[Mike Nolan]

We had chili and cinnamon rolls.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches, a nice tummy warmer on a cold day, plus some salad from the Aerogarden.

[Mike Nolan]

We had leftovers here.

[Mike Nolan]

Spaghetti tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

I have two loaves of semolina bread in the oven this evening.

[Mike Nolan]

We had cheese tortellini with diced tomatoes.

[Mike Nolan]

I just sliced up the last of the semolina bread, time to make more tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

I made about a quart of Thousand Island dressing on Thursday, we finished it last night. (I did send some of it home with a friend, who really loves Thousand Island dressing, but can't eat most of it because it often has olives or olive oil, which she is allergic to.)

The Salanova hydroponic crisp curly pelletized lettuce seed I got from Johnny's has been great, I've already gotten a second picking from the first three I picked last week and I should be able to pick more tomorrow. It looks like a frisee but it is sweet like a romaine.

I got a big container of vegetable beef soup out of the freezer for dinner tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

Watched Nebraska pull off the upset against Iowa in football, now I'm watching the Nebraska women's volleyball team struggle against Wisconsin, a team they've lost 9 straight matches
to, including the national championship match last December.

Lunch was leftover salad, supper was leftover turkey, stuffing and beans, followed by a piece of chocolate cream pie.

[Mike Nolan]

The chocolate cream pie, made with chocolate pate sucree and topped with meringue.

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[Mike Nolan]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Busy day in the kitchen here, with dinner planned for 5:30, but I've got my schedule posted and there are plenty of rest breaks in it, so I don't totally wear out. Right now we're watching the Macy's parade.

I've got the chocolate pie filled and cooling, I'll make meringue once it is a bit cooler. (I'd prefer a Swiss or Italian meringue, but my wife prefers French meringue, even though it has a tendency to weep.)

I tried something a bit different when I was blind baking the pie. I cut a 12" circle of parchment, then made slits around a third of the way in all around so that when I put it in the pie pan the slits folded over each other, which avoids having parchment wrinkles. Seemed to work fairly well. I also chilled the dough after putting it in the pan, that's supposed to reduce shrinkage some.

I read an interesting article online about various ways to blind bake a pie, their preferred way was to use aluminum foil then fill it with granulated sugar and cook it at a lower temperature for an hour. It is supposed to reduce shrinkage and also results in making a batch of toasted sugar. I didn't do that because I don't have a lot of recipes that use toasted sugar, though some might benefit from it even if they don't call for it. (I'd also have to find a place to store it!)

[Mike Nolan]

Simple fare ahead of Thanksgiving here: macaroni and cheese. I added ground beef to mine, Diane added some ham and havarti cheese to hers.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got pie crusts on my to-do list for tonight, 2 bottom crusts, 1 top crust and 1 blind-baked bottom crust that is chocolate pate sucree, for a chocolate cream pie. I'll make my sweet potato pie tomorrow and blind bake the pate sucree but make the chocolate cream pie filling on Thursday morning. This will also give me a set of crusts for an apple pie after our son and granddaughter get here for Christmas.

[Mike Nolan]

I use my KA mixer to cut in the butter, and that takes less than a minute, so butter crusts aren't all that time-consuming for me. I weigh the butter and water, cut the butter up into cubes, chill both of them for a while, then throw the butter in the mixer, holding back about 25% of the flour until after the butter has been cut in and before adding the water.

I use a 5" or 6" ring with some plastic wrap in it to weigh out the amount of dough for each pie crust; that keeps the counter cleaner, all I have to do is fold over the plastic wrap. I use a coffee tamper to flatten the dough into a solid disk.

A trick I learned in a BBGA online class is to take some parchment and wrap it around the top of the bowl as a shield to keep the flour from spilling out before starting it, since I don't have a bowl shield for my mixer.

[Mike Nolan]

Using a bench knife for fraissage would be good for those of us with hot hands.

At SFBI, they had us use a chef's knife to cut in the butter the first time we made pie crust, to show us what the dough should look like. Afterwards we could use a mixer or a food processor.

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