Don't even talk about fur thongs! I did wear a fur SARONG to a party once. *grin* The tree thing has been covered, so I'll touch the second one. Kev is too modest to do so. I think we as Americans have too many hangups about the naked human body. Even more so with the naked male human body. I mean..look at nudity in films..it's mostly female. In some R rated films, a woman's who-ha is in plain sight, but I challenge you to find a full frontal scene where a man is involved (I think of Julian Sands in Warlock or that other cute guy in 28 Days Later). If you feel sexy and comfortable, that's really all that matters. How can guilt come from something so natural..I just don't understand.. Clint

Linda, If you want to convert a bread machine recipe to a made by hand recipe, try this: in a bowl - put in the water or other liquid called for add in the yeast, whisk to dissolve, let sit 5-10 minutes to "proof" the yeast and made sure it is viable add any sugar, honey, maple syrup or other sweetener called for in the recipe, stir well add half of the flour called for in recipe, add salt and mix well, stirring with a strong spoon or heavy duty whisk also add in any dry herbs or spices now add in any butter, oil, or other fat called for - if melted butter, make sure it is only just warm, not hot - add in any egg(s) listed in recipe add in rest of flour and any other ingredients, chopped herbs, nuts, dried fruits, cheese, etc. stir well with spoon or mix with your hands until dough is a rather shaggy mass turn out dough onto a clean, floured flat surface and knead for 8-10 minutes adding only small sprinkles of flour if the dough sticks to your hands and the kneading surface [if you forgot those nuts, cheese, or raisins, you can knead them in now] when dough has been kneaded sufficiently it will come together into a nice firm ball (rather than a shaggy mass) and spring back when poked with a finger grease or oil a large bowl (or use the one you mixed in), put dough in, turn it around in the oil to grease the top of the dough and turn it oiled side up in the bowl; cover with a bowl cover (shower cap type), plastic wrap, or wax paper, then cover with a clean kitchen "tea" towel (dampened with hot water if you are making whole wheat bread) and set the dough to rise until doubled in bulk turn out dough, knead 2 minutes, divide into portions according to recipe or not - form loaves and put in greased loaf pans or not - cover again with wrap, and let rise until doubled in bulk preheat oven, bake bread until done, let cool at least a few minutes before cutting - and enjoy!

Although I've used the microwave method in the past, and there is a book written based entirely on this method so you can speed the rising of the dough, I have to caution using it. 1. You can get the temperature inside the microwave too hot if you aren't careful. Most people don't take the temperature inside the microwave before popping their dough into it. Yeast will begin to die at 115-degrees F. Yeast grows best around 75-85-degrees F. When temperatures exceed 85-degrees F, the dough can develop an "off" flavor. 2. The next potential problem is you can't always maintain a constant temperature. The temperature is highest when you add the dough, and will continue to fall. A constant temperature is optimal for dough. The goal isn't speed, and there is nothing wrong with a long cool rise, which develops flavor. If you want speed, find a recipe using a fast-acting yeast which eliminates the first rise. You cover the dough for a 10-minute resting period after kneading to allow the gluten strands to relax before you form the dough for the final proof and eliminate the first rise entirely. This is one of the reasons fast-acting yeast products were developed - that and you could add them directly to the dry ingredients and skip proofing the yeast in water/sweetener. This is also a problem when the "pre-heat the oven method" is used. In this method the oven is turned on for a few minutes to warm the oven, the oven is turned off, add the dough. Potential problems: 1. The oven temperature may be too hot if the oven temperature wasn't checked, and some of the yeast killed. 2. The oven hasn't been heated long enough to penetrate the entire oven in order to maintain/hold a good proofing temperature for a long period of time, so the temperature may be too hot when the dough is add, and then falls quickly during the proofing. Once again, a uniform temperature is best, not a falling temperature. A better method is to leave the light on in your oven for a constant low temperature. Turn it on when you start making your dough so it has time to warm the entire oven. Be sure to test the temperature in different areas of the oven. In my oven it is best as far away from the oven light as I can get it, and the temperature is too hot close to the light. If you want to add humidity, place a shallow baking pan or dish on the bottom rack and add hot (not boiling) water TO the pan as a safety measure. Don't fill the shallow pan at the sink and walk it to the oven. You could slosh the hot water all over yourself. -If you use a dough-rising bucket for proofing dough, it's a perfect little environment which maintains the moisture from the dough, so adding humidity isn't necessary, and keeps drafts off the dough. You are also able to quickly tell when it's "doubled" in bulk. If you pat 1-quart of dough into a dough-rising bucket, when it reaches the 2-quart line, you know it has doubled in bulk. -Cold dough is actually easier to handle when forming for the final