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Nice to see you posting again, Sarah. So many people seem to have disappeared. (Cass, PaddyL, etc.)
Oriental Trading has a retail store in Omaha called Nobbies, we make a trip there every few years to pick up big bags of things for Halloween. (Balls, puzzles, rings, necklaces, dinosaurs, etc.)
Some years pencils go over big, this year they did not.
We also keep on the lookout for toy sales. If we can pick up a dozen Hot Wheels for $5 we'll do that and add it to the stuff on the shelf.
I've got a 'cooking with honey' book, I'll have to look for a glaze recipe there. I've never found a chocolate glaze that tastes like the stuff the bakeries use, though.
We haven't given away candy in many years. We give away small toys (carnival trinkets), and my wife always buys some small books and other kid-safe items to give away to really young kids.
This started when I bought a case of colored chalk for a few dollars at an office supply auction in late summer about 25 years ago. My wife asked what I planned to do with it, and I said 'Give it away at Halloween!'. We haven't done candy since.
And whatever we don't use one year just goes back on the shelf for next year.
November 1, 2016 at 12:55 pm in reply to: Did You Cook Anything Interesting the Week of October 23, 2016? #5331The haystacks went over well, even though my wife said there were lots of desserts on the table. I sent in a big tin of them, probably about 60 of them, just one came back.
Her scones went over well, too, though for some reason most people seem to skip the lemon curd. (That means more left over for us, oh the horrors of it all!)
I haven't made pizza in over a year now, mostly because it's a hassle with just 2 of us, and with my wife's low-carb diet she hasn't been eating much bread, so I've cut way back on my baking in general.
Even when I was making it, I seldom decided on pizza far enough ahead to make the dough more than a few hours in advance.
I also got a big box of them last week, and then I got a smaller box yesterday with 6 more, so Cindy may have had her assistant pick more lemons and sent some out to others on the list.
So far I've made a batch of lemon curd and frozen a bunch of them whole. I need to zest/juice/freeze a bunch of them today.
We also sent some on to my granddaughter in Pittsburgh, but given how quick they're ripening I'm hoping they'll still be good by the time they get there.
Letting the dough age for 12-24 hours seems to make it a lot easier to roll out. I'm told sourdough pizza dough also rolls out easier, but I've never made a true sourdough pizza dough. The longer you let it age, the more it is going to start to behave more like a sourdough. (I learned that testing the baguette recipe in Peter Reinhart's 'artisan' book.)
The type of flour you use also affects it, a flour high in glutenin is going to be very elastic and will bounce back, so you need to let it relax frequently. A flour high in gliadin is going to be more plastic and will roll out quicker.
I'm not aware of any significant chemical reactions between baking powder and salt. Leavening is caused by the interaction of an acid and a base. Baking soda is the base (alkali), but a solution of salt in water is pretty much pH neutral, so you still need some acid. (With double-acting baking powder, there are two acids involved, one of them requires heat to begin reacting with the base.)
I've tried far too many recipes that were WAY too salty for my taste. Graduates of certain cooking schools (I'd put CIA at the top of that list) seem especially prone to develop and prefer recipes that are heavy on salt.
October 30, 2016 at 12:52 am in reply to: Did You Cook Anything Interesting the Week of October 23, 2016? #5305I made boeuf bourguignon with braised pearl onions and mushrooms on spaetzle, and a bigger batch of haystacks for my wife's office Halloween celebration. She's going as Mother Goose this year, so she's been busy making a goose doll.
I made Vienna bread.
I know a lot of sourdough fanatics who would dispute that a new starter tastes 'just like' an old one.
Chad Robertson (Tartine Bakery) talks about 'mature' versus 'young' starters, and the methods he describes in his book produce a starter that is always 'young'.
There are also 'cold storage' starters and 'warm storage' starters, and the cold ones are more sour than the warm ones, because cold encourages a different type of bacteria than warm.
IMHO a reasonably well-established starter is a pretty hardy beast, folks have left one sitting in the back of the fridge for months and it bounced right back.
I'm a medium to medium-well done person, as long as there's still a little pink in the middle it is fine with me.
My wife used to eat beef blood rare, like her father, until one day her older sister looked at a steak and said, "Ewwww, sanguinary!". After my wife looked it up a dictionary, she couldn't eat beef unless it was well done. I've slowly gotten her back to the point where medium is acceptable again, and now she complains if her steak doesn't have some pink in the middle.
Interestingly enough, Kenji Lopez-Alt has done blindfolded taste tests where people couldn't see how done their steak was, and they overwhelmingly preferred medium-rare, even the blood-rare crowd.
One of my favorite episodes of Master Chef had the contestants cooking 3 steaks, one rare, one medium and one well-done. As Gordon Ramsay noted, it is possible to cook beef to well done without totally killing both the flavor and the texture, but it takes a deft hand. Sadly, few chefs take the time to even try it and many restaurants have disclaimers in their menus saying that they will not take responsibility for meat ordered 'well done' Cowards!
Hamburger is a different matter, it need to be well-done for food safety reasons.
Sadly, the bat was not repairable, the wings kept falling off. But it was still tasty, even though the spray painted black cocoa butter tries to come off on my fingers.
I had to look up 'Brunswick stew', that's one I had not heard of.
There was a soup course as part of lunch at the Chocolate Academy every day. (The lunches were catered in, not prepared in-house as I had assumed.) The soups we had during the 4 days I was there: Corn chowder (very sweet, almost a dessert), ginger-carrot, broccoli cheddar (best broccoli cheddar soup I've ever had, several of us had more than one bowl of it!) and onion.
Of these, the onion soup was the most pedestrian, I thought the onions were a bit under-caramelized. The broth was good, but I wasn't able to identify what it was made from, chicken stock and something else, I think. Might have included veal stock. It was well-seasoned, so often onion soup is so salty it's hard to eat.
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