[Mike Nolan]

I've got it set so that the next day's quiz should be released at 12:30 AM every day. (Central time.)

[Mike Nolan]

Once you have the lavash, which we can buy at the grocery, making a lavash pizza is easy. This is a 14" diameter lavash. (I've made lavash a few times, the trick is to get it rolled out really thin so it gets crisp.)

I put the lavash on a big sheet pan, I start with some chunks of havarti cheese, add some shredded mozzarella, then I put on 1 small can's worth of mushrooms and about 6 artichoke hearts that have been quartered. I didn't have any fresh tomatoes today, otherwise I'd have sliced it into thin slices and put them on as well. (The picture below is from one I made a few weeks ago.)

I throw it in the oven at 425 degrees for about 5 minutes to get everything warm, then switch to the broiler for a few minutes to brown the cheese a bit. We use a pizza cutter to cut it into six pieces.

[Mike Nolan]

We had lavash pizza for supper, I was looking for something simple to make because I spent 4 hours taking a confection-making class this afternoon and was too tired to do anything complicated. I'll post something about the class in a day or two.

[Mike Nolan]

I've never actually tried the raw giblets liason, it is supposed to add a lot of flavor but can turn the gravy a bit 'muddy'. The giblets cook as you cook the gravy, of course, so you're not serving raw poultry.

[Mike Nolan]

Tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches, a nice warm dish on a cold and rainy day.

[Mike Nolan]

Keep in mind that's for a 4 ounce serving. I suspect you're more likely to eat a larger portion of sweet potato than of carrots.

Years ago my wife and I attended a conference at a resort in SW Florida that included several meals. I don't know what the deal was, maybe the chef got a heckuva bargain on a carload of raw carrots, but we had candied carrots at every meal, including breakfast. We had one evening off, so we ate in one of the hotel restaurants, one that specialized in fish. (We were on the Florida Gulf Coast, after all.) Guess what vegetable came with our meal? Yup, candied carrots.

[Mike Nolan]

BTW, while researching this question, one source said that there are 3 plants that produce both an herb and a spice. The other two might show up in a quiz question some day. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I wondered that as well, but didn't see anything directly answering the question when I searched.

My wife is one of those for whom cilantro tastes like soap, I am not. Our older son apparently got my genes on that, not hers.

The spice form (also not trying to give away the answer) is not one I use a lot, I don't know if my wife is willing to be a guinea pig for some testing.

[Mike Nolan]

It's not a digestive issue, she just doesn't like the taste of either barley or lentils. I can get away with barley syrup in bagels, because that's mostly just a sweetener.

[Mike Nolan]

As long as it is properly covered so it isn't exposed, I think the health department is OK with sourdough starters at room temperature, or at least they are in Nebraska.

I get the impression from Anthony Bourdain's books, especially his first one, that NYC rules are similar.

[Mike Nolan]

More than a few people who've tasted my breads and pastries have suggested I open a bakery. No way! Too much work, lousy hours and not all that profitable.

A second issue is that I'd probably have to change some of my recipes to make the products affordable, I once figured my costs for my deep dish apple pie at about $6.00. If I follow the usual restaurant rule (selling price is 3-4 X the cost of the ingredients), that means charging anywhere from $18 to $24 per pie. I suspect not enough people would buy them, especially when most of the apple pies available locally are $10 or less.

[Mike Nolan]

I've had and made a number of breads made with beer, I can't say any of them made my top 10 favorites list. However, the spent grain I got didn't really smell much like beer, and the breads I made with it did not remind me at all of those 'beer breads', they were more like some of the ancient grains or 10 grain breads.

[Mike Nolan]

Sourdough is a very complicated subject. The best research I've seen on it seems to indicate that the temperature at which the starter is maintained has a lot to do with how sour it gets, because some of the bacteria in the starter culture generate a lot of lactic acid and others do not. Low temperature bacteria tend to be more prone to produce higher acid concentrates, or maybe they just thrive better under high acid conditions, they're not really sure which--probably a bit of both.

Another challenge is that the bacteria present in your starter tend to adapt to your locale over time. If you buy some San Francisco starter, it will be high in a bacteria called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. But tests on starters that have been maintained for a year or longer tend to show that the percentage of L. sanfranciscensis goes down if you're not in San Francisco, as the local indigenous bacteria tend to dominate the sourdough culture.

My wife won't eat the local sourdoughs, they're just too sour for her, she thinks, and they bother her stomach. (I suspect that some of the bakeries, notably Panera, add acid to their dough to increase how sour it is in an attempt to make their dough taste the same regardless of location.)

Oddly enough, when we visit our son in San Francisco, she handles the sourdough breads available there just fine.

I've been tempted to try Chad Robertsons's techniques (as documented in the Tartine Bakery cookbook series) to create and maintain a less mature sourdough starter, which he says is much milder. But it involves throwing out 95% of your starter on a frequent basis.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight was YOYO (You're On Your Own), so I had leftover spaghetti and meatballs and my wife had McD's on the way home from her chiropractor.

[Mike Nolan]

Restaurants are a high risk operation, even franchise operations for major brands like McDonalds can fail, independent restaurants, even a small chain, are even more prone to fail.

One of my professors and I did some studying of this when I was in grad school. We found that among non-franchise restaurants, fewer than 20% of them lasted as long as 5 years, and half were gone within 18 months.

There's a building near us that has been at least 5 different restaurants in the past 22 years. Most lasted 2-3 years, even the most recent attempt, a second location for one of the most popular restaurants in Lincoln, recently closed after a 4-5 year run. I think it's just a bad location. The building size and configuration may also be a problem, it's big enough that it requires a lot of covers in a day to break even.

I'm not a beer drinker, either, so it's kind of funny that for several years I was developing software for beer distributors. There's a brewpub/restaurant near us that is a second location for the place I got the spent grain from, we go there a few times a year. My older son really likes their beer cheese soup, several times he's ordered a gallon or more of it frozen and takes it back to Pittsburgh. They do some interesting breads with their spent grain, but my wife's favorite thing on their menu is the lavash pizza. Now that we've found a place to get good lavash, that'll limit the number of times we go back.

The liquor industry would go broke if it had to depend on me, and with my wife's garlic problems and low carb diet, there aren't very many local restaurants we go to on a regular basis, either. We do some fast food takeout, burgers, pizza and fried chicken mostly.

We've spent the night in South Bend a number of times when driving back and forth between Lincoln and Pittsburgh. Haven't done enough exploring of it to get away from the I-80 corridor, which may also be where a lot of the college/tourist crowd goes, so we don't know where the locals eat.

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