MelissaH

My KA is a 4.5 quart model. It was fine for a while, but I started getting frustrated with it because it wasn't really big enough to do a batch of bread dough to fill two loaf pans. I eventually added a 7 quart Viking mixer (no longer made) to my stable of power tools. The KA is the one I go to for cookie dough, cake batter, and egg whites if I'm not doing them with a hand mixer. (My oatmeal cookie dough recipe is about at the large limit for the KA.) But for the bread dough or really large cake batter batches, I use the Viking. Based on my experiences with the 4.5 quart model, I can't imagine that anyone would be happy with a mixer that's a quart smaller, unless that person doesn't bake much. But why would such a person need a stand mixer anyway?

Agreed wholeheartedly, just like the cucumbers!

If I'm going to store something for a while, I'll wrap the lid edge with some Parafilm.

I'd think that a cucumber heart was the seedy portion. I'm not quite sure how you'd dice those!

Some e-cookbooks are done well. There's just often no way to tell before you actually look inside one. If I were a cookbook author, I'd go ballistic if my publisher was lazy about the conversion.

When I open a jar of something, I generally replace the ring and flat lid with a plastic one-piece lid (like this) that's easier for me to deal with.

Not exactly a quirk, I'd say, but when an e-cookbook hasn't been formatted to be easy to use as an e-cookbook: when you're told to see another page but it isn't a live link; indexes that aren't live, but just list the page numbers from a print book (and are therefore useless in an ebook); and even the lack of a live table of contents with a list of recipes (especially if the print book has one). Apart from that, I get frustrated with multipart recipes where a given part is not near the rest of the recipe, even if it isn't given a use in the cookbook for anything other than as part of a multipart recipe (and the corollary of a multipart recipe that gives a prep time without mentioning the assumption that the multiparts don't count in the prep time); the Pomeroy pretension problem where a specific esoteric variety of an ingredient is deemed critical to the success of the recipes; and cookbooks that don't have headnotes or any kind of "flavor text" that tell how the author of the book likes to use the recipe in question. I may be a minority, but I don't care about photos particularly, so the last of these is possibly more important to me than to others.

The rings can be re-used, but the flat lids need to be replaced for a new batch.

And the reply from my second email came quickly:

Aha! That picture rang bells with me because my husband and I cycled the Mosel on our tandem two years ago. If any of you are planning to explore this area, I highly recommend doing it by bicycle. The path is well-signed and well-mapped, very easy to follow. There aren't many hills to ride; those rise up above you. And there are plenty of easily-accessible lodgings nearby; check out the site bettundbike.de for cycle-friendly overnight accommodations. (The places we stayed had marvelous breakfasts that fueled us almost too well for each day's cycling.) In many ways, for us riding the Mosel felt very close to home. Which has me wondering whether any of the Finger Lakes wineries do a sparkling Riesling. Must explore that further....

I just emailed Anova again2, since I haven't seen an updated app on the App Store yet.

I got an email about this from Anova, sent to me on 16 April (a week and a half ago). They issued a mea culpa and an explanation: I don't have a voice control device, nor do I have a wifi Anova device. If their timeline is accurate for an app update, it should be due any day now, and I anxiously await it!

I always prefer Heath bars to raisins. When I make oatmeal cookies with inclusions, I generally use either dried cherries or dried cranberries, sometimes dried blueberries. And chocolate chips too, either the ordinary kind or white chocolate chips. My baking yesterday was the soft cream cheese cookies from Food52. I have fiori di sicilia, but I used vanilla and lemon zest instead because I then used the juice from the zested lemon to make a little bit of glaze, to amp up the citricality. I scooped the cookies with a #60 Zeroll scoop, which gave me about 4 dozen cookies. I didn't bother to flatten the dough balls because even after an hour in the fridge, it was pretty sticky stuff. My assessment of the finished cookies: they're good, but probably not the best use of cream cheese. Make sure you leave more than an inch between dough balls, or they'll spread together in the oven. The first sheet I made was probably a little underbaked, and thus didn't cleanly release from the parchment. I left the other two sheets in the oven to bake a little longer, and that worked better. They are still decent, the day after baking.

I'm thinking I'll give the water, milk powder, and starter yogurt a whirl in the blender. From there, it can go into the Instant Pot overnight. Maybe tonight?

