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Ooooof. Where to begin? As some of you know we had a major hail storm the beginning of September. Time has flown so fast it still feels like it just happened last week. We're slowly getting things fixed up and back to normal. Roof people can't even start until possibly next spring they are so backed up. Luckily I haven't found any leaks. Anyway, all of the sudden it was time for our hunter friend to be here 😮 **panic** lol. He arrived last Wednesday and left on Sunday--it was so hectic that I couldn't post anything in real time. Hoping that the December visit is muuuuuch calmer. So. Here's a bit of what we got up to: I managed to throw a quick chalkboard drawing together (thank you internet for the inspiration) and got some fall/Halloween decorations put up. Ronnie's granddaughter was selling mums for a school fundraiser so I bought some for the porch--our pumpkin patch got demolished so I didn't have any pumpkins (insert major crying face). I was shocked when Ronnie and our friend arrived from the airport and unloaded a ton of pumpkins that they bought for me! Now, if the cattle come to visit me this winter I'll have at least a little snack for them to enjoy. I really dropped the ball taking pictures a times- so I'll have to piece in here and there. The first night, since they had grabbed lunch not too long before, I put out just a few snacks. @HungryChris's marinated mushrooms were again a hit. I've been ordering from Nuts.com and loving some of their offerings--these spicy pickle pretzels are addictive. That night I IP'd ribs that Ronnie had smoked along with stuffed jalapeños and baked beans. Next morning they got up early to go dove hunting and work on the deer stands etc. Scout got to go and had a blast. A dove cleaning pictorial--as usual they saved all of the livers, gizzards and hearts, too. On the way home they stopped off in a mostly Amish community and bought some homegrown tomatoes--it pains me to type that lol. But we had none, again, due to the hail. They're better than store bought....but not near like ours. Another snack board Ronnie really wanted me to do pressure cooked chicken gizzards. That's a LOT of frying when there are three of us. But, I started at like 3 in the afternoon and got done around 4:30. I included the guts from the doves. Pressure cooked for 40 mins along with salad and gravy for dipping Next morning more doves were gotten. This time, I asked them to pluck them so I could freeze them and we'd have them roasted in the oven over the winter. I wrapped them in saran and then vac packed them

@ElsieDKAF used those measurements by volume. I used those too until last month when I visited more recent sites to get some different recipes. They say to use equal parts by weight and those measures by volume are fairly equal by weight. ( I don't imagine a pioneer woman in a sod hut on the prairie used a scale to get weight exactly down to the gram) I like the consistency of that mix better. The flour depends on your taste. AlaMoi used buckwheat. That sounds good. I tend to use all purpose flour because it is neutral compared to others and you can use other flours in your recipe with it if you want something different. I did use instant or rapid rise yeast but now I am trying to develop my skills to handle making more varied recipes using just the starter. In the future, if I need to make bread for an occasion and i absolutely need it done it a couple of hours, I will use the recipe with instant yeast added. I use the starter for the taste and the yeast for dependability. Come to think of it, the two new recipes I tried, used starter and used baking soda and baking powder for the levening. Isn't that more or less the same thing?

@Norm Matthews I was about to mix flour and water together to make starter as per KAF but I like the looks of your method for making starter. 2 questions - what king of flour do you use and why 1.5 cups of flour to 1 cup water vs. 1 cup flour to 1 cup water? And i take it that you use instant yeast?

Breakfast is served. Schwartz's Montreal Smoked Meat on homemade sourdough rye.

some of the best sourdough starter I've used . . . 7 day 'creation time' using buckwheat flour. especially good twang/taste to the bread.

Today's bake. Out of the oven at 5:30 AM. Two sourdough rye loaves. Started the dough early yesterday morning using one of the mini bigas. Dough went into the fridge for a 12 hour cold fermentation. Taken out last night at 8:30 and left on the counter until 3:00 AM this morning.

Me neither.

I'm trying to imagine the flavor combo of chocolate and durian... and am having problems doing so. I'd think that the durian would either overpower the chocolate and teh combo would be a little weird.. but then again, when it comes to chocolate, I'm a purist - I'm not a huge fan of chocolate and fruit together.

