[Mike Nolan]

I broke down and ordered the Brod and Taylor dough sheeter (it's my anniversary present to myself), it should be here tomorrow. BTW, they now have a somewhat larger model, the platform is 15x35 vs 12x24, which might work better for cottage industry production, but I went with the smaller one.

[Mike Nolan]

As a non-Jew who is interested in Jewish traditions (and those of other religions), I've always wondered about the rules regarding birds of prey. I guess eating insects and grubs doesn't count, since nearly all birds do that, but what about ducks and other waterfowl, who eat fish and frogs, and possibly some warm-blooded animals as well?

Boiled cider has some of the characteristics of other cooked sugars, so I'd say the cooking process does more than just concentrate the flavor. It might be possible to reduce the water content in a low-heat environment with less impact on the cider, but that's probably not easily done in a home kitchen.

I wonder if my brix refractometer would measure the change in cider vs boiled cider?

[Mike Nolan]

I made semolina bread this evening, and my wife made her buttermilk scones.

[Mike Nolan]

Making maple syrup is one of those things that works much better on a commercial scale than in home kitchens. Choco has quite an investment in their setup.

[Mike Nolan]

I canned 7 quarts of tomato juice today.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight we had tuna melts.

[Mike Nolan]

I use the King Arthur recipe https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/brazilian-cheese-buns-pao-de-queijo-recipe, but without the garlic.

I use a #60 scoop to dish them out onto parchment. In restaurants they're often much larger, but IMHO smaller is better.

I was using the 4 cheese blend that Sams Club sold (romano, asiago, provolone and parmesan), but they've stopped carrying it, and their new 'shaved cheese' blend is terrible. These days I've been using Soiree 3 cheese blend (parmesan, romano and asiago) or Bel Gioso cheeses.

I've had them with ground pepper in them and also with bits of hot peppers or pepper flakes, they're good but strong spices can clash with the main course.

[Mike Nolan]

The chipas recipes I found online were all similar to pao de queijo (Brazilian cheese rolls.)

IMHO the key to those rolls is the cheese. You can also play with the herbs and spices in them. (Of course I consider garlic unnecessary in them, and when I made them for the Brazilian-American Friendship picnic, nobody complained that they didn't have garlic in them, they were too busy snarfing them down!)

[Mike Nolan]

We had tomato and salami sandwiches plus sweet corn.

[Mike Nolan]

We had melon and salami and sweet corn. And ice cream with hot fudge and caramel sauce.

[Mike Nolan]

How much cider do you use in a batch of challah?

I grew up in NW Illinois and the locals said some of the apple trees in the county were planted by Johnny Appleseed himself (John Chapman), though there's no evidence of that in the historical records. (He planted mostly cider apples.)

The u-pick orchard I go to that has the winesap apples I like lost its entire crop this year to one of the windstorms, so no fresh apples this year. They've had bad luck with weather, they lost most of their trees to a tornado a few years ago. I don't know if the orchards in Nebraska City have any winesaps this year, and they're 50 miles away. Maybe I'll check with them in a few weeks, winesaps don't get ripe until late September or early October.

I may have to do pizza on the grill again this weekend, yours looks really good, Len.

[Mike Nolan]

I like to mix spinach with ricotta cheese in things like Chicago stuffed pizza and lasagna.

We prefer our sweet peppers after they've turned red, too. I've tried growing yellow and orange peppers, not much luck with them, either. I've seen purple ones at the farmer's market, haven't really looked for them as plants or seeds. The guides say bell peppers are perennial plants in warmer climates, I don't have a covered porch I could over-winter them on. If I could redo one thing of our house design, I'd probably have added a solarium, possible in front of the garage or in front of the first floor guest bedroom. With a south-facing house, the back yard is not sunny enough for a standalone greenhouse, except perhaps where the vegetable garden is.

My son was growing poblano peppers in one of his Aerogardens, it looked like he was getting a nice crop of them. They're a little strong for us.

[Mike Nolan]

When I put my plants in the ground, I make sure they have some fertilizer, I've been using Osmocote, it seems to be working OK for me, with the occasional calcium additions. I left the landscape cloth in place this spring, the previous year I pulled it up, tilled in several bags of peat moss, one bag of gypsum and one of bone meal and put the landscape cloth back down again. Next year I'll probably do that again, though the landscape cloth might need to be replaced by next spring.

We had a problem with tomatoes a few years ago that we thought might have been nematodes and/or cutworms, so I seeded the usual garden area in alfalfa and buckwheat for two years, then tilled that all in. I grew a few tomatoes in another area of the yard, most did reasonably well, but I didn't have space for all 24 cages. I went back to putting tomatoes in the primary garden spot 3 or 4 years ago.

I'm tempted to find another area of the yard to seed in buckwheat, it is really pretty when it blooms and the bees just LOVE it.

Our front yard is a mess, the heat a few years ago killed off a lot of the grass, probably because we didn't water it enough. (We did not put in a sprinkler system when we built the house, though there's a water line to the front corner of the house for that purpose.)

I'm thinking of putting in buffalo grass, a low-water native grass that one of the professors in my wife's department has been promoting; we've tried reseeding with fescue twice, neither took, don't know if it was bad seed or something else. What mostly came up was what my iPhone says is St. Augustine grass, which many northern gardeners consider a weed, though it is grown in the South, and it doesn't look too bad if you keep it short.

I wonder what a front yard of buckwheat would be like and what the neighbors and city would think of it? The listings say it isn't very drought tolerant, though. I may start using it to fill in some areas in the back where the grass won't grow, it is supposed to be a good cover crop for bare soil.

I should probably move this post to the gardens thread. :sigh:

[Mike Nolan]

I thought I remembered reading in the Master Gardener literature that my wife has that they recommend against Epsom salt for tomatoes unless your soil tests show you need magnesium and sulfur, which is not common.

As this page indicates, adding Epsom salt can increase blossom end rot, because too much magnesium can limit calcium absorption.

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/lifestyle/ask-a-master-gardener-dont-use-epsom-salt-on-tomato-plants

We had a lot of blossom end rot two years ago, but I added a lot of calcium and I've only seen one instance of it so far this year.

[Mike Nolan]

I have terrible luck growing bell peppers, snap beans or cucumbers. Maybe next year I'll try starting some bell peppers inside, that worked very well for the eggplant.

I picked about 10 pounds of eggplants the other day, used a third of them in my lasagna and gave the rest away to two friends. There's still a lot of eggplant left on the plants and they are still blooming, though I'm not sure if they are still setting fruit.

Here's the Wiki entry on piperade, I also posted it in another thread:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperade

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