[Mike Nolan]

We had salad (picked 2 bowls of it today) plus assorted leftovers and apple pie for dessert.

[Mike Nolan]

Cosmic Crisp apples make a great apple pie!

I'll put that on my list with Jonagold for apples to watch for in stores. (I've never seen Winesap in stores but if we have a normal growing season and harvest in 2021 I should be able to pick some when the U-pick orchards open next fall.)

I've still got about 7 pounds of them in the fridge, I may try making a strudel with some of them.

[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.

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