Smithy

I've wondered about that. In Minnesota, relatively small quantities (5 gallons? I don't remember) of milk spilled from a commercial operation must be reported to the Minnesota Duty Officer and treated for cleanup. We in the mining business, who had to worry about non-food spills, thought it sounded very silly, but the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency noted that the Biological Oxygen Demand was quite high for breaking down even such a benign substance. So where should the whey go? My darling said his parents would have slopped the hogs with it. Are there pig farming operations in or near the Mohawk Valley?

I forgot to mention earlier that I think tsatsiki is a fine condiment that I enjoy eating but have never made successfully. Would your DW care to share her recipe?

I always drain it. The bottom picture in the collage above is of the yogurt draining in my Euro Cuisine Greek Yogurt strainer, recommended by @kayb (and others). I tried cheesecloth in a colander at first, but find the very fine mesh in this strainer to be more effective than cheesecloth and easier to clean. When I remember, I use the whey to make bread. I can't tell that it makes a difference in the bread quality, but it feels less wasteful. eta I'll post a better photo of the draining process if it seems useful.

I managed to make yoghurt without the Instant Pot, thanks to the helpful information given here. Once I'm back on the grid I'll resume the IP, but it's nice to be able to do without it. Thanks, Anna N, ElsieD and Tropicalsenior!

Glory be, I've had my first success at making yogurt without electricity. I know that yogurt-making predates household electricity by centuries. No doubt many (most?) folks still make it the old-fashioned way. However, my attempts at making yogurt have been such failures that I resorted to store-bought for years - until the advent of the Instant Pot. That little beauty has been wonderful as, among other things, a yogurt maker. Where we are presently camped, we rely on the generator for electricity. That precludes the long run times needed, say, to incubate yogurt or do sous vide cookery. I asked over here about the temperature that the Instant Pot uses to incubate the yogurt culture. Thanks to @Anna N and @ElsieD, with additional information from @Tropicalsenior, I picked up the information that I needed: the incubation temperature should be around 107F and ElsieD's Instant Pot maintains between 105 and 106F. My oven, with the pilot light on, registers 107F according to my meat thermometer. I brought my half-gallon of milk to a low boil, let it cool to around 110F, added some of my precious culture and whisked it all thoroughly. Wrapped it in a towel and stuck it in the oven. Periodically I'd reassure myself about the temperature: open the door, quickly turn on the thermometer (which goes to sleep after a few minutes), shut the door, then recheck the temp. 106 or 107F every time. This morning, I had yogurt. Hooray! I don't have to go back to store-bought!

There's a certain pride in that, isn't there? I was frantic during our packing-up: the large batches of kraut fermenting in our kitchen still needed to be dealt with one way or the other, and I had (grr) no time. I got it done anyway, and what we have here is about half of what I'd made. What method did you use for your kraut? Have you written about it in the Sauerkraut topic, or in the less specific What Are You Preserving, and How Are You Doing It? topic? If not, we're missing out.

My bread-baking is improving again. My latest loaf, from a few days ago, looks pretty good: ...at least, until you see the bottom ... Still, it's better than its predecessor. I used the screen you see in the top picture and no cast iron. It still got a bit too warm on the bottom. Next try I'll use the middle oven rack. The crumb shot will be at the end. During our last trip to town, we succumbed to the promise of this label: As we suspected, it was a "t" and not a comma that was missing. The label looks messy because the butcher was good enough to split a package and wrap the halves separately for us. A 3-pound roast is as much as we care to cook at once. We wanted a pork roast for cool-weather cooking and to use some of the sauerkraut I made last fall. 5 of these 1-quart containers take up a lot of fridge space! This is usually a slow-cooker recipe for us. Since we're on generator power only, we opted for the oven. Here's the roast, sprinkled generously with cumin and nestled in its bed of potatoes, carrots and onions, just before going in for a low and slow oven cook. When the potatoes were soft and the roast was nearly done (somewhere around 160 - 165F), we added the kraut and let it come up to temperature. We think this also helps slow the temperature rise of the meat and holds it at that magic collegen-stall temperature a bit longer, but don't have rigorous tests to prove it. We do know that if the kraut goes in too soon it's difficult to get the spuds cooked. This is a different form of simple cooking altogether than the hash and microwaved asparagus, and we don't find it compatible with troubleshooting mechanical problems - but when it comes together, we're happy. The leftovers make us doubly so.

To be fair, MW asparagus can be good and we've had some success with it. Unfortunately it can also be overcooked in an inattentive heartbeat, and we've had limp army drab bits often enough that I tend to think of microwaving it as last-ditch expedience. I generally prefer it roasted, grilled or otherwise browned, or else used as one of many elements in some dish like pasta primavera. I'll try Kenji's method, with the proviso that it must not be left whole unless I'm cooking for myself (another point of contention in our household ). Thanks for that link!

