[Mike Nolan]

It was - to myself. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I made another pizza tonight, on my new stainless steel 12 inch pizza pan. I think the dough needed a few more minutes in the oven, but it was tasty. I might have to play with the oven temperature/baking time.

[Mike Nolan]

Our younger son used to make the oatmeal crisps cookies with butter (so did my sister), they definitely came out flat. I'm not sure if increasing the amount of shortening would make them flatter, which is why I will try it the next time I make these. At the rate of about one cookie a day, it could be October before I'm ready to make them again. The ones with additional oatmeal were definitely less flat, so that might be an option as well.

I lowered the temperature 25 degrees because I've had issues with allulose-based cookies getting too dark, so that might have been a factor as well.

If you research online how to make cookies crisp, there are multiple not necessarily consistent suggestions, such as decrease moisture, increase the amount of sugar, which I don't think would help with allulose, because it has different crystal states than sucrose, and add fat.

[Mike Nolan]

The edges are my wife's favorite part, anyway. We have one of those 'all edges' pans, but I haven't made brownies since last year. I did use it for cornbread once, because I was planning to use it for stuffing.

[Mike Nolan]

So: Tea, a drink with jam and bread,
that will keep you making dough.

[Mike Nolan]

I made another batch of tomato sauce/marinara tonight, that makes about 35 pounds of tomatoes I've turned into sauce this season.

Dinner tonight is salami and cantaloupe, I may also have some salad and possibly a tomato since I picked some nice big ones today that didn't go in the stockpot for sauce.

[Mike Nolan]

I know of several of the authors and have been in forums with a couple of them, but that's not much of a recommendation. My guess is this is not a book I need, certainly not when I'm almost never baking with wheat products. However, their books are usually helpful, informative and have recipes that work, something I cannot say about a few cookbooks I own. Several online bookstores have a pre-publication price of $27, FWIW.

[Mike Nolan]

Well, today is my 75th birthday, so I had a nice dinner: Porterhouse steak (shared with Diane), a small baked potato, sauteed mushrooms, steamed broccoli and a couple of the chocolate chip cookies (see baking topic post.) And with all that, I still stayed under both my carbs and calories goals for the day.

[Mike Nolan]

I made my first two attempts at a keto-friendlier version of my mother's oatmeal chocolate chip cookies today, using carbalose as the flour and allulose as the sugar, with just a little molasses to give it that 'brown sugar' taste. I used Guittard Sante chocolate chips, they're made with coconut sugar and are low net carbs.

They show potential, I think the taste is similar but it needs more oatmeal flavor. I used 1/4 of the usual amount of oatmeal in the first batch and doubled that in the second batch. The oatmeal itself adds a little under 1 carb per cookie, so I've got room to increase it further.

They're not crispy, they're more chewy/soft, and a bit too flat. I think those things can be worked on, too, possibly by increasing the amount of shortening.

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[Mike Nolan]

We had the 2nd half of the pizza for dinner tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't had a banana sandwich in years. When I was very young (around 6), there was a family from England trying to establish a farm outside of town, and we'd go out there on Sundays to visit. Their barn always had a bunch of farm cats that were very friendly, and they had the usual assortment of barnyard creatures, including a goat and sheep. (Eventually they decided they couldn't make a go of farming and moved back to England, we used to get Christmas cards from them every year.)

But at 4PM, everything came to a full stop for tea. They always served tea with milk, I still drink it that way though lately I've been using cream because it is more keto-friendly. As one of the characters in "The Great Escape" said, "Tea without milk is just so uncivilized."

They also served some sandwiches, but the only ones I remember were the banana sandwiches, mashed banana mixed with butter and spread on bread. Yum. (Elvis would have been disappointed - no peanut butter.)

I used to make them for our first son, the second one didn't care for them.

[Mike Nolan]

I made a keto fudge yesterday using a recipe I found online, but it isn't setting well, so it's more like a spoon fudge. But I think it'll heat up decently for hot fudge sauce.

Followup: Not quite hot fudge, but pretty good and 3.5 carbs per serving. (And it'd be fewer carbs if I used the Guittard Sante chips, which I haven't found locally yet; I found ones that were similar at Target, just a little higher in carbs.)

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight's pizza

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[Mike Nolan]

I took the two chicken thighs left over from the other day, warmed them, spooned some tomato sauce on top, added a slice of tomato and topped that with a slice of swiss cheese, then melted the cheese under the broiler.

Sort of a cross between chicken cacciatore and a tuna melt. 🙂

Very tasty, too.

[Mike Nolan]

I bought a bunch of 4 and 8 ounce freezer jars and froze both of the batches of tomato sauce I made, and I've got enough jars left for a third batch. I also want to freeze some quart-size containers for things like spaghetti and lasagna (both made low-carb), so I'm hoping I get another 3 or 4 batches of sauce made from this year's garden.

My Celebrity and Rutgers tomatoes are doing so-so this year, but that's true of well over half of the plants I started in March. I don't think it's just me, I've talked to others in Lincoln and their tomatoes are not having great seasons, either.

I'm probably going to try Defiance tomatoes next year instead of First Lady, for which I haven't found a reliable supplier, but will probably stick with the 4th of July, Italian Heirloom and Amish Paste varieties, though I'm getting a lot of shoulder splits on the Amish Paste tomatoes this year. Not sure if I'll do Porter next year, though it has been a reliable producer, a lot of little ones but the weight adds up. I haven't done Big Boy or Better Boy in a while, I might try them, and I am tempted to try the Burpee Supersauce tomato, though my experience has been that when tomatoes get over a pound in size, they aren't as flavorful.

The UNL urban soil improvement project we're in ends with a third set of soil samples next spring, so I will probably pull the cages and landscape cloth afterwards and re-till the garden for 2025, most likely throwing in a few bags of peat or sphagnum moss.

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