Fat Guy
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Posts posted by Fat Guy
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Has anyone found an easy way to mount under-counter lights to metal cupboards? I have the original-to-the-house 1950s type. They're much handier than wood for painting, but I dread drilling into them.
Why don't you want to drill/screw into them?
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Alas, FG, my Woodmode cabinets have no lip, the bottoms are completely flat, with flush doors (I think that's what they were called).
Yeah but how high are the cabinets? Are the bottoms of the cabinets below the level of your eyes? If so -- and I'm sure it's the case -- then your cabinets are a valance. You can take a low-profile light and recess it and it will be totally invisible to a normal-height person. It won't cast 100% of the light it would cast if properly positioned at the front edge of the cabinets, but it will still provide really good illumination. It's all a question of how much work you want to do, but the Hera lights are amazingly versatile and mount well even under flat-bottomed cabinets.
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a lawyer from the author's guild once told me "you don't own a recipe, you can only own the language."
Which is another way of saying that copyright doesn't protect ideas, only the unique expression of ideas. With recipes, there is even some question about whether a standard recipe can ever be unique expression. A basic list of ingredients is a standard example of something that can never be protected by copyright; whereas directions or descriptions that are more literary and unique are more likely to be protectable.
On the other hand, I think it is polite to tip your hat if you in fact did get an idea from another food writer.I agree but would add that it's more than polite. I think it would be unethical to behave otherwise. That's because, once you get to the question of acknowledgment you are no longer talking about copyright at all. You're talking about plagiarism, which is a separate ethical issue. The works of William Shakespeare are not copyrighted by anybody -- they're too old. Anybody can take all of Shakesepare's plays and reprint them. No copyright issue at all. But if you print a Shakespeare sonnet and you say you wrote it . . . well, you're still a plagiarist even though you were conducting yourself totally within the bounds of the copyright laws. Of course, most recipes aren't Shakespeare, and nobody is a plagiarist for publishing a recipe for hollandaise without acknowledgment. But if you got your ideas from somewhere else, you should always say so, whether you used the exact same words or not.
I think it's also worth noting that there are two ways to make a recipe "your own": the honest way and the dishonest way. What we saw described above -- what pattimw and Wolfert do to recipes -- is the honest way, whereby you work with a recipe and make it better or at least different. It's a time-honored evolutionary process, it's part of the very definition of what it means to be a cook. The dishonest way is to change for the sake of ownership or as an end-run around the law or ethics -- to do a robot-like rewrite of the recipe just so you can say, "See, it's in my own words!" This is the equivalent of the elementary school student who, when told it's plagiarism to copy an encyclopedia article, goes through and encyclopedia article and changes every big word to a synonym, leaving all the ideas, structure, etc., intact, and represents that as his own work. He may have stayed one step ahead of the copyright laws by doing that, but he's still a plagiarist.
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You've handled it exactly how I would have. Once you work on, adapt, and improve a recipe, I think you theoretically have the right to print it with no attribution at all -- it becomes yours, in effect. Nonetheless, from the standpoint of good professional comportment, the right thing to do is give a credit.
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Rack/grid/board systems are great for covering up backsplashes and unsightly walls, and giving a more pro- look to the kitchen. Pot-racks are also great if you have ceiling or wall space to accommodate them -- they really draw visual attention, especially if you hang some copper pieces in the most visible spots.
Now Mr. tommy, about those countertops . . . Assuming you're not going to tile them on account of the PITA sink situation, go out and get yourself either some really big wood cutting boards or some marble or granite slabs to cover up as much of the visible area of the countertop as possible. This, combined with a tiled backsplash, will do the trick. Note there are some wood cutting boards with a lip that goes over the countertop edge -- this is a particularly nice feature for covering up some of that ugly-ass laminate.
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A light rail/valance is an option, but I found in doing my kitchen that it was a lot easier to buy Hera lights (which can fit pretty much invisibly under almost any cabinet in the world) than to install a rail.
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Who cares what it's made of? If it's smooth and flat, it's going to be an easy surface to deal with whether you tile it or paint it. You should do one or the other. Personally, I prefer tiling. It requires less preparation of the surface (the adhesive will stick to a minimally prepared, clean surface -- that's why they call it an adhesive!) and while it does take longer and cost more than painting, it doesn't take a lot longer or cost a lot more. Of course you can spend a ton of money on tiles, but you can also get very nice tiles for very little money -- like pennies per tile. And regardless of the relative time commitment, you can tile a backsplash in a weekend no problem.
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Well, my phone call to the carpet store was not productive. "Floor mats" was all I could get out of them in terms of a product name. But here's what my recently acquired beauty looks like, and please forgive that I'm using such an old crappy camera (the wife is away with the good one):
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Can the floor matting you mention be cut to size once you get it home?
