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September 7, 2018 at 10:42 pm in reply to: What are you baking the week of September 2, 2018? #13381
Fresh tomatoes are often too juicy for pizza. If you concasse them (remove the skin and seeds, leaving just the pulp) that helps, but sometimes even then I will drain the tomatoes on a paper towel for a few minutes.
The easiest way to concasse a tomato is to start by dumping it in boiling water for 10-20 seconds then in ice water so the skin peels off easily, then slice it in two along the equator and dig the seeds out with a finger. You can then quarter them if you want smaller pieces, especially if the tomatoes were big ones.
Sometimes I core the tomato before peeling it, I've never decided if that makes things easier or harder.
The Montreal Smoked Meat dry rub was interesting to make, as several of the spices, including mustard seed and fennel seed, had to be toasted first, and each seed took a different amount of time to toast, and smelled interesting as they toasted.
I tend to skin bone-in breasts before cooking them, and you have to do something to keep them from getting tough on the outside. Coating them with oil isn't quite enough, coating them with a sauce (often tomato-based) or cheese seems to work better. Adding wine seems to help, too, so I've wondered whether the acid in wine or tomato sauce is what's keeping them from drying out.
I tried covering them with cabbage leaves once, it worked well, but the cabbage leaves weren't very edible. Spinach might work better.
We've had rain here every day since last Friday, upwards of 8 inches so far. It's still misting today, and rain is forecast through the coming weekend as the remnants of Gordon is expected to move into eastern Nebraska.
The Akron@Nebraska football game was called off because of thunderstorms last Saturday night, a first for Nebraska football.
It takes a really heavy rain to dissuade the hummingbirds, though. We must have at least 30 of them visiting our feeders.
I've never made pastrami, I've made corned beef a few times, none of the recipes I tried were worth repeating. The best thing I've made with a brisket is the time I tried to do a variant on Montreal Smoked Meat (without the garlic.) It was almost good enough to convince me to buy a real smoker. It bears some resemblance to pastrami.
The pastrami at Katz's on Houston in NYC is world-famous, and for good reason. I had a friend who lived in Chelsea for a while and he would take the subway down to Katz's every few days. Later he moved to the DC area for a few months, and was ordering whole pastramis from Katz's every few months.
September 3, 2018 at 12:09 pm in reply to: What are you baking the week of September 2, 2018? #13334I grew up in a small town (population 1200 then, more like 800 today) that had as many as 3 grocery stores. Today there are none, just a convenience store/gas station that seems to me to have a somewhat larger than usual section of groceries. I think the nearest real grocery store is 15 miles away.
Two of our neighbors raised vegetables and sold them at roadside stands in the summer and fall, another baked bread and cookies that she sold to a regular clientele. Our neighbor across the street at times ran a roadside hamburger stand, when she wasn't running one of the two restaurants in town.
The farmers markets here are too big and have too many procedures, rules and limitations, but if I lived in a small town I'd think about baking for a local farmer's market at least occasionally.
Tomato soup and open-face fried cheese sandwiches here.
At one point this morning there were 5 or 6 hummingbirds trying to feed from one of the feeders at the same time. I got some video of 3 hummingbirds trying to feed at that feeder a few minutes later, I'm not sure how to get it off my iphone so I can post it. It's 28 seconds long but about 52 MB, most email engines won't handle files that large.
Yes, we're in the western band of the rubythroat flyway. There are some other varieties that are seen in Colorado, but we have to be content with the rubythroat.
Depending on when the seasons turns, we could have some here until mid-October. Usually the peak is in mid-September, if this isn't the peak we're going to be really inundated when it get here.
The tomato flood hasn't started here yet, maybe next week. My wife's appetite seems to be coming back, so we had Steak Diane for supper. (Her favorite meal, and one of mine as well.)
I baked custard yesterday and today, and will probably have to make white bread soon, as I think I just took the last half-loaf out of the freezer.
When I switched from using margarine and/or shortening to using mainly butter, my serum cholesterol went down and my good/bad cholesterol ratio improved too. My doctor asked what I did to change it, I told him I started eating more butter.
I've seen one pizzeria that puts huge basil leaves on and throws the pie under the broiler for 10 seconds, but otherwise it is usually added as the pie comes out of the oven.
I haven't baked or cooked much in the last two weeks, today we had eggs for breakfast, toast with cheese or peanut butter for lunch and custard for supper. (My wife is essentially on the BRAT diet at the moment.)
I believe that semolina is not considered a whole grain product, because it's essentially just the endosperm from the durum wheat berry that isn't pulverized into a fine powder after stripping off the bran and germ. (The same thing is true with couscous.)
Durum flour may or may not be a whole grain flour, most of the durum flours I've seen are not whole grain flours.
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