[Mike Nolan]

Stopped at the local Costco yesterday, a 16 ounce bottle of vanilla extract (no brand name but packaged for Costco) was $26.99.

They also had unbleached organic AP flour in 10 pound bags as well as much larger bags of bleached AP flour.

[Mike Nolan]

You make muffins from a box?? Oh the Shame of it all! Where did we go wrong?

I'd sentence you to 3 lashes with a wet noodle, but you'd have to make noodles. 🙂

Seriously, though, glad you enjoyed what you made.

[Mike Nolan]

I think it's the first topic that really needed to be split, so I had to figure out what the tools were to do that. Not too bad, but not something I'd want to do every day.

[Mike Nolan]

Admin note: I split the discussion about mice off from the one about cooking Cinderella pumpkins.

[Mike Nolan]

Admin note: I split the stuff about catching mice off from the Cinderella pumpkin thread.

I prefer the older style Victor traps, with the metal trigger, over than the plastic ones, but both seem to work fairly well here. I alternate which I use, because mice seem to learn how to avoid one, so I switch for a few weeks.

I tried the glue ones, a strong mouse just bounces around until he frees himself.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by htfoot.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by htfoot.

[Mike Nolan]

I'll check on the vanilla the next time I'm at our new Costco, which opened on Saturday and is only a few blocks from us. So far I've not been impressed with their website as a shopping experience, though. (Sams site is much better, IMHO.)

They may not carry the same brand of vanilla at every store, and it might be their house brand, Kirkland.

I know they only carry King Arthur flour in the northeastern US (though KAF uses mills in Kansas, among others), I'm not sure they even carry an 'unbleached' flour here.

[Mike Nolan]

There is no scientific evidence I can find that essential oils keep mice away. Many of the websites that recommend it, surprise, surprise, sell essential oils!

[Mike Nolan]

The problem with mouse and rat poisons is that you do not know where the dead bodies will be, perhaps inside your walls?

[Mike Nolan]

When we had our annual mouse invasion last fall, I baited several traps with some warm tempered chocolate, it did a great job catching mice.

[Mike Nolan]

We tend to buy the smaller sizes of bananas, but usually I make banana bread when we have anywhere from 2 to 4 bananas that got too ripe for eating, so I don't always have the same amount of banana in each batch, and the amount of banana I use doesn't seem to affect the texture much.

[Mike Nolan]

I'd happily send you some of my mice too, I've got multiple traps set up in the garage to catch them as they try to get out of the cold. These are sneaky mice, they've figured out how to lick the peanut butter off the trigger without setting it off, I wind up rebaiting all 4 traps nearly every day, whether I've caught a mouse overnight or not.

[Mike Nolan]

I just posted my banana nut bread/muffin recipe, which is pretty similar to many other recipes, except that I almost always add raisins and often add cinnamon.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's one of the 6 banana nut bread spiders I made using a mini-bundt pan,

[Mike Nolan]

So serve him the juice at breakfast. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I have wondered about that as well, all those grooves seem like places for things to stick. They
might increase the rate of heat transfer between the pan and your dough, I suppose.
--
Mike Nolan

[Author]

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