[Mike Nolan]

Some people start maple syrup businesses after they retire, others start food blogs. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

We have ceiling can lights in several places, as the bulbs need replacing I've been replacing them with LED bulbs. Some of the fixtures are on dimmers, so I have to use dimmable bulbs there.

[Mike Nolan]

When I was in grad school I took several courses on statistics for researchers, proving causality is difficult in the laboratory and nearly impossible in the real world.

[Mike Nolan]

I just wonder if ramping up the production is going to have to change your marketing methods. It's one thing to sell a small amount of syrup, it might be something else to sell enough to make enough to live on.

I spent several years advising small businesses when I was in grad school, ramping up production and sales were major issues for a number of businesses that I worked with. With one, the challenge was convincing the owner to go from owner/salesman to owner/manager and actually hire a sales staff.

[Mike Nolan]

It looks like comments to quizzes are going in the Forums now. I don't think I"ll go back and try to fix the earlier quizzes, but future quizzes will all have followups in the Forums, so I've set up a special category for them.

The quiz question itself gets messed up in the Forums, I don't know if I can prevent that, though I did fix it for today's quiz, but at least the link worked.

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

[Mike Nolan]

Have you thought about how you're going to market your product when you have enough to sell?

There's a Wisconsin maple syrup producer who makes the circuit of the midwest/great plains farmer's markets in the summer, going as far west as Denver. He usually is in Lincoln around the 4th of July, we get an email from him every spring letting us know when he'll be in the area.

We're planning to be in the Valley Forge PA area for a convention this summer, but that's still 450-500 miles from Vermont. Otherwise, I'd love to come visit and see your setup, although right now is probably the best time to visit a maple sugar facility. There were a few small groves of sugar maples near where I grew up in NW Illinois, and one or two of the farmers would tap them. You could smell their sugar shacks in operation from several miles away. And these were really small operations.

[Mike Nolan]

It appears any comments to today's quiz will appear under the quiz but not in the forums (unlike comments to blog posts), which means they aren't as visible as I'd like them to be. I don't know if this is a conflict between two plugins (bbpress and wp-quiz) that might be resolvable or just the way it works.

[Mike Nolan]

Cheer up, yesterday was the first full day of spring and the temperature in Nebraska hit the mid 60's today, with a high of 72 forecast for next Thursday.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tuna salad sandwiches tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not sure I've got the technical chops, much less the time and access, to read the actual JAMA article, but I do kind of wonder if the popular press articles on it aren't a bit like the 7 blind men describing an elephant, each seeing just a small piece.

[Mike Nolan]

Whole grain recipes are always challenging. The 100% whole wheat recipe that you make in the food processor is probably the most successful one I've ever tried. That's a part of the repertoire here now, we're on either our 3rd or 4th loaf of it.

I'm tempted to try the techniques of that recipe (a 2 1/2 hour autolyse and using the food processor instead of the mixer) on some of the other whole grain recipes I've tried unsuccessfully over the years.

[Mike Nolan]

The last time we went to Pittsburgh we came back through Indianapolis rather than I-80. It's an hour or two longer, but we thought it was a less stressful drive. Indianapolis traffic was bad, but nothing like having to drive through Chicago. The only real downside was we couldn't stop at a Portillo's in Chicago for Italian Beef sandwiches.

It also allowed us to stop at the North Market in Columbus Ohio. I'm really glad we don't live close to Columbus, I could spent thousands of dollars there every month! Best meat, poultry and fish markets I've seen in 40 years, some pretty good bakeries, too. One case had venison and bison steaks, ground yak meat, ground camel meat, ground elk meat and ground water buffalo meat! When we were there in December of 2016 they had about 5 different varieties of whole duck plus duck breasts and duck legs confit. The only meat market that comes even close to the ones at North Market are at McGinnis Sisters in Monroeville PA.

[Mike Nolan]

There's a Penzeys in Indianapolis, but that's probably a good 100 miles away.

The nearest one to us is in Omaha, I think I've been there just once. I've probably been to the one in the Strip District in Pittsburgh more times than that. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

Today was a leftovers day.

[Mike Nolan]

We had steak, mushrooms, baked potato and a salad for dinner tonight.

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