MelissaH

The cookies are in the Joanne Chang book, Flour. I actually have both paper and e of the three older books (got the paper first, then acquired the e when they were crazy cheap).

If you enjoy making cookies, her cookie recipes work amazingly well, and have become my go-to recipes for snickerdoodles and PB cookies. (But don't even think of trying them without a scale!) Now, I'll get out before I'm accused of enabling again.

How much flour/oatmeal for the butter in this recipe? My favorite oatmeal cookie recipe has 2.5 sticks butter (1 1/4 cups), 1 1/2 cups flour, and 3 cups oatmeal, among other ingredients.

Mine's seemingly fine, after however long it's been. It clumps a bit, but I keep it in a container that seals tightly enough that I can shake it, which breaks up the clumps.

I made a batch of toasted sugar shortly after the Serious Eats recipe came out. Mine took about 3 hours to turn a light beige color. To me, it does taste less sweet, and I use it in applications such as angel food cake that I often find too sweet for my tongue. Next time I'm going to bake longer and darker. It's something I do on a day when I'm home and not overly occupied with other tasks, or am working on something and need a reminder to get up and spend a bit of time looking at something other than the computer screen every so often.

No problem: give it to ME for safekeeping, and he'll never get his paws on it!

As an editor, I'd wonder if that sort of text was ready for me yet, or if it needed another pass by the author before coming to me.

A couple more: Soframiz, by Ana Sortun and Maura Kilpatrick ($1.99) has wonderful-looking Middle East-inspired baked goods, and was fun reading. Pok Pok, by Andy Ricker and JJ Goode ($2.99) was also fun reading, with doable-looking recipes from the eponymous Thai restaurants.

As long as you're springing for countertops that aren't laminate. I know people say there are ways to have laminate countertops with an undermount sink, but I have yet to see a system that I'd be comfortable with.

On the old ATK podcast (and on the new Milk Street podcast), Christopher Kimball never missed a chance to slam SV cooking. Whether he truly believes what he's saying or whether it's part of his curmudgeon persona, I do not know. But I do wonder if the apparently upcoming ATK SV book is something that would not have happened previously, while they were still under Kimball's watch.

I enjoyed that book immensely.

I won't use my mandoline without wearing a metal mesh glove topped with a rubber glove. I like counting in decimal!

Well, salt will help to drive out the water. Salt will also help preserve the tomatoes better by giving you another attack against bacteria growing. And salt makes them taste better.

Some cheap books I found today: Pizza Camp by Joe Beddia, $3.99 Three books by David Tanis, all $2.99 or less: One Good Dish, Heart of the Artichoke, and A Platter of Figs Crossroads: Extraordinary Recipes from the Restaurant that is Reinventing Vegan Cuisine by Tal Ronnen, $2.51 Kokkari: Contemporary Greek Flavors by Erik Cosselmon, $2.99 Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking by Dana Shultz, $1.99 and the one I'm most excited about, Breaking Breads: A New World of Israeli Baking by Uri Scheft, $2.99.

Very often, but not always, books that are dirt-cheap on Kindle are also dirt-cheap on other ebook platforms as well. If you see something listed here as a Kindle book but you prefer a different platform, check it out on your preferred ebookstore. It may be bargain-basement priced there also.

And today: Nancy Silverton's Pastries from the La Brea Bakery ($1.99US) Vibrant India: Fresh Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Brooklyn by Chitra Agrawal ($2.99US) And also the book that started many of the discussions we're still having, The Omnivore's Dilemma ($1.99US) Usual disclaimers apply, blah blah US Prime, blah blah.

Except that every couple of years, he'd come up with a new One More-Perfecter Way to cook that dish!

Yup. What @DiggingDogFarm said—and that's a brand-new Whole Foods store that won't be open till the middle of next month. One's supposed to be coming in Rochester, which is only 75 miles away from me, but we drove by the site where it's supposed to be located a couple of weeks ago and didn't see anything resembling a building. It's interesting to note that both these Whole Foods stores are located very close to the flagship Wegmans store in each city, so they're obviously trying to go head-to-head with the longstanding local, much-loved giant. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out, and how loyal the customers are.

Also cheap right now: Questlove's cookbook Something to Food About ($1.99), and Hot Bread Kitchen ($2.99, hope you have better luck with the recipes than I did but I enjoyed reading the flavortext accompanying the recipes, and at that price you don't have to feel bad about the recipes that never worked for me).

My husband is a strawberry snob. No strawberries for him unless they're out of our local fields, and small and very red. Anything large or pale gets referred to by him as "Floridian" and not worthy of purchase. I'm less picky, but I like strawberries to have flavor. Alas, this year was not a great year for strawberries in these parts: the spring was so wet that the local berries ballooned into a Floridian shape, with a diluted flavor to match. So no strawberry jam for us this winter!

Remove the photo and that sounds like an order, or a warning.

Out of curiosity, spurred by a discussion currently happening on the thread about whether ebook deals belong in their own topic, I did a price comparison between Kindle ebooks as listed on Amazon and the corresponding Apple ebooks as listed in the iBookstore. The following were the same cheap price on both: Lucky Peach Power Vegetables ($3.99), Taste & Technique ($2.99), Flavorwalla ($2.99). The following were cheap on Amazon but not at iBooks: Victuals ($1.99/$16.99), Big Bad Breakfast ($2.99/$15.99), All Under Heaven ($1.99/$19.99), Poole's ($1.99/$18.99). Nothing I checked was cheaper on iBooks than on Amazon. So, if you prefer a format for your ebooks other than Kindle, it may be worth checking to see if your preferred format has an equally good deal. If you use a non-dedicated reader, there's probably an app available for whatever your favorite file type is.

Those wings sound awesome. Do you have a recipe/technique you could share?

I'm not familiar with the term "granary flour". Could you please describe what this is? The pancakes look delicious!

I like to go for a few-miles-long walk in the mornings, and I listen to podcasts while I walk. For some reason, I decided to try the Milk Street Kitchen podcasts, maybe because like when you bang your head against the wall, it feels really good when I stop? For all intents and purposes, it's basically a duplicate of the now-discontinued ATK podcasts, right down to the roster of regular rotating guests, with the substitution of Sara Moulton for test cook Bridget and the minuscule loss of the tasting and testing segments. I can handle the interview segments, but every single one of the phone call Q&A sessions makes me want to throw my iPod on the ground because CK tries to sound knowledgeable about things he has no business sounding knowledgeable about, giving answers that don't make sense. Someone bang my head against the wall, please? So you can stop in a little while? So, when I got the email from ThermoWorks, I was about ready to scream. I love my Thermapens, but I think if I were to buy a CK-branded timer, my head might just explode with his opinions.