[Mike Nolan]

Some lemon pie fillings are very mildly lemon and some are pretty strong, personally I want one that tastes lemony but doesn't scream "I AM LEMON, HEAR ME ROAR".

I've only tried a buttermilk pie crust once or twice, and I wasn't fond of the results, but if you do try it again, try cutting the buttermilk in half. When you add too much liquid, you encourage gluten to form, and once that happens it won't be flaky. If the dough was stretchy, you had developed your gluten too much.

The epicurious buttermilk pie crust recipe uses more flour and less buttermilk, FWIW.

[Mike Nolan]

Nothing fancy here today, steaks on the grill, sauteed mushrooms, a nice salad and strawberry shortcake for dessert.

Happy Fathers Day, all you fathers out there.

[Mike Nolan]

I've made salmon with dill a few times, but I've never made couscous. My wife won't eat salmon (too many really bad canned salmon patties as a child), so when I do fish for dinner I get salmon and she gets orange roughy.

[Mike Nolan]

50 years together is a feat, even these days when more people live into their 90's, so congratulations. We'll be at 45 years in September.

[Mike Nolan]

Today I made honey wheat bread.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

The filling in a lemon meringue pie needs to be a custard, pudding, mousse or curd. That means it needs something to thicken it, such as a starch (corn, wheat, tapioca, etc) or egg yolk. I've had dairy-based ones and ones made with no dairy, the latter tend to be more commonplace, I think.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't think she ever made it available on her site, though, and the traffic there is way down. We've got a loyal core of users but lost a lot of people who never came over from KAF, and aren't getting a lot of new users. I just hope the anti-spam stuff isn't keeping people away.

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen articles about Amazon's free banana stands outside their buildings. They call the people who work at them bananistas.

You have to be a wary grocery shopper at Wal-Mart, some things are priced noticeably higher than at the grocery stores.

[Mike Nolan]

Please post it to our recipes section, so the next person who wants it can find it.

[Mike Nolan]

There were hundreds if not thousands of recipes that were only in threads, many were lost when the old BC was transformed into the new BC without transferring the existing contents over, others were lost when KAF shut down the new BC a year ago. There may still be some recipes and threads that were saved by someone but have not been uploaded here yet, but that activity has slowed way down from last summer, so I assume we have the bulk of what was saved.

[Mike Nolan]

I thought all the recipes that people had saved had already been uploaded.

Someone once said that Zen had captured the entire recipe file, if so, perhaps she can send it to me and I can see if there's a way to determine which recipes have been posted and which have not. (I dropped her an email about this.)

Of course, if it was a recipe posted in a thread rather than in the KAF recipe section, it may be lost.

I don't trust anything on the web to be there indefinitely. It's one reason why I prefer books and paper recipes. Those can get lost or destroyed, too, of course. And some day my kids will have to sort through my collection of several hundred cookbooks and who knows how many printed out recipes and decide what to do with them.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years ago by htfoot.

[Mike Nolan]

There are so many different ways to make the custard for a lemon meringue pie, one of the simplest might be the microwave lemon curd recipe that KAF put out several years ago, and it works very well with meyer lemons. (I'd cut back on the lemon juice in it for a pie, it's pretty tart.)

Something I've seen done but never tried is adding lemon juice to pastry cream. I think that'd make an interesting lemon meringue pie.

[Mike Nolan]

According to the NAMP, skirt steak is from the plate primal cut. The skirt steak is the boneless diaphragm muscle from the 6th through 12th ribs. It's a flavorful cut of beef, but can be tough.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirt_steak

It is often confused with flank steak, which is cut from further back on the underside of the steer and is the tail of the porter house and T-bone steaks, cut from the short loin primal.

The last several times I've done an eye of round, I started it at a high temperature (475-500) for about 15 minutes, then reduced the temperature to 150 and let it sit until it is 140-145 in the center, because I don't like roast beef too rare. (The recipe actually says to just turn the oven off, but I find that the temperature drops too much, probably an issue with oven insulation/ventilation.)

The only downside with this recipe is that you don't get much drippings for gravy, because eye of round is quite lean, so I make the gravy with roux and beef stock.

In hot weather, I'd generally do eye of round on the outdoor rotisserie.

The Wall Street Journal had an article recently which said that millenials are turning to jobs like being a butcher as more satisfying (if less lucrative.) I wish there was such a renaissance butcher near us! I grew up in a small town where the local butcher raised his own cattle for slaughter, he knew more about meat than any butcher I've been to in over 40 years.

[Mike Nolan]

Barbecue beef, chicken and pork are best with a sauce tailored to the protein. That extends to other proteins, like lamb and goat, though few people consider them 'barbecue', since they're usually more Mediterranean or Middle East in flavor.

A pork sauce needs to be sweeter than a beef sauce and a chicken sauce (IMHO) needs to be spicier, since chicken is pretty bland. You can't cook a chicken for as long as you can beef or pork to impart smoke flavor, so the sauce often has 'liquid smoke' added to it, though I think that is often overdone. A touch is fine, but if you can obviously taste it, you've got too much 'liquid smoke'.

St. Louis barbecue is know more for its dry rub than its sauce.

Carolina sauce is very vinegary, St. Louis sauce to me seems to be close to a Carolina sauce, but is often close to a sweet-and-sour sauce with lots of sugar or honey to offset the vinegar. Memphis sauce has a lot of hot sauce or peppers in it, more than Kansas City sauce, which is usually quite thick.

Egg is a new one on me, but thickening a barbecue sauce is not. I make my variation of the "Warren's Barbecue Sauce" out of the Better Homes & Garden Barbecue book. It is similar to a Carolina sauce, but I use less sugar and more hot sauce, then I cook it a lot longer than the recipe calls for, so it has higher viscosity. I've been known to take a few cups of it, add some honey and cook it down to nearly a paste for steak sauce. I also make it in large quantity, I've been known to start with a #10 can of ketchup.

I suspect a sauce with egg in it would not store well, the sauce I make will last a year or longer if refrigerated.

[Mike Nolan]

Happy birthay, Cass!

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