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A good choice, as long as you have a strong bladder. Supposedly back in the Algonquin days nobody wanted to leave the table, for fear of the maliciously perfect things she'd say behind your back.

Most CBC Radio shows are downloadable as podcasts from this page. The direct link to download Fridge Light is here.

Actually, many do sing but many do not. I guess it comes down to confidence in one's own voice, or at least one's ability to sound feminine while singing.

From the glorious silliness that is "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert":

One more for everyone's delectation: Authentic Chicken Parmigiana

I think this is legitimate for our thread, since it addresses at least the "drink" side of food and drink... http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/drunk-man-arrested-claims-he-time-travelled-to-warn-of-aliens-1.3619979

In fairness, the same could be said of Julia Child...she had the training, but was not a restaurateur. Nonetheless, she used her pulpit to change how millions thought of, and understood, cooking. In his less-exalted way, whatever one things of his on-camera persona, Alton is doing the same.

Well, just to put that into context for you...I'm a chef and former restaurateur, and my lunch most days is whatever leftovers are in the fridge (usually slopped onto a plated, or into a bowl, and microwaved). I eat oatmeal for breakfast almost every day, and dinner usually involves kids and grandkids, so lunch is my opportunity to make leftovers go bye-bye (my GF, bless her heart, simply doesn't see them). On days when I'm caught up on the leftovers situation lunch might be a sandwich not unlike yours, or if I'm really pressed for time and energy I'll just nuke a hot dog. Not that I won't do a nice lunch if there's a reason, you understand, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I'm sure the same holds true for a lot of people here, so post away whenever the mood strikes. We won't judge.

I didn't remember the raisin rant and resulting thread, though I was here a lot in those days. I used to be surprised when people told me they hated raisins, but now I'm merely resigned. More for the rest of us, is all I can say (I cook 'em into my oatmeal, which is my near-invariable breakfast). Also, I'm the polar opposite of several posters on that thread...I'm sorry, but chocolate chip cookies are in no way comparable to a perfectly executed oatmeal-raisin cookie, the greatest exemplar of the home baker's art. Cake? Pie? Pudding? I value them all, but if there's an oatmeal raisin cookie on the table it's the first thing I'll try. I also (just to emphasize the point) love raisin pie and raisin squares. In fact, I sometimes make a recipe that came from author Lucy Maud Montgomery's personal notebook, called "Mock Cherry Pie." It's made by cooking equal quantities of raisins and cranberries in sugar syrup, then thickening the syrup and adding a dash of almond extract. It's pretty good, if not easily mistaken for real cherries. One of my texts in culinary school was Bo Friberg's The Professional Pastry Chef. In his discussion of brownies, he mentions that in an earlier edition -- as a European-trained baker without North American cultural context -- he'd suggested raisins as a perfect add-in for brownies. As he ruefully expressed it, "I haven't been in that much trouble since I used someone's fabric scissors to cut paper..."

I've spent most of the last few years divesting myself of kitchen stuff, so it requires a bit of thought. I'd say probably my AeroPress would be a shoo-in for one of the two spots: It fits the timeframe, and since I (usually) only have one coffee a day now I really appreciate having a good one. The mint-condition Vitamix I found for $25 at the thrift store has been used exactly twice, so that's not a strong contender. I've just picked up a backup for my 80s vintage Cuisinart food processor, but I'm not really going to count that one. The pressure cooker I bought for and then inherited from my father might become a good long-term friend, but I've only used it once so far. So...I'd go with the pasta attachment for my KitchenAid as the second one. My old manual Imperia died a couple of years ago, and I'd missed making pasta regularly until I bought this a few months back.

I sometimes arrive at the same point with long-cooked dishes, but from the opposite direction: I can't resist picking at them while they're cooking, so by the time they're done I'm full and can't eat.

I grew up in rural Nova Scotia eating rabbit and venison and moose, and on one occasion* shot myself a few squirrels so I could see what they tasted like. I concluded they tasted much like rabbit but were infinitely more work because they were so small in comparison, and abandoned that particular line of inquiry. Later we moved to Newfoundland, where I got to try a few other things. This gave me the opportunity later in life to troll my mostly-urban classmates in culinary school: We'd been discussing offal, to the distaste of most of my classmates, and I piped up that I was a big fan. "It's often the best part of the animal as far as I'm concerned," I told them, "I know back in Newfoundland the old-timers are all about the flipper pie, but give me the seal's liver any day." As I'd anticipated, this led to a chorus of revulsion centered around a rough theme of "Ew, you ate SEAL?" As that initial reaction died away, someone asked the question I'd been waiting for: "What does seal taste like?" "Well," I said, "It's dark and rich and rather strong-tasting. I'd say it's gamier than moose, but not as strong as whale." Yeah, they lost their minds over the whale thing, which was exactly what I'd intended. Just for the record, said whale was not killed deliberately as food (it got caught in a gillnet and drowned, and was a small and non-endangered species, so the fishermen pragmatically butchered and shared it). Right now my freezer contains a few small pieces of my father's last deer, and a nice bear roast from one of my Newfoundland uncles. The flavor of bear depends heavily on what it's been eating (it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "garbage in, garbage out") but this was a really good one. * I asked my father what they tasted like, and he invited me to find out for myself. The proviso was that if I shot it I ate it, and wouldn't whine about liking it or not liking it. Also, I had to skin and gut them myself.

