Terrasanct

Not surprisingly, it also has 2110 mg of sodium and 79 grams of carbohydrates.

Oh, good--I was going to start a thread like this today, but I knew there must be one somewhere. Now I'll have to read the whole thing to see if anyone has addressed cannelles/caneles/canneles and whether it's two or three syllables. And provolone--three or four?

They really should make a point of telling people about wasabi the first time they have sushi. I did something similar, since I'd never heard of wasabi in 1979. My most embarrassing restaurant moment was a million years ago when I a young mother with a one-year-old child. We were at a Mexican restaurant somewhere in the West on a trip. It was a small place and we were the only ones in there. We were about to leave when I noticed that my daughter had...uh...lost something hard and round from her diaper on the floor. I scooped it up in my napkin and couldn't find anywhere to throw it away. My husband was paying the bill and the waitress was about to come clean the table. I quickly dumped it on the plate and covered it with the Spanish rice. Horrible, I know, but I didn't know what to do. I got my stuff and was just leaving when I looked back--and my husband, who was kind of a glutton, was eating the rest of the rice off my plate. I never told him, and he didn't notice.

I've never heard of putting it on only one slice of bread. And you'd think the Miracle Whip people would urge you to use gobs of it so you'd have to buy a new jar more quickly. The tomato should always be next to the mayo, simply because it tastes so good together.

Really? I wince every time the commercial comes on because it looks so foul. I don't have a problem with KFC, even though I don't eat there more than once every year or so. But piling it all together and topping with cheese...oogh. Why don't they just be honest and call it a trough?

10/11. Missed the Polish one, too.

I did post that. I love Weebl and Bob. Piepiepiepiepie!

Yeast food was one of the possible problems I was concerned with. Another potential problem--I know that slow fermentation converts a lot of starches into sugars and I wonder what possible effect this might have on the low carb aspect of a finished bread. That's something I can't really determine precisely by experimentation. I suppose I could make a slow rising bread and compare with a regular loaf. All of this is assuming that the stuff will even make a decent loaf to begin with. This might just be a fool's errand, but it won't be the first time. For what it's worth, I eat mostly natural, healthy foods. When I have a garden it's organic. I buy from the farmers market, local suppliers when possible, and almost never buy convenience foods. The artificial sweetener thing is somewhat of a compromise, but since I can't deal with the effects of sugar, and I'm really not willing to go without sweet stuff forever, the Splenda is helpful. It hasn't killed me yet, anyway. I like fruit the best, but it's got a lot of sugar in it, even if it's more natural. As soon as we're done with this heat wave (high 80's this week) I'm going to do some baking. This would be a good time to attempt a starter.

It's true, cake is prettier, which is much of its appeal. Pie is homely, even dowdy, but it has real substance.

I have concrete proof that sugar harms me. Not so with Splenda. Plus, I have a genetic disease that makes me react to a lot of different foods and chemicals, and Splenda doesn't bother me. I really didn't start this thread to get lectures on what's healthy and what's not. Why not jump over to the cake vs. pie thread if that's your intent? I really just wanted to know if anyone has experimented with this low carb flour.

For me, there's something inherently unhealthy about sugar. I can't always avoid it, but I'd like to try baking without it. There's nothing unhealthy about Splenda either; it's been a real help for a lot of people. I might eat a piece or two of bread a week (good bread only, not cheap stuff) but when I make it from scratch it's hard to keep from eating more. Yes, I do make whole-wheat bread from time to time, and I even grind my own wheat. It's probably fairly healthy. But this isn't an either/or thing--I have this low carb flour and I'd like to experiment with it.

It's only a little salt, which you would put in bread, anyway. I imagine the Splenda is to make it taste more like regular flour. I don't think sugar is all that healthy, either. It amazes me what a big deal people make of artificial sweeteners not being healthy but no one seems to mention that about sugar. It's better for me because I have blood sugar problems, and when I eat regular bread, it makes me ill. Even though I love it, and even though I make very good bread. So if I can make decent bread that won't make me sick, that's a good thing.

I think it's in the genes. My mom was never much of a cook but she was really interested in food. There were some things that made it hard for her--having six children, for one, and having a job outside the home, which most of the other moms at the time didn't. And it was the sixties, when fast food and convenience food were really becoming popular. But she was also working on a cookbook with her sister; it's too bad that it never got published. Her sister died and by the time I had a look at the book it was just too outdated. We grew up testing all kinds of interesting things for inclusion in the cookbook, like seaweed soup, stinging nettles, and foreign foods that weren't well-known at the time, not in Seattle, anyway. For a time, one night a week we took turns planning a meal, then would make a family trip to whatever stores we needed to find the ingredients. I also loved to read Mom's Joy of Cooking. I loved the stories in it, like the one about cooking potatoes in pine resin, which I still remember. I wanted to try that for years! We were all avid readers, and cookbooks were a major source of entertainment. When I recently found an old cookie cookbook, I remembered all the hours I'd spent looking at all the color plates and wanting to make every kind of cookie. I'm still in love with cookbooks--I'm gathering a lot of them in preparation to start selling them on my website, but for now I love to look through them. All of my kids (now grown) learned how to cook at home. It was hard to do Thanksgiving without them. When my oldest daughter was very young, one of her first words was "ham." She came in one day when I was taking a nap, carrying a ten-pound ham and the carving knife, so I could fix her a snack. The second daughter is about to enter culinary school. The third is a vegetarian and makes all kinds of really good food, and grows a garden. The fourth (yes, I have a lot of girls) used to make all of the pies and rolls before she left home. My son will try anything, and cooks things that only he will eat. But he likes them.

