[Mike Nolan]

Here are the chocolatines before baking:

And here they are after baking. They should probably have come out a minute earlier, they're not burnt but they're darker than I think they should be.

There was enough butter leakage that the bottoms are almost like they were fried in butter. I'll have to work on that.

A couple of them popped open, I need to work on that, I need to make sure the end of the roll is tucked fully tucked under. The one that was made from scrap pieces fell apart, but that wasn't surprising.

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[Mike Nolan]

Here's the chocolate cream pie:

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[Mike Nolan]

I only got 19 chocolatines from this batch of dough, and one of them is made up of trim scraps so it might not even stay together.

I made a double batch of the chocolate pie filling, using 75% dark chocolate and 25% milk chocolate. A single batch wasn't filling a 9" pie shell up to the top.

I'll post pictures of the chocolatines and the pie later today.

[Mike Nolan]

Oh, I'm terribly sorry to hear that, I hope it doesn't totally ruin the holidays.

[Mike Nolan]

I got in 3 letter fold turns on my croissant dough tonight, so that gives me 55 layers. I think I rushed the turns a bit and the butter was still too cold, so some of the butter I could see under the surface shattered, but I don't know if that happened all the way through.

I think this picture after turn 2 shows what happened:

Even if the butter did shatter in the inner layers, I think the croissants should be OK, though probably not quite as flaky as if the butter layers were more intact.

Next time I'll allow more time in between turns.

I made about 700 grams of croissant dough, I'm not sure how many chocolatines that'll produce, I'm planning to roll them out to 4mm and cut them into 7x11 cm rectangles. I'm hoping to get at least 24, I think I might be able to get up to about 30.

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[Mike Nolan]

I used the bones from the veal to make something close to brown sauce, so the veal marsala should be really good, because I normally just use beef stock.

[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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