We had a cat who kept picking fights with squirrels, losing badly. They nearly chewed his tail off more than once. He wound up with a couple of bald spots by his tail where the fur didn't grow back out. Eventually he decided that the squirrels weren't worth chasing, and he complained less about going to the vet than any other cat we've had.
I find it deglazing the pan with a little dry vermouth improves the gravy.
For Thanksgiving I rested our 12 pound turkey for about a half hour in a dome made from two large Vollrath stainless steel mixing bowls, an idea I first saw on an Alton Brown show. That gave me another half cup or so of juices to add to the gravy. (AB when he doesn't go off the deep end has a lot of good ideas, along with a few strange ones, and like a lot of 'trained' chefs, he oversalts his food. I used his recipe for popovers once, then went back to the King Arthur one.)
I have a theory about why so many chefs oversalt their food. Like many kitchen workers, they are heavy smokers and heavy drinkers, and it takes that much salt to register on their palates.
We wound up having creamed tuna on toast.
I wound up cooking mine for about 18 hours total, but it was pretty thick after 12. (I kept adjusting the spice mix, and each time I added spices I cooked it some more.) In the end it was probably a little too thick.
We had a rotisserie chicken, and I'm using the remains to make stock this evening.
We had steak, mushrooms and baked potato.
We had tacos/taco salad.
We're having frozen breaded fish fillets for supper.
This is what The Fresh Loaf had to say about replicating the mixture:
The blend itself is mostly steel cut oats, some bulgur and a small amount of flax seeds, golden or brown. You can use 3:2:1 proportions if you wish: 3 Tbsp oats, 2 Tbsp bulgur and 1 Tbsp flaxseed (whole) in the mix.
It looks like the Pompanoosuc porridge mix had just 3 ingredients:
Wheat Bulgur
Steel Cut Oats (Irish style oats)
Flaxseed
We're having a lavosh pizza tonight, with tomatoes, mushrooms, artichokes and 3 kinds of cheese.
We had egg salad sandwiches.
We had ground beef stroganoff on toast.
If I have extra egg whites, I usually make chocolate meringue cookies with them. I used to make macarons, but nobody seems to really appreciate a good macaron unless they spend $3 on it.
I don't use the Cake Bible much, either, I find her recipes too fussy and too easy to mess up. I like some of the cake recipe in the KAF Baking Companion and in Susan Purdy's cake book. (I like her pie book, too.)
I buy from webstaurant on occasion, their shipping charges are a bit higher than others, but they also carry some things that are hard to find elsewhere.
I've ordered 50 pound bags of semolina from them, the shipping winds up being almost as much as the product, but it still comes out at only about $1.15 per pound, which is a lot less than BRM. And once you hit about $30 in shipping charges, adding a few things to the order doesn't affect the shipping cost much.
