[Mike Nolan]

We had spaghetti for supper.

[Mike Nolan]

Profits being up by some percentage doesn't tell you much unless you know the pattern of profits over time. Could a year ago have been way down due to the destruction of flocks caused by bird flu?

[Mike Nolan]

Diane had the last of the chili, I had some vegetable beef soup from the freezer.

Eggs were $4.79 at Hy-Vee today, and gas is back up to $3.39 at several places.

[Mike Nolan]

I wonder what makes them chewy, most peanut butter cookies seem a bit crumbly to me.

[Mike Nolan]

When I was in college, I spent a summer as an engineering aide on an Army base near home (one of LBJ's Great Society programs), basically assisting the engineers and playing around with the drafting equipment. Two of my HS classmates worked as draftsmen, and all summer I was getting pointers from the head of the drafting room. I learned more about drawing plans that summer than I did in a course on it at college. They would draw the plan in pencil then ink over it, both skills that are obsolete now.

A standard thing to do for birthdays and such was to order a batch of cinnamon rolls from a bakery in a nearby town. It was a full 18x24 sheet pan and I think it had 24 rolls. My birthday is in early September and Northwestern is on the quarter system and the fall term doesn't start until around the 3rd week of September, so I ordered a batch to celebrate my birthday that summer the last week I was working there.

[Mike Nolan]

I picked two big bowls of lettuce today, plus another 5 ounces of pea pods, and I probably missed getting all the pea pods. There'll be a stir fry on the menu some time this week.

But tonight we had salads with tuna fish.

[Mike Nolan]

If you made it, IMHO it still counts as cooking to reheat it.

[Mike Nolan]

I prefer smaller cinnamon rolls, so I can have more than one. 🙂

This is a 15x21 sheet pan (3/4 sized) and most of the rolls weigh between 1.5 and 1.75 ounces. They freeze well. I made this pan in mid-November and there are still 3 or 4 left, so I'll probably make more in the next week. This recipe uses a tangzhong dough and I use a compound butter rather than melted butter and cinnamon sugar, I just find it easier to spread on.

I don't frost them, I've been tempted to put on a light sugar syrup glaze. I did do one batch with some penuche frosting, but in general the frosting just adds carbs but not really much taste (they're plenty sweet), and my wife says it gets in the way of dunking it in chili.

Next time I'll be aiming for a total of 40 (8 rows of 5).

If I was running a bakery, I'd probably have to make them larger for them to sell well, but those dinner plate-sized ones are too big and have WAY too many carbs.

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[Mike Nolan]

Brings to mind the Al Stewart album and song from 1976, which was probably written and recorded in another year of the cat, as one ended in early 1976.

(Google says the title was inspired by his girlfriend's interest in astrology.)

[Mike Nolan]

We had fish and broccoli.

[Mike Nolan]

Shortbread with caramel and chocolate sounds more like Twix than KitKat.

Milk is slightly acetic so I suspect milk powder is also slightly acetic, but I think it is the milk sugar (lactose), fat (if not fat-free) and possibly some milk protein that makes the bread softer.

[Mike Nolan]

The KAF Whole Grains cookbook has a Scottish Shortbread recipe that uses 2 1/2 cups of oatmeal ground up in a food processor plus another 1/2 cup of wheat flour. It is very good, I've used it as a base for several apple desserts, it doesn't quite hold together well enough to be a pie crust (it sinks along the sides) but it makes a pretty good base for an apple crisp or an apple tart.

I've also made it as a bar cookie with some chopped pecans, but you have to cut it quickly as it firms up as it cools.

[Mike Nolan]

My brother continued to smoke after lung cancer surgery, and my wife's stepmother kept on smoking until the day she died of lung/brain cancer. Neither lived to age 70.

For many people it's nearly impossible to quit smoking, there are apparently some genetic factors that impact nicotine addiction. Vaping is apparently almost as hard to quit and might lead to some medical conditions that are worse than those caused by smoking.

What worries me most about the creeping decriminalization of marijuana is that the research is starting to show marijuana smoke has many of the same toxic substances as tobacco smoke, and that doesn't take into effect what THC does to the body and mind over time. (But the long term effects of alcohol use have been known for a long time, and alcohol has been around for millennia.)

[Mike Nolan]

Looking good, Aaron. I wonder if you could switch from bread flour to AP (slightly lower in protein) and leave out the cornstarch?

KidPizza (Cass) would probably recommend you use bleached flour for cookies. I keep some on hand (GM AP) for that purpose, though most of the time I use KAF unbleached AP flour.

I do keep pastry flour on hand for pie crusts, lower protein/gluten content flour has a noticeably impact on the tenderness of the pie crust.

[Mike Nolan]

An ounce is over 28 grams, I think you misread the recipe and it calls for 0.25 ounces of instant dry yeast, which would be around 7 grams or 2 1/4 teaspoons.

Generally, yeast companies tell you to use 25% more active dry yeast than instant dry yeast, but these days there are many baking sites that will tell you to just use the same amount, and the comments on these sites seem to indicate that a 1-1 replacement does not affect how the recipe performs.

There are also sites that will tell you that active dry yeast doesn't need to be proofed, but that advice seems dubious to me.

Peter Reinhart, among others, has often written that many recipes use far more yeast than they really need. This may be a holdover from recipes developed many years ago, both active dry yeast and instant dry yeast have improved over the years and a higher percentage of the yeast stays alive, meaning you need less yeast to get the job done.

Personally, I haven't used active dry yeast for several years, I buy 1 pound packages of Fleischmann's instant dry yeast and keep it in the freezer. It takes me anywhere from 2 to 8 months to use up that much yeast.

I do have some SAF Gold osmotolerant instant dry yeast, and I've been using it a bit more lately, and not just on sweet doughs. For example, I've seen several sites that recommend using osmotolerant yeast for laminated dough, like for croissants. I know several professional bakers who only use osmotolerant yeast these days.

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