carbonel

I've been baking my own no-knead bread for the last six months or so, and I've decided I'd like to reclaim that counter space the bread machine is taking up. The brand is Regal, though I don't know the model offhand, and the manual should be available online. I think it'll make loaves up to 1.5 pounds. It worked fine the last time I used it, almost a year ago.

This is an offer for pickup, so Minneapolis and environs.

Let me know if you're interested; otherwise, I'll offer it on Freecycle.

ETA: Bread machine has been claimed and collected.

I've been making no-knead bread occasionally for the past year or so, but I'd like to branch out a bit.

I tried making kneaded bread (a cob loaf) for the first time in years, and it turned out more or less the way it should, but it wasn't my kind of bread -- too soft and too dense a crumb (that may have been a proofing error on my part). I prefer bread that has some holes but not huge ones, and that has a bit of chewiness to it.

I'd like something that calls for kneading, since I'd like an alternative to an overnight rise, and doesn't require a sourdough starter. Any recommendations for a non-sourdough kneaded loaf that uses wheat flour? I currently have bread flour, AP flour (lots of this), and WW flour, but no flour from other grains.

I had a dental adventure of sorts. On March 19, my dentist announced that the office would be closing, except for emergencies.

That same day, a piece chipped off of one of my molar crowns, leaving most of it intact, though there was a sharpish edge remaining. But as long as I didn't poke at it with my tongue, it didn't cause problems, and I figured I could live with it for another couple of months.

On Monday, another big piece chipped off, leaving a hole for food to get stuck in and another sharp edge. Possibly related to this, I found that I kept chomping my cheek as I chewed, making eating difficult.

On Tuesday, I called the dental office and left a message. He called back an hour or so later, and we had an interesting negotiation. My situation wasn't an emergency. But a broken crown that goes down into the tooth is considered one. Turns out he's allowed to perform procedures to *prevent* an emergency. What he really wanted was a photo for documentation, but since it was at the back of the mouth and I live alone, I couldn't manage that. But he said I could come in that afternoon for an appointment, and he would do a temporary repair. (Whew.)

It was weird going into the empty office, and the dentist was definitely a bit off his game having to wrangle all the equipment himself. But as long as I don't indulge in jujubes or chomping on jawbreakers, the repair has a good chance of holding up until things open up again.

On my way home, I stopped at Cub and picked up a few groceries, including a two-pound bag each of white and brown rice. Hooray! It wasn't until I got home that I realized I'd forgotten to check if they had whole wheat flour. Oh, well.

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On a totally unrelated subject, I really appreciate all the egg suggestions. A bunch of them are things I definitely want to try and never would have without a bit of a push.

So far, I have made beef fried rice (which I hadn't before) that used up two eggs, and curried chicken salad, with another two eggs. I hard-boiled six eggs, so I have four of those left. And I bought sour cream, so a sour cream pound cake is planned for this evening. That'll be six more eggs. Soon I hope I'll be able to transfer the remaining dozen eggs into a normal egg carton and get the oversized one out of the fridge.

I don't often think this, because I don't do proper cooking all that much, but right now I wish I had someone besides me to cook for. Good food is for sharing.

The subject line is a misnomer, because I never actually set foot in Chicago over the weekend. But I'm not sure if Glenview, Skokie, and Long Grove are meaningful places, and everyone knows Chicago.

On Wednesday, I took the train from St. Paul to Glenview, which is a suburb of Chicago.

