Thursday, September 28, 2023

Menu Calendars for 2024

For those of you who like to plan your menus in advance, like I do, this morning I uploaded a PDF file with printable monthly calendar grids for 2024. Below you can see what the pages look like. You can download the file from my main website HERE.


Sunday, August 20, 2023

Update on my "new" stove

NEW STOVE

Almost ten years ago, I blogged HERE about getting a new stove after the oven in the old one had died. I was excited at the time because the new oven seemed to bake things much more quickly than the old one had done. Well, over the years I came to realize that there was a big problem with the new oven.

OLD STOVE

Apparently, our landlord bought the cheapest stove he could find and it was likely a "scratch and dent" one. I did notice one large dent in a place that didn't really matter but it took some burnt food before I realized the extent of the damage. I bought an oven thermometer a few months ago and discovered that the oven temperature is off by over 100 degrees! For all these years, I could only guess where to set the dial and how long to bake things. It was extremely frustrating and I dreaded having to use the oven.

Determined to figure out where the various temperatures actually were on the dial, I spent a day figuring that out by setting the oven to each of the main settings and recorded what the actual temperature was for each of them. In the process, I discovered that the problem is even stranger than I thought, as you can see in the photo below of the dial. 300 and 325 degrees are actually well below the 200 degree mark and 350 degrees is off by 125 degrees compared to the dial!


As I progressed around the dial, jotting down the actual temperatures, the temperature difference gradually started decreasing. It eventually reached a point, somewhere between the 400 and 450 degree marks, where the oven was actually the correct temperature. After that point, it turns out that the oven doesn't get as hot as it is supposed to. In fact, it was a struggle getting it to go up to 500 degrees even after preheating it for over 20 minutes. The broiler works fine, by the way.

Each of the temperatures on the round stickers corresponds to one of the main markings on the stove dial even if they aren't lined up perfectly. I did place the 350 degree sticker in between though because I needed to know exactly where that one was since it's the most common setting. The little line on the 350° sticker is showing that the setting is on the smaller dot that is between 200° and 250° marks.

Baking is so much less stressful since I applied the stickers and I haven't had any more trouble with burning food in the oven.


Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Deluxe Sloppy Joe Stuffed Peppers


DELUXE SLOPPY JOE STUFFED PEPPERS
1 pound ground beef *
1 pound ground turkey *
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
2 8-ounce cans tomato sauce
Sweetener equal to 1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon blackstrap molasses, optional
1/4 cup vinegar
2 teaspoons mustard
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper

8 ounces cheddar cheese, shredded
4 large green peppers, halved vertically

Brown the ground beef, ground turkey, onion and garlic; drain the fat. Stir in all of the remaining ingredients except the cheese and green peppers. Simmer covered 30 minutes. Meanwhile, scoop out the seeds and membranes from the peppers. Parboil the them, 2-3 halves at a time, in a little boiling water for 3 minutes; drain well. Place the pepper halves in a 9x13" baking dish. Sprinkle a little bit of cheese in the bottom of each pepper half then fill the peppers with the meat mixture. Top with the remaining cheese. Bake at 350° 20 minutes until hot and bubbly and the peppers are tender.

* I use half ground turkey to save money. You can use 2 pounds of ground beef, if you like. I don't recommend using all ground turkey because it can be a little dry.

Makes 4-8 servings

This recipe is posted HERE at Linda's Low Carb Menus & Recipes. I have tweaked my old Sloppy Joe Stuffed Peppers recipe over time and this is how I make them now. I no longer have recipe software so I am unable to post the nutritional counts for this updated version.


Friday, September 10, 2021

Thank you everyone for your support

I have been a bit scarce for a while and I apologize for that. This is partly due to lack of motivation during the pandemic but also because my 14 year old Windows XP computer suddenly died a couple weeks ago on August 26. I thought I had better post an update on my situation so that nobody would worry that I had caught Covid-19 or something. My husband and I are both well. We are staying safe and taking every precaution to avoid the virus. He had a liver transplant in 2010 and he is on immunosuppressants. He has had three shots of the Pfizer vaccine but there is no telling how well he is protected so we are being extra careful. While I was shopping for a new Windows 10 computer, I was able to use my husband's computer for email but not much else.

