My instructor at the SFBI pastry school probably thought I was never going to get a good pie crust made, and I do admit it took me 3-4 tries after I got back home to get the knack, but once you've got it down, good tasting pie crusts aren't difficult.
One of the reasons I developed the pie dough chart was so I could size the pie dough correctly, having too much dough means a crust that is too thick or a lot of wasted dough, having too little dough means working it harder to stretch it to fit the pan, and that toughens the crust.
I've tried RLB's cream cheese pie dough a couple of times, while I think I'm making it correctly, we prefer the all-butter one I learned at SFBI.
As I suspected the video is way too big to post, but here's a shot of the first wave of the parade.
Our little two-block long street has been doing this parade for a few years now, getting participants from the whole neighborhood. They skipped 2020 because of the pandemic, of course, but this year's turnout may have been the largest one so far.
I made some potato salad using my mother's recipe, for the 4th. Our street is having its 4th of July bike parade tomorrow, I'll see if I can get some good pictures and post them.
Happy 4th of July, everybody.
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.
