[Mike Nolan]

It's now been a week since Thanksgiving. The left over cheese grissini don't taste nearly as good as they did a week ago and some of them got incredibly hard. But the regular ones still taste great, possibly better than they did a week ago. I've never thought of staleness as something that could improve flavor.

[Mike Nolan]

Some years ago we had a holiday dinner at my sister-in-law's house, and she asked us to bring a rutabaga dish.

Cutting those darned rutabagas took forever, I think a band saw would have helped. I wonder if an apple peeler would work on them, I've used it on potatoes.

[Mike Nolan]

I've tried the knot method a few times, haven't gotten ones that looked right yet.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making beef stock today, I roasted a pan of bones, onions, carrots and celery, and now I'll let it simmer for about 18 hours, then probably do a remouillage, a second wetting of the bones, for another 12 hours. I should get 3-4 quarts of stock out of all this.

I also got a container of vegetable beef soup out of the freezer for supper.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

They were time-consuming to make but the process of folding Kaiser rolls isn't hard once you master the technique, and its kind of interesting to do. I will say the stamped ones are more uniform, if that's a plus.

[Mike Nolan]

They're cut at an angle so each one is sort of a truncated triangle, then squished down in the middle with a finger so the spirals bulge out a bit.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's a kaiser roll I hand folded from a stack of two colors of dough from Peter Reinhart's marbled rye bread in BBA:

And here's what they looked like after they were cut:

You can't get this with a kaiser roll stamp!

[Mike Nolan]

I wound up doing a soup and salad from Zoup.

[Mike Nolan]

His bio says he started working in his father's bakery as a teenager, so he probably never went to cooking school, but he's worked in hotel bakeries around Europe.

I've got one of his books, his recipes tend to be pretty complicated, something I'd expect of a high end hotel baker.

I know how to hold a knife, I just can't hold it as tightly as I used to due to arthritis, so I wind up putting my finger on the top of the blade at times, too. I think it gives you slightly better control at the expense of speed.

And bakers don't use knives as much as chefs do.

[Mike Nolan]

I liked the pearl sugar part myself. As to size, she's holding it in the palm of her hand so it is not huge, she's cutting the dough basically in 4 cm lengths.

If I make them, I'll probably leave out the cardamom, though, not one of our favorite spices.

It was the shape that intrigued me, most cinnamon rolls are baked so the roll is vertical, these are horizontal. That means twice as much of the spiral is exposed.

[Mike Nolan]

It might make some difference, but ground pepper is really light. By comparison, a teaspoon of table salt is around 6 grams.

[Mike Nolan]

Any drug store should have surgical gloves. I've also seen them for sale at a kitchen supplies store.

I've looked at the Better than Bouillon products, there's a lot of sodium even in the reduced sodium versions. That's why I make my own stocks with little or no salt in them. I'm also not fond of their having soy protein, sugar, corn syrup solids (whatever that means), potato flour, etc. And 'flavorings'.

[Mike Nolan]

The bouillon is the only salt added to the recipe, though there is salt in tuna fish; it really isn't all that salty, but I just make a roux (flour and butter), add milk and cook till it thickens, then add tuna.

The bouillon adds more flavor than it does salt, I think. That's how my wife's mother made it (though on a stove, not in the microwave) so that's her preferred taste.

I have surgical gloves handy for times when I either have an open sore or don't want to touch raw meat, like when I'm mixing up meat loaf or meatballs. I also have finger cots available for when I nick myself with a knife. (I haven't done that in a while, knock on wood!) :knocking on forehead:

[Mike Nolan]

We didn't get cornbread or cinnamon rolls with chili in school, either. Might have been some fruit, canned pears were pretty common. And there were always peanut butter sandwiches available.

My mother would sometimes serve cornbread as a meal, with a little butter and maple syrup. She often served cornbread with navy bean soup. That soup was not my favorite, it took me years to decide bean soups were worth eating.

When I was in high school (mid 60's) I think a lunch ticket was about $4.50 a week. You could get a burger, fries and a Coke at the diner across from the school for about $1.25, but the place was where all the smokers hung out and the air was too thick to breathe.

[Mike Nolan]

Actually, I'd never heard of pairing cinnamon rolls with chili until we moved to Nebraska, it's something Lincoln Public Schools has done for a long time. Their cinnamon rolls are not very sweet. And because all the kids and most of their parents grew up with that pairing, most of the restaurants in the area serve a cinnamon roll with chili as well.

I've heard of it being done elsewhere, too, so it's not just a Nebraska thing.

Cinnamon actually goes well with chili, I've seen recipes that added some directly to the pot. We don't tend to think of it as a spice that goes with savory dishes these days, but originally that's what it was, as was nutmeg.

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