[Mike Nolan]

The new gas grill is here, but it uses a different sized quick-connect valve, so we need to get a plumber out to work on the gas pipe.

[Mike Nolan]

This is more of a 'family' dessert than something I'd make for dinner with guests, I may try it again adding a little cinnamon to the butter block. The instructions have you take the butter block out of the fridge about 15 minutes before you start the lamination process, I think I'd cut that to 10 minutes in summertime, it was getting pretty soft as I made the folds. By the time you get it in the cake pan, its too late for refrigerating it to have much value.

The instructions say not to worry if it looks like a mess going into the oven, it will come out great. It looked pretty good going in, though it was a bit messy getting it onto the parchment.

We ate about half of it today, I'll be interested to see how it is tomorrow.

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[Mike Nolan]

Here's what the kouign amman looked like when it came out of the oven:

Here's what a slice of it looks like:

We think it's better with a little cinnamon and/or chocolate.

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[Mike Nolan]

It'll be burgers on the (old) grill, salad and some of the kouign amann for supper tonight.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.

[Mike Nolan]

We are planning BLT's for supper.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't think this is the article I was thinking of (I think perhaps the link I gave before and upthread was revised to a text format from a tabular one), but this looks like a pretty good table on substitutes for egg washes from a source that I use frequently:

https://bakerpedia.com/ingredients/egg-wash-substitute/

And here's a link (to an archive site, as the original site may no longer be around) that looks useful:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100913084511/http://www.piemaven.com/egg_wash.htm

[Mike Nolan]

We had sandwiches on some of the semolina bread.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not fond of chamomile and in general I think tea makes for bland baked goods. The subtleties of tea tend to get buried by flour. (I have well over a dozen types of tea in the cupboard.)

Cinnamon might be an improvement over tea. As to the internal texture, lowering the temperature and increasing the bake time might help.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm thinking there was another link to washes that included things other than egg washes, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking for it. As I recall, this one was more tabular in form.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's the link on egg washes:

https://www.cooksinfo.com/egg-wash

[Mike Nolan]

I'm a bit worried that my tomato plants got stunted a few days after I planted them, when it hit 38 degrees one night. Some of them haven't grown much in the nearly 4 weeks since then, and none of them have really taken off like I would have expected.

Hopefully I'll still get an OK crop, but maybe it'll be a few weeks later than I was hoping. Last year we had our first tomatoes by about July 6th. (They were '4th of July' plants, of course.)

[Mike Nolan]

Not all grow lights cover the same light spectrum or with the same intensity. We had some fluorescent bulbs that were supposed to be good grow lights, they didn't work very well. I've not been impressed by the incandescent grow bulbs I've seen, either.

The LED lights that Aerogarden uses work well.

So do the LED lights that my wife bought some years ago, they're made by Happy Leaf. One of the professors in her department (Agronomy and Horticulture) tested them using a light meter and they rated 100% across the portions of the spectrum he tests.

As I understand it, the reason LED lights have improved so much has do do with how they can be 'tuned' for specific crops, most notably cannabis, and their low energy usage. There was an illegal cannabis grow house busted a few blocks from here a few years ago, the cops found it by looking at electricity bills, the house was using FAR MORE than the expected electricity usage for that size house.

[Mike Nolan]

We're having a light meal again tonight, lunch at the seminar tends to be our big meal of the day.

[Mike Nolan]

The Challah Prince's website is apparently being revised; previously, you'd see a number of his loaves are quite dark. He uses an egg yolk wash and the protein in egg yolk adds a lot of color. Plus, challah is something that is better a little overbaked than a little underbaked.

It is an issue that comes up on the BBGA forums a lot, some customers will take the darkest loaves they can get, others only want the palest of them.

[Mike Nolan]

I wonder how some candied slivered almonds would work? I find that ramps up the almond flavor quite a bit.

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