[Mike Nolan]

Ruhlman's ratio book is great, it arose from his training at CIA in New York, which is the subject of another of his books: The Making of a Chef. The ratios themselves only take up two pages.

[Mike Nolan]

Part of it is recognition that guild members bake a lot more than bread, and a growing percentage of the membership is outside of the USA these days.

[Mike Nolan]

We had leftovers tonight, too, my wife had one of the blintzes our son made for lunch yesterday, I had some of the prime rib cut up on a salad.

We've probably got enough leftovers to get us through the weekend.

My wife had one of the tangzhong cinnamon rolls I made for Christmas Eve earlier today, she said it softened up nicely when heated up in the microwave. That's definitely a keeper recipe.

Here are the two recipes I started with:
tangzhong cinnamon rolls
KAF tangzhong cinnamon rolls

For quantities I mostly used the first recipe but I did make a few changes:

1. I added about a quarter cup of sugar to the dough.
2. I made a compound butter for the filling, using about 6 tablespoons of softened butter rather than 4. I find that easier to spread on the dough than putting on butter and sprinkling on the cinnamon/sugar mixture.
3. I rolled the dough out to about 22 x 16, next time I may roll it out to 24 x 16.
4. For the cream cheese frosting I used an 8 ounce package of cream cheese with 3 tablespoons of butter, so the cream cheese is more prominent than the butter in the taste profile. I probably used too much powdered sugar, the frosting is quite stiff.
5. I wound up getting 17 rolls. If I had rolled it out a bit wider I could probably have gotten that to 20 rolls which would have fit my pan better. I used a 7 blade pastry cutter to score where to make cuts, then made the cuts with a bench scraper.

[Mike Nolan]

I think as long as you know the key 'must do' and 'must not do' things and the reasonable ratios of major ingredients, it's fine to make up a cake recipe as you go.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not sure what I did wrong, but the meringue collapsed when I added the chocolate chips and nuts, so the cookies came out really flat:

They puffed up a bit when I baked them, and they taste (and crumble) like meringue, but they're supposed to be tall and puffy.

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[Mike Nolan]

I'm not sure it's even possible to trap and release ants.

In Lincoln if you trap an animal like a raccoon or a possum, you can only take them a short distance, like 400 yards, before releasing them. Like that's going to make much difference to an animal that has a normal range of a mile!

[Mike Nolan]

We seldom even see bats here, when I was growing up in rural NW Illinois we generally got one in the house about once a year.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm going to make my mother's chocolate chip meringue cookies from the left over egg whites from the frosting for the German's Sweet Chocolate Cake. They're very different from the 'forgotten chocolate meringue cookies' I've been making.

[Mike Nolan]

There are air spaces in the soffits that are necessary to prevent the attic from getting too humid and allowing mold to grow there, they're usually big enough for mice and sometimes squirrels to squeeze through. Around here a major problem is with raccoons getting into people's attics by chewing to enlarge any openings they find in wood or plastic. Overhead garage doors are another common entry point.

A few years ago I was sitting in our powder room and I heard a bird chirping, it sounded fairly close to me. Turns out a bird had either found or created a hole in the screening on the exhaust fan for that bathrom and had gotten into the piping for the exhaust fan and built a nest about two feet in.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife is making a German's Sweet Chocolate Cake tonight, she'll make the frosting and assemble it in the morning.

[Mike Nolan]

We had a cat who used to catch voles in the back yard, bring them to the door in his mouth, and try to let them loose inside the house. He did the same thing with June bugs. He found out the hard way that squirrels are much harder to catch, one nearly chewed off his tail at the base, the vet was able to save it.

Your shrew may come back, or you may find you have a whole family of them. They can get in through a hole about the size of a quarter, and many door thresholds have a gap wider than that at the bottom.

Fortunately, they aren't considered as destructive as mice, though they will foul any food they get into. Mice will chew through plastic or even metal containers to get to the food inside. Two or three years ago mice chewed a hole in a foil bag of chocolate wafers and emptied the bag. (I've used chocolate, cocoa butter and peanut butter in mouse traps, they like all three.)

[Mike Nolan]

The standalone induction units that go up to about 1800 watts will work in a standard wall outlet. You might want to have a dedicated outlet for it, like you might have for a microwave oven.

A drop-in electric range top generally uses 220 power with an outlet in the space where the surface drops in, and that's what a drop-in induction surface would use, too.

I've actually seen a standalone induction cooktop, intended for commercial use, that requires a 220 outlet but can go up to about 3000 watts. It will handle a pot up to about 14 inches in diameter, so my 24 quart induction-ready stock pot would work on it. We used one at SFBI.

If I ever remodel the basement kitchenette, I might be tempted to get rid of the two-burner ceramic cooktop and replace it with an induction unit, especially if I can get one with enough power to do canning. (That might require putting in a 220 outlet, but that's not far from a power panel.)

I'm using my 1500 watt standalone induction unit a lot more these days, it doesn't heat up the kitchen nearly as much as using a gas or electric cooktop does, which is a big plus during the summer when it is hot. We've made Cardinal Preserves (strawberry jam) in it, without heating up the entire kitchen. I've put a small room thermometer about 6 inches away from the induction unit and it says the temperature when boiling something doesn't get above 75.

[Mike Nolan]

I use our standalone induction unit a lot, but its coolest setting is still too hot for some tasks.

I started using it when I made the oyster stew on Christmas Eve, but the butter was getting too warm to poach the oysters slowly (they shouldn't sizzle), so I switched over to the electric cooktop which has continuous adjustment.

I've been thinking about switching the cooktop to induction, but we'd have to replace a number of pans, including my wife's egg pans, which aren't induction-ready

If you get a drop-in or standalone induction cooktop, make sure it has sufficiently low settings to handle things that need to be gently warmed.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got egg whites from my Hollandaise that I'll use to make chocolate meringue cookies with tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

We did have eggs Benedict (mostly) for lunch, though on Semolina bread, not on English muffins.

The Hollandaise came out very good, even if I was afraid for a while it would never thicken.

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