I just picked about 45 pounds of tomatoes from the garden, so I'll be making sauce tonight, though I'm not sure where I'm storing it until the upstairs freezer is repaired, probably around the middle of next week.
These are fairly acetic tomatoes, I might try canning some, possibly adding a little citric acid. I've got a digital pH meter that I use for the hot tub, the information that came with it says it is safe for food use as long as I rinse it thoroughly before and after. USDA says it is safe to use the boiling water method for canning tomatoes as long as the pH is below 4.6.
Cooler weather and storms are headed this way, but if it doesn't get too cold or damp I should be able to pick another big harvest next week, and somewhat smaller batches for the next several weeks.
We had beans and wieners for supper tonight, as my wife's stomach is starting to get back to normal.
My experience has been that an immersion blender still leaves lots of tiny pieces of tomato skin, so I still skin tomatoes before saucing them, either manually or using my Roma Food Strainer.
Putting the tomatoes in boiling water for about 30 seconds deactivates an enzyme in tomatoes that causes them to separate when you make sauce. The last time I made sauce I used the Roma 'salsa' screen which removed all the skins and most of the seeds. The sauce had some lumpiness to it, but I actually liked that.
It may just need to cool and set up.
I've thought about using a slow cooker for trying an 18 hour black bread recipe.
I don't see any reason why whole wheat recipes wouldn't work if recipes using white flour work in a crock pot. The baking temperature and times are usually about the same.
A cobbler generally doesn't bake as long as a pie does, so the cinnamon roll idea on top is more likely to work.
An interesting idea, probably better done with pie dough, which shouldn't get hard.
A shortbread dough might have worked, too, since it's closer to pie crust than bread dough.
Yeah, a lot of whole grain breads are really dense, which is why the Pepperidge Farms loaves are sliced so thin.
Peter Reinhart has a recipe in his whole grains book for Broom Bread, that sometimes comes out fairly light but not always, and I'm not at all sure why.
Recipe writers from the 50's, 60's and 70's tended to use more yeast, though for the most part both active and instant dry yeast have been pretty consistent since the mid 60's when the current processes were developed. More recent authors, like Peter Reinhart have been advocating using only as much yeast as needed, often cutting back on yeast then adding additional rise time, the classic trade off for bakers is more time = more flavor.
Well, with loaf pans if they rise a bit more than you expected, it's usually not a major problem.
We don't drink coffee, but I don't think I've seen a traditional one-pound coffee can in the stores in years. Most of the ground coffees seem to be in plastic pouches these days.
I always wondered why they had the top spot to begin with, as they aren't very flavorful. Macintosh used to be the most commonly grown apple in Nebraska orchards, but I don't think it has the top spot here any more.
Well, a 1 pound coffee can held about 4 cups, which is about the same volume as most 8x4 bread pans. When making something like brown bread you would fill the can about 2/3 full.
Well, to make 1 1/2 cups of mashed potatoes from instant potato flakes, you'd use 3/4 cup liquid and 3/4 cup potato flakes. Potato flour may be a bit more dense than potato flakes because it is ground up more, so there's less air in it when you dry measure it. (I wish more people gave instructions by weight.)
Too often the KAF recipe of the month seem so be 'What catalog product can we push this month'?
Sorry to hear about that, Sara.