Yesterday morning started off with a bang, literally: it sounded like the contents of 3 kitchen drawers all falling to the floor at once. Up from the kitchen there rose such a clatter, we bounced out of bed to see what was the matter. Nothing looked out of place. The sound was coming from the heater vent. Oh, dear. Further investigation and dismantling, several hours' worth, led to the picking out of dozens of itty bitty plastic pieces from inside the works. That clatter and bang had been the sound of the furnace fan disintegrating and spitting vanes all over the heating element (oh, the odor!). We'll need a new furnace motor. We'll need to go to a service place. We're miles from any repair facility, and don't want to break camp. We'll make it until we're closer to a repair place, after Christmas; we intend to have outside electrical power in a couple of weeks, and we can tough it out without heat until then. It isn't very cold here. ... Nonetheless... ... I'm really quite put out about yet another mechanical problem. It could be worse: it could be the generator and wiring (as last year) or a glide motor breaking (ditto) or a wheel bearing failure (previous trailer, at least twice). We're safe, dry, healthy and mobile. Still, it takes time we'd rather use for other things, and saps the energy needed for my intended cooking. We went the easy way. Last night was my darling's basic comfort food, almost as easy as it gets: sausage, onion and potato hash cooked over the campfire, and asparagus cooked in the microwave with butter. I don't have a picture of the asparagus; I think it's an insult to the poor vegetable but at least it was edible. The blurry photo probably reflects my mood when I snapped the picture. There had been better cookery in previous days. I'll write about that in another post.

I understand that, and most of our trailer stuff is plastic or metal to minimize potential for breakage. There are, however, some things for which I prefer glass because of its nonreactive properties or, to be honest, its heft and feel. Wine glasses, for instance - and he has his beer mug and scotch glass. He uses a plastic coffee cup but I insist on my china mugs that don't change the flavor of the coffee. We certainly didn't need glass for mixing or storing that spice blend, but household habit took over that evening, and in the end a glass pint jar was all we had for storage. The winds that have fanned the flames of Southern California have been fanning us as well. It isn't much fun for being outside, so we chose one day to go to town and run errands. With these winds we're upwind of the dusty areas, but the farther south we drove the dustier it got. That blur isn't just due to a lousy focus. Fry's Grocery has a monthly deal for people, er, over a certain age, and we took advantage of it along with half the winter population. All my good work at emptying out the freezer is undone. One of the bulky packages we've been carrying around, that had come out of the freezer for a cook-inside day, was a whole chicken. I love roast chicken, and I love to roast it myself. As an experiment I lined the bottom of the roasting pan with a layer of thinly sliced onion, along with a bit of sliced celery and a Meyer lemon wedge, and set the chicken atop it. (My usual procedure is to use a few sticks of celery as the 'roasting rack' and add a few wedges of onion.) The chicken I coated with more of that berbere spice mix - which turns out to be an Ethiopian blend, by the way - and added another Meyer lemon wedge to its cavity. It all roasted , with occasional turning of the chicken, until the chicken was done. Meanwhile, I did green beans with peppers, mushrooms, and other must-use-it vegetables on the stove top. The onion layer, which had been an experiment, was a revelation: the onions had melted down and caramelized with no effort on my part, and made a delicious accompaniment to the chicken. The lemon wedges and berbere spice produced excellent flavoring. We had some breast meat (not dried out!) and the hind quarters for dinner. The next day more of the breast meat was sliced up for sandwiches, with the remainder of the caramelized onion adding an extra layer of flavor. The carcass has since been stripped and put in what was the few free cubic inches of freezer space, and the rest of the meat has become a chicken salad. Chicken salad sandwiches are in our future!

That. Is. Gorgeous! I hope it gives you a lifetime of pleasure. I'm not an authority on this, but as far as I know you cannot over-oil a board. The excess will simply sit on the surface until you wipe it off. You'll have wasted a little oil doing that, but you'll know that the wood has enough oil if there's a slight sheen of excess 5 - 10 minutes after oiling.

Thank you for that information! I didn't know that could be done with yogurt culture. Is there a minimum amount you'd recommend in order to reseed the next culture?

Beautiful, thank you! Now I have an idea what temperature to shoot for during my yogurt incubation. In the oven, with the pilot light on, may work well here. I'll have the pot wrapped for insulation as well.

