[Mike Nolan]

I've never tried making vegetable broth, but I'm told you need to avoid things like cabbage and broccoli. Mushrooms are supposed to be good in vegetable stock. (Personally, I'd avoid garlic, but would include onions, carrots and celery.)

The 'secret ingredient' in my chicken stock is parsnips, so I'd be sure to include them.

[Mike Nolan]

I made a cheese souffle in a kitchen where I couldn't find an egg separator, so I separated them by hand. Unfortunately, I broke 2 yolks and twice made the mistake of dumping the egg whites in the souffle pot rather than in the mixer bowl, so I wound up with a souffle with 10 egg yolks in it but only 6 egg whites. It was tasty but a bit too eggy, more like scrambled eggs in places than than a souffle.

[Mike Nolan]

Specialty markets or online stores might be your best choice for varietal honey, so much 'commercial' honey is aggregated so it can't be described as coming from a particular flower. About the only varietal I can find here other than clover honey is buckwheat honey, which is really dark and has a flavor I don't really care for.

Butter and brown sugar (or butter, white sugar and molasses) make true butterscotch, though many people call it caramel. (Caramel is made from white sugar.)

Glad to see you posting again, Cass.

[Mike Nolan]

I didn't have a camera with me, but it was a flat piece of hard caramelized sugar, probably about 1/8 of an inch thick, roughly about the size of the eclair, so it stuck out over the rounded top, rather like a pastry aircraft carrier. It was slightly irregular in shape, so I don't think it was cast in a mold. Maybe cut by hand before the sugar sheet had fully hardened, or possibly using a stencil?

It had a slight pattern of stippling on it, like you'd get if the hot sugar syrup had been poured onto a silpat. I could see cutting it to shape, heating it with a torch and then touching it to the top of the eclair to pull it off the silpat.

It was quite tasty, with a nice pastry cream filling.

The North Market is Columbus's indoor year-round farmer's market, sort of like Faneuil Hall in Boston or Pier 39 in San Francisco, but smaller. It had a fish counter, a poultry counter and a meat counter, all the type that I wish we had ANYTHING like in Nebraska! (I can't even find veal chops or cutlets in Lincoln these days, much less specialized cuts, I saw about a half dozen veal cuts at the meat shop, at least 4 types of whole duck, plus duck breasts, confit duck legs and fois gras at the poultry store, there was a place doing sausages, one doing cheeses, a bakery, a patisserie, probably a dozen restaurants. I'm either sad that it isn't close or glad.)

[Mike Nolan]

Frozen blueberries seem to release more juice than fresh blueberries and that can affect baking times.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife has done 2 kinds of cookies so far, raisin oatmeal spice cookies and Russian teacakes. She's got dough for chocolate mushrooms chilling, so that's probably today's project.

I made caramelized almonds and then some chocolate almond haystacks. I need a better mold for those, though, I've been making them in a 30mm hemispherical mold and I think they'd work better in some kind of a log mold so that the almond slivers are mostly aligned in the same direction.

Tried coating some nougat (from a pastry shop) with milk chocolate but the chocolate wasn't properly tempered and it came out too soft. I may need to add a little cocoa butter to this type of milk chocolate to get a firmer coating.

[Mike Nolan]

My experience on both this forum and the KAF forums has been that some of the best questions AND some of the best answers have come from people who "didn't think they had much to contribute."

So, everyone is welcome! Remember, there are no 'dumb questions', there are only ones that didn't get asked.

[Mike Nolan]

I think this may be the same course they ran about 2 years ago, or at least very similar. I tried to get started in that, but it had a weekly time requirement that I estimated at 10 hours or more a week, and I just didn't have that much time available back then. Now that I'm retired, maybe I'll have more time. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't looked at the crock pot chocolate recipe, but based on what I learned at Chocolate Boot Camp I'd be very wary of the temperatures, monitoring them closely, infrared thermometers work well for this

Chocolate will scorch if it gets much over 50 degrees (C), lower for milk and white chocolate The temperatures to create and maintain well-tempered chocolate are rather precise (between 28 and 34 degrees C for dark chocolate, a little lower for milk chocolate and even lower for white chocolate), and most crock pots don't have heat controls that are that accurate.

A few days after I got home from Chocolate Boot Camp I ordered a Martellato Mini Meltinchoc pot for my chocolate work. This was about the lowest priced tool I could find that I felt was sufficiently accurate for chocolate work.

[Mike Nolan]

When we built our house in 1996-97, we built one of the first smart homes in Nebraska, doing what was then state-of-the-art in home automation, so there are around 70 devices, mostly lights and outlets, that can be turned on from programmable button panels around the house. Light sensors and timers control what 'phase of the day' various areas of the house are in, morning, day, evening or night.

One touch of a button in the bedroom, for example, and all the outdoor lights come on. Really good for bump-in-the-night noises.

We also put in quite a few motion sensors, so that in most rooms lights come on automatically as needed and go off after a few minutes. It's also tied to our security system, so when you open doors lights come on, etc. The house also 'talks', so it announces when doors open. Very hard to sneak in or out of this house.

By current standards, it's probably a bit primitive, though, and it's not web-enabled.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen some printers for making cocoa butter transfer sheets, similar to doing dry transfer lettering for t-shirts, I guess. The best of them aren't available in the USA because the printer cartridges won't work on the printers that are available here, but I'm told they're not TOO expensive in Europe, if you're into doing transfer sheets for your chocolates.

There are also ones for doing cake decorating with pictures, sort of a fancied up airbrush, I assume.

[Mike Nolan]

I could probably find counter space for one, since we actually have 2 microwaves in the kitchen, but this seems like an appliance whose time hasn't quite arrived yet.

But in a few years, this technology will almost certainly be more affordable, more mature and more refined. Look what happened with microwave oven prices over the years. We spent something something in excess of $300 for our first microwave oven 25 years ago, and these days they're under $100.

And immersion circulation heaters for sous vide cooking were until recently only available for $1000 or more, now there are several models that are under $200, sometimes under $100.

The 3D food printer is the technology that will eventually redefine cooking, the food replicators of the Star Trek world are coming!

[Mike Nolan]

Well, it doesn't appear that our current Cuisinart is on the recall list, so at least I don't have to spend time trying to get that taken care of. I don't use it a lot, but there are some tasks for which a food processor is the best tool to use.

[Mike Nolan]

I was at Target the other day, and they had 5 speed hand mixers on sale for around $31. I don't remember if they were KA or Cuisinart.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not the pancake expert, but I've thought that thicker batter generally doesn't bubble, but if you're happy with the pancakes, don't worry about whether or not they bubble.

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