Joan. My grocery store has had KAF all-purpose flour at 3.99 for 5 lbs for a couple of weeks now. But last week I bought 50 lbs of Sir Lancelot, the commercial size, at the KABC store for $37.46, which was 20% off, on sale. What breaks my budget is the 2 or 3 lb bags of Super 10 or Harvest Grains or Pumpernickel for $14.95. I've been making Christmas cookies and do not want to use the regenerative whole wheat that I recently bought in those, but am anxious to try it.

If anyone is interested in a road trip -- KAF usually has a 20% off "friends and family" sale with 20% off most everything (except appliances, gift cards, and a couple more things) shortly before Easter. We could all meet for lunch in the Cafe. Their sandwiches are superb - on their own bread, of course, and amply filled with turkey, cheese, lettuce, your choices of course.

[Mike Nolan]

Today is the day MIT announces who has been accepted under the early admission program for 2025. MIT was our granddaughter's first choice.

MIT is releasing the list at 6:28 this evening. (That's 2 x PI for you non-geeks.)

[aaronatthedoublef]

I made more molasses cookies. I made a double batch to give-away.

It's also a ciabatta week. I usually would cut and bake the whole batch then freeze what I didn't need and thaw. Last batch I tried leaving the dough in the fridge and baking as needed. I did cut and freeze some dough then thaw and shape as needed. That works but not as well and I still need to work out the timing for thawing/shaping/rising. Pulling off and shaping some cold dough really is the best option.

I kept my challah dough in the refrigerator for a month and it still had some rise in it. I did not try eating it because I didn't want to risk making myself sick.

I also have been letting them rise at room temp under a quarter sheet of parchment. This morning I let it rise at room temp inside a tented baking bag. They came out higher so maybe the parchment has been weighing them down?

I made New Haven style pizza but for some reason the dough was really elastic. I took it out of the freezer and let it thaw in the refrigerator then for the last few hours I let it sit on the counter. I will try thawing and rising for longer. This may make it a little more relaxed.

Anyone ever converted from compressed yeast to instant? I have a recipe that calls for .8 oz of compressed yeast. The calculator I found on the web (https://www.omnicalculator.com/food/yeast-converter) says this is 7.5 g.

[BakerAunt]

I'm chiming in a little late. We arrived home to freezing temperatures on Wednesday. I was going to post on Friday, and the internet company took down our internet to work on it. We were without it until about 15 minutes ago when it was finally fixed.

Scott and I enjoyed our time with Joan! She sent us home with two loaves of banana bread and half a pound cake. We will finish the banana bread tonight. We each had a slice of the pound cake the next day at a rest area. (We needed it, because the traffic was surprisingly heavy all day.) After we arrived home, I sliced the rest into six pieces, wrapped each well and popped them into the freezer for emergency desserts!

Joan also sent a bag of treats for Annie May, who is appreciative!

Joan is the second member of the group that I have met in person. Joan and I calculated that we have been talking online for about ten years, first in the Baking Circle and now at Nebraska Kitchen. When Scott and I were still in Lubbock, we were able to meet Mrs. Cindy and her husband, The Saint (her name for him) when they came through on a trip to New Mexico. It is always special to meet another member!

[navlys]

Here's my refrigerator story. We did not realize that we had a slow leak in our ice maker line....for over a year. When our baseboard in the cut out for our refrigerator started bulging out we realized we had an issue. We discovered that the ice maker line (made of plastic) had a crack and voila! The plumber replaced the line with a stainless steel ? line. Bottom line my kitchen floor and beyond has mold as do the walls near the fridge. We have been a week without the use of our kitchen. The floor which runs from our kitchen through our dining area and living area will have to be replaced because floor warehouses no longer store samples.

[Mike Nolan]

So tonight we finished off the chicken marsala.

It's been 3 or so years since this fridge was worked on, and it is, after all, almost 28 years old. And replacements aren't going to fit in the same space, SZ's current models are about 6 inches higher. There was another maker (Frigidaire, I think) making one that fit in the same space as two SZ's side-by-sides, but when we looked at this two years ago there was something like a 6 month backorder list. I'll probably call the appliance store this week, just to see what they say.

[Mike Nolan]

Diane is making a German's sweet chocolate cake for a friend's birthday (a few days late, it was last week), and I'm busy being her commis.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm pretty sure I read all of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books, though I'm missing a couple of them now. I recently reread several of them, somehow they're just not as enjoyable as they were 40 years ago, but as I recall the last few in the series were a bit disappointing even back then. Rumors of an unpublished book (with 'black' as the color in the title) that ended the series continue to circulate, though the MacDonald estate has denied its existence many times.

A continuing series of books is a challenge for an author, sometimes they just run out of new ideas, and reading them, or especially rereading them, makes you realize how repetitive the series has become.