The train leaves at 8 am. I'd allowed plenty of time to get to the station because there had been a snowstorm the night before, and six to eight inches had fallen (and were still gently falling). I drove carefully, and had no problems until I got to (IIRC) Jackson St., which is the street just before one turns right to get to the train station parking lot. That's an uphill street, and I had to stop about a third of the way up because there were cars scattered all over the street. Apparently a number of cars had only got halfway up and then weren't able to get sufficient purchase to continue. I sat there for about five minutes while various cars maneuvered without a lot of success. Finally one of them gave up and backed into the driveway of a parking garage, apparently willing to wait until someone came and Did Something. That left a clear if sinuous path for me, and I decided to take my shot. Despite not having snow tires or four-wheel drive, I made it up the hill without any spinning or skidding.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I brought my miniSpinner and got a few hours of spinning in. I'd lost my good headphones, though (the really ones were stolen out of the car a few years ago), and eventually my ears hurt enough that I gave it up and read instead on my iPad.

My mother met me at the Glenview station and took me to her home, which is a condo in Skokie. We had dinner a few hours later at a local sushi place. It was rather startling to see no snow at all; it had faded out out halfway through the train trip.

The next day, we went to the bowling alley. This is a tradition that goes back over 50 years, started by people from Habonim (a labor Zionist organization). Originally it was the women shooing the fathers and kids out of the house so they could cook, but these days it's whole families. Usually I bowl a couple of lines with my nephews, but they weren't there this year, though I'd see two of them later. So I hung out and watched people bowl and chatted with people I only saw once a year.

Shortly after three, my mother drove us to my niece-in-law's (if that's a term) mother's (Jenny's) place. We'd been at my sister-in-law's for Thanksgiving for many years, and my mother's before that. But my SIL's Thanksgiving was down to nine people last year, and felt very thin on the ground. Her oldest son (my nephew) and his wife (Elisha) are expecting their first child, so it seemed an appropriate time to make a change. There were about 20 people there, and the place was large enough to accommodate all of us easily. Jenny had called me a week or two before to make sure I understood I was personally invited, not just an add-on to my mother's invitation, which I really appreciated. She asked about family traditions, and I told her that our family usually said the Hebrew blessings appropriate to the day and read Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus." She asked me to bring a copy, and I said I could look it up on my phone.

In the event, that never happened. There were appetizers (including a yummy baked brie with apricot jam), and squash soup, and then a buffet for people to help themselves, and one thing just sort of faded into another. It was a very congenial time, though. I baked a pumpkin bread that the recipe claimed to be better than Starbucks'. I don't know if that's the case, but it did turn out quite well. (This is the one that was a quarter-cup short of pumpkin. I used an eighth of a cup less of flour, and it was fine.) We all hung out afterwards for a couple of hours, and I kibitzed a game of Aggravation that was being played with adults and kids. Next year, if all is well, there will be four generations present -- my mother and Jenny's mother will both be great-grandmothers.

On Friday, my mother and I had lunch with her Hadassah group. It meets every Friday at a restaurant. Last year was rather sad, because the restaurant they'd been meeting at for years -- The Bagel at Old Orchard -- was closing soon after, and this was the last time. We all said goodbye to the waiter that had been our usual one, with hugs and some cash for him to remember us by. He's now at another restaurant and doing well, I hear. This time it was just five of us (it's usually about double that), and we tried a new restaurant, Sweet Basil Cafe, that replaced the Ruby Tuesday that had been there. The menu is huge and the food was very tasty, but there were several glitches in the serving process -- always a danger with new restaurants. I ended up taking half of my California panini home with me, and ate it on the train the next day.

That evening, two of my three nephews and their wife and girlfriend (respectively) came over for Shabbat dinner, along with a cousin my age who lives alone. We had to do a quick reset of the table because we'd set it for eight, then belatedly did a recount and realized there were nine -- which meant putting out an extra leaf for the table. It was a dinner intended to clear out the fridge and freezer, so rather eclectic -- two kinds of soup, salmon, brisket, corn casserole, ratatouille, cranberry sauce, and applesauce.

On Saturday, my youngest nephew and his girlfriend were supposed to come over to bake mandel bread with my mother, but his mother played the mom card and the two of them hung out with her instead. So my mother and I just hung out and occasionally chatted, and left for the train station shortly after one.