It is fairly expensive. High gluten flour would still be really high carb, which is what I'm trying to avoid. I'll just have to do some experimentation--I was hoping that someone had beat me to it. I haven't seen the kinds of recipes I'm looking for. I do know that the flour requires about twice as much leavening as regular flour. I don't know if that's because of the salt content, the high fiber, or for other reasons. I haven't made a raised bread or roll from it yet. I did make some very good crepes the other day. I used the Joy of Cooking recipe that we've used for years, subbing Splenda for the powdered sugar and Carbalose for the flour. I cut down the salt to a pinch. The crepes turned out very well, hardly distinguishable from the "real thing." As a first experiment maybe I'll try making a sourdough with regular flour and making a lower carb bread with it. I'm not expecting it to be the same as regular bread, but I'd like to make something good.

I've been trying to stay fairly low-carb for health reasons, and have just bought a bag of Carbalose flour. It's not the same thing as Carbquik baking mix--it's supposed to be a straight substitution for flour. I've read a lot of recipes but haven't been able to get answers to some of my questions. I thought that maybe some here could help me figure this out. Some of it has to do with the chemistry involved in baking. I've been reading The Bread Baker's Apprentice and the La Brea bread cookbook, and thinking about sourdough and breads with long fermentation times. I'm wondering if a low carb flour would even work for sourdough breads (would there be anything for the yeasts to eat?) Here is what the website says about it: Considering the ingredients, can any of you chemists figure out what would happen if I try to make sourdough or long fermented breads with this? If it would even work at all, that is. I've also thought about combining with regular flour to just make a lower carb bread, which would be better than nothing.

I've always thought this would be a great idea, but it's not as practical in some parts of the country. I'm not sure I want to give up oranges and coconut entirely, anyway.

I'm not quite clear on the categories, but I'm not elitist. To me that means excluding or exclusivity. Someone who loves food isn't a picky eater, they're just someone who has eaten enough of it to know what's good and what's worth striving for.

My husband's mother used to gather her friends in Hardin, Montana to make egg noodles. This was before my time but apparently the menfolk were kicked out and all the women would hang noodles all over the place to dry, employing broomsticks as drying racks. In my family, there was often a big cookie bakeoff right before Christmas. We would get together and bake millions of cookies and everyone would take some home. Some years it was gingerbread houses, too. This past year my mom decided it would be easier for everyone to bring a few dozen cookies and trade, which was fun, too. Unfortunately, I live too far from my family to participate in any of these events, but I hear about them. When I was a kid, it was canning that we did as a family activity. Sadly, all of my cooking is done by myself now. I can't coax my husband into the kitchen to even talk to me--it's all too foreign to him.

I imagine people ate a lot of wild greens, which would help. I've got to watch this show. I saw a few episodes of the one they filmed here in Montana, was it Frontier House? Interesting stuff.

I just found a recipe for panna cotta with roasted rhubarb--I think I'll have to try this, too! http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/2003/04...cotta_with_.php

Chufi, can you post your compote recipe? It looks delicious. How did you cook the rhubarb so it's so pretty, and what kind of meringues, and how did you prepare the ginger, etc. I just picked the first rhubarb from my yard and am anxious to use it.

I once ordered "truffled potatoes" and they tasted nothing of truffles or even truffle oil. I asked the waiter about it, and he said that it was just a method of making mashed potatoes, it didn't have anything to do with actual truffles. Okay... And don't you love it when the 19 year old waiter looks at you like you're a complete idiot when you ask questions?

The gelatin might be worth a try but I wonder what effect it would have in the ice cream. I know it is used in some recipes without eggs. I just read the On Food and Cooking section on ice cream as suggested and it sounds like emulsifiers are the important part here. Since egg yolks act as emulsifiers, I wonder what effect it would have to add more of them in a custard base?

Hmmph, I'd like to see a piece of shoo-fly cake!

I'll change things all the time, but when you're baking you really have to understand what you're doing. You just can't replace white flour with wheat without drastic changes in the end product. And why would anyone use margarine in the first place? It's not any healthier than butter and it just doesn't turn out the same. Most margarine has the same number of calories unless it has water in it, which really means you don't want to bake with it. And I have a rule that I don't ever try out a new recipe on anyone outside of family. If I take something to a dinner it has to be good.