Mike Nolan
Fri. Feb 27th, 2026
I managed to get in enough time over two mornings and one evening to get all the big weeds pulled in the tomato patch, hopefully I can keep it clean with shorter stints. Hot is the order of the day here for the next week or two.
I've got tomatoes on quite a few of my plants, the 4th of July ones have nice clusters of them, but they're not starting to ripen yet, so they won't make their eponymous target.
The cherry tomatoes I planted indoors in the Aerogarden are starting to bloom, haven't seen any fruit that has set yet. But I may have cherry tomatoes by the end of July.
I've had some commercial pies where eating the cardboard box the pie came in might have been a taste upgrade. Fortunately, I learned how to make a delicious pie crust at SFBI.
We had a lavash pizza with the usual ingredients (tomato chunks, artichoke hearts, mushrooms) plus some Canadian bacon.
More leftovers here.
Here's a shot showing today's bread (above) and the previous bake (using a 50-50 ratio of flours).
The semolina bread came out differently than the previous blend of flours, more of a dusty color crust and it probably wasn't developed enough. Tastes good, though.
I am making semolina bread today, I changed the proportions of flour from 50-50 to 5 parts semolina and 3 parts bread flour. The recipe that I'm trying to reproduce lists these ingredients:
Water, enriched durum flour, enriched semolina flour, unbleached enriched
flour (which includes malted barley flour), less than 2 percent of each
of the following: rice flour, salt, sesame seeds, malt syrup, yeast.
So I'm figuring the durum + semolina has to be more than 50% of the total flour. I don't know what the rice flour is used for, possibly just lubrication under the bread?
While thinking of cookies there used to be a chocolate chip cookie that was around silver dollar size and crisp, not chewy, it came in a box covered by foil, mostly brown and silver as I recall. I haven't seen it in decades, I'm sure it is long gone.
And there are those who still insist that Hydrox was better, I'm one of them. I've lost count of the number of Oreo variants there are these days.
Congratulations on 40 years, we'll be at 49 in September.
We're in leftover mode for a day or two, here, cleaning out the fridge from all the meals we made or bought while my son and his family were here. So we had bagels tonight.
Tonight we had eggs Benedict. It has been a while since I made a Hollandaise (my wife doesn't like it, she had hers without the Hollandaise), and of course the sauce broke, so I had to rescue it with another egg yolk and some water.
My son and his family will be leaving tomorrow morning, so I'm planning an afternoon of baking, most of it road food: bagels, Brazilian cheese rolls and chocolate meringue cookies.
No-knead techniques were probably around long before the middle 20th century, but the NY Times article was well-written, and well-publicized. Timing and who you know is always important.
Remember, Leibniz and Newton both came up with calculus, but Newton got most of the credit.
