[Mike Nolan]

I had a BLT, my wife had scrambled eggs and bacon.

[Mike Nolan]

Personally, I like a vinegary taste to cole slaw.

[Mike Nolan]

The guidelines have been lowered over the years, they were once at 175, and chicken is pretty hammered at that temperature, turkey breast is nearly inedible at 175.

[Mike Nolan]

We had a beef stir fry with pea pods, mushrooms, bean sprouts and water chestnuts.

When I was cutting the meat up (sirloin), I was going "This is the biceps femoris and this is the gluteus medius, so this must be the 'mouse muscle'".

[Mike Nolan]

Most kids dunk the cinnamon roll in the chili. It's not generally heavily frosted, though, and often kind of light on cinnamon, too. I used to think this was just a "Nebraska" thing, but I've seen references to it from other parts of the country, too.

I'm hoping the 3 batches of Cardinal Preserves we made yesterday (my wife did most of the work, with me filling in as needed) will last us a year. It freezes well and is so sugary it lasts several months in the refrigerator.

[Mike Nolan]

The TJ's product is essentially a milk chocolate made with the Ruby cacao bean. I don't know if Barry Callebaut plans to release a higher cacao level semi-sweet product for commercial use (eg, through restaurant and bakery supply houses) or whether there will be high percentage ruby cacao retail products like we see with dark chocolate. I wonder how long it will take the FDA to allow calling it 'chocolate'?

The bag I bought was interesting, my wife wasn't impressed with it, but I thought it had some interesting notes to it. But I don't see it as something I'm likely to buy very often, as I generally don't use milk chocolate chips in baking, either.

[Mike Nolan]

We don't drink either, though I do use wines and spirits for cooking. I probably only go through about 6 bottles of wine a year, though. I cook with marsala and sherry, but not port and I use brandy and vermouth for cooking, too. I've tried the vodka pie crust recipe, wasn't impressed with it. I've tried bourbon in a pecan pie, didn't think it added much.

[Mike Nolan]

There's a local u-pick berry farm and they've had some tough years lately, but picking berries is a lot of work, so we haven't been there in a while. There are usually a few strawberries at the farmer's markets but usually the small ones and on the expensive side, it'd be tough to get enough to do a batch of jam, much less 3 of them like we did yesterday.

[Mike Nolan]

The test-taking experts say your first instinct is almost always your best choice.

[Mike Nolan]

Cardinal preserves are the best strawberry preserves I've ever had. The recipe comes from the Farm Journal Freezing and Canning book, but we have it here:
Cardinal Preserves

You start with crushed berries and sugar, then you add whole berries and more sugar in three stages, you wind up with berries in several different states, some nearly whole, others partially dissolved, others fully dissolved.

Here's some of the Austrian Malt Bread with some Cardinal Preserves on it:

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making a batch of Donna German's Austrian Malt Bread, because strawberries are on sale at $8 for an eight pound flat, so we're going to make Cardinal preserves.

[Mike Nolan]

We had BLTs

[Mike Nolan]

I stopped by Trader Joe's this evening, and they had several bags of the ruby cacao wafers (they can't call them chocolate yet.)

$2.99 for a five ounce bag of what look like somewhat flattened pink chocolate chips isn't too bad a price, comparable with other candy products from TJ.

The sweetness level is similar to a milk chocolate, which makes sense because the ingredients are similar to that of a milk chocolate, too.

If you didn't know what they were, you'd probably say they tasted like chocolate with a little fruit, though there's no fruit in them.

[Mike Nolan]

I think once it is available through candy wholesalers, it'll be a more reasonable price, but the two sources I cited above are very high, in large part because its being imported. Mostly I was pointing out the Kit-Kat one as a place where the ruby cacao bean is showing up in retail products, at least in Japan and a few other places.

The FDA isn't allowing it to be called 'chocolate' yet. That might delay its availability.

I may check our local Trader Joes to see if they have any, apparently that's one place it was available in the USA earlier this year. (I have suspected for some time that some of the TJ chocolate bars are made by Callebaut.)

When I was in high school, our science teacher had us taste a red fluid one day. Most described it as either strawberry or cherry flavored. It was milk with red food coloring in it. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I've switched from canola oil back to corn oil. Less processing.

Most olive oil has too overpowering a flavor for me, it's OK as a dip but it takes over the dishes you put it in.

I do my cooking mainly with butter, though, and my cholesterol numbers have gone down since I started doing that.

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