[Mike Nolan]

I order citric acid powder, spices and wintergreen mints from Bulk Foods.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't blind bake much, but I have done some experimenting with it. I never use a baking sheet under the pan for blind baking, I think it interferes with the air flow.

I have played around a little with the convection cycle on my oven for blind baking, but not enough to have reached any conclusions yet. (I do use the convection cycle for the first 20 minutes of baking a fruit pie.)

I use white pie beans. When we blind-baked in pastry school, our instructor told most of us to add more beans, so make sure you use enough.

In pastry school we used parchment to line the pan (the beans should never touch the pie dough), I've also tried aluminum foil and coffee filters, of these commercial-sized coffee filters seem to be best, but mostly because they've already got the right shape. But you generally have to buy them in huge quantities. The biggest advantage of aluminum foil is if you mold it over the edges you generally don't need to use a pie shield to keep the top edge from getting over-baked.

All our pies in pastry school were made in disposable aluminum foil pie pans. At home I use a glass pie pan for blind baking, I use a Norpro non-stick pan for fruit pies. (It really is non-stick, you can slide the pie right out once it's cool.)

Some blind baking instructions (including, as I recall, King Arthur's) recommend you remove the pie beans for the last 5 minutes or so of baking, but that's challenging because they're HOT. I'm not sure it's necessary, either. We didn't do that in pastry school.

Lately my pie-baking experimentation has been geared towards trying to determine the optimal thickness of pie dough, from which I'm hoping to be able to create a pie dough recipe calculator, so you don't have too much left over pie dough or run short. To assist in this effort I'm using a digital caliper which can measure in 0.01 inch increments that I got at Shipwreck Beads.

One thing I wonder about pie dough is whether the type of pie dough (butter, lard, shortening or a combination of fats) affects the ideal thickness. I suppose it might affect proper blind baking as well.

I consider hot water pie crusts a different breed, worthy of its own set of investigations.

[Mike Nolan]

I've resigned myself to the fact that there are ingredients just that have to be ordered online, pastry flour, for example. (All I can find locally is whole wheat pastry flour, which I am not impressed with.) I can't find semolina locally any more, either. (The co-op used to stock it in bulk but dropped it.)

WalMart's selection often leaves a lot to be desired. I buy some items there because of price, but even then the local chains often beat them on the basics, especially if you watch for the sales.

[Mike Nolan]

We'll have 6 for supper tonight, our older son and his family are here, plus a family friend. (We think the last time he was here for Thanksgiving was around 1996.)

We'll be having:

Relish tray
Olive tray (one of our guests is allergic to olives, so we keep them separate)
Turkey and gravy
2 kinds of stuffing (bread cubes and GF cornbread)
Mashed potatoes
Dreaded Green Bean Casserole
Roasted Brussels Sprouts
Cranberry Sauce, two kinds (fresh and canned)
Apple Pie (currently in the oven)

It'll be in the 60's here today, so I'm doing the turkey on the outdoor gas rotisserie/grill, that always makes for the juiciest turkey.

[Mike Nolan]

Made bottom round with onion gravy and gluten-free cornbread, some to go with the beef, some to make GF stuffing with tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

I've made sweet potato breads before, so it's possible. But sweet potatoes really are sweeter than ordinary potatoes, so you may need to adjust the amount of sugar the recipe calls for.

[Mike Nolan]

Not really cooking or baking today, but I did temper a batch of milk chocolate and fill a bunch of chocolate molds to make pieces for a chocolate Advent calendar for our granddaughter. It's the first chocolate work I've done in a few months, so it was good to practice those skills.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making a rump roast today. I started it out in a 450 degree oven for about 10 minutes, dry, then I added beef stock, red wine and a medium onion and dropped the temperature to 275 for 3 hours. Then I added potatoes, celery and carrot, and will add mushroom in about a half hour and let it cook until the potatoes are tender.

[Mike Nolan]

I just spent 15-20 minutes browsing the new Chefs Catalog site. I didn't see much that I haven't seen on other sites.

Two items that I was interested in more details didn't have them.

One was a 'high capacity' kitchen scale, but it didn't say what the capacity was.

The other was an 'extra large sheet pan with cooling rack', but no dimensions of the pan. It appears someone else asked a question a week ago about the dimensions but it has not been answered yet.

So my initial impressions are not all that favorable. If anyone orders from them, let us know how their fulfillment is.

[Mike Nolan]

Unfortunately not many catalog companies can make it on 'funky stuff', even Williams Sonoma moved away from the interesting hard-to-find stuff to having pages and pages of spices and sauces and expensive pans.

I remember when Brookstone had all sorts of tools you couldn't find anywhere else, instead of junk.

[Mike Nolan]

Much better than my first attempts at piping, which, fortunately, were not documented.

At a guess you were going too slow. You probably need to squeeze harder and go faster.

[Mike Nolan]

I'd go with 3 tablespoons of honey and probably subtract 1 tablespoon of liquid. Honey is slightly sweeter than table sugar and in liquid form it takes up less space, too.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been using the USDA database more lately, it tends to do a better job with quantities and nutrients. None of this 'a serving of flour is 1/4 cup' nonsense that's required on nutrition labels.

See USDA foods database
USDA uses 125 grams/cup for unbleached AP flour (4.41 ounces.)

I still tend to use KAF's flour weights (4.25 ounces/cup) as a starting point, though many recipes seem to be based on a higher weight/cup basis. But it's easier to add flour than take it back out again. (And an enlightened author/site should give important quantities in both dry measure amounts and weights anyway.)

[Mike Nolan]

I think Aldi's is a store that kind of grows on you. It's no-frills taken to an extreme, starting with the 25 cent deposit on shopping carts. I get the impression there are seldom more than a half dozen employees in the building, if that. Mostly private label products, but decent quality. Ours has a good though limited to the basics produce section, usually with the lowest prices on produce, milk and eggs. The limited selection of meats is more of a problem for me, so I don't buy much meat there.

For what it's worth, Fareway opened a full-service meat store on the east side of town this week, and once I took the time to talk to the senior staff, I was impressed. They had veal fore shanks in stock though not in the display case, and can order hind shanks on 2 weeks notice, some of the best beef shanks I've seen in years, a good price on rump roast and I stocked up on frozen duck breasts at $9.99/pound. Although Fareway, based out of Des Moines, has mostly full service grocery stores in smaller towns, this is their second meat-only store, just meat, wine and cheeses. I hope it survives in Lincoln, we've needed a good butcher shop for years.

[Mike Nolan]

I've never done the home-made vanilla extract, but I assume there's a limit to how much vanilla you can extract from a vanilla bean pod.

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