Unseasoned bread crumbs, corn meal, ground cumin, hot paprika, sweet paprika, Lawry's Seasoned Salt, onion salt if we have it (we didn't), garlic salt instead if I can talk him into it, parsley, oregano. All herbs are dried. Those are listed roughly in order of proportion, but don't ask for more specifics. Our attempts to measure and write down what we do for this have consistently failed due to misplaced notebooks and lost computer files. I suspect an internal resistance to simplification.

Welcome from the lurkers' shadows! What sorts of restaurants and cafes have you cooked and served at? Any favorite cuisines?

Thank you, that's very helpful. It gives me a target temperature range for what my pot should be doing: around 107F. Thank you - that range is close to the 107F that is cited in Anna's link - but yes, if you have time and inclination I'd love to get your measured temperature in the 3-quart (mini) pot.

Sometimes, the simplest things are complicated by living in such a small space. Well, maybe they're complicated because I am not wired for simplicity. I want my toys, and I want variety, and I want ready access to it all. Meanwhile, my darling - who is wired for simplicity although he puts up with me - wants his own ways of doing things. They are rarely the same as mine, so his simple needs add to the variety of things we buy, store, and use when we can find them. Case in point: pork steaks. Pork may be my darling's favorite meat. Pork shoulder steaks are, dollar for pound, his favorite steaks. To him, they're a far better ratio of flavor (including fat) to money than any beef steak ever invented. And they're simple. Pork steaks are simple because, in his opinion, there is only One True Way to cook them: bread them in a Shake 'n' BakeTM-style mix of our own devising, put them in a baking pan, bake at 425F for 25 minutes. No variation. Simplicity itself. While I agree that the treatment is simple and tastes good, I've occasionally tried other treatments. I get bored doing the same thing to a particular cut of meat every single time, with the possible exception of Prime Rib. He has liked the results well enough, but invariably noted that he prefers his method. The upshot is that (a) I've given up trying to do anything else with pork shoulder steaks and (b) if we're going to eat them, he gets to cook them. The balance of who cooks has shifted gradually over the years, from roughly 50/50 to my doing the lion's share of cooking and cleanup. He does the simple (rote) stuff that he most favors, and this is one of those dishes. The complication came when we realized that we didn't have any of our mix in the cabinets. That was used up before we left home. "OK," he said, "you hand me the spices and I'll mix it up. Where's a quart jar?" "We don't have one," I replied. "We left the empty quart jars behind because you hate carrying glass around, and we haven't emptied any pickle jars yet." "A quart plastic container?" "All filled with sauerkraut or sourdough starter." We rooted around. Eventually we found an empty plastic container that hadn't been thrown away yet and only carried peanut dust. That dust could only help, right? He started calling off ingredients. I kept finding them. Most of them were in here (*groan*) although the bread crumbs were someplace else entirely. Eventually it was all assembled in the big container - which turns out to be an excellent size for shaking and mixing dry ingredients, by the way. We shook the steaks with some of the coating in a plastic bag, à la the original Shake 'n' BakeTM, then put them in a shallow enameled pan for baking. The remainder of the mix went into a pint jar - we have some of those, from salsa we brought along - and has a home now. The final result was delicious. I'll tell about the beans in another post. But it wasn't simple.

Thanks for that. Letting it cool below 115F is necessary information, but I also want to know the temperature that the pot maintains during the "Normal" mode. I believe "Normal" amounts to a temperature specification, but I don't know what that temperature is.

Can someone please tell me the temperature inside the Instant Pot during yogurt incubation? I'm not talking about the "BOIL" phase but the incubation step. I ask because I have to make my next batch manually or go back to store-bought. I'm loathe to give up the yogurt culture so lovingly developed with the help of my IP. I know the manual method shouldn't be worrisome - people have done it for centuries - but I never succeeded in making yogurt until I got the Instant Pot. (There's nothing wrong with the pot. I'm off the electrical grid at present and don't want to run the generator for hours.)

I found during our kitchen reno that I had to ride herd on the group every day - that is, every day that they showed up. They gave new meaning to the phrase "independent contractor". In the end, I had to withhold a significant amount of money (the final payment) to get them to come back in with the last switchplate cover, since they'd ordered the wrong size/shape in the first place. What was estimated to be a 3-week job, IIRC, took more like 4 months counting the weeks of waiting for someone to come back with the proper cover. There were also some misread plans that led to a counter 2" shorter than I'd intended on the kitchen island. (That actually worked out for the good, due to passageway clearance issues, but I was irritated at the time.) That said, their work was excellent, and we love the result. We've used those same guys since then for window replacement and siding repair. Hang in there, weinoo. It'll get done, and you'll love it. As others have said, you have my admiration for your fortitude!

Nice summary, @Tuber magnatum. Thanks for writing that up.

