[Mike Nolan]

Pie is out but the way I crimped the crust didn't hold together, so there's a gap between upper and lower crust most of the way around. Might make taking it out of the non-stick pan a bit trickier. (I prefer not to cut a pie in the non-stick pan to avoid damaging the non-stick surface.) We'll see what happens after it cools.

I do have some steel cut oats, so the baked steel cut oats will be brunch tomorrow--with another Cosmic Crisp apple.

[Mike Nolan]

The baked steel cut oatmeal sounds wonderful, I may try it tomorrow if I've still got some steel cut oats. It'd make a great brunch.

[Mike Nolan]

I am making the Cosmic Crisp apple pie today and another batch of Semolina bread.

[Mike Nolan]

For onion soup I like pieces that are no more than about 2 inches long, otherwise they can fall off the spoon. I usually cut the onion in two through the poles, so everything is half moon or less.

For burgers and hot dogs, size isn't as important.

[Mike Nolan]

Flank is a tricky cut, low and slow, then thinly sliced against the grain is the usual advice. An acetic marinade can help, too.

I find it is generally overpriced compared to a lot of good cuts, like bottom round or rump.

[Mike Nolan]

I weigh nearly everything these days, even the water. I have a small scale that does tenths of a gram for measuring smaller amounts, like the sugar and salt in a pie crust. (I have a third scale that measures in milligrams that I use elsewhere, but seldom use in the kitchen.)

[Mike Nolan]

I cut both ends off (some experts recommend not cutting off the root end, but I think that makes peeling the outer skin layers off harder), then cut the onion in half (pole to pole), then cut into slices to get half-rings. If the onions are really big, some of the ones in the bag I bought at Costco were over a pound, I'll cut about 2/3 of the way through each half so that I get quarter-rings for the outer layers, otherwise they're just too long.

I just dump them in the stock pot, stirring them during cooking every hour or so separates them. If you throw a little oil or butter in, they'll caramelize faster. Some people recommend throwing in a little sugar as well, I've never tried that.

[Mike Nolan]

There's a 'caramelized onions' recipe that comes up if you do a search on the FN site, but I don't know if it the one she had found before. It's kinda short.

[Mike Nolan]

Recently I went looking for the Danish Kringle recipe on the Food Network site and couldn't find it in any of their lists, but their search tool still brought it up. I think they may have removed some recipes from the current indexes. Pity.

[Mike Nolan]

Peeling the outer layer off the onions seems to take the longest for me. The old Veg-a-matic did a great job slicing onions, as I recall. (The newer versions of that tool, if you can even find them, don't seem as sturdy.)

When I made my onion soup I used a 10 pound bag of onions and that didn't quite fill a 12 quart stock pot. After 5 hours in the oven, it was down to only 2 or 3 inches deep.

I'm told you can freeze them after they've been caramelized and throw them into something you're making, often without even thawing them. I may have to try that. I wonder if they'd smell up your freezer, perhaps not if you double-bagged them?

[Mike Nolan]

It doesn't take much starter to get a new batch going, the Tartine books have you inoculate with just 5% starter, so 50 parts water, 50 parts flour, 5 parts starter. I was doing this with my rye starter before it died and it was very active within hours.

[Mike Nolan]

Last week we did pizza night on Saturday, we've still got a few pieces left, so I'm not sure if we'll do pizza this week or just skip a week. (We're almost out of Havarti, anyway.)

[Mike Nolan]

I think this is only the 2nd year of large-scale production of Cosmic Crisp apples, I remember seeing a few last year, priced at over $4.00 per pound. This year they've usually been around $3.50 a pound, the $1.28 per pound sale was the lowest I've ever seen them and they're back to something like $2.86 a pound this week at the same store. I need to make pie dough tonight so I can make an apple pie with them tomorrow or over the weekend.

[Mike Nolan]

Wait until she discovers things like Moomies buns! (I also really like the recipe for 4 cinnamon rolls in a 6x6 pan, it works better for the two of us than a tray of 12 or more rolls.)

A recipe that is just plain fun to make is grissini (thin bread sticks.) I like the fast way of shaping it that is in Carol Field's book. You shape the dough into rectangles that are 4 inches wide and cut off pieces of it with a bench knife, then grab the ends and pull them to about 12 inches wide and put them on the baking sheet. It takes some practice to get them even, but it is really fast once you get the hang of it, and the breadsticks will just disappear at the table!

Over the years our go-to bread has changed several times. I used to make the honey wheat bread recipe I developed 4-5 times a month, then for several years the Clonmel Double Crusty bread that Paddy posted was the most frequent one I made (I make two changes to it--I use butter instead of oil and I shape it as a free-form loaf, making it more of a Vienna bread.) For about six months it was the Austrian Malt bread (sometimes adding some semolina), but for the past year or so it has been Jeffrey Hamelman's Semolina bread recipe. (Semolina breads have a lower glycemic index.)

His recipe is online, but there's an error in the first edition of the book regarding the sugar and the version of this recipe that is online has the same error. It calls for 0.6 ounces but calls that 1/2 teaspoon, in fact 0.6 ounces is 4 teaspoons.

[Mike Nolan]

We wound up having the last of the onion soup and a salad.

My wife is more of a pancakes-for-breakfast type, and occasionally lunch. But even those are infrequent. We're not big breakfast eaters here, she's trying to limit her carbs and I'm just not hungry when I first wake up. A glass of orange juice to take my morning pills with is usually enough.

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