Search Results for '("C'

[BakerAunt]

My husband felt that he had not started the bell peppers early enough, so he will plant those in pots so that they can overwinter in the house at the end of the season. Our beans have started coming up, as have plants for the two potatoes. We are still waiting on the squash to make its appearance. He also planted a few snow peas.

Two of the tomato plants got broken when a grow light got knocked on to them in the house, so Scott told me to go ahead and buy another tomato plant at the farmers market. There I encountered a self-proclaimed tomato geek, who had an amazing variety. As they were $3 apiece, or two for $5, I naturally came home with two. One is a Dester Indiana. The story is that the seeds were brought by a German man to Indiana, and he gave some to an Amish woman. I couldn't resist the story. The other plant, also an heirloom, is a Goliath, which is a variety that does not grow very tall. It's supposed to be sturdy and to continue producing fruit until a freeze. If we have a good season, I should have lots of different tomatoes with which to play in the kitchen.

My husband also bought seed for a fairy tale pumpkin--a variety I discovered at the farmers market a couple of years ago but have been unable to get since then. (There is someone else who likes the variety who usually gets there before the market opens and grabs the one or two that they have in their selection. The idea is to plant the seed in a large grow bag left over from when I used to plant a garden and place it on the side of the house, then let the vines run along the sunny side, and perhaps let any pumpkins that develop rest on the sidewalk. I got the idea after seeing a yard with lovely pumpkins a couple of years ago, even though most of the "yard" was pavers, with just a small spot of ground. We will have to protect the seeds until they germinate and get large enough that the chipmunks will leave the plant alone.

So far this year, we are getting regular rain and not too hot of temperatures. The black raspberry and blackberry crops look promising.

One of our two blueberry bushes has developed berries. For the second year in a row, the second one did not. If I can keep the birds off the one bush, I might get enough berries for muffins.

[Mike Nolan]

We had salads with tuna fish and a hard boiled egg.

Jack (the new cat) loves tuna water. He ignored the piece of hard boiled egg.

[RiversideLen]

Navlys, you've inspired me to make a stir fry tonight. I have some rotisserie chicken left and was undecided how to have it tonight. I have the veggies chopped up (carrot, onion, kale and broccoli and a little garlic), the chicken is off the bones and cut up, just have to do the cooking now. I'm thinking a little angel hair pasta with it.

[Mike Nolan]

You'll find most of the consumer brands are pretty secretive about the percentages of cocoa solids and cocoa butter in their products, most of the professional products are very open about that same information, because they know professional confectioners need that information to produce the desired results. (In chocolate school there was considerable discussion about what happens at various levels of cocoa solids and cocoa butter, and we made a couple of similar recipes adjusting the amount of cocoa butter to see for ourselves what happened.)

The exceptions at the retail level appear to be in the dark chocolate products, where 60% vs 72% or whatever cacao is used more as a marketing tool.

One of the big differences between a couverture chocolate and a coating (or compound) chocolate is that the coating/compound ones generally don't need to be tempered before using. (Whether they would temper properly is debatable, since tempering is the process of controlling the formation of the cocoa butter fat states, and if there's not much cocoa butter, there's nothing to temper.)

I find this page helpful, I have the chart taped to a kitchen cabinet door:

The Polymorphs of Chocolate

[Mike Nolan]

From the World Wide Chocolates site:

Couverture chocolate is classified as a higher-quality baking chocolate due to it containing a higher percentage of cocoa solids and cocoa butter.

I've seen couverture grade chocolate available in chip form, in callets (essentially larger chips), in chunk form, in small bar form and in large bar form. There are some advantages to each shape, depending on what you're doing with it. If you're melting them, the shape really doesn't matter except that it might speed up the process of melting them.

[chocomouse]

Today made a new recipe for "Cowboy Cookies", which includes oatmeal, coconut, pecans (I used walnuts), and chocolate chips. They are just OK, but not great. I think the chocolate overwhelms the flavors of the coconut and nuts. I'm sure my husband will love them! But I'll not be making them again - there are too many great cookies recipes waiting to be made.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Your baking all looks great. Maybe we could schedule a My Nebraska Kitchen meet up? We had the virtual pizza night during Covid.

This week was supposed to be a challah week but my logistics partner is laid up after surgery so we're skipping May. But I think I'll bake her one next week.

We're expanding challah production. Not quite sure how we'll do it yet. One of the rabbis wants to have more people involved and I also want to do this for a second congregation. Part of this too, is to convince people who are already making their own challah to give a loaf away. Most traditional challah recipes will make two loaves (at least). It's tradition to have two loaves on your sabbath table. It would be great if everyone took one of those loaves and gave it someone else.

[Mike Nolan]

Haven't heard of it. I will say that I've read far too many articles on kitchen design that were full of terrible advice.

Commercial kitchens and home kitchens seldom share design characteristics for both practical and aesthetic reasons, and I'm trying to remember who the chef was, but he was able to help design the kitchen layout for a newly built restaurant, and he did some things that are seldom done. One of them was he put the area where dirty dishes are taken when bussing tables just inside the door to the kitchen. I've been in my share of commercial kitchens, the dirty dish area is often towards the back of the kitchen, requiring the staff to walk back and forth across the kitchen with each load of dirty dishes.