When I took the train from Chicago last time, the train was almost three hours late because of mechanical problems. This time, it was right on time. Once again, I got some spinning done, though not as much as on the way down. A woman on the train recognized me (or my e-spinner) from last year, which was amusing. The train was about 15 minutes late, but I was home by 11 pm.

Today I'm spending the day lounging around, catching up on email, and doing laundry. Tomorrow I fly to Boston for work. My cat hasn't forgiven me yet for the current abandonment, and she's going to have another one to be angry about soon. So it goes.

Tomorrow, I'm having some friends over for cards and a light collation. Here is the current planned menu, which is also serving as a reminder for me not to forget any of these.

Savories
Quesadillas
Cucumber sandwiches
Radish sandwiches (I may only make one of these two)
Potato chips
Onion dip
Terra chips
(I also bought a packet of Bugles totally on impulse, but I think three chiplike items is one too many. Possibly two too many, actually.)

Sweets
Brownies (already made; need to be defrosted)
Palmiers
Watermelon
Eton mess

It's that last one that led to my fruitless (as it were) quest. An Eton mess is a classic British summertime dessert consisting of slightly sweetened whipped cream mixed with macerated strawberries and broken bits of meringue shells, topped with more strawberry. Variations can include many different fruits, of course. But all of the recipes I looked at online called for commercial meringue shells to be broken up.

The Target grocery (my usual one) doesn't carry meringue shells -- no surprise there. Cub (big box grocery chain) also doesn't carry meringue shells, or even meringue cookies, though it does carry meringue powder. Since that was around $6, and I already had eggs and sugar, I didn't choose that route. The one that really surprised me is that Kowalski's also doesn't carry meringue shells. I didn't try Trader Joe's because that was too far away to drive to for just one item. Luckily, the recipe from the Telegraph also included an added recipe for making your own meringue -- though I've been making chocolate chip meringue cookies for years, and would have coped just fine on my own.

I wonder if meringue shells are a standard item in British grocery stores. They certainly aren't in my local options for groceries, though I know I've seen them from time to time.

As long as I'm musing about things culinary, I have a question about strawberries. Does anyone else cut out the white core bit from their strawberries when they're cleaning them? My mother never did; she just slice off the tops. But I don't like the texture, so after I slice off the tops, I cut it out as part of the cleaning process. Am I the weird one, or is she? (I can't attribute it to laziness on my mother's part; for years, she cut off the little thorny spikes on asparagus, until we persuaded her that once you cook them, they pretty much disappear. Strawberry cores are much easier to deal with.)

Or possibly in process, depending on how you look at it.

I have mixed up a batch of Toll House cookie dough (the classic recipe, minus the optional nuts), and it's sitting in the fridge overnight, waiting to be baked up tomorrow. I'm not sure why an April snowstorm in Minneapolis led to a fit of baking, but I'm pretty sure they were connected somehow in my mind.

I remember once reading an article that claimed to contain a recipe for the world's best chocolate chip cookies. But I think it was in the New York Times food section, which is now behind a paywall, unless the people who decide such things have decided to relent. In any case, I remember nothing about the article except that it strongly recommended leaving the dough to rest overnight.

Since reading that, I've tried to plan things well enough that I have time to do so. It does seem to make a difference. At least, since then I haven't had the failure mode where the dough melts all around the chocolate chips, leaving them to stick up like rocks in a sandy landscape.

Does anyone else have advice or thoughts on the subject of chocolate chip cookies?

I'm hoping some of the foodies on DW can provide some inspiration.

On Monday, I made this recipe from Hello Fresh. It's ragu spaghetti with zucchini, and comes with a little bottle of pepperolio (which appears to be indistinguishable from my Chinese chili oil) to spice it up.