I used heavy cream as the original recipe specified. (I only had half-and-half for the first attempt.) The cheese involved a mixture of parmesan, cheddar and fontina, and probably used more total cheese than the original recipe specified. I was more generous with the salt and pepper than on the first attempt, and used plenty of garlic. For the potatoes I used Yukon Gold instead of russets, and they were sliced perhaps more thickly than specified. My mandoline has 3 settings. So far I've used the thinnest (for the first attempt) and the thickest (for the second). This time I hit the Goldilocks standard. Once sliced, I submerged them in the cream/cheese/seasoning mixture and dredged them around until they were ready to be placed in the pan. As for the layout: yes, I overlapped them the way one would for Potatoes Anna or a Gratin Dauphinois. I didn't bother layering them artistically, but grabbed several slices from the pot o' cream/cheese/etc. and made sure there was plenty of that mixture between slices, then laid them down flat but overlapping, like a card spread. After getting the bottom of the pan covered I scraped the remainder of the cream/cheese/etc. mixture over it. Then when I was cooking it, I just kept going until everything had been absorbed. (I think I turned it over once - which contributed to the mess of the pan.) There was probably more dairy mixture than necessary, but I was determined to finish that particular container of leftover ingredients in the refrigerator. :-) Once I have the proportions set to my satisfaction in this recipe, I think it will be interesting to try russets vs. something firmer like the Yukon Golds. I normally insist on russets for my gratins, but I'm starting to think that the Yukon Golds and their middle-road siblings might hold together better and absorb the huge amounts of dairy liquid without having the starches explode and give a dry texture. Does that make sense?

The current frenzy of Christmas cookie baking and Christmas confection making has me thinking of making stollen. I love the stuff. I tried making it once, with leaden results, but that was long ago and far away. Our existing topics on stollen link to many dead recipes, or to discussion about where to buy the best stollen. I'm bumping the idea anew. Do you have a favorite? One to avoid? A quick dash through some plausible-looking web sites yields these candidates: Thomas Haas stollen, archived here and discussed in this topic, with some misgivings stated about the recipe; Serious Eat's Buttery Marzipan Stollen Recipe; The Spruce's German Christmas Stollen; King Arthur Flour's Christmas Stollen; The Splendid Table's Stollen; Slate's Stollen, the Best Christmas Bread You're Probably Not Making. (Actually, I have no idea whether Slate is plausible when it comes to cooking, but the title and blog post earned it a place in the list.) There are other listings too, of course: Better Crocker and Martha Stewart as well as those web sites that are notorious for not having tested and vetted recipes. So my question to the stollen bakers is: which recipe do you prefer? Do you have any pitfalls to warn me about before I launch this venture? Does any of the above-linked recipes look particularly good or bad? I'll be shopping on Wednesday, so I need to make the shopping list tomorrow.

For the mini-pot! Wow! I've had the 6-quart on my wish list, but wasn't aware that they were making one yet for the 3-quart.

Last night we sat out on the deck and watched the Super Moon rise, then lit the fire. There was a light breeze: just enough to fan the flames and keep the smoke going in the same direction, not enough to cancel my campfire cooking plans. I'd picked up this seasoning packet on a whim, last Christmas? - but hadn't opened it. The time had come. It has a nice spicy heat. They are vague about the "spices" in it, but it reminds me slightly of curry powder. There's probably a touch of turmeric, possibly cumin, definitely a hot pepper of some sort. Our last two chicken thighs had come out of the freezer; I dusted them generously with the berbere seasoning. I've been determined to work out a way of doing that Hasselback Potato gratin to my satisfaction. I've also wanted to work out a way to do a gratin in Papa's Pan. I had a lot of the cream/cheese/spice mixture left over from the last attempt. It went to coat a fresh batch of sliced potatoes (medium slices, this time). It all got packed into the pan. I had brussels sprouts and bacon ready to roast in the oven, then decided not to run the oven AND the campfire. Would it cook properly in a foil packet? I decided to find out. Out everything went, to the fire grate... ...where we shifted wood, listened to the night sounds, talked, and waited for things to cook. Timing was an issue. I found myself trying to keep the chicken warm while the spud sauce cooked down, but the trio of dishes eventually was ready to serve, and the chicken was not overcooked. Potato success! This was the best browning and sauce absorption I've had yet! (It made a terrible mess of the pan. Papa would have been proud. ) All told, this was a very satisfying dinner. The sprouts might have benefited from an extra touch of sauce - when I do them stovetop I often add a flourish of vinegar - but they were just soft enough and had picked up some char. No complaints on the texture. We very much liked the berbere seasoning on the chicken. I'll be looking into that to see what goes into it. It's good that we did this last night, because the wind has been rising all night and is rocking the trailer now. We'll be cooking inside for the next day or two.