IMHO one of the worst trends ever in commercial kitchen design was the 'open kitchen' concept, where the 'pass' is little more than a half-wall or counter and you can see and hear what's going on in the kitchen. This is part of what contributes to restaurants being so noisy that people have to shout at each other while sitting across from each other. (And I don't want to hear the staff swearing at each other, either, even if it is in Spanish.)

[Mike Nolan]

I did make keto-friendly cheesecake filling last night, 11 custard cups with about 100 grams each (under 5 carbs.)

[BakerAunt]

Your cheese bread sounds delicious, Skeptic.

I needed to use the last of my Cara Cara oranges, so I found a quick bread recipe, "Barley Orange Bread" in Bernard Clayton, Jr.'s New Complete Book of Breads (expanded 2nd edition, pp. 177-179). It uses just barley flour, which appealed to me, since my husband and I are both fond of barley. I baked it, with a few changes on Thursday. I reduced the baking powder from 1 Tbs. to 2 ½ tsp. because the larger amount always seems to me to leave an aftertaste, and I find that the Bakewell Cream baking powder outperforms other brands. The rise was fine on the baked bread, but the center of the loaf has a slight depression. I wonder if 2 tsp. baking powder and ¼ tsp. baking soda (to offset the acidity of the orange juice) would correct that slight defect. (Cass would have known!) The recipe has a complex boiling of orange rind and creating a kind of syrup with it and half the sugar, but the headnote in the 2nd edition of Clayton's book, unlike in the 1st, says that you can skip that if you do not mind assertive orange flavor. However, he does not say how to compensate for the syrup. I decided to cut the amount of water used to make the final syrup (which I did not make) in half, as I assume at least half would have evaporated in the 25-minute cooking time. I added 1 Tbs. milk powder, and I replaced 3 Tbs. of butter or shortening, melted, with 3 Tbs. avocado oil. I altered the mixing instructions to mix the wet ingredients first, along with the sugar into which I had mixed the orange zest. The pans called for were either a 9" x 5" or two 7" x 3". I used three 2 ½" x 5" loaf pans. I baked for 38 minutes but perhaps should have taken then out after 35, Once they have cooled, I will wrap up two for freezing, and the other I will wrap and allow to rest for a day or two, as Clayton says a richer flavor will develop if allowed to rest for at least a day. As we have dessert for the next two days, that works perfectly.

[Mike Nolan]

Nothing special planned for Memorial Day (officially tomorrow) here.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm planning to do an experiment with keto-friendly ingredients to see how individual ingredients affect the taste and texture. I've got a base recipe (yeast, butter, vital wheat gluten, salt, eggs and psyllium husk powder), that'll be my control recipe, then I'll make small batches adding one of the other ingredients. This might be the first of several such tests, because there are other ingredients I'd like to test as well as testing combinations to see what different ratios of ingredients does.

The ingredients I'll be testing this time are: Golden flax powder, almond flour, oat fiber, whey protein isolate, and sunflower seed flour.

[Mike Nolan]

We taught our other cats, most of whom we got when they were small, not to jump up on the table or kitchen counters by using a spray bottle of water.

Whether that training method will work on an older cat is uncertain. The vet said he's probably 2-3 years old.

He has apparently lived on his own outdoors since last August according to my sister-in-law's neighbors. He wants to go outside, too, but that's not going to happen anytime soon, mostly because right now we're not sure he'd come back in or even stay in the neighborhood. And my wife doesn't want him hunting her birds. (The foxes may get some birds, I'm pretty sure I heard one get a rabbit the other day, and we've seen a fox chasing squirrels. The Cooper's hawk gets some birds, too , though I haven't seen him lately.)

[chocomouse]

My last cat (of 19 years) did not get up on the counters except to watch the asparagus (and only asparagus, not other veggies/foods) going round and round in the microwave. Jus waiting for it to be done so he could have his share. And he'd snag it off the plate if you didn't feed it to him fast enough. He did not eat human food, except for asparagus and tuna juice - only the juice, not tuna fish.

[BakerAunt]

Mike--I agree about having the ability to close off the kitchen when there is a pet. With some projects, I do not want the dog in the kitchen because either she or I might get hurt. Of course, I am in the camp of the no open concept kitchen, even though I ended up with one.

I had a beloved Siamese cat for many years. She considered it beneath her to get on tables or countertops. She preferred the back of an armchair near my typewriter. (Yes, that was before computers.) Most of my family's cats happily jumped up on countertops. One slurped tea from my mother's unattended large mug--but only if she put milk in it. A favorite place was on top of the refrigerator--back in the days of non-enclosed refrigerators. One cat once jumped up to the top, noted that another was already there, seemed to freeze in the air, just as in the cartoons, then sailed over the refrigerator and onto a table. I did not witness this acrobatic routine, but my mother did and told us about it.

It's a good sign that your cat wants to explore the house, but as you note, it will require some rearranging to prevent problems.