MelissaH

Has anyone tried freeze-drying canned pumpkin yet? I'd be interested to know how much mass gets lost during the process. (I'm trying to reverse-engineer a pumpkin bread mix, and wonder how much of the water that gets added is just to replace the moisture originally in the "pumpkin flakes" listed on the ingredients.

I have both. I specifically got a paper copy of Prune rather than an ebook, because it looked like a format that wouldn't translate well. And I like the fact that the recipes are way more approachable than most restaurant cookbook recipes. I think the first one I'm going to try is the pumpkin in ginger beer with yeast...as soon as I can find a source for the yeast. I have all kinds of other yeast in the house, but not the nutritional version! Never mind that the cookbook itself is so much fun to sit down and read like a novel! (And also check out the book section of today's NY Times: the By The Book column is with Gabrielle Hamilton! http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/gabrielle-hamilton-by-the-book.html?ref=books

I can't think of anything better to do with a pretentious experience than laugh. Thanks for sharing it. I would have loved to join you, except that I don't think I could get to you right now!

Does the dislike of cinnamon extend to all varieties? If you have a Penzey's or other spice store nearby, you can smell the difference between the various kinds, which carries through to the taste and overall impression. There's a huge difference between the traditional "hot" cinnamon of Red Hots or Atomic Fireballs and the gentler flavor of Ceylon cinnamon.

If the hand-cleaning is a bigger issue than the counter space, try this with your stationary blender: half-fill it with warm water, add a few drops of dish soap, put the lid on, and run the blender for a few seconds. Dump, rinse, disassemble, and that's it!

Emmalish, thanks for finding those pictures. The one thing they don't show is that if your roll is longer than your ruler, you can work across and back: push with the ruler and pull the paper in that area, then slide the ruler over a bit and repeat, etc. Then work your way back down the roll until it's even.

Ooh, those muffins look like an idea worth keeping, especially since we may be on the hook for breakfast for two dozen in a couple of weeks. Being the type of person I am, I wonder if they'd work with some crunchy bacon pieces added, and then maybe using the rendered bacon fat in place of an equal amount of whatever other oil or fat was included?

That tofu looks REALLY good. Any chance of another Ladies Lunch on this side of the border before the snow starts to fly?

Or a homebrew supply store, which may or may not be the same as the wine making supply store.

Have you ever tried this with honey rather than maple syrup? I like the general concept, but my husband isn't into maple.

Waffles.

At the risk of going off-topic, although this might be interesting information for anyone else who is contemplating producing a cookbook: Word is a decent tool for getting the text of a project into shape, especially if it's something that has multiple authors or that needs a few go-rounds between author and editor. But AFTER that process, when it's time to make the cookbook look pretty and perfect and consistent, whoever is in charge of layout will port the document(s) into a more specialized layout program. And at this stage, text that's been changed WITHOUT HAVING A PARAGRAPH FORMAT OR CHARACTER FORMAT APPLIED is a designer's nightmare. I'm not saying that I want to remove the ability to create text that is italicized, underlined, or boldface. But when I'm working on a document that needs to be internally consistent, such as (one hopes) a cookbook, it's vital that all formatting gets consistently applied. For example, in cookbooks, each recipe usually has a title. On the page, the titles of recipes are generally typographically differentiated: different size, different typeface, different color, different treatment, what have you. You could do all this manually: change the font family, change the size, change the color, make it italic, and make a note of what you did so that you can do the same thing for each following recipe. Or you could create a paragraph format, which you'd call something like Recipe Title so you know what you're using it for, which includes all this, and apply that paragraph format to every recipe title. The paragraph format could even include instructions such as "Always start at the top of an odd-numbered page". If you do this, and you've set up your cookbook file to be printed on both sides of the paper and bound into a book, every recipe title and presumably the recipe that belongs with that title will start on a right-side page, without you needing to do anything else to it. (No need to manually put in page breaks or insert empty pages!) You could also just start at the top of a page, without specifying even- or odd-numbered pages, in which case the recipe title (and recipe) would start on the next new page. The real beauty comes if you decide to change the way your recipe titles look. If you've manually applied the changes, you need to then find each recipe's title, and change it from right-justified blue boldface 16-point Arial to center-justified red small caps italic 14-point Times (or whatever), and repeat those changes on every title throughout. If you've used paragraph styles, you make the changes within the Recipe Title paragraph style, and bam! it automatically updates everything that has the Recipe Title paragraph format, with NO chance of a rogue blue character or a comma or period that somehow escaped being italicized. Spend a little bit of time up front to create paragraph styles for the recipe's title, any notes, the ingredients, the procedure, even photo captions or table headings or whatever else you need in your book, apply them consistently, and you've taken care of most of the formatting. Paragraph formats apply to an entire paragraph. Word (and most other programs) have character formats in addition to paragraph formats. These are useful when you want part of a paragraph to look different than the rest of the paragraph (such as a few italicized words, or to add some characters from the Symbol font if the character you need is not available in the font you're using as the base for your paragraph format). When you click that little B button in the Word toolbar, you're applying an override to the paragraph format. These overrides wreak havoc later on: they don't necessarily transfer into your designer's layout program; if they do transfer, they create extra work for your designer; and they're easy to lose. (I speak as someone who has spent hours hunting through a hundreds-of-pages document for the one period that's italicized but is not supposed to be, and that will screw up the printing process if you leave it in.) What I would prefer to see, instead, is a B button that does not apply an override, but instead applies a character style called "Bold" (or, better yet, "Strong") where the character style is to make the text bold and leave everything else (typeface, size, color, and the like) untouched. This would have the same overall effect, and be transparent to most users, but make the editor's and designer's lives much easier in the long run. Ditto for the I and U buttons: have them apply character styles, not overrides. You can keep your buttons; I wish they worked differently because of all the busywork it would save! From an editor and sometime designer's point of view, if you want to write a cookbook, there are a few little things that you can do when you get started that will ease the process later on, and make you into one of those authors that editors like to work with, at least from a technical point of view. With that, I'll get off my soapbox.