Both Lydy (who had a taste) and I agreed that it was edible, tasty even, but bland. This despite the fact that it had onions, fresh garlic, and a generous helping of Italian seasoning (containing garlic, black pepper, parsley, basil, and oregano), plus some of the pepperolio. I don't remember blandness being a problem the last time I made this recipe. This time, the Hello Fresh had a rather larger onion and zucchini than the time before, but that shouldn't have made a significant difference. The only other difference I can think of is that last time I was on my own, and I left the sauce to simmer for about 20 minutes; this time, I was running late, and I only went with the minimum mandated 5 minutes.

I still have more than half of the spaghetti left, so if I can figure out what I can add to it to improve it, that would be nice. I would appreciate suggestions. I also have lots more of the Italian seasoning, since most of the recipes that use it call for half a packet. I have a decent but not luxurious spice shelf in addition to that.

I know that a lot of spaghetti sauce has some sugar in it, but I'm loath to add that without a strong recommendation. I can add more pepperolio, but spicy hot isn't necessarily a substitute for flavor.

Any other ideas?

I've been back for a week and a half, and I finally caught up with reading DW. I'm still behind on Ravelry, and will probably have to declare bankruptcy on a number of threads, which I really hate to do.

I was on the long-planned cross-country train trip with Pat WINODW. We started in Chicago (having driven down there from Minneapolis) and took the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles. It wasn't as spectacular as the California Zephyr (which goes through mountains) would be, but it allowed us to take the Coast Starlight up the California coast to San Francisco, which was spectacular. After a couple of days in San Francisco, continued on the Coast Starlight to Portland. From there, it was the Empire Builder to Glacier National Park (the original inspiration for the trip), and then continuing on the Empire Builder back to Minneapolis. (Pat's father drove her car from Chicago to Minneapolis.) It was an amazing trip, and I'd love to do something similar with the California Zephyr and maybe the cross-Canada train. But next year, my mother wants to do a road trip to South Dakota and Yellowstone, so that will have priority.

Because of the train trip, I only got to the Minnesota State Fair once this year, as opposed to my normal two or three times. The day before I left was my only day to drop items off for the Creative Activities competition, which I did. I entered four skeins of handspun in the four classes: fur/hair, wool, silk, and art yarn. I won first place ribbons in the fur/hair category (a skein of white lace weight cashmere plied with white silk) and the silk category (a gradient skein spun from hand-carded silk). I also won the Weavers Guild "best fine yarn" award for the silk skein. The wool and art yarn skeins won fourth and third place ribbons, respectively.

I'm hosting our tea group this Saturday, which was probably a mistake because I haven't had time to do the amount of cooking I'd really like, what with catching up with everything else. I'm about to head out to go shopping, and will see what TJ's and Cost Plus World Market can save me from preparing myself. Thankfully, I did plan ahead sufficiently to have the monthly cleaning person in yesterday, so while the place is sadly cluttered, it is reasonably clean. I'm hoping we're still doing this four years from now when I'm retired, and (at least in theory) will have time to spend the week preparing.

And coming up in a couple of weeks is a three-weekend-in-a-row marathon: the Minn-stf fallcon, Scintillation (convention in Montreal), and a spinning retreat in Alexandria, MN. I'm really looking forward to all of them, but not to the recovery period afterward.

Ants

Not giant ants from White Sands, but little ants that appear in the spring (un-tra-la). It's ant season. The problem with ants in my house is that I generally discover them by checking the dish of dry cat food and seeing that it's covered by a swarm of ants. No matter where I put the cat food dish in the kitchen, the ants find it.

I called the exterminator in a few weeks ago, and he spritzed his nasty stuff along the baseboards where I'd seen ants. That lasted for a couple of weeks, but now the ants are back. Apparently he can't do anything more permanent until the ground thaws more. The last time he dealt with the invasion, the treatment lasted almost four years.

In the meantime, the cat is learning to jump up to the chair where I've been putting the food. She really wants me to hoist her up there. We've compromised; I do it once when I first put food in the dish, but if she comes back later, she's on her own.