My rawit chilli plant is finally ripening the chillies. For the longest time, it was putting the flowers out and the flowers would turn into chillies (after I hand pollinate them) but the chillies would be staying green, seemingly forever. Also, the plant kept trying to get taller and taller. So this past weekend, I figured what the hell and trimmed all of the branches that were getting too tall, and I added extra light. My keriting chillies only need one light and ripen just fine, but I thought that maybe the rawit needed more - especially because the internode length of some of the branches was so large - that usually means there's not enough light. And yay!!! The chillies are finally ripening well! Going to harvest the first one soon...

Italian night... Negroni to start. Amatriciana Estiva, with possibly the last of the summer farmer's market cherry tomatoes. Ensalada mista alongside. https://www.ettoregermano.com/vino-barbera-dalba-superiore-della-madre?lang=en

This...I only use "good knives" and they are immediately wiped with a wet rag after any task and ready for the next task. If there's no next task, the can readily be put back onto their storage space...if I've cut anything that would involve washing them down, that's what happens anyway. In other words, there's never a dirty knife lying on a cutting board...(as Taylor would say) like...ever.

For no particular reason (do I really need one?) a butterfly among the asters in the beautiful early-autumn sunlight. Taken in the gardens at my mom's nursing home.

Miss Prissy's little one is growing well, and is now slightly bigger than the adult quail (and with similar coloration to some of them, which has occasionally given me a "moment" when I see him/her out roaming around). Our granddaughter, whose most recent fascination is with astrology, has dubbed named it Pisces. I remain devoutly disinterested in the topic, so while I've heard the explanation all I can tell you is that it involved the words "moon" and "rising." I was primarily amused that she would name a bird "fish," but her mom named a black cat Marshmallow, so... (shrug). I have to say, I don't enjoy the quail the way my GF does. They're quarrelsome and can be terribly vicious to each other, like chickens only worse, and are perhaps the stupidest of all domestic livestock (a category which boasts, as many of you will know, some highly qualified competition). A few months ago my stepdaughter just happened to be on the deck at the right moment to see an escaped quail come swaggering around the corner of the chicken run, and march right up to the big mastiff as if trying to stare it down and assert dominance. She had to go rescue it from the literal Jaws of Death (it helped that the mastiff was as surprised as anyone, the damned bird all but hopped into her mouth). I'd listened around that time to a CBC radio interview with researchers who had put some effort into figuring out ways of measuring relative avian intelligence, and when pushed by the interviewer they named domestic turkeys and quail as among the least intelligent of all bird species they'd looked at. We've recently weaned some baby bunnies (ie, separated them from mama and put them into a different cage). Ordinarily when we take the babies out of the cage, their mothers are either indifferent or visibly relieved; by this time the babies are about guinea-pig size and having 8-12 of them constantly trying to burrow underneath for a snack gets wearisome. This time one doe, pretty brindled Ivy, amused me by doing something different. When I pulled out the first two kits to go into the other cage, she immediately rounded on the others and began grooming them frantically. I laughed out loud, because she looked for all the world like a human mother glaring at a small and dirty boy and declaring firmly "You're not going out in public looking like that!" before vigorously applying a wet washcloth (and yes, as a boy I was on the receiving end of that a time or two). I need to start culling our surplus roosters ASAP now that they're reaching sexual maturity, because my GF wants us to focus on the gold-laced Wyandottes as our main working bird (the silkies, as I've mentioned, will largely be pets). Many of the fertile eggs we bought to hatch from our incubator were "barnyard mix," which is homestead-speak for "I have a lot of breeds and don't chaperone them." In practice, like us, many homesteaders/backyard chicken aficionados let their flocks run free until the young cockerels start pestering the hens, then consign them to the freezer. The bottom line is that you never know what you're going to get, and we do indeed have some very funky chickens. They're somewhat camera-shy (ie, very suspicious of what that human is up to) but I've done my best to get shots of a few with especially dramatic plumage. Several of them have the feathered feet you see in the middle pic. Mostly they're large grey birds, which my GF says means they're such-and-such a Polish breed, but the name eludes me at the moment. Presumably the others are hybrids of that breed. Others also have a large, bushy tuft of feathers below and/or slightly behind their eyes. Aside from location, they put me in mind of bushy old-man eyebrows (my personal frame of reference for that is my paternal grandfather, but Leonid Brezhnev is a more universally-known example). Here are a few of the quail, as well. We'd taken photos a few weeks ago to send to prospective buyers. I'll give the names where I know them, but I don't know the names of each breed, sadly. If one of the unknowns or "unsures" catches your eye, just ask and I'll check with my GF. First one's Red Range, second I'm not sure, third is Andalusian. The pure white one is... "Fairy," I think? Next one I believe is a Calico, and the last is a Red Tuxedo. In accordance with human stereotypes, the red breeds in general seem to be the feistiest.

