Donn Cave

That's my guess, the consistency has to be consistently fine.  When I boil for that long, I can get a generally fine, soft result, but there's a fraction that doesn't soften - mostly the tails, but could be also some meal from the center of the kernels.  Seems likely to me that when people make masa, the big masa harina industry but also the small businesses that make the masa I've occasionally been able to buy in the US, are getting those tails off somewhere in the process and what goes into the mill is just the edible part.  People rub the kernels some after the lime boil, which does get rid of some stuff, but for me not the tails.

Thom Bri wrote:
Try a southwest US or a Mexican variety.

I'm back with the results of that - I grew some green Oaxacan, and made these tortillas.

I don't know if this variety is really the ultimate for masa, but believe it or not it's the only flour corn I could find among the EU online seed catalogues I looked at.  My yield was kind of marginal, the garden isn't very developed yet and things have to be able to tolerate calcareous clay and low phosphorus, but I got a few fairly healthy cobs.

Results were OK, not yet sure it's  worth it.  I think the masa was the best I've yet made.  The tortillas were pliable and tasted like the real thing  ... but still no inflation.  It's possible that the improvement is due in large part to three hours of boiling, and grinding as fine as I could, and the flatness is because there's too much roughage in there, the little brown tail that still sticks pretty hard to the kernel.  Have to experiment with locally available corn with the same conditions.

No recipe here per se, but back when we could get nettles, I often used smoked paprika with them.  The smoked paprika comes in those little rectangular cans, not cheap but it's a strong flavor that you can use sparingly with a lot of things.

Popcorn popper could work, or not.  A few will do OK out of the box, some will be fine once some overheating protections have been disabled, some are pretty much hopeless.  I believe later models tend to be in the last category.  I roasted a fair amount in old poppers made by the Wearever Aluminum Company, if I remember right.  Typically yellow and white.  I think I had to hotwire all of them, the procedure depending on which model.

A simpler and maybe more reliable way involves a heat gun, of the kind people use to set their wood siding on fire while trying to remove paint, a steel bowl, well insulated gloves and a large spoon.  Keep it going while you hear some loud popping noises, which should die down, and then some smaller crackling sounds signal completion.

Coffee is an excellent house plant because it tolerates some shade.  I managed to get a few beans, which I planted.  I'm no expert, but I expect they were of very low quality - well, I know they were, because good quality Coffea arabica is grown under very specific climatic conditions that aren't going to be reproduced inside the home, including but not limited to very high elevation.  Other species - C. robusta or C. liberica could be a better bet.  If I had somehow managed to grow a useful quantity of them I'd have roasted them anyway.  The processing problem is less the fermentation part - I don't think they do that everywhere - just dry them, but they have kind of a shell that needs to be milled off, which for a large quantity would be kind of a nuisance.

We just got home from a restaurant that I thought might have lamprey on the menu, but didn't - their excuse being that low river flows last year made for a poor harvest this year.  A local restaurant can get it, but at considerable cost and you have to pay for an entire lamprey, enough for 4 people, not to mention that I wasn't super impressed by their bordalaise sauce the time I had it there.  Lampreys exist in my native Pacific NW, a couple species I think that are reportedly quite tasty if anyone would eat them.  The taste is rich and not much like fish, as one might guess as it is taxonomically just barely a fish.

The gooseberries I tried to grow in Seattle were ravaged by a worm - currant sawfly or something like that.  Wasps would come and clean them out, but they'd let them come back, it was kind of a worm ranch for the wasps and the worms ate up the leaves real fast, so they weren't a very effective control.  Keep an eye out for them, maybe you can nip an infestation in the bud.

I want to get a bicycle - what should I get?  If you know nothing about bicycles, that might seem like a reasonable question.  Same goes for electric motor kits.

All kinds of them will work well enough to make a lot of happy customers.  The motors can be on the front wheel , rear wheel , bottom bracket - all make people happy.  People love big motors, and small motors;  need big batteries, or not.  If you can draw a good picture of the exact kind of experience you want, maybe there's a motor setup that's really for you.  For me, it's to be able to get out there with the traffic and move kind of fast when necessary, on the way to get groceries or something - not motor vehicle fast, just ca. 15-20mph, but under all conditions, not just favorable grades.  I've heard from a lot of people who want to be on a bicycle for fitness purposes.  Takes all kinds, I guess, that's not me.  Or they want to tour the countryside.

My motorized bicycle is real heavy.  When I ride that one, I'm highly dependent on motor power.  I think it doesn't have to be that way, depending on what you need.

I surfed around a bit to see if email software ever uses "private" browser sessions to show links.  It seems like kind possibly a good idea, but a casual search didn't turn up any reference to it, and anyway you'd probably have noticed - I think this feature usually comes with some distinct rendering cues.  But it's something you could check.

It doesn't seem entirely ludicrous to me - wheat does move around in very large batches and is sourced from a broad range of environments, so I wouldn't expect it to necessarily reflect the pace of change, in the kitchen.

So I made a casual web search, and my impression is that climate change is kind of expected to lower protein content on the average, but no one knows for sure yet.  So King Arthur phone bank people should probably not be citing this factoid.

I bought some commercial purslane seed, and was not real happy with the results.  The plants grew surprisingly tall - over a foot tall, maybe more (in full sun), with great fat stems, and the taste was nothing special.  The Portuguese regard it as a soup ingredient.