I'm lucky enough to live within range of Wegmans, where the "club pack" of chicken breasts are individually vacuum-sealed. We cut them apart on the dotted lines, put the individual breasts (still sealed) into a ziplock bag that we label and date, and toss the whole thing into the freezer. It's easy to pull out and quick-thaw as many as you need, although lately the ones we've gotten are so giant that one breast feeds both of us. My MIL is quite envious of the packaging, since all she can get is a massive pack where if you toss it in the freezer, you'll get a giant single unit.

I would certainly think that your designer will drop a document into his template. However, you can make your editor's life much easier if you use paragraph and character formats appropriately in your document. Speaking as an editor, I'd dearly love to remove the bold, italic, and underline buttons from the toolbar of Word, and replace them with buttons that will apply an appropriate character style! Believe it or not, the extra spaces, tabs, and the like aren't a big deal. I use a macro package to do this for me: I click a button, sit back, and it cleans up all of this sort of thing for me. I know I'm a couple of days late on this, but check with your designer first, to be sure you need to spend your time doing this rather than working on other tasks that are less easily automated.

There are times when a taste would be nice. For example, in a Mexican restaurant, I'd sometimes like to know how spicy a specific salsa is, before I order a dish that I may or may not be able to handle. (And if the dish turns out to be intolerably hot to me, then I'd have to order something else, and wait for it to come, and presumably pay for it.) This is particularly the case if I'm visiting somewhere and don't have a grasp on how "hot" the taste buds run there. (The "hot" where I live now would barely qualify as "medium" in other places I've lived.) If the server can correlate the heat level to something I've already tasted, such as maybe the salsa with the chips and salsa, that helps. But in this case, just telling me that it's medium hot doesn't really help me, as much as just a taste would.

(Speaking as an editor here) It's not necessarily a bad thing to have each recipe as an individual computer file. It's just a matter of having the right tool to organize the individual files into a cohesive book. I may be in a minority, but I actually do sit down and read cookbooks from cover to cover. When I put a meal together, though, more often than not I mix and match recipes from different books, or with an old standby or something like rice where I don't need a cookbook. For me, what is crucial is being able to find a recipe again, if I decide I like it enough to put it into my computer and therefore into my personal recipe library. And because of this, an index is an absolute necessity for me. I think you can organize it however you want. But also think about your users. If you intend for people to actually cook from your book, make sure it's possible to find a recipe within its pages. As Smithy said, diversions from the norm can make readers tear their hair out trying to find something. But a good index can help immensely.

I am not a fan of canola oil, as I am one of those who detects a fishy odor even in a newly-opened bottle. Yuck. I'm currently auditioning for a general-use neutral vegetable oil.

10 by 10 sticks out awkwardly from a bookcase. This might not be a problem if you're the type to keep books on your coffee table, but if I tried to do that, the table would collapse under the weight.

Safe travels. Since the ferry is done for the season, I guess this will be a little longer drive than the trip up was?

What is the difference between stem ginger and the ginger in the produce section? Is stem ginger just candied ginger?

Well, the other option is for you to lend me your freeze dryer. (Or just bring some kimchi and let me know the next time you head over the bridge to this side of the border.)

I'd also wonder about trying just the freeze-dried kimchi powder with a little sesame oil as the sticking agent. However, someone with a freeze dryer will have to try that experiment.

How would Umami Bombi work, crumbled into popcorn?

I'm with lindag and andiesenji: I use a timer, if only because that way I'm not likely to get distracted and return to a cup of stone-cold overbrewed tea.

Looks nice! If any of the cupcakes are left still, how do the colors hold up over time? Do they dull or fade?