All Activity

Baked two enriched sourdough sandwich loaves using one of the mini starters. Dough was made last night and left on the counter overnight.

@MaryIsobel that sounds delicious! @FrogPrincesse Boy do I miss Mud Creek Ranch (Santa Paula) coming to the Santa Monica Farmers market. They grow something like 200 varieties of citrus and you could always count on them for that kind of stuff.

Marmalade for sure. Also I’d try salt-preserving a couple. Bergamot is hard to find here (even though California has a ton of great citrus), so I am very jealous! I’d love to see pictures of the fruit, please share if you can.

Had a blackberry gin jam in London - loved it.

Your welcome. It's best to use my recipe as a base guideline and adjust the amount of bechamel to suit your taste/texture. I ended up using only half the amount of bechamel that my recipe made, but in hindsight, i probably could have used 3/4 of it and it would have been creamier while still holding together after chilled before shaping.

I don't necessarily love them either, but they are classic in their way. I do like their "cocktail knishes," which tend to have a nice filling to dough ratio.

Lazy man sheet-pan chicken thighs. Roasted along with carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes, garlic and Caraflex cabbage.

I’d love an Earl Grey marmalade! Or maybe fig & bergamot preserves? Bergamot poached prunes?

Moe wasn't hungry for a big dinner so I made him a Prawn cocktail with a homemade cocktail sauce.

It had been a while since I baked biscuits so this morning I made Ham, Cheddar and green onion biscuits.

No apparent problems with sticking, or the interior crazing?

Beautiful crust and crumb. And I love your pan.

I have a bit of time this morning without formal work on my hands, so I'll drop a brief update here. A few weeks back, my GF spotted a listing online from someone looking to rehome a whole flock of quail. In keeping with my comments above about being unprepared for the realities of this lifestyle, they'd been thinking in terms of a fresh-egg supply, but hadn't reckoned on the smell, cleaning, or birds' rather brutal social interactions. They also weren't getting any eggs, so they decided it was probably time to just abandon the idea. So of course we cheerfully said, "Yes, thank you very much, we'll happily take a flock of already-adult quail off your hands!" I met them a day later and took delivery of the flock, along with two convertible waterer/feeders (turn the base one way up and it's a waterer, other way up and it's a feeder, with the same bottle holding either food or water as needed), and a sack of feed. The sack of feed explained why they hadn't been getting eggs; it was actually chicken grower pellets (??). Those are relatively large, the same size as our rabbits' alfalfa pellets, so I'm actually surprised the poor little birds could choke them down. In any case, it wouldn't have given them enough protein (we feed a turkey/game bird starter, in crumbs, with supplemental calcium). They told me, visibly still horrified, that they'd had to remove a couple of males from the flock for being far too aggressive (that brutality thing I'd spoken of). It happens when you have surplus males, which is why harvesting them is so important, but these kids weren't at all ready to face that. So they... (I cringed at this part)... "had to release them into the wild." It's not that a couple of males will establish a feral population and compete with local wildlife, but it's not exactly humane for the birds. Aye, well. They're a variety we didn't already have, so my GF was delighted to get them, and they're laying with metronomic regularity now that they're getting proper food and supplemental lighting. Since we got our new incubator it's also seen steady use. My GF hatched out a batch 6 weeks ago, which are now mature and beginning to lay, and she's used those to flesh out the flocks we have out in our shed. She'd reloaded the incubator shortly after those ones had hatched, and that second hatching is 2-3 weeks old, so about halfway to maturity (maybe chickadee size?), and now there's a third batch incubating. I was worried that this was probably not a good time of year to be filling out our flocks like this, and increasing our number of beaks to feed (so to speak), but it seems to be working out. We sold one of our flocks a couple of weeks ago, just in time to move some of the juveniles out. This morning we sold a (sexed) flock of 10 that had just hit maturity and begun to lay, as well as 25 of our 29 younger hatchlings (unsexed), to the same buyer. On Monday, a third buyer will be coming here to buy a flock of 6 or 7 (one male to 5-6 females is optimal). So that'll bring a few hundred $$ into the coffers, which is very welcome right now. Freelancing pretty predictably peters out for the year around mid-December and doesn't start to pick up again until the 2nd week of January, so income from other sources takes on rather more importance. We have 14 rabbits in one cage that are well overdue for harvest, and 7 in another cage that are ready now (not to mention a number of young roosters from our second hatch back in the summertime), but we've been hobbled by lack of freezer space. I believe I mentioned that our largest freezer crapped out on us, back in the summer; we managed to rearrange things into our other three freezers, but are still space-constrained (and it didn't help that our big French-door fridge, with its trunk-sized freezer compartment, also died a few weeks ago). We'd already decided that one day we wanted to have a full-sized freezerless fridge and a full-sized upright freezer to go side by side in the kitchen, so it's just going to happen a little more quickly than we'd originally envisioned. As it happened, through a stroke of luck, we were gifted the freezerless fridge (one of my stepdaughters was the one who made that connection for us). We lost some time trying to buy a used one privately (I'm used to being ghosted by potential buyers, but potential sellers? C'mon, people!), and finally ended up getting one at a promotional price from Home Depot. That'll be delivered on Tuesday, and then I'll finally be able to get the rest of those rabbits harvested. Right now they're eating us out of house and home, so it'll be a relief to return the favor. The meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid is no substitute for a proper meat grinder, but I've found I can get through a 5-lb bag of partially-thawed, boneless rabbit in about an hour from start to finish. That's the (relatively quick) coarse first grind, the (slower) fine second grind, and then cleaning up the bits afterwards. Then I package the meat in 1-lb or 500g lots (I really need to just pick one) in Ziplocs, and once the portions are frozen I pack a few at a time into vacuum bags for longer-term storage. We have plenty of rabbit pieces in the freezer already, and a perfectly adequate number of whole rabbits, but my GF really appreciates having the ground rabbit on hand for all the things she used to make with ground beef.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I also think that these batteries have no "memory" so you don't need to worry about losing capacity when not fully discharging/recharging most of the time.

Pistachios are back on Canadian governmental recalls this morning. So I finally went to Mr. Google for more in-depth reporting on the endless announcements of salmonella carrying pistachios. And it is indeed a continuing item on the news. "As of early December 2025, 155 people have been reported sick with Salmonella linked to an outbreak involving pistachios and pistachio products in Canada, with 24 hospitalizations but no deaths, primarily affecting Ontario and Quebec, though the actual number is likely higher as not everyone seeks testing. The outbreak involves various brands from Iran and has led to multiple recalls, with people falling ill from March to November 2025. " What I don't understand is why this continues on and on and on. Why can't all pistachio items from Iran be pulled off the shelves?

If I could get my hands on bergamot in affordable quantities, I‘d make both juice and syrup for highballs …

I picked up two kilos of bergamot this afternoon intending to candy some of the peel and make jam or marmalade with most of the rest. I'm wary of all the AI articles out there and wanted to see real people do with it. Any suggestions for flavor pairings or proportions when adding to a marmalade?

Thanks! I found an online store that carries it! When it first disappeared from supermarket shelves here, I checked Barilla's website and at that time it was only being sold in Australia. I'll be happy to have some in my pantry soon 😀

Sorry, couldn’t resist …

The recipes seem like good ones, but just too...dough-present for my tastes

I'm bracing myself for the crust separating, regardless of what I do.

I feel like a heretic saying this, but I've never really enjoyed the Yonah Schimmel knishes, or any obviously dough-wrapped knish.

It's beautiful, and that's a great crumb!

They didn’t … I like it a lot, too. Good & tart olive touch.

Reminds me I need to make dumplings.