[Mike Nolan]

I've always been told that heat is what causes seeds to germinate or roots to sprout, but in the absence of light for photosynthesis the plants won't survive. I remember my son doing a test in junior high science planting some seeds in pots in the dark basement using a seed starting pad for heat. They came up, put out their cotyledons (the first leaves), then died for a lack of light.

[Mike Nolan]

We've been talking about whether we want to start any plants indoors this week, we generally can't put them outside until mid-May, and even that's risky, we've had cold enough weather in the last 8 days of May to kill or stunt the plants three times in the last six or seven years.

We usually get a lot of plants from the UNL Horticulture Club's plant sale, which is still on this year but the plant list seems smaller than usual and it'll be order online for delivery. So I need to check our stock of seeds and see if we've got any tomato seeds worth trying to start. They may be a bit too old and the mice got into our seed box in the workshop a year ago and we had to throw a lot of them out.

We've got some good grow lights, though, from Happy Leaf. One of the professors in my wife's department tested them and liked them so much he ordered a bunch of them for his lab.

[Mike Nolan]

I think I may do some brownies this week, too. I'm running out of chocolate snacks, and I've got a couple of box brownie mixes I bought on sale.

[Mike Nolan]

We've grown Athena muskmelons a few times, one year they did VERY well and I had several that were larger than a basketball and weighed over 10 pounds. The biggest problem was they all came ripe within a few days of each other and that's a lot of melon!

[Mike Nolan]

My plan for tonight is to make Reubens using some of the sauerkraut I started earlier this month and some rye bread from the freezer.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been neglecting my rye starter a bit, and it got even with me today by going moldy. So I threw it out and I'll start a new one. But that means I won't be making any recipes from Ginsberg that use a starter for the next week or two. I think there are still a number of recipes that use commercial yeast that I haven't tried yet, though.

[Mike Nolan]

Peanuts and potatoes are good plants for young gardeners. They're interesting to watch grow and not terribly labor-intensive. Cinderella pumpkins are another good one, but it's MONTHS before they're harvested, though at least then you get to carve them for Halloween. Melons are another possibility, but, like pumpkins, you need a lot of space and some patience. My granddaughter liked radishes, but she's like her mother, really into spicy foods.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm terrible at drawing or cutting straight lines, which is why I've started using the straightedge for cutting or scoring dough rather than a pizza or dough cutter. For things like a laminated dough, you can't just put the trim into the middle and roll it back in, though. So I take the scraps from a laminated dough, put them in a pan with lots of butter and brown sugar and bake them. The butter and brown sugar turn into a lovely butterscotch sauce. These always disappear quickly.

I think crispbreads are essentially just a type of cracker, but I'm not sure whether that's based on the ingredients used, a regional or ethic distinction or a size-based one, they do seem to be on the thick side and often use a lot of whole grains. Of course what we call a 'cookie' the English would usually call a 'biscuit'.

[Mike Nolan]

The Washington Post says seed merchants are the latest to see a big increase in orders because of COVID-19. Spring greens like spinach and lettuce are selling especially well, along with any kind of beans.

Amazon says that the 7th most popular item in online searches these days is jigsaw and other adult puzzles, which usually rank somewhere around 2000th. My wife and her sister, who have been getting together on Sundays to do puzzles, are doing virtual puzzling, they do a puzzle then send a photo of the completed puzzle to each other.

[Mike Nolan]

It's only 75 grams of butter for the entire recipe, which makes 48 pieces, so its about 1.6 grams of butter per piece, so 3 of them is less than 1 pat of butter. You also might be able to cut the butter back, or substitute another oil.

I think these crackers could be rolled out a bit thinner, they were about 1/2 inch thick after baking. They might not have enough structure to stay together if too thin, though.

We were talking about what else we could do with these crackers. My wife suggested topping them with cheese and putting them in the microwave. I think a little cheese and sausage would go well, and I think it'd stand up to some of the stronger cheeses. Not sure how they'd be as a soup cracker, it'd probably have to be the right kind of soup. Might be interesting in a lentil or split pea soup.

I haven't tried making anything with the new plant butters, they're supposed to work just like butter in baking.

My cholesterol numbers are decent I think my last HDL was around 98, my wife's latest HDL (the good cholesterol) was like 126, her doctor said, "I run 5 miles a day and I can't get mine that high!" Our diet uses a lot of butter and other dairy and red meats. I think it's genetic.

[Mike Nolan]

I find using good pre-shaping techniques on the balls of dough and then letting them rest for several minutes before trying to poke a hole in the middle works very well. My granddaughter learned both of these skills fairly quickly when she was 10 or 11, and it was really hard to tell the bagels she shaped from the ones I did, and I've done it many times.

Like a lot of baking skills, making bagels isn't hard, but it is a bit precise.

Of course the best part about making cheese bagels is you get to eat the cheese that falls off the bagels after it has been baked into a chip.

[Mike Nolan]

Report on Buttery Crispbread (Ginsberg pps 193-195):

These are 100% rye crackers, and fairly easy to make, though the recipe makes a lot of them, so I only did a half-recipe, which was one 12x18 sheet of dough. The coarse rye meal that I have might almost be a little too coarse for these, pieces of the meal get stuck in my teeth, as do some of the sesame seeds and caraway that I used.

I wound up with 24 crackers about 1/2 inch thick.

They're pretty good, and versatile. I've had several plain, one with some butter, one with peanut butter and one with pimento cheese on it, and all of the toppings worked well.

Because the rye meal is so coarse, it's hard to tell how the dough is developing. I was a little worried it was under-developed, it seemed pretty gummy for a while, but after it bulk proofed it rolled out easily, so it must have been sufficiently developed by then. (There's not a lot of gluten in rye flour.)

I used a carpenter's straightedge to trim the edges straight, you take the excess dough and roll it back in. I also used the straightedge to cut the dough into rectangles before baking them. This is a handy tool that we used a lot in chocolate school, so I picked up a 12" and a 24" one for home. They're reinforced so they're not likely to bend or warp. I've used them to cut anything that needs to have nice clean lines, including cinnamon roll dough. (These days I cut the dough into strips before rolling it up, a trick I learned a few months back.) Next time I make laminated dough, I'll use it to cut them into strips for schnecken and triangles for croissants.

Next time I make this recipe (or other crackers), I might use a little aluminum foil to tent the edges, they were threatening to get overdone before the center was fully done. After I broke them into squares, I put them back in the cooling oven to dry out a bit more overnight. Today they're pretty dry, and the recipe says they should keep well--if they last that long.

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[Mike Nolan]

We do have a pizzelle oven somewhere, I think my wife used it once. Might be interesting to try doing some flatbreads in it.

[Mike Nolan]

Your bagels look great, a bit more baking soda in the water might have given them a little shinier surface, the alkali bath changes the surface starches a bit. (I'm almost out of baking soda, if we buy a new large bag of it I plan to bake some of it into sodium carbonate, which gives a much higher pH, though still well below that of lye.)

I'm making the Buttery Crispbread from the Ginsberg book today, but they're supposed to air dry for 24 hours before you eat them, if I can last that long before sampling them.

[Mike Nolan]

Maybe we should set up a virtual potluck?

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