[BakerAunt]

Dinner for tonight is salmon and couscous with Greek seasoning, along with microwaved frozen peas.

[BakerAunt]

I'll post it later today, Skeptic. They remind me a bit of biscuits.

I use 1/3 cup canola (or sometimes olive oil) in place of butter. Of course that does not work for every recipe. (I've had to give up a lot of cookies and shortbread.) Butter is a big one, since a single tablespoon contains 7 g saturated fat, and most women should limit themselves to 11g per day. I try to make sure that the saturated fat that I do consume includes some healthy fats. Canola oil has 1 g saturated fat per Tablespoon, and olive oil has 2 g, but both contain other healthy fats. Ditto with eggs.

For cheese, I stick with small portions of 2% pre-grated cheese (I can't get it ungrated where I live) or low-fat mozzarella (no more than 3g per oz.). Some low-fat mozzarella cheese sticks are 1.5g saturated fat, and they do give a nice calcium boost, so I include those as snacks. I drink 1% milk. While I use about 3/4 cup whole milk when making yogurt, it gets combined with 1% milk and some milk powder, so the saturated fat remains low, and I do need the dietary calcium.

I still use some butter--in streusel toppings, but I usually halve the streusel and keep the butter to a minimum.

We do not eat much beef, and we stick with less fatty pork. We eat a lot of chicken, as well as tuna and salmon. I cook my chicken on a rack and pour off the fat and do not eat the skin. (I do however roast whole chickens on potatoes and carrots, so some fat is included there.) I try to incorporate more beans, but my husband and most beans do not get along, so I do most of those recipes for myself for lunch. We do a lot of lean ground turkey, which I try to pair with ingredients that will make it not so bland.

I eat steel-cut oats for breakfast almost every morning. My cholesterol was 25 points lower last year (and that was with having eaten breakfast). I'm curious as to what it will be at my next doctor's visit.

[BakerAunt]

I, too, searched the Nebraska Kitchen site, and I concur with Mike's assessment that the recipe is not here.

[BakerAunt]

The story is indeed behind a paywall.

It makes me sad to think of all that wasted flour. One bright spot would be that if anyone is interested in picking up a lightly used bread machine, they should start popping up at home sales and thrift shops. People who buy bread machines do not often realize that it is not a "dump it all in a forget about it" activity. Most bread machines do not give the kind of information that would help people use them effectively, since I find mine most useful for mixing and kneading dough. I'd never bake in it.

We are living in a society where a lot of people expect instant results. Bread making and gardening require a focus on process, and both demand that the practitioner pay attention, and perhaps change the process while proceeding. As Mike notes, people do not realize that it takes time to master skills. What I thought that the former KAF Baking Circle did well is that it brought together a number of people who helped new bakers master skills. I don't think that the KABC Facebook site creates the same sense of community.

We do have that community here at Nebraska Kitchen, whether it was helping Italian Cook develop her pizza skills or Chocomouse her bagel skills. I've benefitted more than once from other people's suggestions when I had a baking issue. We are also generous here with sharing what we learn--and admitting our not so successful bakes, while celebrating the great ones. We are a lot less intimidating than some baking sites, and I wish that we could have been noticed by more of those would-be bakers. Maybe more of them would have stuck with the baking they began.

[BakerAunt]

I made another batch of tomato sauce. I freeze it in 1-quart yogurt containers, which is about 3 ¾ cup, which is a good amount for what I use when I cook.

[BakerAunt]

On Tuesday, I made dough for my Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers. I’ll bake it at the end of the week or early next week.

[BakerAunt]

Hi, Skeptic--it's good to see you posting again. I had two of the scones at lunch. I warmed each up, wrapped in waxed paper for 40 seconds, and they were almost as good as fresh. I did have some jam on one. If you are interested, I'll post the recipe as I've developed it so far. I hope to try a whole wheat pastry flour version. I like the sweet taste that the barley gives these scones. The recipe uses only 1 Tbs. sugar, and it made eight.

[BakerAunt]

Perhaps the sweet potato interacted with the split peas?

[BakerAunt]

To go with the rest of the soup for Sunday dinner, I decided to try baking the recipe for Classic Scones that appeared in the May 2004 issue of Bon Appetit (p.90). These are a Scottish scone which only calls for 1 Tbs. of oil and no butter. I have written about it in the thread where I first asked about it: British vs. American Self-Rising Flour. These are delicious, and I will do more experimenting with the recipe.

[BakerAunt]

I did some additional research by pulling out Shirley O. Corriher's Bake Wise and reading about self-rising flour--the American kind. She is an advocate for buying self-rising flour because the leavener is evenly distributed, which she says is hard to achieve. She mentions that self-rising flour is usually lower in protein than AP flour. She also notes that "commercial flour companies have more leaveners available to them than home cooks, and they have complete control over the time that bubbles are produced" (p. 57).

So, any substituting we do for self-rising flour will inevitably not equal what the self-rising flour would do.