proofing. -Cover the dough with a sheet of plastic wrap. If you handle your dough with oiled hands the dough won't stick to them and the dough won't stick to the plastic wrap. You can also give the plastic wrap a shot of vegetable cooking spray to keep it from sticking. -Avoid using damp towels over dough. The skin of the dough can get too hydrated from the excess moisture in the cloth and it can affect the flavor and texture of the dough. -Punching dough down after the first rise is an important, and often ignored, function. How to: Oil your hand/fist. Plunge it slowly down the center of the dough. Now pull the dough on the outside of the container to the center. Do this all around the ball of dough. You are essentially turning the dough inside out. The cooler outside dough has been moved to the center and the warmer inside dough to the outside. This breaks up the gasses and redistributes the yeast. -At this point you need to scale (weigh) the dough and divide it, if necessary. If you are making two loaves you can now have equal amounts by scaling the dough, and they will bake evenly. Scaling dough balls for dinner rolls, hamburger or hot dog buns, sandwich rolls, etc. will make them all the same size and they will bake evenly. -Rounding the dough after the dough has been punched down is the next step. This is done by laying the dough on a flat surface (I use a silpat so I don't need bench flour). With both hands, pull the top of the dough down to the bottom, shifting the dough a quarter turn with each movement until the dough is a nice smooth ball. This gets the gluten strands running all the same way and the tight ball helps hold gasses inside the dough ball. Cover (a sheet of plastic wrap or turn the mixing bowl over it) and let the dough rest for 10-15 minutes so the gluten strands have a chance to relax before you form the dough. It's the techniques that make all the difference between good bread and wonderful bread. Unfortunately, they are rarely noted in recipes ;-). -Grainlady

I do use the salsa screen for Annie's Salsa and love it. The salsa screen gives you a semi-chunky puree. I hate to use the word puree, because it isn't really a puree. The sauce screen gives you a puree that is the exact same texture as canned tomato sauce, so I use it for tomato sauce, pasta sauce, ketchup, bar-b-q sauce, etc. The salsa screen gives you something thicker than puree with bigger chunks, but I hate to call it chunky because it really isn't chunky either. It is just bigger pieces of tomato in something that is too semi-chunky to be considered a puree. It is a finer cut than handcut, but I've used it for so long---since around 2008, that I have forgotten what salsa looks like if made from all hand-cut tomatoes. If I am making one batch of Annie's salsa, I usually cut the onions, sweet peppers and jalapeno peppers by hand. If I am making multiple batches in one day, I switch to the food processor and cut huge mounds of onions and sweet peppers, and a smaller mound of jalapenos (or serranos if I am subbing in some serranos for part of the jalapenos to get a hotter salsa) first before I do anything else. Then, I measure out the onions, sweet peppers and jalapenos into gallon zip lock bags, essentially creating a pre-mix of those three veggies that I'll add to tomatoes and the other ingredients one batch at a time. It is a huge time saver, and allows me to get all that chopping out of the way, put the food processer washable parts in the dishwasher, and put away the food processor to keep the counters clear. I have a little herb mill I use to cut up the cilantro in big batches that I can measure out and dump into the previously mentioned pre-mix of veggies, and I do all the garlic at once using a garlic press. If I work really hard in the morning and nothing interferes, I can quickly cut up all the veggies and herbs for up to 4 or 5 batches of salsa in the morning, and then cook/can the salsa in the afternoon. Or, I can do all the chopping and cutting in the evening, and get up and can first thing in the morning. When I do this, I call it speed canning and the one rule my family knows about speed canning is that everyone needs to stay out of my way when I'm speed canning because if they come into the kitchen during that time, I am likely to put them right to work. In the early years here, I cut up and chopped and minced each batch individually as I went along, so when one batch went into the canner, I started processing all the veggies and herbs for the next batch. That seems much slower to me than the speed canning method I use now. I like that I can run all the tomatoes through the mill and be done with it for the day. I like that I can then do the same with everything cut up by the food processor, herb mill and garlic press. I do run through a lot of zip lock bags when doing prep for speed processing, but I can turn them inside out and wash them and reuse them. My favorite thing is merely that once all the chopping and such is done, then all those machines and tools are out of the way and I have all the kitchen counter space available just for the canning part of the process. You have to find what works for you. The method I described is what works for me. Because I grow so many tomatoes and because our plants' spring productive period generally is cut short when the June heat sets in and stops fruitset, I find myself processing huge amounts of tomatoes in the main salsa canning period which normally starts around mid-June and can run through sometime in July. It is almost too much to do in