[Mike Nolan]

My wife prefers raised fried donuts I'm more of a cake donut fan, so the baked ones work well for me.

I don't have the donut pan, but I've made KAF's donut muffin recipe as donut holes several times.

What chocolate frosting recipe did you use?

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making a big batch of beef stock today, starting out by roasting some of the shank bones I got at the farmer's market, some beef shanks, various trim pieces from the kitchen that I've saved over the last few months, some neck bones and a sirloin tip roast (just to make sure I've got lots of beef for the soup), with onions, celery and carrots on top. I'll wind up with 10-14 quarts of beef stock, about half of which will go into a batch of vegetable beef soup tomorrow.

There's an ice storm heading our way, so this'll keep the house nice and warm and smelling wonderful.

[Mike Nolan]

What kind of bread did you use for your bahn mi? There are a half-dozen or so recipes for 'Vietnamese-style baguettes' on the Internet, but I'm not sure I'd know the difference. I think the local bahn mi shops here just use what's available from restaurant suppliers.

I've made a lamb/beef gyros mixture (which I cooked on the rotisserie), but my wife doesn't care for the taste of lamb. Our favorite local gyros maker uses an all-beef gyros meat, so that must be the local preference.

When our younger son was studying in Germany, he subsisted largely on Doner Kebabs, which were available nearly everywhere when we visited him in Berlin and came in a variety of types, beef, beef/lamb, chicken and fish.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got a tapered rolling pin, I've never figured out how to use it for anything. My go-to rolling pins these days are two non-tapered wooden ones with no handles, like the ones we used in pastry school, in two different diameters. I like the larger diameter one for pie crusts, the smaller diameter one for other doughs.

[Mike Nolan]

There were problems at first, and right after your host moved to a different ISP, but it's been up every time I've gone there for the past several months, so I think they got it worked out.

[Mike Nolan]

You should be able to find replacement wood strips at a hobby store, I've even seen them at hardware stores.

For that matter, 1/16 of an inch is 0.0625 of an inch, and the thickness of a penny is 0.0598 of an inch, so if you tape a row of pennies to the counter, that should be really close to 1/16 of an inch.

[Mike Nolan]

I love crackers, but I totally fail at making them! I think my biggest problem is getting them rolled out evenly so that they're evenly baked.

[Mike Nolan]

By the time bananas turn black, I think they're too liquid for baking, but I don't mash them unless they're REALLY firm, most of the time I just make sure they're breaking up decently as I throw them in the mixer.

[Mike Nolan]

pmiker is another of the KAF BCers who joined here but hasn't posted, I think he wrote me once that he was having trouble getting a password to work.

[Mike Nolan]

I used to keep a log of recipes I was tinkering with, along with our thoughts about each iteration, but I haven't done a lot of tinkering lately.

However, my wife tends to enter any new recipe I make into My Fitness Pal's recipe analyzer, and I can usually remember any tinkering I do with a new recipe long enough to dictate it to her.

I should probably start keeping a log again, if only for weight control purposes.

[Mike Nolan]

I can see advantages to both methods. I often have to think back to remember what I baked nearly a week ago. A weekly recap means starting a new thread each week, whereas a 'what are you baking now' thread might go on for weeks.

I also find if I bake or cook something truly new and interesting, I may not want to wait until next week to write about it. But sometimes my opinion of a dish changes after a few days. (For example, if nobody wants to eat the leftovers, that says something about it.)

[Mike Nolan]

I appreciate your efforts to keep Zen's site going, I check it periodically but haven't posted there in a few months.

The My Nebraska Kitchen site is slowly gaining real subscribers, though most of them aren't posting yet. We're getting more spammers as well, most of them coming from Poland it appears. I deleted another spam post this morning and another half-dozen suspicious-looking new subscribers, all from Poland, as I recall.

We've got a few people from the old KAF BC who joined here when it first launched but haven't been active, including people like Paddy L. I'm thinking of doing a bulk mailing to all subscribers to see if I can nudge some of them from lurkers to posters.

[Mike Nolan]

If you left the sugar out completely, i wonder if they'd be more like biscuits than muffins or rolls.

I've stopped experimenting with biscuit recipes, because my wife prefers Bisquick biscuits and they're so easy to make. About the only time we make biscuits these days is to serve with creamed tuna.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Does greasing pans with butter make the outside of the product more tender than Crisco?

Butter has a somewhat lower melting point than Crisco, but there's so little of it used to grease a pan that I don't know if that would affect tenderness. I do it because I tend to prefer the flavor of butter over the flavor of Crisco in most baked goods. (My mother's Oatmeal Crisps cookie recipe is an exception to that rule.)

Why would self-rising flour make a recipe come together quicker versus one with baking powder or baking soda added?

[Mike Nolan]

I used Baker's Joy on something last fall and my wife said it left a taste she wasn't fond of.

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