[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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[Mike Nolan]

It may be that he starts a new round of tomatoes because this is a teaching lab, not a hydroponics farm.

[Mike Nolan]

Defiance (which I'm pretty sure is what the first two plants are, as the Defiance package has been opened and I didn't order it until mid-September) and Better Bush are both determinates that get about 3 feet tall, Celebrity is classified as a semideterminate, it can get 6-8 feet tall but I've grown it several times in the garden and it seldom gets above the top of my 5 foot tall cages. My setup should handle plants up to about 4 feet tall, I've got a metal rod in each grow bucket and will use garden clips to hold the plants upright. The timer that controls the drip irrigation pump also has a reciprocating fan plugged into it, so that should help with pollination.

The hydroponics professor at Nebraska-Lincoln has grown tomato plants that reach about 30 feet long, 10 feet vertically and 20 feet along the floor, with stems about as thick as a broomstick. He gets about a year's worth of yield from them, pruning off the older branches after they've stopped flowering. He uses a variety developed for hydroponic gardening, he told me the seeds cost $1 each from Johnny's.

The annual open house for the fall hydroponics class is coming up the week before Thanksgiving, I'll see if I can get some photos to post. In the past he's had students that did both Kratky and Nutrient Film systems, though gravel feed ones seem more popular. (The students do them with PVC rain gutters.)

[Mike Nolan]

We had our steaks (filet for Diane, NY strip for me), plus a small baked potato (< 4 ounces), sauteed mushrooms and the last small pieces of apple pie.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm planning steaks tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

We had keto-friendly creamed tuna on biscuits. The biscuits were made with CarbQuik, they were OK but the keto-friendly biscuits I made a few months ago were better. I made them using some cream, next time I might try using butter. I also used Carbalose for the roux in the creamed tuna, it didn't get quite as thick as flour does, but it tasted like creamed tuna (though it needed more salt, probably not enough chicken bouillon.)

[Mike Nolan]

I baked a second tray of the ossi di morte cookies today, I think letting the dough hydrate for 36 hours made a big difference in how easily it rolled out, I needed a lot less extra flour this time. I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, a lot of dough for shaped cookies needs to hydrate for at least 24 hours.

[Mike Nolan]

I have the first two tomato plants, either Italian Hierloom or Defiance (I'm not sure which, though I'm about 80% sure they're Defiance), in the DWC hydroponics system. I think I finally got one Celebrity and one Better Bush to sprout, but it'll be a couple of weeks before they've got enough roots to be moved to the hydroponics system.

Hopefully I've got the pH and nutrients in proper ratios and appropriate schedules set up for the drip irrigation and grow lights. If not, I may have to start more seedlings.

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[Mike Nolan]

Almond flour is low catb but high in fat, so it's fairly high in calories.

[Mike Nolan]

We had some deviled eggs, some potato-leek soup, I had some salad, and we had some Ossi di Morte cookies.

Happy Halloween!

[Mike Nolan]

We made a big batch of deviled eggs last night, most of them to go in to my wife's office for a pot-luck lunch.)

[Mike Nolan]

More Ossi Di Morti, these are the original recipe but I somewhere along the line I think I messed up and I wound up adding a lot more flour in order to get a dough that would roll out.

Each cookie weighs 5-6 grams, has just under 5 grams of carbs (wheat flour is about 75% carbs and sugar is 100% carbs, so that seems to make sense) and about 30 calories.

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[Mike Nolan]

I'm doing baked pork chops (reverse seared) with a variant on Sauce Robert (mustard/onions/white wine) and broccoli.

[Mike Nolan]

I started with a recipe online but then made changes to make it more keto-friendly, I'll post it here later today.

[Mike Nolan]

I made a small batch of ossi de morti (bones of the dead) almond cookies tonight, just to see how well the recipe works. I baked them at a lower temperature than normal (around 280) so that they'd dry out more, and am pleased they didn't lose their shape.

For a low-carb cookie (made with almond meal, Carbalose and Splenda) the taste is pretty good. I think I might increase the amount of almond extract but that's a tricky ingredient, too much overwhelms the rest of the cookie.

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