The cloth covering in the top picture is good.  I have also used loose foil or cling wrap.

I was making sourdough before it was cool, man. I have started countless mothers and have used things like peach leaves or wild grapes to get them going.

I so hope that Italian restaurant with fantastic cocktails, perfectly braised meat, and house-made pasta survives.  I could never believe that such amazing food was so affordable, and I look forward to sitting at that bar and eating dinner again.

Aww. This reminds me of my favorite regular when I worked at a diner. We made great milkshakes, and there was a pleasant old man who came in a couple times a week about an hour before closing. He always wanted this awful two-top that no other customers ever wanted to sit at, and he ordered a vanilla milkshake with two…

Classics has been one of my most often used cookbooks for more than a decade. I was planning on using it tonight. The recipes are good because you can combine them, like when I will be layering a couple of the sauces in there with homemade pasta to make lasagna.

My biggest failure was laminating cinnamon rolls. Hypothetically, it should have worked. Instead of regular cinnamon rolls, I laminated the dough a few times with butter, and I added cinnamon and sugar to the last two laminations (kind of like kouign amann). But I used too much butter (a wasteful sin in these times)…

My pasta maker has been getting a workout. I have found that it is also useful for pirogi and wonton wrapper dough, as well as for making crackers. I will make tagliatelle for dinner tonight.

I am going to make another nod to the folks at Corning.  About 20 years ago, I bought a set of pint glasses at an outlet.  They were the “transition” glass that they use to clean the equipment between colors.  They have thick walls and bases so they are perfect for everyday use (they keep my drink cold longer than any…

Recently, I finally donated the Corelle plates and bowls that my mom had given to me when I went off to college. She had gotten it as a wedding gift when she got married in 1972. Those dishes are going to outlive us all.

Fresh, on the vine tomatoes in a grocery store, even if they are called vine-ripened, were picked green. Then the flavor development almost completely stopped. I always keep a few cans of either whole stewed or crushed tomatoes in the pantry because they are so versatile.

My favorite omelet is black beans and green chilis.

I am more surprised that Arnold has such an old-man house full of tchotches than I am that he has a miniature horse and donkey hanging out in the house.

If House democrats hadn’t been so eager to send the letters of impeachment to the Senate, they could do it now.  There might be enough republican Senators afraid of losing their own jobs to impeach Cheetolini.

This takes me back to the days of working at KFC and coming into work so weak with the flu that I had to keep finding a place to hide just so I could sit down before I passed out (the stairs going up to the roof, FWIW). I wonder how many people I infected. I even tried to stay home at least once but was told that if I…

I am feeling like absolute shit right now. I lost my job. Normally I would burn off some stress by hiking with my dog, but she has an injured foot. I had one interview cancelled this week because they are in a hiring freeze, and today I had a phone interview that went well, but they refuse to extend an offer until we…

I wonder if my mom still has hers.

I am having flashbacks to my childhood.  One of my regular kitchen responsibilities for special occasions was to prepare the relish tray--sweet pickles, olives, radishes, carrots, and celery arranged on the fancy platter around a dish of ranch dressing.

Same here. I hadn’t liked him in anything before that because I thought of him as a smarmy fratboy, but somehow he completely charmed me in Deadpool. Now I love him.

Borden Dairy really surprises me.  I thought that was too ubiquitous to go out of business.  Of course, I would have said the same thing about K-Mart and Sears at one time.

There is definitely market saturation, especially when the beer is only mediocre and the burgers are overcooked.