[Mike Nolan]

I made a pizza for supper tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

Smoked pork chops for supper again here.

[Mike Nolan]

We had spaghetti squash from the garden with some of my tomato sauce, also from this year's garden, with mushrooms and ground beef added, plus one slice each of oven cheese toast on keto-friendly bread.

[Mike Nolan]

You can't always trust the Internet on food issues, especially food safety, but the USDA guidelines tend to be on the really conservative side, so as sources they tend to balance out. One thing about having bread dough in the fridge, if it goes bad it's usually pretty obvious. But people have been keeping sourdough starters in their refrigerators for decades and I've never heard of anyone dying from sourdough food poisoning. (One of the bacteria strains that is likely to grow in bread dough is Clostridium perfringens, often cited as one of the leading causes of food poisoning but which is also the active leavening ingredient in salt-rising bread.)

Back when Peter Reinhart was working on his 'Artisan' bread book, I tested several of his recipes, including one where you made up a big batch of lean dough and took out just enough of it to make that day's bread. I think I made 2 baguettes a day for about 9 days, and it was interesting to see how the baked bread changed as the dough aged.

Around 20 years ago I was asked to talk to the sports journalism students at the University of Nebraska, as I have been running multiple online/email discussion groups on sports since 1991; it wound up being an extended session on just how trustworthy the Internet is. I said then, and it has certainly come true, especially over the last decade, that the Internet would be weaponized by various factions to promote their versions of 'truth'. The 1993 New Yorker cartoon with the caption "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" was prescient.

[Mike Nolan]

The Internet says that bread dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to two weeks, but I think that doesn't apply to doughs with egg in them, they will start to go bad after 3-4 days in my experience.

I find a lean dough will start to smell, look and bake like like sourdough by about day 6.

[Mike Nolan]

We had the last of the potato-leek soup tonight, and I had a salad as well

[Mike Nolan]

I have at least 7 different digital scales, and I've cross-tested them several times and found them pretty consistent as long as you stay away from the high and low end of their respective ranges. I have 25 and 50 gram weights for testing the lower range ones, the bigger ones I usually test with a pound of butter.

The biggest of them can handle up to about 35 pounds, I find that useful for weighing large batches in the pot, like when I make 15 quarts of beef stock in a pot that weights over 8 pounds. (I usually have to put a 6 inch cake ring on the platform when weighing a big pot, or I can't see the display.)

Two of them can measure in 1/10th of a gram, I find them useful for baking because I often resize a recipe up or down, so 1 tsp of salt (around 6 grams) may become 4.8 grams. I've also been using one of them to measure out chemicals for the new hydroponic system.

The smallest of them can measure in milligrams. The thing I used it for most recently was to measure the specific gravity of a batch of tomato sauce. (I weight out 10 ml of sauce in a graduated cylinder, water will come out to almost exactly 10 grams, the sauce came out at about 11.5 grams, so it had a specific gravity of 1.15.

My wife prefers one scale that handles up to about 15 pounds, I mostly another than has a similar upper range. (The one she uses is an older MyWeigh KD-8000 that the on/off button has lost the cover over the switch, but it still works. I will probably replace it with another KD-8000 at some point.)

[Mike Nolan]

In honor of today's election, we had pork for dinner.

[Mike Nolan]

Odd, that link is supposed to be a 'gift' one, and it works on my iPhone. I wonder if browsers are messing with that.

[Mike Nolan]

The taller one on the right appears to have grown about a half-inch in the last day. I'm hoping to transplant another tomato over the weekend, and the 4th in another week or two.

The real challenge will be to see if I can get them to the fruiting/vegetative stage and actually get tomatoes from them, hopefully some time in January. There are a lot of things that can go wrong between now and then. I've got water quality monitoring in place and have been tracking pH (mainly) which is running high, despite adding citric acid several times I've also got the beginnings of an algae problem, so I'm setting up a UV sanitizer on the drip lines to see if that gets the algae under control.

[Mike Nolan]

So we had tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches tonight, plus a salad.

[Mike Nolan]

I think this is the 2nd latest we've ever had tomatoes off the vine, one year we got some on November 11th. With no sub-30 temperatures in the forecast until the 16th, we could beat that this year, but the vines are pretty bare after today.

[Mike Nolan]

There were 3 tomatoes among the ones I picked today that were big enough that I made breadless tuna melts instead. A nice garden bonus meal.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's what the tomato plants look like 2 days after being moved to the grow buckets. Looking good so far.

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[Mike Nolan]

I picked a few tomatoes today. My wife said: "Off dead vines?"

I said, "No, Miracle Max says they're only mostly dead."

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