Mike Nolan
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I tried a chicken experiment tonight.
I took 2 bone-in chicken breasts, skinned them, placed them on a bed of shredded carrot, spinach, celery seeds and mustard powder, sprayed the breasts with oil, dusted them with dill weed and poured in some white wine. Then I threw it in the oven for about an hour at 350.
Smelled great, probably needed more wine so there was more sauce and it could probably have used more carrots and spinach as well, but it was quite good. Served it with a salad.
A lot of breads come out of the oven with a fairly hard outer crust, but it softens up as the bread cools. The recipe I use for sandwich loaves is like that. The Clonmel Double Crust recipe stays a bit firmer, but I like the taste of it as Vienna bread. (Some years ago I made a batch of it and a batch of Peter Reinhart's Vienna Bread recipe from BBA, and the Clonmel version won a blind taste test.)
I know one bakery whose sourdough feeding schedule is roughly this:
10AM: Feed the starter, doubling it in size. (He says he maintains about 40 quarts of starter, so after he feeds it he probably has 5 or 6 big tubs of it.)
2AM: Take half of the starter, about 20 quarts, as the beginning of that day's bread.
As I understand it, the legal meaning of the date printed on a milk carton varies from state to state, but in general it is a 'sell by' date, not a 'use by' date.
Buttermilk, being a cultured product, like sour cream or yogurt, seems to have a much longer shelf life than fresh milk does, so the date printed on the carton may be of little help to consumers.
I suspect the neighborhood birds would have a field day with blueberries, they get about half of the black raspberries. I planted elderberries, there are never any that even get purple before the birds descend upon the bushes. (Elderberries are one of the favorite foods of cardinals, and we have at least two breeding pair in our yard.)
This site says that blueberries are self-pollinating but that you get bigger berries if they're pollinated from a second variety. (But both varieties have to be in bloom at the same time, of course.)
I've never grown blueberries, how long is the harvesting season?
190-205 is a rather wide range. I don't doubt that Hamelman never uses temperature, he's baking in quantities and using equipment and techniques that help ensure consistency from one day to another.
In his book he says that the internal temperature of bread reaches a maximum of about 210 degrees. The surface temperature gets hotter, though.
I've been using the KAF Whole Grains book recipe for Hot Cross Buns for a number of years, it's the best one I've found. I grind my own whole wheat flour, though, and I think freshly ground flour has a higher moisture content, so I haven't noticed the dough being dry.
I divide the dough into 32 parts (about 1.5 ounces each) and bake them in 6" round pans, 8 rolls per pan, for about 30 minutes.
There are a number of fruits that need a separate pollinator. Usually the nursery catalogs are pretty good at letting you know what you need.
Rye starters are definitely possible, Jeffrey Hamelman brought one with him when he went to work for King Arthur Flour that he's had for many years.
But like any starter, it needs regular feeding, probably several times a week. Will you be making rye bread often enough to justify that?
Although most procedures for maintaining a starter at home have you throw half of it away every time you feed it, commercial bakers don't do it that way (they couldn't afford to), so what they do is feed their starter anywhere from 18-24 hours before they plan to bake a batch of bread, doubling the amount they have on hand, then use half of it for their next day's baking.
I've been making my own marinara with the tomato sauce I made last summer (no salt added) plus I add a can of no-salt-added tomatoes to it, and some herbs (basil, oregano, marjoram and thyme)
It did seem to bring out a few lurkers, or maybe they just hadn't been authorized to post yet.
I shouldn't have to send an email like that very often.
Wow, nice research!
No matter how long you cook tomatoes, they don't turn into a smooth sauce unless you puree them either before or after cooking them. (A stick blender works very well for this.)
Most slow cookers don't get hot enough to melt the fat out of a fatty roast.
Last year we only put in 5 tomato plants, and they didn't do very well in the hot summer, but rebounded when things cooled off. Then we had a week where it rained every day and I didn't get out to pick and the fruit over-ripened and the vines shut down.
Fortunately, two of the graduate students at UNL had some test gardens (10 rows of tomatoes, each about 160 feet long) and they were picking 500-1000 pounds of fruit three times a week by late August, which was more than even the food pantry could handle, so we got several batches of 50-75 pounds of tomatoes, and I made a lot of tomato sauce, of which I think I've used less than half.
I think another duo of graduate students are doing tomatoes again this summer. We've been getting a few hothouse tomatoes during the winter, too.
I'm trying to decide what I want to try this year other than a few tomatoes. Lettuce and spinach have such a short growing season, because as soon as it starts to get hot, the plants bolt. I seldom have good luck with peppers or eggplants. I don't care much for cucumbers unless they're pickled, and salty pickles are off my diet. Doesn't leave much. (The problem with farm shares is you get lots of stuff we don't eat, like kale and beets.)
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