Mike Nolan
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Traditional wafer-style ice cream cones haven't really gone away, though these days it seems like waffle or sugar cones are easier to find, both at the grocery and at ice cream parlors.
The flat rectangles of ice cream cone wafers that my grandfather's store had for making ice cream sandwiches do seem to have disappeared, I can't even find them at restaurant supply houses.
Thanks for the extended post.
We prefer whole milk mozzarella, which we can get in shredded form in 5 pound bags at Sams, though most recently I had to go to the Sams that is further away in Lincoln to get it. (NONE of the grocery stores carry whole-milk mozzarella.) As to the argument that whole milk mozzarella is higher in fat, I think you use less of it when it's whole milk compare to part-skim, because it spreads out more, so it kind of balances out.
I haven't found a jarred pizza sauce I like, mainly because most of them have garlic in them. I use Hunts Traditional or Mushroom sauce for spaghetti, they're both garlic-free. I haven't tried it on pizza, mainly because I haven't actually made pizza from scratch other than the lavash pizza in a while, because there's just two of us.
If I'm making spaghetti and meatballs, I take one can of Hunts, add one 15.5 ounce can of diced no-salt tomatoes and one (sometimes two) 4 ounce can of mushrooms, and I cook the meatballs in that. If you're going to cook meatballs in sauce, as opposed to frying or baking them, I think it helps to use meat that is at least 85% lean.
I also have a no-garlic marinara recipe posted here that makes quite a bit of sauce, it starts with a #10 can of diced tomatoes. It's enough for a batch of lasagna and is very good on both pizza and spaghetti. I puree it with a stick blender, but for spaghetti I'd be tempted to do what I have been doing lately with the Hunts sauce and mix some sauce with some diced tomatoes, because we really like having chunks of tomatoes in our spaghetti sauce. If I put tomatoes on pizza, I prefer them to be sliced, not diced.
I was in San Diego a few years ago for a conference and went to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant with my older son and his family. We went through several stacks of Ethiopian flatbread. It's definitely got a fermented flavor to it. They were saying it takes several days to prepare a new batch of batter, and they were close to running out of flatbread that evening.
It's possible to make white chocolate ganache, but you need a recipe tailored to that, because there are factors such as balancing the fat contents that enter into a ganache recipe. (And it helps to know the specifics of your white chocolate, which isn't always readily available.)
Ice cream sandwiches made with chocolate chip cookies sound simpler, but carb alert!!
We have both these days, though we probably use the Sams one more, and I think their prices are, on average, slightly less. But the Costco is much closer. The Sams on this side of town has products the one on the north side doesn't have and vice-versa. Recently I went to the north one to get two five-pound bags of mozzarella cheese, which the south store has stopped carrying again.
Sams Club has 18" wide food service wrap, Costco might have it as well, and it's available on Amazon for around $25 including shipping.
Gordon Food Services has 3 locations in Indianapolis and is open to the public.
I'm going to miss having a restaurant supply showroom in Lincoln, Restaurant Depot in Omaha is members-only and you have to have a food service tax permit to become a member. I might be able to order through Sysco (my former neighbor manages their Lincoln office), but they don't have a showroom. A friend of ours is talking about opening up a food truck for barbecue and I may be helping him develop some recipes (like cornbread), so that might give me some other options.
I like hitting kitchen stores and restaurant supply stores for the same reason. The only restaurant supply store with a public showroom in Lincoln has closed the showroom, though they still service restaurants out of their Omaha office.
My grandfather's drug store had rectangular pieces of ice-cream cone material for making ice cream sandwiches. I've not seen those anywhere in recent years, though. (As a former soda jerk, the challenge was to press down slowly enough that you didn't crack the shell.)
The only ice cream sandwiches you can buy these days have a soft cake-like exterior, often chocolate flavored. I've got a Norpro gadget for cutting and pressing the sandwiches once you've baked the cake-like exterior.
Bagels are fairly easy to make, boiling them in an alkali bath leaches some of the starch from the surface, which helps achieve the firm exterior but creamy interior. I've seen some pretzel recipes (which are also boiled in an alkali solution) that just dipped them in a cold solution of water and baking soda, but I've never tried that with bagels.
Traditionally, a lye solution was used, but food grade lye is not something most kitchens have on hand. Baking soda only produces a mildly alkaline solution, no matter how much of it you add. (Anything over a couple of tablespoons is a total waste.) I usually add a little honey which is also mildly alkaline.
Baking the baking soda in the oven for an hour to produce sodium carbonate is something that's on my 'to do' list, that would raise the pH significantly, but still well below that of lye. (The New York Times suggested this some years back.)
Peter Reinhart's recipe in BBA produces nine full-sized bagels (4 to 4.5 ounces of dough each), but we prefer smaller ones, 3 ounces each. That's still about 45 carbs! His recipe in the Artisan book is similar but produces 6 bagels rather than 9.
Maybe it was based on 'pastoral' meaning something from the rural countryside?
The Wall Street Journal has an odd definition of 'share'. :sigh:
Anyway, here's a different link to the fish-shaped ice cream cones:
I made Vienna bread on Friday. I made 2 large loaves, cut them into thirds and froze all but one of them. I'm hoping having them a little smaller will mean we'll eat most of a segment before it goes bad.
You have to be careful with Amazon reviews these days, some sources say as many as half of them are fake. And apparently this works both ways, companies posting fake positive reviews and competitors posting fake negative ones.
As I recall, their 'everything' bagel topping includes garlic powder. We're pretty basic when it comes to bagels, I like mine with Asiago cheese (actually I use a 4 cheese blend from Sams Club) and my wife likes hers with some poppy seeds on them, or sometimes a combination of poppy seeds and sesame seeds.
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