Not really, because they have to finish the ragged exposed cut edges and that requires use of a machine that's too big to take on the job. I'll try to find out the exact brand name or technical term for the mats that work well for this purpose. They're essentially the same mats you see in the lobbies of office-buildings on rainy days. They come in rolls ranging anywhere from 2 feet to 12 feet wide and can be cut to near-infinite length. They have a border on the edges, so after they cut the piece off the roll they use a big machine to put a similar border on the two exposed cut edges. I recently got a 16'x3' piece of this for my kitchen, albeit for totally different reasons: I have a beautiful kitchen floor but it's too slippery for my dog, and since he spends so much time in there I wanted him to have a non-skid surface. I was kind of bummed at how much it concealed my nice floor. But then I realized what a great trick this would be for someone with an ugly kitchen floor!
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Personally, were I looking at 3 years waiting time for a complete renovation -- which is bound to turn into 4-5 years -- I'd think about tiling over the formica backsplash. Formica is a great surface on which to lay tiles. I bet you could do the whole job in 2 days with the help of anybody who has ever done amateur tiling before. The only real challenge you've got is that you've got a few annoying corners and edges to work with on account of the way the formica meets the side wall. So you'll want to limit your tile choices to ones where they make a variety of narrow cap and corner pieces that you can fit to those twists and turns. This may limit your choices to solid colors, but you can still use accent tiles for the open surfaces. As for the area between the sink and the window, I'd just forget about tiling it altogether. I'd just tile up to the window and leave the space under it blank, then I'd come up with a different solution for that little space, like maybe spackle it flush with the surrounding tiles, paint it to blend in, and conceal most of it with a shallow shelf on which you'd put spices or whatever.
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Tommy can you post a more comprehensive set of photos of your kitchen? If we can see it, we can be a little more helpful in terms of doing a Queer-Eye-style makeover.
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all of this tells me that we could all use a thread on quick, cheap, and easy way to make your kitchen way better. i'm guessing quite a few of us have some ideas.
Here:
http://forums.egullet.org/show.php/act/ST/f/1/t/27117
Those task lights are going to be a big improvement, but you should consider getting twice as many. You want even lighting over the entire counter surface, not just a centered pool of light.
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Tommy say on this thread:
all of this tells me that we could all use a thread on quick, cheap, and easy way to make your kitchen way better. i'm guessing quite a few of us have some ideas.Let me start by saying that I think the top several things are all going to be lighting-related. It's amazing how much of a difference good lighting makes to a kitchen. A few things:
- The absolute simplest thing you can do is get better light bulbs. Not better fixtures; just better bulbs. It's amazing how many kitchens are illuminated by standard yellowish Soviet-interrogation-room incandescent bulbs or by Bronx-public-high-school cold greenish-white fluorescent bulbs. Almost any style of standard incandescent or fluorescent bulb can be replaced by a warmer, more efficient bulb that will immediately brighten up the space in question.
- Only slightly more complex is adding more lights. We talked about this on the other thread a bit. The two major categories of lighting in a kitchen are overhead (general illumination) and under-cabinet (task) lighting. The theoretical goal with task lighting is that you should be able to shut off every other light in your house and, in the middle of the night, be able to perform all countertop tasks with only task-light illumination. These lights are so cheap and so easy to install, you should get twice as many of them as you think you need and put them everywhere so that they fully and evenly illuminate every square inch of counter space. No electrical expertise is required -- most models are available in plug-in versions with the ability to link one light to the next so they can all run off one or two outlets.
- If you have some electrical ability, or if you want to bring in an electrician for a very easy job (very often the job is so easy that an employee of a lighting store can do it after work, off the record), your best move is to install a whole bunch of halogen lighting both in the ceiling and under the cabinets.
- There are additional places where extra and better lighting can be helpful. If, for example, you don't have a good light in your range hood, that's an easy place to make a big improvement. If your cabinets don't go all the way to the ceiling, there's an opportunity for lights to be installed on top of the cabinets. And there are also baseboard/kickplate lighting options if you want to get fancy.
Some other thoughts:
- Tile the walls between the countertops and cabinets (aka the backsplash). This is an incredibly easy DIY project if you work slowly and carefully and use spacers. There are so many options with tile, including a solid color, a checkerboard pattern, a solid color plus a few judiciously spaced accent/contrast tiles, or a variety of other looks. A well tiled backsplash pulls attention away from most everything else.
- If your countertops are really ugly but you don't want to replace them, consider 1) getting some really nice cutting boards to virtually cover the entire countertop -- you can even get colorful vinyl ones and just lay them almost edge-to-edge; or 2) if you have a nice flat countertop surface and the only problem is that it's ugly, very often you can tile right over it no problem; the only potentially difficult area is the sink but it's often doable with minimal expertise.
- If your floors suck, consider a rubber-backed floor mat to cover most of the floor. You can go to any carpet store and get this in a variety of colors and simple geometrich patterns and textures, but even gunmetal gray is a huge improvement over a bad linoleum floor. If you have a long galley-style kitchen this is a particularly good aesthetic option.