I'm hoping it'll be warm enough for a longer-term solution soon.

Waterbed

For the last week or so, I'd been sniffing something untoward in my hallway. I thought perhaps the cat had found a mouse and it had not been completely disposed of, but I hadn't found anything to account for the odor. Then on Saturday, as I was getting to bed way too late and just putting on the CPAP, I realized that the CPAP hose smelled untoward in a different way, like cat pee. But it wasn't cat pee. It was a leak in the waterbed, and apparently the leak had marinated enough to get entirely funky. I abandoned the bed, went to the office, and place and order for a new waterbed mattress, liner, and mattress pad. I made up a bed on the living room couch, and finally got to sleep around 3:30 am.

On Monday, Lydy came over, and we emptied the waterbed and managed to wrestle the slimy odiferous object to the trash. She is a hero. Luckily, the liner did its job, and nothing escaped. That also went into the trash.

The new mattress and liner have arrived, and once I vacuum the accumulated dust and fluff out of the waterbed frame, I'll be able to fill the new mattress and sleep in my own bed again. In the meantime, this sleeping on a couch and making up the bed every night is getting old quickly.

Hello Fresh

This is the quotidia part -- nothing has gone wrong so far. I signed up for Hello Fresh a couple of weeks ago. It's a service where you pick meals from a bunch of options, and get enough for a week. It's more cooking than I'm used to doing (and more dishes), but out of three meals, two have been winners and the third was okay. It's really intended for two people, but I am willing to eat the same thing two successive days, possibly for lunch the second time. If anyone is interested, I can give you a discount code and I get a bit of a kickback, but you can also get the same discount just by going to the website, I think.

Pat WINOLJ has been doing the vegetarian option of Hello Fresh for almost a year. The vegetarian version only has three options per week, so no choosing from a bunch of options. I wish it was possible to mix and match, because some of the veggie meals look tasty and more creative than the regular ones. But it's an either-or thing.

There are six of us who get together for tea every couple of months. We call ourselves the Romance Exchange, because we used to swap Regency romance novels and other books, but in these days of ebooks, that's pretty much fallen by the wayside. But we still take turns making tea for each other.

This was a rather deconstructed tea, with a table full of materials that people could make into whatever sandwiches they like. Usually I have at least one hot item, but this time the Fabian Seafoods shrimp truck was in town, so instead I had a couple of pounds of fresh-never-frozen shrimp from Texas. For savories, I also had various vegetables, curried eggs (like deviled eggs, but with curry instead), chive cream cheese (my favorite base for cucumber sandwiches), horseradish hummus, artichoke tapenade, cheese, bread to put it all on, and vegan and regular scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam. I'm not sure why the scones and jam are considered part of the savory course, but it's traditionally what we do. There may

Sometimes we take a break between the savory and sweet course. This time it was a necessity, because I had taken a notion in my brain to make Queen of Puddings after seeing it made as part of a technical challenge on the Great British Bake Off. All the recipes say it should be served hot. There's a baked custard base that can be made earlier, and I did that, but I added the raspberry jam (an authorized substitute for the homemade berry jam the recipe calls for) over the custard and made the meringue (a French meringue, for anyone who cares about the distinction) just before putting it in the oven. I'm not sure if it was the fact that the custard had been in the refrigerator overnight, but that portion of the pudding was merely warm, not piping hot when it came out of the oven after half an hour. On the other hand, the meringue was nicely fluffy, with a crisp outer top, so I call it a success.

I also made mrissa's fruit shortbread (with more of the raspberry jam) and Grasmere gingerbread. I had vegan chocolate truffle ice cream made with cashew milk for the non-milk-tolerant people, plus spelt gingersnaps that I'd bought as an impulse purchase because they were also vegan and very gingery (Whole Foods had them on sale, with samples). Oh, and beadslut brought some Japanese biscuits, so all in all there was enough to leave people groaning (pleasantly, I hope) by the time we were done.