[Mike Nolan]

I'm blind-baking a pie crust this afternoon, to make a chocolate cream pie tomorrow. I made the detrempte for the croissant dough last night, I'll do the lamination steps this evening, then let it rest overnight before final roll out, shaping, and baking tomorrow morning.

[Mike Nolan]

The only veal I could find for dinner tomorrow (veal marsala) was a bone-in loin chop, so I took it off the bone and am making some veal stock with the bones, I'll use that in the sauce tomorrow. It won't quite be demi-glace, but it'll be good.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm planning another batch of croissant dough this week, for chocolatines. I talked about it more in the weekly 'cooking' thread.

This will be the third time I've used the hand laminator, hopefully I've got it figured out by now. The final roll-out will be 4 mm thick, because it's about a 40 layer dough and the ideal thickness for laminated doughs is 0.1 mm per layer. (Below that the butter doesn't stay a solid layer, it breaks up.)

[Mike Nolan]

We had ham steak with pineapple and some steamed broccoli tonight.

Friday is Diane's birthday and I'm planning veal Marsala. Finding veal was a real challenge, though. (Wrong time of year, probably, though it is getting hard to find in general.)

I'm also making a large batch of chocolatines for her Alexander class's Christmas party on Friday. I'll mix up the detrempte tomorrow and do the lamination on Thursday, that way all I have to do Friday morning is final roll-out, cut the dough into rectangles, roll them up with the chocolate sticks inside, let them rise for around 90 minutes and then bake them. They should still be slightly warm when we take them to the party.

I'll probably make another chocolate cream pie for dessert on Diane's birthday, too, but this time in a standard butter crust rather than the chocolate pate sucree I used last time. She though the meringue was over-beaten, I think it was because I used a 2-1 sugar to egg white ratio as that is supposed to prevent weeping. It also makes the meringue stiffer and not as light, so I'll drop back to 1-1 this time.

[Mike Nolan]

I can't say I've noticed a shortage of cornstarch, but I buy it in big containers at Sams Club and haven't needed to buy one lately.

I see a lot of open spots on shelves throughout the grocery store, though. I was at one store today that had NO granulated sugar on the shelf except for a couple of 10 pound bags, at $7.99.

And although the government says retail prices moderated in the last month (as if we can trust anything the government tells us), egg prices are out of sight. 2-3 weeks I bought some at Aldi for $2.19/dozen, but it took me two trips, the first time they were totally out of eggs, this past weekend they were $3.48/dozen, and I saw an article online that said the WHOLESALE price of eggs in the midwest is now over $4.50/dozen.

See https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/pybshellegg.pdf

Broccoli prices have soared, too, Hy-Vee had it for about $4.50/bunch the other day.

[Mike Nolan]

We had macaroni and cheese tonight, simple, fast and warm.

[Mike Nolan]

I tried searching for that recipe, didn't find it online, but I've never used the wayback machine.

[Mike Nolan]

We're having potato-leek soup out of the freezer tonight, and probably salad.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's a shot of the pea pod jungle, it's now taller than the Aerogarden. No sign of any blooms yet, but we're only at day 44 and they're supposed to be about a 60 day crop. But that means I may start seeing blooms soon.

They're sure thirsty, I wind up adding water to the tank nearly every day.

You can see the Salanova hydroponic crisp lettuce in the foreground, it's the curly stuff. Behind it is some hydroponic butter crunch, then some black-seeded Simpson and on the left some rouge d'hiver.

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[Mike Nolan]

We had baked pork chops tonight, they were a little tougher than I was expecting them to be. Next time I may try marinating them in buttermilk for a few hours, that's supposed to make them more tender.

We also had salad with some fresh Thousand Island dressing.

[Mike Nolan]

Leftovers tonight here, too.

[Mike Nolan]

The tupelo honey was one my wife wasn't fond of. I may have to find a local source for alfalfa honey for her, though, as she really liked it.

[Mike Nolan]

First it was donuts, then cupcakes, now cookies. There are at least a half-dozen stores in Lincoln that specialize in cookies, one of them specializes in delivering warm cookies. We recently went to a charity fundraiser where they delivered warm cookies for dessert, they were great!

Several of the cupcake places have closed. We still have a number of donut shops, though I'm almost tempted not to count Dunkin among them these days, heaven knows where those donuts are made!

Will bread ever have a bakery renaissance?

[Mike Nolan]

I've always wondered what would happen if you substituted some of the flour in the pan grease with cocoa powder.

I use butter and cocoa powder for the Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake, but cake-in-the-pan/crazy cake doesn't use any grease in the pan.

[Mike Nolan]

We wound up having some of the chili a bit later than we had originally planned. The BBGA had an online event this evening that we participated in, a honey tasting organized by the National Honey Board with five different varieties of honey. It was very interesting and there were several of the honeys that I had never tasted: avocado and tupelo. I'd had orange blossom honey, buckwheat honey is fairly easy to find around here, and I have sampled alfalfa honey in the past.

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