- New cabinet and drawer pulls in large-format shiny metal or bright white can brighten up cabinets more than you'd imagine.
- Repaint any surface that's already painted, like the ceiling -- a new coat of bright paint makes a big difference.
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The industry standard in restaurants at the French Laundry level is Bernardaud, though I don't know whether FL actually uses the brand. Still, it's what you'll find in most of the five-diamond-type places. The Bernardaud restaurant stuff is not the same as what you'll find in a retail store, though. I think you have to get it through a restaurant sales rep. I'm sure it's doable, but I'm also sure it's damn expensive.
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Does anybody know of an authoritative, independent organization that collects statistics about NYC restaurants, such as how many there are, what their ethnic breakdown is, how they're distributed geographically, etc.? I'm not talking about the survey summary data in Zagat. I'm looking for something more along the lines of a database maintained by the city or state, or an organization that monitors these things.
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Actually the very good news for you is that Hera seems to have broadened its product line and now makes a plugin version of the awesome SlimLites that I have in my kitchen. http://www.heralighting.com/ -- click products then SlimLite XL.
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You don't need to get involved in a big electrical project. You just need an outlet. The basic GE T5 Profile Performance lights can start at an outlet, and then you chain the rest together -- one plugging into the other. As long as you have enough of a lip on your cabinets to hide all the crap, and enough juice in the circuit, it doesn't really matter if you use plug-in lights plus duct tape and wire-tacks. You can also go with some of the cool three- or five-light halogen setups; those also come in plugin. If you have a very small lip, like less than an inch, you should get Hera lights. All you need there is to hardwire one light to the circuitry -- the rest get wired to each other. Unless you have two walls of cabinets, in which case you need two points of origin for the current. It's all extremely easy -- one of the easiest kitchen jobs you can do.
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This stuff was all the rage for California brides in the 70's.
Enough said!
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Stone, if you don't have good taste, you need to let other people pick your stuff for you.
But yes, especially for your primary set of dishes, you should have white or at least majority-white plates. Otherwise a lot of what you serve will look dreadful unless you spend a lot of time coordinating and garnishing it properly.
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Maybe tommy should just put in brighter light bulbs? Those grooves look like a real bitch.
that's another issue altogether suzanne. right now, there's a big flourescent fixture on the ceiling. i like it because it's pretty bright. mrs. tommy hates it because it's ugly. but given the set-up right now, i can't imagine anything else providing as much light.
Do you have task lighting under your cabinets? That's the most important lighting improvement you can make in a kitchen.
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Rooms aren't always dark for the reasons we think they're dark. You can have an all white room and it can be dark, or you can have a very bright room that's all deep-red. Quality and quantity of lighting make a huge difference, but there are also other important factors. I have a friend who's a decorator and he helped my mother decorate a space for a party. It was some awful basement space that had been donated. We were all standing around looking at the walls, trying to figure out how we could possible cover them up. We had all sorts of stupid ideas, like hanging lots of sheets from the walls -- we probably would have burned the place down if left to our own devices. When my decorator friend showed up, we explained some of our stupid wall ideas, and he said "The walls aren't the problem; it's the ceiling!" What he did was got up on a ladder and put all sorts of white stuff on the ceiling. And he brought in a bunch of cheap clip-on lights from a hardware store, all pointed up at the white stuff on the ceiling. It was amazing: the walls, the floor, every dark, gray, ugly, institutional architectural feature seemed to disappear.
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I think it's safe to say that most people these days, when they're alone or eating with spouse or nuclear family, don't use cups and saucers. But I also think many people do use them with guests. Presumably, Stone wants to have a set of dishes that performs both everyday and guest duty. If that's the case, standard 5-piece place settings are a useful option.
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They're both very popular sets. It's possible to go to the Mikasa Web site to get an extra soup bowl for $6.49 or a capuccino mug for $3.88. The Oneida site has three pages of selections available in the sand dune pattern -- if you need 4 extra forks it's $11.95. Of course, no pattern gets made forever. Even the ones with long-term manufacture, like Old Country Roses or Napoleon Ivy or whatever, change from era to era so the plates made now don't look much like the ones made 50 years ago. So it's often sensible to buy a whole bunch up front -- ever since we got married we've refused to buy anything unless we get 12 or more of it. But Dave's a single guy. He's not going to have this stuff forever. He'll give it away to a friend when he gets married. All he probably needs is service for 8.
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Here in the East it's White Dove.
Pickling and other finishes of that sort are really nice if you strip the cabinetry down to the wood first, because the whole point is that they bring out the grain. But I don't think Mr. tommy is going to want to strip.
("stripping skills," double meaning note)
Food Writers
in Food Media & Arts
Posted
He probably meant "fluff."