One russet potato makes 40 potato chips on the mandolin, each 1/8 inch thick, 3 millimeters, the perfect thickness for crispy, crunchy chips. Takes less than five minutes, in a cast iron skillet, no odor.Oxo mandolins are $46 on amazon. I have had mine for 15 years. I cut mostly by hand, but 1/8 inch thick is tedious.We use canola oil, drop one chip in the oil when we pour the oil in, add the rest of the chips when the test chip starts baking. The oil is refiltered through a paper towel and reused.

Our all purpose flour used to make fresh pasta is different from italian and french all purpose flour both in protein content and fineness. We have a real flour maker in our little town whose family has made flour over 100 years. He doesnt sell European flours, but taught me how to make a finer flour with more protein, ten percent instead of the normal eight percent, and how to make a finer flour for pasta making.I also make a cracked wheat flour to make rustic rye bread and dark rye bread. I made these flours in my coffee grinder, the flours worked better, but the process was slow.I now use an attachment to my dough maker that grinds flour. It makes very fine flour for pasta as well as cracked wheat to bake rustic rye bread.

Save your old bread slices, and when you have a few, make croutons, breadcrumbs, and pasta.If your bread contains dairy products like milk or butter, use right away. If your bread is made with non-dairy products, you can make and freeze bread crumbs from the croutons that will retain their fresh and crunchy taste in an airtight jar in your freezer.

There is a special pan in Northern Europe to make mini pancakes. It makes 14 at a time. Tradition is that children sing a song that counts the pancakes as they get the pancakes served.If you do not have this pancake pan, you can make mini pancakes in a regular cast iron skillet with thicker mini pancake batter.Both recipes are in here. The mini pancakes are called Puffs in local languages, sprinkled with powdered sugar and cinnamon mix. The puff comes from the baking powder in the batter, it makes for lighter pancakes.#pancakeday

No equipment needed, just a rolling pin and a sharp knife. These are the rice flour noodles used in asian cooking, but made with fresh eggs. They are 1/8” to 1/4” thick flat noodles, same width as fettucini, long as your cutting board. If you make the rice flour yourself, use glutinous sushi rice in your coffee grinder.

A Quarter cup of vinegar or lemon juice, and a gallon of full milk make four cups of rich cottage cheese, and ten cups of whey, nutritious for cooking, in an hour.Four dollars of milk and vinegar or lemon juice make eight dollars of cottage cheese.All you need is a pan and a thermometer and a sieve.Fresh cottage cheese every week.

I include home made fresh cream cheese as part of my recipes, but it might be easier to list the recipe for cream cheese itself in here, because it is so delicious, quick and easy to make.

When corn was first imported into Europe, it made people sick. And when ground, the flour did not make dough. So it became animal feed. In the Americas, people thrived on it. Still do.The reason is that corn needs to be nixtamalized, that means the corn flour needs to have caustic added to become digestible, to make flour, to reduce mycotoxins 97-100%, and to grind easier.Mayans used, and still use, the ashes from cooking fires to add caustic. Commercial corn processors that make corn flour use food grade lime.If you grow and grind your own corn, you can use ashes or lime. We use oakwood ashes.

By making a small quantity of mayonnaise, it is always fresh when used. Here is the recipe for one cup, small egg quantity. Keeps peak freshness for a month in the fridge.

Centennials are people who live beyond 100. Some feel this is their genetics. Some feel it is their diet, life style, social support. It is called blue zones, where people get very old. Some feel it is bogus, poor birth records, exaggerations .My own family records are mixed. The men in my fathers family get very old, the women in my mothers family outlive everybody else.I have cooked diets for centennials from Nicoya, Costa Rica. It is very monotonous, three identical meals a day, so I added breakfasts and luncheons from other blue zones. But very inexpensive, and people eat well everyday.Alcoholic drinks are included in all centennial diets, in social settings, 2 to 4 glasses a day. Wine at 5, it is called. Coffee and sugars are included.I am growing most of these diet ingredients in my California home garden for a dollar per meal. All these plants are heirloom, they grow their own seeds, roots, rhizomes and tubers for planting year after year.My climate is not suitable for coffee or sugar cane growing , or rice, so I buy and roast my own bulk green coffee ($60 a year), buy bulk basmati rice ($25 a year), bulk milk powder ($100 a year) and sugar ( $60).Using the intensive square foot gardening method, you only need a 30’ by 30’ space, like a parking space for two cars, to plant this food for a whole year. A centennial garden against a back drop of handsome tall rows of 12’ high blue corn stalks.

Lent is the season to serve delicious puffy miniature pancakes for breakfast, made of buckwheat, they are fun and fluffy but very filling. They make it easy to skip the main daily meal if you are fasting. By using buckwheat flour, baking powder and a bit of olive oil, you make a delicious meal in minutes.You can use a cast iron skillet by making a thicker batter, use only one cup of milk instead of two. You can also splurge and use a special pan that holds thinner batter and makes a bakers dozen, twelve plus one, 13 poffertjes pancakes. Served with slices of fresh or dried fruit.

My interpretation of Shokufan bread, the Japanese interpretation of american wonderbread, which was an interpretation of european luxury breads. This recipe works for one breadpan, you can easily double the ingredients to bake two.“ Butter Thieves” my grandmother used to call these light and fluffy slices because they took the same amount of butter as hearty heavy farmbread slices, and us kids ate more slices so she needed more butter.