Me. I've just gotten so spoiled by the Kindle books that regularly show up for $2 or $3 that I'm wondering if this one is really worth $17!

I don't even try to make anything that requires much precision measuring if I'm on the road. Practice eyeballing while you're still home, or use the packages from things you buy (water bottles, cups of yogurt, and the like) to help you estimate when you're there. Presumably, if you're traveling for business, you can afford to eat some meals out. Take advantage of those, to get things that aren't easy to make in your setup. If you're really lucky, you'll have yummy leftovers for the next day's lunch. Cook simple stuff when you want to eat in. If I had to bring one precision tool, I'd bring a thermapen.

Anything further? I picked up a similar bag at our Asian (Korean-owned) market today. The writing on the bag looks Korean to me. The 12 grains specified on the bag are brown rice, brown sweet rice, black rice, oat, barley, red sorghum, job's tear, black bean, red bean, peeled mung bean, sweet corn, and green pea. This is also the ingredient list on the back. The cooking directions leave a bit to be desired: 1. Soak 12 grain rice for 5 hours prior to cooking. 2. The use of pressure cooker will enhance your taste of the product. You can cook 12 grain with rice or itself with the pressure rice cooker or regular rice cooker. I asked one of the employees at the store about it, and she said definitely soak it for 5 hours, but she'd had varying results in the pressure cooker and better luck on the stove. She also cautioned me to chew it well or it won't be digested well, adding that because of this, it's great for eating lower-carb. Any guesses on a water:grain ratio: And any guesses about cooking time, either with or without a pressure cooker?

When we spent three months living in Belgium, we augmented the kitchen with a sharp knife for each of us, purchased locally. (Our cutting board was OK.) With access to a decent knife (and some way to keep it reasonably sharp; don't discount using the underside of a ceramic bowl or plate as a makeshift steel!) and cutting board, a pot, and a stove with at least one functioning burner, you can do an amazing amount of cooking. If you have a microwave, you have even more options. We found that Rubbermaid-style storage containers (the ones that can be reused but you wouldn't hesitate to give them away and not get them back) were a godsend, for storing leftovers, as prep bowls, to hold the cooked spaghetti sauce when you take it out of the one large pot so you can cook the spaghetti in that pot, for microwaving, for using the lid as a quickie plate to hold something, or even to seal up stuff that you wanted to throw in your suitcase and bring home without worrying about leaks. You may need to invest in a can opener, depending on what you're cooking and how it comes packaged. It's OK to use convenience foods such as precut veg, especially if your prep space and time are limited. If you're looking for a couple of things to make a kitchen bearable, don't overlook IKEA.

Those of you using reconstituted dry milk to make yogurt: do you mix the powder and water and immediately put it in the pot? Or do you reconstitute the day before, and then let it sit in the fridge before turning it into yogurt? Do you use cold or hot water for the reconstitution?

When I was a Girl Scout and we went to camp, we'd use a similar sandwich press to make what we called mountain pie: two slices of squishy white sandwich bread, with canned pie filling between, toasted in the fire. They ruined toasted sandwiches of all kinds for me, for years afterward.

My blade came last week! I never got any correspondence from them, but I'm happy to have the blade.

There are also a number of recipes in Joanne Chang's Baking with Less Sugar where the sweetener is dates that get simmered with a touch of baking soda until they turn to mush. Sounds like you may be able to use those recipes and skip that step.

I'm also surprised to hear that the steel liner would take on any kind of flavor. We have one silicone ring that I've written off completely to only use with oniony and spiced dishes, another ring that is still reasonably clean, and a third that is brand new, waiting for the first to get intolerable.

My favorites are cookies. I typically make cookie dough, portion it into appropriate-size balls (and, for peanut butter cookies, crisscross them with a fork), freeze them flat on cookie sheets, and then bag them. For just a few people, I'll bake just a few. For a crowd, I'll bake a few sheets. My MIL will often make a sheet cake, from a box, with frosting from a can. She'll spread the frosting over the cake still in its 9 by 13 inch pan, no muss, no fuss. If you have the right crowd, either a Dirt Cake (don't forget the gummy worms and fake flowers) or a Kitty Litter Cake can be fun, but neither of those does well outside on a hot day.

So maybe this stuff is intended to get cooked, rather than just mixed with hot pasta? That might make more sense.