[Mike Nolan]

We had tacos tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

I think I suggested a half-dozen ideas for supper tonight, none of which clicked.

Finally I suggested lavash pizza. It was excellent. The brand of pepperoni I've been buying now has garlic listed as an ingredient but I found a less well known brand (Bridgford) that doesn't list garlic and it was pretty good, it added a kick but wasn't too assertive.

[Mike Nolan]

I've always thought pumpernickel referred to both it being a whole grain product AND a coarsely ground flour. Most of the time, I think a dark rye berry is used, with white rye berries used more for light rye flours, I think light rye flours also take out some of the bran and germ, since those are darker in color than rye endosperm.

The time I bought a 5 pound bag of rye berries and ground them up, it made for pretty good pumpernickel rye bread.

FWIW, Amazon has rye berries in 25 pound bags for under $40 these days and they're part of Amazon Prime, too. I suspect it would take me an awful long time to use up 25 pounds of rye berries, though they also have a 10 pound bag for $16.50, which is nearly the same price and, I have to say, somewhat tempting. (Having my own grain mill gives me options not everyone has.)

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, I saw several recipes that called for sweet pickle relish, something I use mainly in Thousand Island Dressing. (I've also got dill relish that we sometimes use on hot dogs.) I may try it in a future batch.

I put in a small amount of mustard, probably less than a teaspoon (for 5 eggs), and my wife thought that was too much. Personally, all I could taste at first was the sweetness of the Miracle Whip.

Olives are one of those love-it-or-hate-it ingredients. I like to put chopped olive in tuna salad, my wife can't stand it in tuna salad. It'd be worth trying in egg salad.

Eventually, perhaps I'll get to a recipe I think is good enough to post online.

[Mike Nolan]

Interestingly enough, asafoetida is often found in Worcestershire sauce. (The label will not mention it, it's lumped in with 'spices'.)

It's considered an umami ingredient, Indian food experts say it rounds out the flavors of other ingredients and spices.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not sure I've ever made egg salad before, so I had to kind of come up with a recipe, as my wife didn't want one that had onion, celery or a few other things in it. (Egg salad shouldn't be crunchy.)

I wound up putting in some salt, pepper, mustard, lemon juice and, after several taste tests, some celery seed. I started with Miracle Whip and wound up adding a little Hellman's Mayo as well. (Miracle Whip is too sweet, IMHO.) I kept increasing the amount of lemon juice, too.

Next time I may leave out the salt and use celery salt instead.

My wife took the leftovers for lunch and she said it was very tasty, aging it overnight appears to help mellow the flavors.

I think this is likely to get added to the repertoire here.

[Mike Nolan]

There aren't exactly uniform standards for labeling wheat flour, either. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I used to use Hodgson Mills semolina, but it has vanished from local stores, and the local coop no longer carries semolina in bulk. I've been using KAF, but the BRM is just as good and available locally for less per ounce, even before using a BRM coupon.

My favorite rye flour is the pumpernickel flour I was getting at the Mennonite store in TN when I was still going there a couple of times a year to work at my company's office. Since I've retired, I've been there once for a meeting and I picked up 10 pounds of it. Not sure what I'll do when that's gone, maybe I'll try BRM.

Several years ago I bought 5 pounds of rye berries and ground them up using the coarsest setting in my grain mill, that was pretty good, too, but a bit pricey.

[Mike Nolan]

I've stopped keeping track of all the items that can't be found in local food stores in Lincoln anymore, not even at Whole Foods. And don't even talk to me about veal! When I was in Pittsburgh in June the neighborhood grocery store a few blocks from my son's house had at least 4 different cuts of veal. Here I'm lucky if they have ground veal.

[Mike Nolan]

We had egg salad sandwiches tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

We had sliders done on the grill, too hot to cook indoors today.

[Mike Nolan]

I think we have 7 feeders up at the moment, and that's about how many we had last year. (Our favorite window feeder broke, and I can't find another like it locally.)

On the peak day last year, around mid-September, we had one day where we were both getting counts well over a dozen. Hummingbirds are very competitive, they'll stake out one feeder or even a group of feeders and spend a lot more time defending it against other hummingbirds than actually feeding. Audubon says that many hummingbirds will nearly double their weight in the fall before taking off for their winter homes.

[Mike Nolan]

I always weigh brown sugar, because you can get big holes in it even when you pack it down. The USDA food database says a cup of brown sugar is 145 grams (5.11 ounces) unpacked and 220 grams (7.76 ounces) packed, though a lot of sources use 7 ounces for a cup of packed brown sugar. (KAF's ingredients list says 7 1/2 ounces.)

Perhaps the biggest challenge with measuring cups is they're not very accurate. I have one '1 cup' measure that consistently give me at least 5 3/4 ounces of AP flour.

[Mike Nolan]

My guess she's never been trained to cut big hunks of cheese because it isn't a common request. Otherwise they'd have knives available without having to go in the back. We've been getting Genoa salami from the deli at the closest WalMart lately, I have to say their clerks do a good job of paying attention to our instructions.

I bought some food at a drive-through fast food place recently. It came to $10.10. I handed the clerk a $20 bill and a dime. He had to ask someone how to enter that so he could make correct change.

As Art Buchwald used to say, you can't make stuff like this up!

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

As far as I know we only get ruby-throated hummingbirds here, though there have been two confirmed sightings of Anna's hummingbirds in Nebraska in the past few years.

Wisconsin is apparently the place to be for rare hummingbird sightings in the midwest, the roufous/allen's hummingbird and the very rare green violetear have both been sighted there in the past few years, usually late in the season for hummingbirds.

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