[Mike Nolan]

mozzarella freezes very well. I buy shredded whole milk mozzarella in 5 pound bags at Sams Club and divide it into 12 ounce portions. (12 ounces turns out to be just about the right amount of cheese for a small pizza or pizza bread for 2 people.)

A good pizza isn't really a 'spur of the moment' dish here, because the dough really needs to age for several hours, preferably overnight.

KAF has a perforated sheet pan for doing pizza that fits in my small oven. I've used several times, you need to oil it well or the dough sticks in some of the perforations (that's also likely due to how I stretch out the dough), but it makes a nice crisp thin crust pizza.

As to sauce and toppings, I've been using a garlic-free tomato sauce (Sams Club) on pizzas, with some oregano, thyme and marjoram added. If I stir in some 4 cheese blend, it makes a great marinara for dipping or on spaghetti, though the Hunts traditional pasta sauce is pretty good too, I add a can or two of sliced mushrooms to it for spaghetti. We almost always have red peppers and mushrooms in the fridge, though for pasta and pizza I often prefer canned mushrooms, and I buy Oscar Meyer sliced pepperoni when it's on sale and keep it in the freezer. (It's the only garlic-free brand I've found locally.)

[Mike Nolan]

I've made spaghetti squash a few times, and my wife bought one at the farmer's market last weekend, so I guess we're having that some day soon. Otherwise, aside from zucchini and summer squash in a dish like ratatouille, I don't eat much squash. My wife like butternut squash, I don't.

[Mike Nolan]

Made the honeypots last night, they're a lot softer than I was expecting, I wonder if I didn't cook them long enough, even though I did it a good 5 minutes longer than the instructions called for.

It looks like I'm not going to get any Winesaps this year, the vendor who normally has them says his late season apples, including Winesap, all got apple maggots even though he sprayed for them.

Going to check with one other local orchard that occasionally has them available, otherwise I'll probably buy some Haralson apples from the one vendor.

I usually bake fruit pies the day before I want to eat them.

[Mike Nolan]

A smaller rutabaga might have been easier to peel and cut, the one we had was probably 9 inches in diameter.

[Mike Nolan]

Eggs at the local farmer's market are about $4.00 a dozen, at the supermarket they are more like $1.25 a dozen. That's not a tough decision for me to make.

[Mike Nolan]

I’ve got my shopping and menu planning for the week done, I’m making chicken cacciatore with some bone-in chicken breasts, using red peppers and tomatoes from the garden, an eye of round roast and potato leek soup. We’ll probably have something like tuna melts or BLT’s one day, and leftovers another.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm going to try one of the recipes from Rosie's book, honeypots.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm with you, I think stevia tastes weird.

[Mike Nolan]

As the article I gave a link to above says, the only foods that are REQUIRED under federal law to have an expiration date is infant formula and some baby foods. In some states milk is required to have an expiration date so it can be removed (by state law) when it is past that date.

Otherwise, all those notations and dates are voluntary and IMHO sometimes they're rather meaningless.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's what one site has to say about using outdated foods.

I've had a lot of foods go bad long before the date on the package, which is really frustrating. Recently it was a package of Sargento cheese that was moldy when I opened it a week after I bought it. I couldn't remember what store I bought it at (I almost never save receipts), so I just tossed it.

I've been known to cut out moldy parts of fruits and vegetables (if small) and use the rest, but cheese is one of those things that I won't use if moldy, unless it's the mold it was designed to have. I also won't use moldy bread, even if the mold might be the one that produced penicillin in Dr. Fleming's lab.

Beyond that, if it looks and smells OK, I'll generally use it. Dry items are ones I'll use beyond their expiration date. Flour is OK as long as it hasn't gone stale or the oils in it turned rancid, but both of those produce easily recognized odors.

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

[Mike Nolan]

Some years ago my sister-in-law asked us to make a rutabaga dish for Thanksgiving dinner from a recipe she gave us. It took at least an hour for the two of us to slice up a large rutabaga, a band saw would have helped! (And neither of us cared for the taste of the dish.)

A bisque is supposed to be a thick but creamy smooth soup. Most of the time when I make soup it's really thick, but that's because it has lots of meat and vegetables (and often noodles) in it.

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, it's one of the greatest April Fools Day pranks ever, and by the BBC no less! And they played it totally straight, no 'April Fool!' message at the end, the BBC was flooded with requests for how to get spaghetti plants.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's footage broadcast on BBC in 1957 of the spaghetti harvest in Ticino:

[Mike Nolan]

American Sugar Refining, Inc. markets products under the brand names C&H, Domino, Florida Sugar and Redpath. They also own the Tate & Lyle sugar refining business, which includes the rights to the Tate & Lyle's brand name, including Lyle's Golden Syrup.

[Mike Nolan]

I would expect it to be a little denser, ie, take up less volume after being ground into smaller pieces, for the same reason that table salt weighs more per teaspoon than the larger grain kosher salt, but if you take it all the way to powdered sugar, I think it gains volume, because a powder can hold more suspended air in it.

If you weigh it beforehand, it might lose a little weight when you grind it up (dust and whatever sticks to the food processor), but probably not enough to matter.

Followup: The C&H site says that their superfine baker's sugar is measured the same as regular sugar, which implies that a cup of both would be the same weight, or the difference so small as to be negligible.

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