[Mike Nolan]

I picked some more lettuce so we're having salads with tuna fish. I'm also baking some sweet potatoes, some of which are for my wife to eat for lunches and some for another sweet potato pie.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm more of a chocolate chip cookie person, not very Christmasy, though lately I've made chocolate pecan meringue cookies the most, mostly because we've been making things that use egg yolks and I have left over egg whites to use up. My wife likes making her chocolate 'mushroom' cookies, the recipe is posted here. Neither of us do much cookie decoration. I'm not very artistic and she's got an inherited tremor that makes it difficult to do piping or precise decoration work.

[Mike Nolan]

I made some custard on Saturday.

[Mike Nolan]

We had chili from the freezer tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

We use white vinegar in the laundry room and for most cooking but use apple cider vinegar (the real stuff not the 'apple cider flavored' stuff) for dealing with calcium build-up.

The higher concentrate stuff is hard to find here, and trickier to use. 20% can be used (with masks and gloves) as a weed-killer spray, it'll kill the foliage but not the roots, so it can regrow.

[Mike Nolan]

The little oven in our 48" dual-fuel range has a removable drip pan on the bottom, under the heating element, so it is fairly easy to keep clean.

My wife only recently figured out that it comes out, after 24 years. I take it out to clean it every few months, but I don't think she's seen me do it, I usually do it when I'm cleaning around the burners and cleaning the drip trays under them.

The bigger oven is harder to clean because I'm not sure how to unplug the bottom heating element, but it does tilt upward so I can clean under it.

[Mike Nolan]

We have some ginger syrup that my wife got from her massage therapist, who uses a lot of botanicals, but we haven't opened it yet, as I'm not sure what I'd do with it. This gives me some ideas, though.

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't heard much about steam cleaning features, but I've been told it is the very high heat (> 550 degrees) in a self-cleaning feature that is the appliance-killer.

I've heard that if you put a half cup of vinegar in the oven, set it at 300 degrees, and let it boil away (it takes about a half hour), it makes the oven easier to clean after it cools. Its one of those ideas I keep meaning to try, but usually I wind up cleaning the oven just before using it, and this require some planning ahead.

[Mike Nolan]

I tend to do a lot of my baking late in the evening and into the night, so by the time the oven is cool enough to clean, hopefully I'm asleep. But I should clean it a lot more often than I do. I never use the self-cleaning feature, my wife thinks we've used it once in 24 years, if so I don't know when that was.

Our appliance repair guy tells us that self-cleaning oven features are referred to among repairmen as 'guaranteed repair work or new appliance sales'.

[Mike Nolan]

I'll look for that, I did find another site with a recipe that just used AP flour, salt and water, but you roll/stretch the dough out into sheets and cut it into strips. I think I'd rather stick to my pasta roller and the semolina egg noodle recipe we're used to.

Semolina is lower in glutenin than most flours, or higher in gliadin, if not both. Gliadin is the one that leads to extensibility for pasta. I may try using it on a test batch, sometime.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight's soup was a major disappointment. I don't think I put in enough vegetables. The lamian noodles didn't pull very easily and they were gummy after they were cooked, with kind of a strange taste, probably from the nutritional yeast and they probably needed more salt. If I try making them again, it'll be with a different recipe.

The chicken leg quarters that I used were probably too old, the chicken tastes freezer burnt and rubbery, the latter may be due to overcooking.

I saved the broth from the soup, I thought it was OK after adding some more salt and pepper but am throwing out the noodles and the chicken. I think the rest of the stock is OK, though, so I'll get it ready for the freezer. This is the first thing I've made in a long time that we basically are throwing out.

We did have a nice salad from the Aerogarden tonight, a mixture of black seeded Simpson, rouge d'hiver, romaine, buttercrunch and a little spinach. I hadn't picked it in a few days and picked a big bowl tonight, I suspect by the time we've used it up it'll be time to pick more. We'll probably be eating salads nearly every night for the next few months. Hope we don't get tired of them. (I'm doing the harvesting this time around, I think my wife got tired of doing it last time and stuff started to bolt, which made it bitter.)

[Mike Nolan]

It was a bigger batch of chicken stock than I had realized, with about 8 pounds of backs and 5 leg quarters, so I got about 14 quarts of stock (before reducing) and I should get another 4-6 quarts from the remouillage (second wetting).

I think I'm going to try making chicken soup with Chinese pulled nooodles (lamian) using these instructions: Lamian Pulled Noodles

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making a big pot of chicken stock, I should wind up with at least 10 quarts of it, some of which will be used to make chicken soup, probably tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

Be sure to stay well hydrated, there's some indication that helps reduce the soreness from the vaccine.

[Mike Nolan]

I had some dental work done yesterday so I'm on a soft diet for a few days and had some soup for supper tonight. Earlier today I made some custard.

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