Mike Nolan
Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
I don't know if higher strength vinegar has been tested, 20% strength vinegar is sometimes used as a 'green' herbicide, though you have to use gloves and take other precautions against acid burns, and it isn't systemic, most of the time it kills off the portion of the plant you spray it on but it won't affect the roots, so the weed often regrows. And it isn't selective, whatever you spray it on gets affected.
Here's an off-the-wall suggestion for keeping your posts from being marked as spam by Akismet. Instead of using fraction characters like ½, type them out as 1/2.
I'd ask the Akismet people about it, but their customer response is horrible. If there was a decent competing anti-spam product for WP, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Yeah, that's what I remember them being, too. NY Bakers sells a one-pound yeast cake, I may order one at some point just for the experience. Liquid yeast isn't available in sizes home bakers could utilize.
Today I am finishing the Kassel rye I started on Wednesday, the sponge wasn't responding yesterday so I had to fiddle with it and give it another day to ferment. I should have a full report in the Rye Project thread later today.
You cut the stems off, cut the tips off (they're sharp!) and peel off some of the outer leaves. Then you put them in a container with a little lemon juice and water and steam them. If you do it in a pan, it takes 20-30 minutes depending on their size. My wife does them in the microwave in about 10 minutes, you can also do them in an instant pot or pressure cooker.
When you can pull off a leaf easily, they're done.
To eat the outer leaves, you peel them off, dip them in a sauce of your choosing (I like sour cream, my wife likes bleu cheese dressing) and scrape off the inner soft part with your teeth. As you get further in, you can nibble on the edge of the leaf a bit, but if it won't easily come off, it is too fibrous to be edible. If you're fortunate enough to find fresh baby artichokes (about the size of a plum), there's a lot more of it that is edible.
When you get to the center, you scrape out the fuzzy 'choke' with a spoon to get to the heart, which is the best part.
Get a big bowl for the scraps you can't eat. I'm told you can compost them, but I've never done it.
Artichoke have an amplification effect on your taste buds, they enhance the taste of everything else you eat.
I've read that you can sometimes find yeast cakes in the freezer section, but I've not seen any there locally. They'd be so small I could have overlooked them, though.
If you're on a PC, I strongly recommend using Irfanview. It is free for non-commercial use, and it gives you a lot of tools to manipulate images but it is very easy to use.
I take most of my photos at high resolution (6000 x 4000) and use Irfanview to reduce them to 600 x 400 before uploading them. Sometimes I'll crop out stuff on the sides that isn't needed, like the edge of the pan.
It has a batch mode for processing large groups of photos, but I usually do one or two at a time, so I don't use that mode a lot. You can manipulate all the way down to the pixel level.
I have something called a ShotBox, which is a portable small photo studio / light box with several photo backgrounds (a Christmas present from my son, who was one of the kickstarter participants for it), but I also went to the craft store and bought a 20x30 sheet of foam board that I use as a background for larger things.
As I noted in the other thread, with this recipe you shouldn't use aluminum foil to cover the cake, the acid from the vinegar will eat right through it in a few hours. May not be all that good on a metal pan, either, but we usually make it in a glass 8x8 pan anyway.
I've looked at a couple of small-batch recipe sites, though not this one.
We were originally thinking of having artichokes again, but I had a video conference that ran from 6:30 to 8:30, so we just had leftovers. We'll have the artichokes tomorrow.
You understand, by 'fresh yeast' they probably mean liquid yeast in a 5 gallon bucket, not yeast cakes. The only place I know of to get the yeast cakes right now is NY Bakers, and by the time you throw in fedex delivery it gets pretty pricey.
The links in the story to their ongoing research look pretty promising, too. I forwarded the link on to Deb Wink and posted it on the BBGA forum.
I've always found it odd that home sourdough instructions nearly always recommend throwing away half of your starter at every feeding or using it for something other than bread, commercial bakeries do not do that (because they couldn't afford to!) They feed their starters a few hours before they plan to start another batch of dough, then take the half they would have thrown away and use it to inoculate a day's worth of dough, and the starter is at its most active point by then, too.
Maybe it's just because most home bakers don't bake bread every day, like a bakery does?
I think that recipe is in the recipes section here under two or three different names, I've heard it called crazy cake, cake-in-the-pan, no-egg cake, etc. The recipe supposedly was developed during world war II when eggs were in short supply.
One caution I will make on this recipe is don't top it with aluminum foil to store it, the low pH causes it to eat right through the foil. (It may not be all that great on metal pans, too, but we usually do it in a glass 8x8 pan.)
We had kraut dogs for supper tonight.
-
AuthorPosts
