[Mike Nolan]

Pizza night, part two, and it was at least as good as last night's pizza. (I did change the cheese blend I used, adding some parmesan and romano and leaving out the alpine blend--raclette, grand cru and fontina.)

[Mike Nolan]

I did a thin crust pizza with just sauce, cheese and mushrooms. Not quite like the one we used to get in Evanston IL in the early 70's, but close enough. (I think the sauce is the missing link.)

The dough makes 2 pizzas, so I'll be doing another one tomorrow night. It'll be interesting to see if having the dough in the fridge overnight changes how the crust is.

I just got the King Arthur pizza book, so I'll be playing around with some recipes from it over the next few months.

[Mike Nolan]

You should be able to find several recipes for buns that use shortening or plant butter, which are vegan.

Here's one.

Easy Hamburger Buns {Vegan}

[Mike Nolan]

I made a meatloaf for tonight's dinner.

[Mike Nolan]

They're small, but tasty, and far better than ones in the store that are picked green and ripened chemically. And it's nice to have fresh tomatoes in April in Nebraska. I don't expect to get any out of the garden until some time in July.

And even the tiny ones are good on a salad.

[Mike Nolan]

I did make honey wheat bread tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

I planted 40 pots of tomatoes and I think 34 of them are doing well enough for transplanting into the garden. (I'll probably only plant about 28.) 85% germination rate is a bit lower than normal.

I posted the latest picking from the indoor tomato hydroponic system in the cooking thread but will post it here as well. Not sure why I'm getting so many tiny tomatoes, probably a nutritional deficiency of some kind. I plan to rip out the current indoor tomato plants some time in June but they keep setting enough new fruit that I'm not in a big hurry, though I want the next set going by mid-July so they start producing around the time the outdoor garden shuts down for the season.

Some of my older cages (at least 35 years old) are wearing out, so I bought a 50 foot roll of concrete mesh to make some new ones.

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[Mike Nolan]

We had BLT's using some tomatoes from the hydroponic garden (photo attached), I had mine on some multigrain bread from Aldi that is much better toasted and made into a BLT than untoasted with peanut butter.

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[Mike Nolan]

I made oatmeal M&M cookies on Saturday, a little smaller than the last batch because I used a #70 scoop. (As far as I can tell, nobody makes a #80 scoop.)

[Mike Nolan]

I wound up filling 72 eclairs today, 4 dozen with chocolate ganache on top, 2 dozen without.

They were very well received at the Agronomy & Horticulture spring pot luck lunch.. We took some of the leftovers to Diane's Friday afternoon Alexander Technique class, and have a dozen left at this point.

[Mike Nolan]

We had fish for supper, with steamed broccoli.

[Mike Nolan]

I made over a KG of choux paste today, the largest batch I've made since pastry school, 13 years ago.

I'm letting it rest overnight to hydrate and will do the piping and baking of the eclair shells (around 70) tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

If you don't line the bottom with parchment, you often have trouble getting the cake out of the pan. I doubt the parchment was cause for the collapse.

[Mike Nolan]

If I'm not filling them within 24 hours, I freeze them.

[Mike Nolan]

We had a houseguest from Brazil who stayed with us while he finished his degree, he's the one who introduced me to Brazilian cheese rolls. I found a recipe and started making them, he said mine were as good as his mother's.

We went to a Brazilian-American Friendship dinner a few times, and my Pao de Queijo were very well received by the Brazilians present.

I've been told that in Brazil, it is more common to use casava flour than tapioca starch, I suspect the main reasons many online recipes use the latter is because casava flour is harder to find in stores here. The biggest difference between them is casava flour has more fiber.

I've also made them--without the cheese--for gluten-free cream puffs, and I made some that were intentionally more like English muffins that we used for eggs Benedict when our daughter-in-law was on a gluten-free diet.

I haven't had the courage (or the ingredients) to make my own feijoada yet. It's a peasant dish that traditionally uses leftover parts from the pig: foot, ears, snout, though many recipes use things like pork shoulder that are easier to find.

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