that time frame, but the tomatoes are ripe when they're ripe, so I just deal with it. Once I've made all the salsa I want to make, I switch to making sauce, catsup, bar-b-que sauce, chili base, a veggie juice similar to V-8 juice, etc. During the same time frame I'm making salsa, I often am dehydrating excess bite-sized tomatoes to save for winter snacks and salads, and am freezing excess tomatoes (sometimes whole, sometimes run through the salsa screen for tomatoes to use in cooking in the winter). It always is a relief to finish the main crop of tomatoes. When that day arrives, I pull out about 90% of the tomato plants, leaving a few to provide us with tomatoes for fresh eating for the rest of the summer. It would kill me if I had to keep up that pace of canning all summer long. The biggest trick is just getting the tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers and hot peppers all to be ready for canning at the same time. Sometimes the sweet peppers are lagging behind all the others. When that happens, I just buy sweet bell peppers in bulk so I don't have to postpone salsa making endlessly. While our canning talk has been focused on tomatoes, let's not forget that everything else is maturing at the same time, so I'm usually squeezing in husking and processing corn at the same time, along with picking fruit and processing it, and harvesting snap beans and dealing with them. At least potatoes and onions will sit in a cool room and wait until I can find time to process them. My summer squash was planted (probably in too much shade) at the west end of the garden this year and has been slow to grow, so I'm just now getting enough squash to process. June and July is harvest/processing insanity time and I'm always relieved when it is over. I do not regret that I have a large food processing garden, but there are days I wonder if I've lost my mind. I have wondered what summer would be like if there was no harvest at all to process, and I cannot even picture it. Well, in 2011 there wasn't much of a harvest to process due to the exceptional drought and extreme heat, but we were at fires day and night virtually every day, so I didn't even have time to think about the food that I wasn't processing. That's one reason I try to process 2 years of food every single year. That gives us a big reserve of preserved food to get us through year 2 if any crop in the garden fails in year 2. It just kills me to have to buy produce at the grocery store if it is something we can grow here and preserve. I'd much rather have our own produce, picked and then processed right here at the peak of perfection, or (of course) eaten fresh within a day or two of being harvested. I make my meal plans for the day after doing the morning harvesting, and wouldn't want to live any other way. Sometimes I think that Tim forgets how much money the garden saves us on buying fresh, organic produce, so I drag him to Central Market down in Southlake, TX, after we leave CostCo and I make sure he notices the eye-popping prices of fresh, organic produce. He goes home with a brand new appreciation for all that the garden produces for us, and he also doesn't mind buying organic lettuce or whatever in the summer because he understands what we can and cannot grow here in the heat. He appreciates organic produce more than he used to because he has learned how hard it can be to grow organically. I cannot imagine our lives without the garden, but every now and then I'd like to have a day where nothing is waiting to be harvested or to be washed, sorted, blanched, cooked, canned, frozen, fermented or dehydrated. I do stay very busy in the main harvesting/canning season, but I have days I just want to be lazy and do nothing. However, what I have found is that when the lazy urge strikes, after a couple of ours of laziness, my conscience gets the better of me and I get up and to into the kitchen and deal with the waiting produce. Our first southern peas now are 3 or 4 days from harvesting and I am excited, even though that means I am about to start in on the endless routine of shelling peas. I love it even though it is time-consuming. To me, nothing says summer like sitting with a big bowl of purple hull peas and shelling them. Then, if I have enough purple hulls, I make purple hull pea jelly. And, of course, we get to eat purple hull peas for weeks and weeks and weeks in the summer, and I put up and freeze the rest. I also planted a long row of lima beans this spring, and they are flowering now, though I don't know if they've set any beans yet. I just kind of run right past them every day to get to the tomatoes. I don't even have to look at the calendar in summer, and neither does anyone else in my family. We can tell, at the very least, what month it is by what produce is piling up in the kitchen. I kinda love that, though there's days I also hate it. I was normal when we moved here in 1999 and was perfectly happy if the garden produced just enough for us to eat fresh and give away the excess. Over the years, though, as the soil improved and our yields improved, I realized that I could preserve huge amounts of food if I tried. So, I do. I grew up with a father who gardened and canned, and with many relatives who did the same, so putting food by was nothing new to me. It is just that when we lived in town on a relatively shady lot, I couldn't grow enough of anything to have much excess left over after fresh eating. Now, we have endless sun and endless space and I grow too much of everything. My attitude is that too much is good. Dawn