[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

I 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.

[Mike Nolan]

I made Vienna bread.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

I make my own croutons, especially for potato leek soup.

The Double Crusty bread recipe makes great croutons. (I make it Vienna-style, using butter instead of oil.)

Then I just cube it (we like them fairly large, 3/4 of an inch or so), spread them out on a tray and put them in the oven on the lowest setting for about an hour. We prefer them crisp on the outside but not completely dried out.

I used to coat them with a little butter about half way through, but that takes time and the croutons don't keep as well, so these days I just add butter to the soup when dishing it out.

[Mike Nolan]

I make chicken stock starting with a whole chicken (or two), so there's plenty of boiled chicken for soup. I use this recipe:

Nancy's Homemade Jewish Chicken Soup The parsnips are the key, if I leave them out, the stock is too bland.

I wish I had an inexpensive source for chicken backs for making stock. In older cookbooks they always say 'ask your butcher'. There hasn't been a real butcher shop in Lincoln in the 40+ years we've lived here. I've seen them in the store for around $2.00 a pound, that's ridiculously high! But I still remember when chicken wings were 5 cents a pound, before they became an 'in' food. I've been known to buy a 10 pound bag of legs and thighs on sale and use it for stock.

I will have lots of chicken to use up if I'm making some other kind of soup.

So, what to do with the 'excess' chicken? Sometimes I shred it and add barbecue sauce and let it marinate for a day in the fridge, other times I make the Chicken Salad recipe I have posted here (which came from a friend.)

I don't do chicken cacciatore and lately I haven't done many chicken and pasta or chicken and rice meals at all, because of the carbs and my wife's low-carb diet.

[Mike Nolan]

I find when making a two-layer Celebration Challah that the smaller strands for the top need to be a bit shorter than the ones for the bottom were, because they don't have as far to go to get around the other strands. And if you make the top layer a little short, you can gently stretch it.

[Mike Nolan]

I collect old editions of the Joy of Cooking, the ones from the mid to late 40's had some recipes that got dropped in later versions. (True first editions are expensive, but it has been reprinted.)

[Mike Nolan]

The sheeters are fascinating to watch, throw in a lump of dough and out comes a perfectly round crust.

[Mike Nolan]

We average less than a load a day, since there's just two of us now. I'm probably more inclined to hand-wash pots and pans, so that lowers the average some. When our younger son was still living with us, we probably averaged about a load a day, when our older son and his family are visiting we probably do two loads a day.

Of course when I do serious cooking (or as I call it, committing kitchen), I can create a couple loads of dirty pots. I made Boeuf Bourguignon on Sunday, with braised pearl onions, mushrooms, and spaetzle, so that takes at least 5 pans and several bowls, plus more bowls for the leftovers. The cast iron pot doesn't go in the dishwasher, everything else usually does.

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