[Mike Nolan]

I’ve got my shopping and menu planning for the week done, I’m making chicken cacciatore with some bone-in chicken breasts, using red peppers and tomatoes from the garden, an eye of round roast and potato leek soup. We’ll probably have something like tuna melts or BLT’s one day, and leftovers another.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm going to try one of the recipes from Rosie's book, honeypots.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm with you, I think stevia tastes weird.

[Mike Nolan]

As the article I gave a link to above says, the only foods that are REQUIRED under federal law to have an expiration date is infant formula and some baby foods. In some states milk is required to have an expiration date so it can be removed (by state law) when it is past that date.

Otherwise, all those notations and dates are voluntary and IMHO sometimes they're rather meaningless.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's what one site has to say about using outdated foods.

I've had a lot of foods go bad long before the date on the package, which is really frustrating. Recently it was a package of Sargento cheese that was moldy when I opened it a week after I bought it. I couldn't remember what store I bought it at (I almost never save receipts), so I just tossed it.

I've been known to cut out moldy parts of fruits and vegetables (if small) and use the rest, but cheese is one of those things that I won't use if moldy, unless it's the mold it was designed to have. I also won't use moldy bread, even if the mold might be the one that produced penicillin in Dr. Fleming's lab.

Beyond that, if it looks and smells OK, I'll generally use it. Dry items are ones I'll use beyond their expiration date. Flour is OK as long as it hasn't gone stale or the oils in it turned rancid, but both of those produce easily recognized odors.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Some years ago my sister-in-law asked us to make a rutabaga dish for Thanksgiving dinner from a recipe she gave us. It took at least an hour for the two of us to slice up a large rutabaga, a band saw would have helped! (And neither of us cared for the taste of the dish.)

A bisque is supposed to be a thick but creamy smooth soup. Most of the time when I make soup it's really thick, but that's because it has lots of meat and vegetables (and often noodles) in it.

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, it's one of the greatest April Fools Day pranks ever, and by the BBC no less! And they played it totally straight, no 'April Fool!' message at the end, the BBC was flooded with requests for how to get spaghetti plants.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's footage broadcast on BBC in 1957 of the spaghetti harvest in Ticino:

[Mike Nolan]

American Sugar Refining, Inc. markets products under the brand names C&H, Domino, Florida Sugar and Redpath. They also own the Tate & Lyle sugar refining business, which includes the rights to the Tate & Lyle's brand name, including Lyle's Golden Syrup.

[Mike Nolan]

I would expect it to be a little denser, ie, take up less volume after being ground into smaller pieces, for the same reason that table salt weighs more per teaspoon than the larger grain kosher salt, but if you take it all the way to powdered sugar, I think it gains volume, because a powder can hold more suspended air in it.

If you weigh it beforehand, it might lose a little weight when you grind it up (dust and whatever sticks to the food processor), but probably not enough to matter.

Followup: The C&H site says that their superfine baker's sugar is measured the same as regular sugar, which implies that a cup of both would be the same weight, or the difference so small as to be negligible.

[Mike Nolan]

The only place I've seen anything labeled as 'caster sugar' in the USA was a specialty grocery store. C&H makes a 'Baker's super fine granulated sugar', it's what is I have used when a recipe called for caster sugar.

[Mike Nolan]

You might try superfine baker's granulated sugar to combat the grittiness, you can make it yourself in a food processor, but I usually keep a container of it on hand.

Our younger son was a pretty fussy eater, until he went to study in Germany for 7 1/2 months. When he came back, he'd eat just about anything we made and was much more willing to eat spicy foods (not that we do a lot of them, but he'd object to sweet peppers in vegetable soup.)

[Mike Nolan]

I made GF cinnamon rolls today, the KAF recipe (but without the butter flavoring), and I used a simple milk and powdered sugar icing. They didn't rise as much as I had hoped, but that's often the case with GF baking.

[Mike Nolan]

My understanding is that edible wafer paper is mostly sugar with some stabilizers to make it into sheets.

If there's a store than handles a good selection of Wilton products (eg, Michaels, Jo-Ann), they may carry them, a package isn't very expensive, probably under $4.

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen lots of recipes for biscuits that used cream as the fat. (In fact, I think the classic 'southern' biscuit is made with cream, because it was cheap back then.)

I made the Clonmel Double Crusty bread shaped as Vienna bread today.

My wife has asked me to make a batch of GF cinnamon rolls for a co-worker who is GF, so I'm busy comparing recipes this evening. I made a batch of them some years back, but I'm not sure what recipe I used, and there have been a lot more GF recipes posted since then, and several companies, including KAF and Bobs, have come out with GF flours since then, too. I've used 2 or 3 of them, they're all fairly similar in performance.

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