[Mike Nolan]

Take out pizza and lasagna here tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

We've had 2 1/2 inches of rain in the last week, after having nearly none for most of April. The grass, or what's left of it, is happy to see the rain.

[Mike Nolan]

We're having leftover french herbed chicken and my wife is baking several large sweet potatoes, some to eat, some for me to make a sweet potato pie with.

[Mike Nolan]

I baked off the second half of the punitions, and played around with them a bit, putting chocolate chips or half a Hershey bar pip on them, and then I put a lid on some of them to make sandwich cookies.

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[Mike Nolan]

I've still got another tray of cookies to bake off, but this recipe is a keeper.

[Mike Nolan]

We had the French herbed chicken tonight, with a salad and some cookies for dessert.

[Mike Nolan]

I did find some cardinal preserves in the freezer, the cookies are quite good with strawberry jam on them. Honey on them was good too, and so was the cream cheese frosting.

[Mike Nolan]

I baked the first tray of punitions today, they came out a range of shades from very light to fairly brown, which is what the recipe said would likely happen if you don't rotate the pan during the bake. I'm OK with that. The darker ones have a more complex flavor to them due to the Maillard reaction and probably some caramelization.

They're fairly classic butter cookies, tasty but a bit dull, though you could eat a big plate of them quickly if you weren't paying attention. (They're about 2 inches in diameter and weigh around 7 grams each.)

They'd be better with a dollop of jam (as the recipe suggests, I'll have to see if I have any Cardinal Preserves in the freezer) or dipped in hot chocolate, maybe even tea. Or maybe a little frosting, I've still got a little of the cream cheese frosting from the Hot Cross Buns left, we've been using it up on graham crackers.

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[Mike Nolan]

Temperature and indoor humidity have a big impact on proofing times, and even a minor variance in the flour or water can affect it, too.

I've overproofed loaves, too, there's a fairly narrow window of 'just right'.

[Mike Nolan]

Blowouts are almost always from underproofing.

There's an interesting 6-blade lame on Amazon, but it's not cheap, around $55. I assume it is primarily used for pastry.

[Mike Nolan]

I decided to postpone the chicken dish until tomorrow, I bought the chicken at the store today and when I went to get it out of the bag it was half frozen. So I stuck it back in the fridge for tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got butter softening to make the punitions dough.

[Mike Nolan]

I changed the topic heading. WordPress is good at certain things, but it has its limitations unless you want to get into some really heavy lifting development. Drupal has a similar reputation, but I think it is oriented more towards my way of writing code.

It looks like I could create a fairly simple recipe structure in Drupal, and I might even wind up doing that as an interim step, but I want one where each ingredient has multiple components: quantity, unit of measure, ingredient name and comments/instructions, so I can manipulate and analyze them, and possibly even support multiple entry formats, including one that uses something along the lines of the BBGA publication template, entering quantities in baker's math percentages.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm doing a chicken dish this evening, onions, celery, carrots, mushrooms, some wine and some herbs.

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, so far I'm fairly impressed with how it works. The grow mode cycle takes a lot longer than the 'lomi approved' cycle I had been using, and I can hear the motor start and stop repeatedly. The grow mode cycle also doesn't get as hot, that's to preserve more microorganisms, according to the manual.

It was raining today so I haven't dumped the residue out yet, but it looks pretty dry so I'm not worried about it getting weird or smelly.

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