I also looked at two examples she gave of recipes where the author apparently did not realize that self-rising flour contains leavening. Those recipes looked a lot like the one in Bon Appetit. Corriher gives the leavening guidelines as 1-1 1/4 tsp. baking powder per cup of flour in the recipe or 1/4 tsp. baking soda per cup of flour in the recipe. From what I can gather, self-rising flour also contains salt.

I decided, based on this information, that Bon Appetit made an error years ago and included leavening that should NOT have been included.

I baked the recipe for these Classic Scones using half barley flour and half General Mills AP. (I might try it with half WW pastry and half regular pastry flour next time.) My idea was to lower the protein of the flour and use half whole grain--and I like how barley flour performs in cakes. I used 2 tsp. baking powder and 1/4 tsp. baking soda, and 1/8 tsp. salt. I used buttermilk in place of the whole milk, and I used canola oil for the one Tbs. of vegetable oil.

These baked very nicely. They are tender but substantial--one was enough at dinner tonight with soup. I would bake this variation again. I plan to try a blend of whole wheat pastry flour and white pastry flour next time to see if I can create an additional variation.

Thank you to CWCdesign for helping to point me in the right direction as I was thinking about this recipe. It's nice to have other bakers and cooks to consult when I get stumped.

[BakerAunt]

That bread looks delicious, Mike.

With the weather starting to cool, I'm beginning to think about rye bread again. I really liked the Pumpkin Rye bread recipe on Ginsberg's blog (not in the book), which I made three or four times last year. I was able to buy three pie pumpkins at the farmers market on Saturday, so there is pumpkin rye bread in our future, especially if I can buy some additional pie pumpkins next week.

[BakerAunt]

Sunday morning breakfast was my own recipe for Wholegrain Waffles (whole wheat, cornmeal, buckwheat, wheat germ, and flax). I decided to wait to stir in the oil until after I mixed in the combined eggs and buttermilk. They seem to come out less soggy and crisper this way, so I will mix that way in the future.

[BakerAunt]

For Saturday dinner, I made my Spaghetti Squash-Turkey Casserole, which is a faux lasagna in that it uses spaghetti squash strands rather than noodles. I used the batch of sauce that I made earlier this week. The spaghetti squash was a 6 lb. one from today’s farmers market. The recipe calls for 4 lbs., but I went ahead and used it all after roasting it. This recipe is a favorite for fall and early winter. It is especially good tonight with cooler temperatures and drizzling rain. We wouldn't mind harder rain. Our area is in drought and the lake level is lower than it has been in the past five years.

[BakerAunt]

On Friday, I baked the first pumpkin bread of the season, albeit from pumpkin frozen almost two years ago. I used my adaptation of the Whole-Grain Pumpkin Bread recipe posted here at Nebraska Kitchen. As we are getting some cooler weather, I pulled out two Nordic Ware loaf pans with pumpkin designs and used those for two loaves. I will freeze one, but the other is slated for desserts for the next few evenings.

[BakerAunt]

The West Texas city in which I used to live had a glass crushing machine. The glass was very popular with people who used it in garden areas to prevent weeds. They never had any left. Then the machine broke, it would be expensive to fix, and that was that. Lubbock never did have curbside recycling--well, they did, but it depended on colored bags in the dumpster with the trash, and it turned out none of it was being recycled. We always took our recycling to a drop-off place, but there was the same problem with people not paying attention to what should go in what bin, and what should not.

Where we live now, in north central Indiana, there has been recycling for around twenty years, but the company does not make an effort to educate people as to what can be put into the bins and what cannot. It's on the company website, but a lot of people do not bother looking at the website. Mixing paper in with plastic cans, and glass means that everything has to be dry, or the paper and cardboard is ruined for recycling. The glass, cans, and plastic ae supposed to be empty and clean. So, that is already a barrier for people who want a quick fix.

One of our friends noted her neighbor's recycling bin had blown open. When she went to close it, she found it full of nice towels and linens. She pulled them out, washed and kept some, washed and donated others. The next recycling day, she looked inside and found lots of nice pots and pans--some much better than what she had, so she retrieved them, washed and kept some and donated the others. She decided to ask the wife. It's a summer/vacation home for them, and like a lot of houses around the lake, it was bought complete with furniture and contents. The woman told her, "I do not like using stuff that belonged to someone else." OK, but she had no clue that such items do NOT belong in the recycling bin.

More common errors are the pizza boxes, recyclables in plastic bags which mess up the equipment, the wrong numbers (and I get this last one because some of those numbers are hard to find and really tiny), or items that are the correct number but not actually recyclable with the same numbers.

Recycling is much more complicated than most place's "feel good" recycling bins imply. There needs to be an effort to create a use for what can be recycled, an effort to create a system for collecting it that works, and an effort to reduce what needs to be recycled (sometimes called pre-cycling). The pandemic has exacerbated the issues with the proliferation of plastic bags from the grocery, carryout containers, disposable masks and gloves.

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