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I don't INTENTIONALLY leave bay leaves in marinara, I just have been known to forget to take them out before I use the stick blender to turn it into a puree.
(I also prefer to make marinara with seeded tomatoes, because tomato seeds can get bitter when cooked and stick in between your teeth.)
You don't HAVE to remove the bay leaf; it tends to crumble into little pieces that are not very appealing, but there's nothing unsafe about it.
I've done this a couple times with marinara.
I wonder what the egg yolk and cream do, keep the potatoes from drying out when they're reheated maybe?
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.
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