Mike Nolan

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Viewing 15 posts - 91 through 105 (of 7,316 total)
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  • in reply to: What are you Baking the Week of November 3, 2024? #44595
    Mike Nolan
    Keymaster

      The Internet says that bread dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to two weeks, but I think that doesn't apply to doughs with egg in them, they will start to go bad after 3-4 days in my experience.

      I find a lean dough will start to smell, look and bake like like sourdough by about day 6.

      in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of November 3, 2024? #44594
      Mike Nolan
      Keymaster

        We had the last of the potato-leek soup tonight, and I had a salad as well

        in reply to: Accurate Scales. Digital and Otherwise #44590
        Mike Nolan
        Keymaster

          I have at least 7 different digital scales, and I've cross-tested them several times and found them pretty consistent as long as you stay away from the high and low end of their respective ranges. I have 25 and 50 gram weights for testing the lower range ones, the bigger ones I usually test with a pound of butter.

          The biggest of them can handle up to about 35 pounds, I find that useful for weighing large batches in the pot, like when I make 15 quarts of beef stock in a pot that weights over 8 pounds. (I usually have to put a 6 inch cake ring on the platform when weighing a big pot, or I can't see the display.)

          Two of them can measure in 1/10th of a gram, I find them useful for baking because I often resize a recipe up or down, so 1 tsp of salt (around 6 grams) may become 4.8 grams. I've also been using one of them to measure out chemicals for the new hydroponic system.

          The smallest of them can measure in milligrams. The thing I used it for most recently was to measure the specific gravity of a batch of tomato sauce. (I weight out 10 ml of sauce in a graduated cylinder, water will come out to almost exactly 10 grams, the sauce came out at about 11.5 grams, so it had a specific gravity of 1.15.

          My wife prefers one scale that handles up to about 15 pounds, I mostly another than has a similar upper range. (The one she uses is an older MyWeigh KD-8000 that the on/off button has lost the cover over the switch, but it still works. I will probably replace it with another KD-8000 at some point.)

          in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of November 3, 2024? #44580
          Mike Nolan
          Keymaster

            In honor of today's election, we had pork for dinner.

            in reply to: Oats making a comeback #44579
            Mike Nolan
            Keymaster

              Odd, that link is supposed to be a 'gift' one, and it works on my iPhone. I wonder if browsers are messing with that.

              in reply to: Hydroponic Garden for Tomatoes #44573
              Mike Nolan
              Keymaster

                The taller one on the right appears to have grown about a half-inch in the last day. I'm hoping to transplant another tomato over the weekend, and the 4th in another week or two.

                The real challenge will be to see if I can get them to the fruiting/vegetative stage and actually get tomatoes from them, hopefully some time in January. There are a lot of things that can go wrong between now and then. I've got water quality monitoring in place and have been tracking pH (mainly) which is running high, despite adding citric acid several times I've also got the beginnings of an algae problem, so I'm setting up a UV sanitizer on the drip lines to see if that gets the algae under control.

                in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of November 3, 2024? #44570
                Mike Nolan
                Keymaster

                  So we had tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches tonight, plus a salad.

                  in reply to: 2024 Gardening #44565
                  Mike Nolan
                  Keymaster

                    I think this is the 2nd latest we've ever had tomatoes off the vine, one year we got some on November 11th. With no sub-30 temperatures in the forecast until the 16th, we could beat that this year, but the vines are pretty bare after today.

                    in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of November 3, 2024? #44563
                    Mike Nolan
                    Keymaster

                      There were 3 tomatoes among the ones I picked today that were big enough that I made breadless tuna melts instead. A nice garden bonus meal.

                      in reply to: Hydroponic Garden for Tomatoes #44559
                      Mike Nolan
                      Keymaster

                        Here's what the tomato plants look like 2 days after being moved to the grow buckets. Looking good so far.

                        IMG_1120

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                        in reply to: 2024 Gardening #44556
                        Mike Nolan
                        Keymaster

                          I picked a few tomatoes today. My wife said: "Off dead vines?"

                          I said, "No, Miracle Max says they're only mostly dead."

                          IMG_1121

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                          in reply to: Hydroponic Garden for Tomatoes #44552
                          Mike Nolan
                          Keymaster

                            It may be that he starts a new round of tomatoes because this is a teaching lab, not a hydroponics farm.

                            in reply to: Hydroponic Garden for Tomatoes #44547
                            Mike Nolan
                            Keymaster

                              Defiance (which I'm pretty sure is what the first two plants are, as the Defiance package has been opened and I didn't order it until mid-September) and Better Bush are both determinates that get about 3 feet tall, Celebrity is classified as a semideterminate, it can get 6-8 feet tall but I've grown it several times in the garden and it seldom gets above the top of my 5 foot tall cages. My setup should handle plants up to about 4 feet tall, I've got a metal rod in each grow bucket and will use garden clips to hold the plants upright. The timer that controls the drip irrigation pump also has a reciprocating fan plugged into it, so that should help with pollination.

                              The hydroponics professor at Nebraska-Lincoln has grown tomato plants that reach about 30 feet long, 10 feet vertically and 20 feet along the floor, with stems about as thick as a broomstick. He gets about a year's worth of yield from them, pruning off the older branches after they've stopped flowering. He uses a variety developed for hydroponic gardening, he told me the seeds cost $1 each from Johnny's.

                              The annual open house for the fall hydroponics class is coming up the week before Thanksgiving, I'll see if I can get some photos to post. In the past he's had students that did both Kratky and Nutrient Film systems, though gravel feed ones seem more popular. (The students do them with PVC rain gutters.)

                              in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of October 27, 2024? #44541
                              Mike Nolan
                              Keymaster

                                We had our steaks (filet for Diane, NY strip for me), plus a small baked potato (< 4 ounces), sauteed mushrooms and the last small pieces of apple pie.

                                in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of October 27, 2024? #44531
                                Mike Nolan
                                Keymaster

                                  I'm planning steaks tonight.

                                Viewing 15 posts - 91 through 105 (of 7,316 total)