As you can imagine, it was pretty traumatic for me to lose my computer after so many years. I knew for a long time that the day would come when I would have to get a new computer but I was dreading it. You see, I've been using some very old software programs to edit my photos, cookbooks and to get the nutritional info for my recipes. I was worried that those programs would be much too old to run on Windows 10.

My old computer had three hard drives in it and two of them died. The ones that died were the primary drive and the secondary drive which stored most of my data. Thankfully the hard drive that did survive was my backups drive so I really didn't end up losing much. I have been religious about backing up my data weekly and even daily and now I am so glad that I did that.

I got my new Windows 10 computer on September 3. The good news is that I was able to install most of my old programs!

Microsoft Publisher 97
Microsoft Publisher 2000
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 (2003)

Publisher is what I use to create my cookbooks and also the blank menu calendars that I post on my low carb website. Unfortunately, the calendar creating feature doesn't work on Windows 10. Thankfully I can still use that feature in Publisher 2000 but it does work differently and not quite as easily.

Paint Shop Pro is my main graphics and photo editor. I do have several newer versions of PSP but version 8 is my favorite and I'm very happy that I can still use that version.

The bad news is that MasterCook 6 won't install on Windows 10. If I post any new recipes on my blog and website, I won't be able to include the nutritional counts any longer.

Thankfully my camera seems to be working fine on Windows 10. I'm also pleased that the internet is so much faster on my new computer and websites actually work as they should. I can once again use PayPal correctly and I can log into my Blogger account once again. On my old computer I could edit my blog with Firefox but not in any other browser.

Anyway, I want to thank all of you for your continued support over the years. I wouldn't have been able to buy a new computer without that support.


Monday, August 16, 2021

Paypal Donations Problems

I was starting to wonder what was up when I realized that I had gotten virtually no donations since the beginning of July. I thought I'd better check to see if there was a problem with PayPal. It turns out that PayPal updated the donation page in July and it has some issues. First of all, I am no longer able to access the donations page at all from my ancient Windows XP computer. Thankfully, I have an Android tablet where I was able to open that page to see what was going on there. I don't have any Mac devices but I assume that the new donation page works pretty much the same on them.

Besides the access issue on Windows XP, I found another issue which I think is the main reason for the lack of donations in the past month and a half. It appears that there is no way to enter a dollar amount and at first glance I thought that the page was broken. If you try to highlight and delete the zeros that are there by default, nothing happens. After trying a few things to try and get it work, I stumbled upon the secret. You should see a flashing cursor bar to the far right of the $0.00 (see the screenshot below). If you are on a computer, simply start typing a dollar amount and it will replace the zeros. If you are using a phone or tablet, click on the $0.00 to bring up the keyboard and begin typing the amount that you want to donate.


After buying a new Android tablet last month, I noticed another issue that might be preventing people from making donations on my blog. If you are using the Chrome browser, my blog should appear correctly by default with a side bar on the right side of the page. That's where the Donate button is as well as other useful links. In that browser, there is an option to view my blog as a "Desktop site". This makes the page fit better on the screen with slightly larger text. I have circled that option in the settings for Chrome below. Make sure that the box is checked for this mode.


However, if you are using Firefox my blog will display all wrong by default. The side bar will be missing and everything will look really bad. What you need to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "View web version" (see the screenshot below where I have circled that option). By default it is set to "View mobile version".


Here is how my blog will look once you switch to web view:



Sunday, June 13, 2021

Follow by Email will be discontinued...

As of July 2021, Blogger will doing away with the "Follow by Email" feature. Those who receive my blog posts by email will no longer receive a copy of my latest post after this month.