[Mike Nolan]

I think calling it American Buttercream is kind of a cooking insult, in French cooking a lot of things are called 'English' in the same way.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got my empanada dough made and will be rolling them out, filling them with an apple-caramel mix and baking them this evening.

[Mike Nolan]

They're a lot less work if you have a mold for them, but I'm not sure what else I might be able to use that mold for. Maybe making shortbread sticks? If you covered them with caramel and chocolate, they'd be similar to a Twix.

[Mike Nolan]

I need to see if one of the stores near us still has Nebraska City cherries in the freezer, 3 small containers of them are about right for a pie.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got a sliced ham marinating in Dr. Pepper, I'll bake it for supper.

I've got some basil in the Aerogarden that I need to trim a bit and then do something with, I may plan to make some pizza sauce over the weekend and chop some up to add to the sauce. I haven't baked a pizza since our virtual pizza party, though I have done lavash pizza several times.

Either later today or tomorrow I plan to make caramel apple empanadas.

[Mike Nolan]

As far as I know, there are no official fireworks displays here on New Year's Eve, but we heard some periodically throughout the evening and until well after midnight.

Anyway, here's to 2021 being a better year than 2020.

[Mike Nolan]

Dessert Person is a book I've looked at online, what do you think of it so far?

I got the 2021 BBGA calendar this week, it has a pumpkin bread for October that is just beautiful. You can see it in this page advertising the calendar for sale:
BBGA 2021 calendar

[Mike Nolan]

No plans for tonight, but we seldom do much on New Years Eve anyway. No football games tonight, and not many left this season, either. :sigh:

[Mike Nolan]

We have leftover potato-leek soup, vegetable beef soup and chicken noodle soup (the latter two from the freezer), so it'll be a soup supper here, possibly with some salad. (We picked the 3rd set of salads from our Aerogarden last night, so it'll be a few days before it is ready for another harvest, but there's still lettuce in the fridge.)

[Mike Nolan]

I'd probably go with a streusel topping, you might be able to put on a fairly continuous layer of oil crust but it probably won't hold together enough to transfer.

I wonder what would happen if you rolled it out, froze it long enough for it to firm up and then tried to transfer it?

I didn't do a lattice crust on the last cherry pie I made, at my wife's request. (It was for her birthday.)

[Mike Nolan]

I'd just set them gently on the poured chocolate and push them in with a toothpick. Another possibility would be to put them in the mold and pour the chocolate on top of them. (Might make sense to put them in face down, making the bottom of the mold the top of the bar, which is often the case with molded chocolates.)

[Mike Nolan]

Juniper berries and pine nuts may have a place in cooking (although my wife can't stand pine nuts), and possibly even pine needles, but I don't think the rest of the tree does.

[Mike Nolan]

Cooked frozen chopped broccoli actually goes fairly well with macaroni and cheese.

[Mike Nolan]

Her trifles are never quite the same each time, the fruit varies, usually bananas, strawberries, blueberries and mandarin oranges, sometimes kiwi or star fruit, maybe grapes if they're really sweet, but it also usually includes ladyfingers (available in the frozen food section), angel food cake, strawberry Jello, pastry cream and Kool Whip. But they're always delicious.

The sweet potato pie is not as pretty as I would have liked, but it tastes pretty good for a first time with a recipe that drew from at least 3 sources. Having pie crusts in the freezer ready to be rolled out cuts a lot of prep time, that's why I usually make enough pie crust for several pies. (And an all-butter pie crust always has great mouth feel.)

[Mike Nolan]

I made our potato leek soup for tonight using the vegetable stock I made and froze a few weeks ago, normally I use chicken stock. It made a subtle difference in the flavors, a bit lighter and I could taste the tomato that was in the stock, I don't use tomato in chicken stock.

I made some minestrone once using Trader Joe's vegetable stock, which I thought had an odd flavor that affected the soup. My home-made vegetable stock was good enough by itself that I could have seen serving it like a consomme. I need to make more.

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