[Mike Nolan]

We haven't made tuna noodle casserole in years, mostly because it tends to be high carb and high sodium. I haven't made chicken and rice casserole in a while for pretty much the same reason.

I used to make a tuna fish, minute rice and mushroom soup dish when our younger son was still living at home, my wife would eat something else, she doesn't eat much rice because it causes her blood sugar to skyrocket, even with a stir-fry she'll just take a tiny bit of rice.

Tuna noodle casserole is one of those dishes that the cooking competitions often select as an 'outdated' dish in need of updating. I've yet to see one of these updatings that solves the carb/sodium issues while still sounding edible.

[Mike Nolan]

I saw nothing in that post to convince me the author knows more about food than I do.

[Mike Nolan]

Without knowing the dimensions of your closet, I can't recommend specifics. We had our closets custom built, but I like the modular metal shelves like these:

Shelving

They come in a variety of lengths, depths and height and there are numerous accessories such as baskets and hanging rods.

We have a number of these in the basement to keep things off the floor, which occasionally get a little water when it rains They're the type that restaurants use and they'll hold several hundred pounds per shelf. I've seen kitchen staff climb on them.

[Mike Nolan]

A few years ago I made Ossi Dei Morti cookies for All Souls Day, they're similar to biscotti. They were interesting and are low fat, no oil or butter, just 2 eggs.

[Mike Nolan]

Biscotti always seem too dry to be enjoyable. We don't drink coffee, and tea isn't really a drink you dunk things in.

[Mike Nolan]

We had vegetable beef soup out of the freezer, nice on a cool rainy day.

[Mike Nolan]

I think a pint of oysters cost me over $15 last December, they've definitely gone up in price in the last few years. (But despite what the government says about little or no inflation, what hasn't gone up? My orange juice just went up about 7%, a jar of pickles is up about $1.00 from where it was 18 months ago, etc.)

[Mike Nolan]

I married into a publishing family. My father-in-law was a publisher, his first wife edited the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook. My wife co-authored a book on using the web for teaching, my brother-in-law has published several books on Nebraska history and my sister-in-law published a book on gardening.

Putting a book together is a LOT of work, and my wife's book didn't have the pictures that a cookbook requires these days. (I think Peter Reinhart's new pan pizza book has more pages of pictures than of text.)

For now I'll pass on doing a cookbook. (However, I've been developing character sketches and an outline for a novel for the past year, it stems from a recurring dream I've been having.)

[Mike Nolan]

I may try to do spaghetti and meatballs over the weekend, as it is expected to be cool on Saturday. I already got a container of vegetable beef soup out of the freezer. Tonight we settled for macaroni and cheese.

There may be a last gasp of the 80's on Sunday/Monday but the forecasted high for Wednesday is 59 with rain.

[Mike Nolan]

Level 1 is amateur, no way those rolls are level 1, an amateur would use dough in a tube.

[Mike Nolan]

For chicken, I'm generally doing more of a broth because I generally use a whole chicken. I can get chicken backs in bulk, but I'd have to buy a 40 pound box, and that'd make a whole lot of chicken stock.

For beef I use mostly shank and neck bones, though the shank bones generally do have some meat on them, which I pull off, marinate in barbecue sauce and serve on a bun like pulled pork.

The point to a bone-based stock (some chefs call it a bone broth) is to extract the collagen from the bones, making it thick when it cools. (I will sometimes throw some chicken feet into chicken broth to help thicken it.) You can get a second or even a third 'wetting' from good quality shank bones. I mix them all together.

Aspic, which is almost unknown in modern restaurants, and consomme, which is only slightly better known, take beef stock to its extreme limits.

[Mike Nolan]

We had salami and tomato sandwiches again tonight. I may have to make another batch of tomato sauce this week, there are lots of ripe tomatoes again, probably a good 30 pounds of them.

[Mike Nolan]

I was hoping most people would get this one.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't have a recipe for it, it may have been something she found on a box of Dream Whip.

I did find one recipe that sounds close online: Chocolate Dream, but I don't specifically remember her putting eggs in it. (The picture is terribly out of focus.) I remember it'd fill two 9 x 13 pans and we'd finish it off in a day or two, but there were six of us kids.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not a big fan of pumpkin pie, don't like either the taste or the texture. (Aside from a few dishes like ratatouille, I don't eat much squash. I like spaghetti squash, but my wife thinks it is too high in carbs.)

I'll make a pie crust for one if my wife wants one for Thanksgiving (she'll make the filling using her mother's recipe which is not all that different from the one on a can of pumpkin puree), but I generally don't eat dessert then, I'd rather fill up on turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, etc.

My mother made a sinfully decadent dessert for holidays using angel food cake, English walnuts, melted chocolate chips and Dream Whip. I much preferred that over pumpkin pie. I tried making it with Cool Whip once, it doesn't come out the same.

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