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We've got a plan at this point--meat loaf.
Posted in wrong thread.
I had a big salad, Diane had two hard boiled eggs and a smaller salad.
The Big Blue river near Fairbury NE has a lot of bald eagles, too, and a number of golden eagles, too.
I grew up near the Mississippi, in NW Illinois. My grandparents used to tell me about the river freezing over and being able to drive over to Iowa back in the 30's.
When I was young, one of the interesting things to do in the winter was go to the lock and dam near Bellevue IA and watch the eagles, hundreds of them! They were less common for a few decades due to DDT, but they've rebounded and you can find lots of videos showing the eagles taking advantage of the dam for easy fishing.
We had smoked pork chops.
The bread is very tasty, for several years this was our every-day bread. It's probably been close to a year since I've made it, but I didn't forget the recipe, though I did have a shaping issue. It gives that loaf character.
We had tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches on the freshly baked honey wheat bread. Yummy.
One of my loaves sort of uraveled a little, it'll make some interesting shaped slices.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.I'm making honey wheat bread today, not so much because we need it (though I don't think there's any in the freezer) but because it is 63 in the kitchen today.
We had more of the cock-a-leekie soup for supper, I skimmed off the fat that had solidified at the top (chicken fat isn't very flavorful), added a little butter for flavor, some more pepper and some basil. I also chopped the chicken up into smaller pieces, Diane thought some of them were too big for a spoon.
It was quite a bit better that way, so I'm adding notes on that to the recipe, as this is a recipe I'll make again. I've still got about a dozen leeks in the garden that I will be digging up over the next month or two, but I think I'll make potato leek soup with the next batch I dig up.
Finished off the leftover pizza tonight.
Doesn't look overbaked to me, but looking at the bottom crust will settle the issue, often the top crust looks great but the bottom one is still half-raw. As long as the top crust isn't DARK brown or black, I don't consider it overbaked.
There was a thread in the Bread Baker's Guild forums a while back where bakers were talking about how they like their breads to look and what sells. The nicely caramelized crusts that many bakers strive to produce sit on the shelf while the ones that are a tepid tan sell out.
In Appolonia Poilaine's book about the Poilaine bakery, there is a recipe for their punitions (sugar cookies), she says they come out all sorts of shades from off white to dark brown, and some customers prefer the light ones while others prefer the darker ones.
I made that recipe and there is a noticeable taste difference between them, the darker ones have more caramelization and that adds flavor complexity. (Biscoff cookies are a perfect example of this; they taste quite spicy, but the only spice listed is cinnamon.) Harold McGee says they have identified at least 1000 different compounds that are created when you caramelize sugar.
In one of Gordon Ramsay's shows a while back (I forget which series), the contestants were asked to bake a pie. In judging them, he cut a slice, scooped off the filling and looked at the bottom crust. If it was soggy at the top, he called it 'raw' and pushed it away without tasting it. Most of the pies failed his bottom crust test. (Some year I want to eat in one of his restaurants to see if I can order a well-done steak that isn't totally dried out, a challenge he's used several times on Hell's Kitchen, giving the contestants 3 identical steaks and asking them to deliver at the same time one rare, one medium-rare and one well-done. I know I can do the well-done one properly, I think I'd struggle to get all 3 done simultaneously.)
The soup was good, but I think I'd do it a bit differently next time, I don't think it reduced enough and as a result it needed more veggies. The star anise adds a subtle flavor to the soup that is more of an after-taste. I tried it with some bread, with oyster crackers and with saltines, all 3 worked well.
I am trying a new recipe for supper tonight: cock-a-leekie soup, using a NY Times recipe:
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1022930-cock-a-leekie-soup-scottish-chicken-and-leek-soup
The main ingredients are chicken and leeks, but there's also celery, carrots, bay leaf, thyme, parsley, star anise, rice (or barley) and prunes. (I left out the garlic, of course.) The chicken and leek greens are just starting to get to a boil, and it smells interesting already.
We're in a winter storm watch, with anywhere from an inch to 10 inches of snow forecast, depending upon the latest update. Right now it is just flurries, but it's a good day for a nice warm soup.
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