@haresfur and others, I did not expect people to want to copy me. I expected a heated discussion calling me names and decrying my methods. I have read that some bakers age their yeast on a regular basis. It gives the bread it makes a more complex flavor. It is not real sourdough but to me it does resemble sourdough very much. I did not mention the details of aging yeast but you should use 1 cup of dechlorinated water at room temperature, 1 1/2 cup flour and 2 tsp. yeast. Every day pour out half and add back the amount of water and flour you discarded, and in three or four days you will have yeast aged enough to use in a sourdough recipe. If you use just flour and water, without yeast, it will start to ferment on its own from natural wild yeast that is present everywhere, in about a week or two and you will have real sourdough starter. Using commercial yeast is a quck start way and some people will tell you it isn't real sourdough but I can't tell much, if any difference and using it with the addition of store-bought yeast will give you a good tasting loaf of bread and be more predictable. @Maison Rustique The first sourdough I got in the mail was dehydrated and it revived well. If you did not use high heat to dry it, it should revive and be as good as before. I kept it alive for sevral years and refrigerated without feeding it very often it when I did not plan to use it again for a while. You can also freeze sourdough starter. Just don't get it hot.

It was so good the other night that I had it again.

I was given a starter from a friend (she made it from scratch) who passed away a few years ago so it is special. With all the moving stuff, I did not have time to maintain it, so dried it. I'm anxious to re-hydrate and try it after I get moved.

That scrambled egg looks well overcooked.

Bacon and egg. Another 5-item cooked breakfast. Lunch: heavily dusted with pepper. Chicken curry and rice. Where do I begin? Some kind of Mexican thing, as authentic, I'm sure, as the previously shown curry. It filled the hole.

The energy that goes into extracting the materials to build the machine, manufacturing and shipping it, and then disposing of it at the end of its life far outweighs any minimal savings in hot water or soap that you might save over the average life of the machine. I have an old dishwasher, use it all the time, but I don’t kid myself that I’m saving energy with it. Living without a dishwasher clearly saves energy.

My situation is very relevant. The reason I don't have a dishwasher is that they are wasteful. The topic is about cleaning knives and I still have knives which I clean in a more efficient and less wasteful way. i did have a dishwasher in England 30 years ago and didn't put.my knives in it then, either. My choice.

Bottom line: is there a difference in taste?

Your situation isn't really relevant to the topic, then. I think we can assume the question of what to put in the dishwasher is only applicable to people who have one.

I avoid putting anything with a wooden handle in the dishwasher. That means my Japanese knives, several crappy old knives, and my cheap as chips Kiwi. I'd put the Kiwi in if it had one of the newer plastic handles. I probably wouldn't put the Victorinox chef's knife in, but I don't have final say on all the matters. I wouldn't put my carbon steel or stainless clad knives in, even if they didn't have wooden handles. I have several knives we keep around just because we can abuse them and not worry about things like the dishwasher. So it is complicated. Good knives that only I use, hand wash as soon after a task as possible. Cheap knives where anything goes. A couple of cheap knives that are hand washed because of their wood handles. I suppose those are the ones where my strategy is different from @Porthos so his post is well taken. The old club of a western chef's knife might be a good one to experiment with, since I have a similar plastic handle one if it dies. If I have a pot of soapy water in the sink, I'll tend to just hand wash the knives so I don't end up cursing the fact that they are sitting in the dishwasher, dirty. But overall dishwashers are more energy and water efficient.

Cacio e Pepe from a CI recipe - interesting approach by building the base through finely mincing the pecorino in the food processor and adding a little bit of hot water to get a cheese “paste”. You use the cheese paste with the hot spaghetti directly from the pot, freshly toasted and ground black pepper and some concentrated pasta water (spaghetti cooked in a small amount of water) to finish the dish. Overall good flavor but the cheese sauce started to form a few small clumps once it cooled down a bit.

The only energy my washing by hand uses is supplied by me, apart from a tiny amount from a gas-fired water heater for a tiny amount of hot water. I don't possess or want a dishwasher. They are unknown here.