[Mike Nolan]

Also affects some King Arthur AP flour.

[Mike Nolan]

One reason whole tomatoes take up so much space is that they're round, so if you freeze them you wind with a lot of air gaps. The other is that the juice is mostly water.

I did around 40 pounds of tomatoes last weekend:

I think they would have come close to filling up my 24 quart pot.

I wound up with about 15 quarts of juice and pulp, plus I filled 2 one-gallon bags with the seeds and skin that the Roma sauce maker separated out. (I'll use those to make beef stock over the winter.) The 15 quarts reduced down to about 8-9 quarts of tomato sauce.

The year that I put in several black cherry tomato plants I wound up picking HUNDREDS of cherry-sized tomatoes. I would throw them in boiling water for a few seconds, then bag them for the freezer. I used them to make stock.

I'm running out of freezer space for containers of tomato sauce, but will probably have two more good harvest cycles, depending on when the first frost hits. I might blanch and freeze a few whole tomatoes, though I'm not sure where they'd go in the freezers.

The tomatoes have been fairly small this year, partly because of the varieties I chose. If I get enough larger ones (the Amish Paste ones are great, up to 10 ounces each), I might make a few bags of concassed tomatoes (skinned and seeded.)

[Mike Nolan]

I've got one of those gloves, I find it gets in the way, so I just make sure my knife is properly sharpened and keep the fingers on my left hand tucked safely out of the way.

Having a sharp knife is very important, it is much less likely to slip.

[Mike Nolan]

My favorite whisk is one that ATK rated at the bottom. I have an OXO eggbeater that works well and disassembles for easy cleaning. We still like the old-fashioned sifters that shake sideways for those occasions when we still sift anything.

I've used my KA Pasta roller attachment to roll out cookie and cracker dough, the width limitation is an issue. There are some commercial pasta rollers that support up to a 10" width. With laminated dough, handling it to feed it through a pasta roller would likely fracture the butter. The sheet rollers don't do that, and I don't think the clay slab rollers would, either. But I think it would be hard to make a sheet roller that didn't require 30 inches or more of counter width, though the big commercial ones require more like 8 feet. About the only way I can think of to do it would be for the roller itself to move left and right, and that would be challenging.

One advantage a sheet roller has over manual rolling is that the pressure is consistent across the full width. That means you don't get a lot of spreading as you pass the dough back and forth through the rollers. Lengthening, yes, but not spreading.

I've seen some videos of experienced pastry makers rolling out laminated doughn by hand without losing the rectangular shape, but I've also seen some very experienced chefs who had to fiddle with the shape to keep it rectangular.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife doesn't care for avocado, it's been many years since I've bought or prepared one. I like it but it's not high on my list of choices when we eat out.

Some of the ways to cut it that I've seen chefs do strike me as risky, but I've seen many chefs use a mandoline with their fingers getting way too close to the blade, too. I haven't cut myself with a knife lately, I'd like to keep it that way.

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen artists put clay through a slab roller, the clay gets everywhere and if it dries it is tough to get out, so they're usually relatively easy to take apart and clean.

But cleaning up a dough sheeter can be a bit of work, too.

I'd be a bit more concerned about them meeting sanitation standards, especially in a commercial environment.

[Mike Nolan]

Grains of paradise is an interesting spice. Some people who are allergic to pepper (capsaicins, not sweet peppers) use it in place of pepper in food.

[Mike Nolan]

This Tuesday will be our 47th anniversary, Joan.

[Mike Nolan]

There are some that appear to fit on a 30" x 14" space, I could see doing one on a small table that stores away when not in use. The big challenge might be that some of them can't handle anything over an inch thick, and laminated dough often is thicker than that at the start of each turn.

Interestingly enough, when you search on 'slab roller' today, you also get a number of pasta rollers, which didn't happen a few days ago, so I suspect we're not the only bakers who have gone net-surfing.

[Mike Nolan]

Speaking of butterflies, the annual invasion of Painted Ladies has started here.

And the hummingbirds finally arrived, we've been seeing a half dozen or more at a time yesterday and today.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't use chemicals on our lawn or in our garden. If I lose some of my tomato crop to bugs, that's just part of the cycle of life. I'm tempted to find an area of the yard to seed in buckwheat again, it was really pretty and the bees LOVED it.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife is working on making grape jelly today. I made about 9 quarts of tomato sauce last night and packaged it up this morning.

[Mike Nolan]

Tomato and salami sandwiches here.

[Mike Nolan]

I never grease pie tins. I've been using the NorPro non-stick pie pan for a couple years now, and it is still the best non-stick pan I've ever used. I let the pie cool, then a slight twist is all it takes to completely free it from the pan. Then I slide the pie into a different pie pan, usually a disposable aluminum one if the pan is going somewhere, or onto a large plate if it is to be eaten at home.

[Mike Nolan]

We've had coyotes here, too, though I haven't seen one lately. We also had a river otter once, he was truly lost as the nearest river or stream is a good mile away. But that was after several days of heavy rains and flooding and we were guessing he got flushed away from his usual haunts and went overland to try to get back home. And there was an elk that animal control followed through the neighborhood a few years ago before it broke a leg jumping a fence around the corner, we figure he almost had to have gone through our back yard to get to that fence.

For a while we had raccoons using our deck just outside the master bedroom door as a latrine, but between redoing the deck and cutting back on the trees that they were climbing up on to get to the deck, we seem to have discouraged them.

We also stopped feeding squirrels on the deck, as they were starting to eat the decking (composite wood) itself. That cut down on the number of raccoons and possums, too. Didn't seem to affect the cardinals much, but there are all sorts of berries for them to eat along the back fence.

The area where I put in elderberries about 10 years ago has kind of gotten overgrown with volunteer trees, mostly maple but one oak, so I'm planning to order a number of bearing elderberry plants next spring and put them in along the east side where we used to have a full row of dogwoods, but only a few of them survived being cut back several years ago.

The black raspberries have spread to that side of the yard, but I think we're going to rip them out on that side, we haven't gotten any berries the last several years, some years because the birds got them all first and other years because we were busy and didn't check to see if they were ripe yet until after they peaked. We seldom got more than a couple cups of them, anyway.

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