[Mike Nolan]

Maybe it's time for a followup-email to folks, I know Zen's site could use a boost and traffic here could be better, too.

[Mike Nolan]

Two of my computers got auto-upgraded to Win 10, I wish they were still running Win 7. (One of them seems to have stopped running completely now, so I've got a new W10 laptop from Dell I'm still breaking in.)

We've got a Trader Joes about 8 blocks from here, I doubt I go there more than 2-3 times a year. Costco just announced plans to open their first Lincoln location about a mile from us (with some neighborhood opposition), that'd make it a lot closer than the nearest Sams.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

We put the feeders out two weeks ago but I've only seen a hummingbird 3 or 4 times. Maybe they're just heading south later than normal?

[Mike Nolan]

Glad to see you pop in, you know we all worry about each other when people disappear for a week or more.

[Mike Nolan]

I've put sage in a chicken pot pie crust (hot water crust recipe), but I prefer to leave it out. A good pie crust has a mouth feel that herbs and spices can mess with.

[Mike Nolan]

I'd suggest you find another recipe, chocolate cream pie isn't that hard to make. You're basically making a pudding or a custard, with either egg yolks or starch (wheat flour and/or cornstarch) as a thickener, often both egg yolks and starch.

[Mike Nolan]

Of the 2250 recipes uploaded so far, over 1100 of them were uploaded by rottiedogs!

[Mike Nolan]

Congratulations on your retirement, I'm at 15 weeks and counting until mine.

[Mike Nolan]

Given how much the latest set of USDA nutritional recommendations has changed from what we all learned as the 'truth' back in the 50's and 60's (and how much some nutritionists say it still needs to change), Woody Allen could still turn out to be right!

One of the more vocal critics has said that the USDA's 'food triangle' may have been a major contributor to the obesity and diabetic trends we're seeing now.

[Mike Nolan]

Salt and yeast are the ingredients you need to be most careful about when increasing a recipe, mostly because small measuring errors can get compounded in a large batch.

You could try putting the original recipe into baker's math and scale up using that.

I'd cut back on the yeast just because I think most recipes use more than what is needed anyway.

Hopefully the temple has a large commercial mixer you can use. But if I was teaching a class like that, I think I'd have the large recipe of dough mixed up ahead of time (through the bulk rise and ready for shaping) but mix up a single batch to start the class off just so they can see what you're doing. If you time it right, the batch you make up during the class should be nearly ready for shaping around the time that the large batch is shaped, proofed and ready to go in the oven, so if you want to demonstrate a different braiding technique or something like a two layer celebration Challah or a ring, you can do that while the dough is baking.

Teaching a class like that sounds like fun, I wish I was close enough to assist.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife uses http://myfitnesspal.com, which she thinks is still free. There's a 'premium' mode but I don't know what advantages it offers that would make it worth $10 a month or $50 a year.

We've put a number of recipes in, but the place to start a new recipe is not obvious, and she winds up searching for it half the time.

She used to use the one at Weightwatchers.com, but they've fiddled with their point system so much that we find their information useless these days, and I always thought it was poorly designed and difficult to use.

I used to use the one on about.com, but stopped using it because their food dictionary had too many errors in it. I'm not sure it's even there any more, if I search on 'nutritional analysis' at about.com I get links to a half dozen or so other recipe analyzers, but not theirs.

If you google 'recipe analysis' there are a bunch of them out there, but I can only comment about the ones we've had experience with.

[Mike Nolan]

Since I started cooking with butter, my cholesterol levels have come down dramatically.

[Mike Nolan]

There may be valid cooking reasons to sear the outside of meat, but 'sealing in the juices' definitely isn't one of them! I think most of the time it just makes the outside of the meat overdone.

[Mike Nolan]

I've stopped searing beef, it really doesn't accomplish much except to make the edges more well done, as if they need that. (The myth about it 'sealing in the juices', which dates back to Von Leibig in 1850, has been thoroughly debunked, searing actually increases water loss.)

Something I haven't tried yet is to sous vide beef, Kenji Lopez-Alt suggests doing it in a beer cooler with water at 150 degrees. (For those who really must have grill marks, you can do that at the end.)

My older brother was in institutional food sales, he once showed me a catalog of par-cooked steaks that restaurants can order with this notation: grill marks optional.

[Mike Nolan]

Two weeks ago a friend brought over a couple of his knives, including a very expensive Shun knife, and we put them under the microscope.

He thought they were sharp, but at 150X we could see multiple issues with them, including several nicks. I think he may take them to a shop to be reground to a new edge, and he's thinking seriously about ordering a handheld digital microscope like my Celestron. (Meanwhile, I'm thinking of ordering a trinocular lab microscope capable of going to at least 1000X and hooking it to my Canon digital camera.)

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