[Mike Nolan]

Unless it's a glazed ceramic pan, I'm not sure what there is to test.

[Mike Nolan]

Change of plans here. I made the marinara and put it in the fridge until tomorrow or Friday, then I made potato-leek soup with croutons from some Vienna bread.

[Mike Nolan]

I am making lasagna today, starting by making a batch of marinara.

[Mike Nolan]

We had steak, sauteed mushrooms and baked potato.

[Mike Nolan]

Sandwich thins always remind me of a cross between pita bread and the end slice off a loaf of bread. They were initially marketed as a 'lower carb' bread/bun but I'm not sure they're that much lower. Some of them have pretty good flavor, others are terribly bland. I've not tried making them myself.

[Mike Nolan]

Dinner tonight was creamed tuna on biscuits.

[Mike Nolan]

My Meyer lemon tree sets fruit even though it is indoors. I've seen some care guides that suggested using a q-tip to cross-pollinate blossoms and increase yield, sounds like too much work.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tomato soup and cheese sandwiches tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

My mother had quite a few herbs and spices in her pantry, but I think her spice repertoire was fairly limited. I like to experiment with a lot of spices, though I've found a few we don't care for, like winter savory. I don't use a lot of nutmeg in savory dishes, I do use a lot of thyme, basil and parsley. I tend to limit oregano to tomato dishes, though I've found myself using its cousin, marjoram, with meat dishes more lately, especially in any recipe that called for garlic. I also use either mustard powder or Dijon mustard more than I used to, and the same with sage. Rosemary is something I use in small quantities, as it can be overpowering. I don't use a lot of paprika, though I have several types I use sparingly. (I like either smoked paprika or hot paprika on deviled eggs, my wife doesn't like any paprika on hers.)

[Mike Nolan]

Something like beef, macaroni and tomato might work for you.

This is kind of a long-standing family joke. My best friend in college (and best man at our wedding) used to work as a short order cook at a Hot Shoppe on the New York Thruway during the summer. We were roommates for a while, too.

He once offered to make his beef, macaroni and tomato recipe for us. It starts by browning 25 pounds of ground beef. 🙂

Long time Lincoln residents tend to reminisce about the baked macaroni and cheese that they used to have at the cafeteria at Miller & Paine, a department store later acquired by Dillards, but now gone. The local Runza restaurants have what they say is the original Miller & Paine recipe, but I don't think it's quite as good. They also have the Miller & Paine cinnamon roll recipe, which does appear to be pretty close to the original. Of course, Runza pairs it with chili, as EVERYBODY in Lincoln eats cinnamon rolls with chili.

But I was raised on the Kraft version and still like it, though I like to add things like ground beef. We used to add a package of frozen chopped broccoli, it was nutritious and relatively cheap back when that was a major issue. (We tried adding tuna fish to macaroni and cheese once, it was not a big hit.)

[Mike Nolan]

Dinner tonight was Kraft macaroni and cheese. My wife likes it plain, I add ground beef and mushroom soup after dishing hers out.

[Mike Nolan]

No, I always use baking soda in the water bath, but sometimes I also put in some honey or barley syrup too.

One of these days I'm going to bake a tray full of baking soda to make sodium carbonate as suggested by a NY Times article some years back. This produces a stronger alkaline solution than sodium bicarbonate, but not nearly as strong as lye, which is not easy to find in stores and requires careful handling.

Sodium bicarbonate is interesting, because according to Quora the pH is going to be around 8.35 regardless of how much you add to the water. (That's usually not the case.) The practical use of that information is that you don't have to add a lot of sodium bicarbonate to your poaching liquid for bagels to get full effect.

By comparison, the pH of a sodium carbonate solution will probably be somewhere between 11 and 12, since for sodium carbonate the pH does vary depending on how much you add to the water. And the pH of a solution of lye in water can be as high as 13, which is why it needs to be handled carefully. (I would probably handle a sodium carbonate solution more carefully than one made with sodium bicarbonate, too.)

The major difference between the bagel recipes in BBA and ABED is that the one in BBA produces about 1.5 times as much dough. I usually make the ABED one these days, since there are just 2 of us.

[Mike Nolan]

Welcome back!

[Mike Nolan]

I've made bagels dozens of times. I generally use one of Peter Reinhart's recipes, either the one in BBA or in ABED.

I have only made cinnamon-raisin bagels a few times, but they didn't seem tougher or denser than 'plain' bagels.

As for toppings, my wife likes them with poppy seeds (and sometimes some sesame seeds too), I tend to prefer them topped with a 4 cheese blend or plain.

I generally use the 'poke a hole in the middle' method, I find that works better than the traditional 'wrap around your hand' method, especially since I prefer bagels made with 3 ounces of dough per bagel rather than the 4 or 4.5 ounces many recipes use, and I have pretty big hands.

You need to do a good job of rolling the bagels into compact balls. I then let them rest for a few minutes. I flatten them into discs, let those rest for another minute or two and then poke the hole in the middle and stretch them a bit, making sure the dough is fairly even all the way around. (When our granddaughter is visiting, she loves doing this part.) By then they're ready for their bath.

I really prefer using barley syrup to using nondiastatic malt powder, and sometimes I put a little barley syrup in the boiling water, too.

[Mike Nolan]

Date sugar is an ingredient you're more likely to see at a store that specializes in mid-eastern or Indian foods, although Bob's Red Mill also sells it. (But they sell a lot of products that most stores don't stock.)

I saw an online article yesterday about cooking with maple syrup or maple sugar, it had one recipe that used a cup and a half of maple sugar!

[Author]

Posts