[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.)

[Mike Nolan]

I need to start using Facebook, but I think someone already has a FB page entitled 'My Nebraska Kitchen'.

I think the heat wave may have broken here, we've had several days in the past week where it was in the 70's, which after several weeks of mid-90's feels wonderful.

But between the weather, work issues (many issues to resolve before I retire) and my wife's 20 carb a day diet, I haven't done much baking at all and not much interesting cooking.

But I've started doing some research on ways to jazz up low-carb meals, there's a limit on how many times we can eat fish poached in butter and lemon or steak and mushrooms. If I could convince her to like Hollandaise and related sauces, that would be a lot easier. Time to open my copy of James Peterson's 'Sauces' book and get creative.

[Mike Nolan]

Aside from a few times when the host site appeared to be down (including when the site moved to a new ISP), I've never had any problems getting on Zen's site.

As to how to help promote this site, probably the most obvious suggestion is find interesting things involving food, cooking and baking to write about!

To that end, I'm going to take as many notes and photos as I can when I go to Chocolate Boot Camp this fall and I hope to turn those into a series of blog posts.

If you want to help promote the site in other ways, posting a link to it on other cooking/baking sites (as permitted by that site) is good, too.

And here's another possibility. I've had some business cards printed up, if you'd like a handful of them, send me your address. (My email address is nolan at tssi dot com.) It looks like I can get about 15 in an envelope and still keep it under an ounce.

I've been handing them to anyone who asks me what I plan to do after I retire later this year. My wife has been giving them away at her office, and when she loaned someone a book this week, I told her to put a business card in it as a bookmark. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

Traffic here isn't exactly breaking speed records, either. I need to spend more time generating content that draws new people to the site, but I may not have a lot of time for that until after I retire late this calendar year. Our search engine visibility could probably be better, too, though I've tried searching for some stuff and it appears we are in the engines, just not at the top. There are two ways to get towards the top, be a popular site with lots of searches, or buy your way up the list.

I did have someone tell me that the site was easy to find by searching for my name and 'cooking'.

I just hope we haven't lost the core of the old KAFBC for good, regardless of whether that's on Zen's site or mine.

[Mike Nolan]

I think she checks in as her health and time permits. Hopefully today she's too busy enjoying her birthday to check here.

Happy Birthday anyway, Cindy!

I haven't seen Sarah Wirth online lately, either, but I think she was dealing with computer issues. I thought about Sarah recently as I was driving back from Indianapolis, but that's a bit more of a detour than I had time for.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I made Vienna bread.

[Mike Nolan]

I was introduced to tea at an early age by a British family who took their tea very seriously. How you brew it does make a difference, though I'm not quite the fanatic some people are.

I never did develop their taste for watercress sandwiches, though.

[Mike Nolan]

Most pound cakes taste a bit dry to me, but then so does an Angel food cake.

[Mike Nolan]

It is worth noting that King Arthur Flour no longer sells the salt-rising starter, because their supplier retired.

There are instructions for how to make the salt-rising starter in several places, notably in James Beard's book Beard on Bread.

Notice: The active ingredient in a salt-rising starter is a bacteria called Clostridium Perfringens. This bacteria is considered one of the leading causes of food poisoning in the kitchen. With proper handling to avoid cross-contamination and adequate cooking, making and using the salt-rising starter should be safe.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

That's a very interesting site, one I'll have to peruse at length. I'm not sure it answers the question of why boiling sugar water in the microwave would produce something different than boiling sugar water on the stove, though. (Maybe my original post wasn't completely clear on that, though.)

[Mike Nolan]

We could use a tool to list recipes by uploader, I'll have to look around for one.

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