[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.

[Mike Nolan]

Sorry to hear you weren't feeling well.

[Mike Nolan]

Growing up in NW Illinois we would sometimes take the train (Burlington Northern or Rock Island Line, both went through Savanna with separate stations) from Savanna to Chicago with my mother's folks. The BN Zephyrs would usually have a dining car and my grandfather loved eating in it. It was a 2 to 2 1/2 hour train trip, so there was time for the dining car. (The Illinois Central went through Galena, not Savanna.)

It was a sad day for train travel when Amtrak took over passenger rail service.

[Mike Nolan]

20 cookies to a full sheet tray? Those were pretty big cookies!

[Mike Nolan]

I don't believe bleaching would kill either E. coli or salmonella. It generally comes from contaminated wheat. As long as whatever the flour is used for results in it getting fully cooked, the flour should be safe. But between problems with flour and with eggs,
eating cookie dough just isn't safe any more.

[Mike Nolan]

I won't buy Nutella in America, because it's mostly corn syrup. The Nutella we had in Italy was superb!

[Mike Nolan]

When I was in high school I took the (pre-Amtrak) City of New Orleans from Chicago to New Orleans and back. I was probably too young to appreciate the dining experience then.

[Mike Nolan]

We had sliders on the grill tonight, the timing was cutting it close, when I went out to turn the grill off afterwards it was starting to sprinkle and now we're in a thunderstorm.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife will eat one or two brussels sprouts when I fix them, but that's about it. (I roast them after tossing them in oil, Dijon mustard and maple syrup, with a little salt and pepper.)

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