Okay, almost any kitchen. And I forgot to mention the faux-woodgrain strip down the handle, to match that classy 70s faux-wood panelling in the nearby dining area.

The one I had combined avocado and harvest gold, so it would fit with the decor of *any* kitchen.

In part because of this discussion, my first use of the pressure canner I inherited was for putting up some stock (we're critically low on freezer space).

A meme went by on my Facebook feed a few weeks ago that defined one's vegetable crisper as "The place where good intentions go to die..."

I've turned about 15 pounds of apples into dried rings with a borrowed dehydrator, and turned another 45 or so into 25 pints of applesauce and 6 of apple butter (the apples were seconds, so there was a degree of waste). Also used the dehydrator to turn roughly 5 pounds of cranberries into homemade "craisins" for the granddaughters. I've canned a few pints of syrup made from red and black currants, as well as the syrup used to sweeten the "craisins," and those will go into colored lemonade over the next few months. The 2 year-old granddaughter loves lemonade with "berry stuff" in it. My father had wanted a pressure canner in a desultory way for years, so I bought him a lightly used one last year around this time. They'd already frozen most of their harvest so he never used it, and then passed away this spring before getting another chance. I have it on the stove now with a load of freshly made chicken stock and beef stock, and tomorrow I'll put up some beef stew that I've made. This is partly in aid of clearing out my freezer, you understand. In a similar vein I've turned a whole eye of round into jerky in the course of the day. I'm also playing a bit with fermentation this year, since I have the opportunity. I have a few quarts of lactic-fermented dills bubbling away downstairs, and have bought 10 pounds of cabbage to turn into sauerkraut when I get home from helping my mom move (again) next weekend. Oh, and took advantage of a really good sale on pork shoulder to lay in 40 pounds or so, with the intention of making sausage. Hence the need for space in my freezer.

Basically what you're asking for is Restaurant Management 101. There are plenty of books and sites to provide that, and resources from the National Restaurant Association and similar bodies. Unfortunately you've already been plunked into the soup, so you don't have the luxury of immersing yourself in learning materials for a month or two before you get started. I still highly recommend that you spend as much time as you can with the best training materials you can find (ask a local culinary school what texts they use to teach restaurant management, for example) but you'll probably have to fit it in during non-working hours, aka "when I'd otherwise be sleeping." Portioning and monitoring those ingredients is a bit of a challenge. The ideal way to do it is with a scale - so many grams of lettuce, then so many of cucumber, of onion, and so on - but that's not usually going to cut it when you're busy. For lettuce, I'd start with a yield test. Take 10 heads of lettuce, weigh them as they come from the supplier, and then weigh the prepped lettuce after the outer leaves are discarded, cores removed etc. You know how many heads of lettuce you purchase per case, so if you know how many grams (or ounces) your prepared salad is *supposed* to have, you can calculate how many salads you can make from a given case. Anything less is spoilage, over-portioning or unrecorded sales (it's possible you have a herbivorous line cook filching lettuce, but relatively unlikely). You can do similar yield tests for any other ingredient. It helps if you specify the size of dice or thinness of slice for each preparation, wherever possible. With cukes, for example, you could specify that they be cut to a standard thickness on a mandoline, rather than being sliced by hand. There will always be some variability with your ingredients, so the target weight of your finished salad will be a range rather than a specific number. That's especially true if your formal recipe (I'm assuming here that your recipes are formalized and standardized, with specific portions for the ingredients...if not, you need to start by doing that). Tare your scale with an empty bowl, then put a full bowl on it and see how much the salad weighs. Record that figure, and do the same for at least another 8 to 10 salads made "to spec" under the watchful eye of yourself or your chef. That gives you your allowable range of weights. During service, intercept a salad periodically and weigh it to make sure it falls within that range. If it doesn't, then someone needs to speak to that particular cook about portion control. It's a PITA, but it has to happen. Another thing you might need to do is scrutinize waste in that department. At one of my jobs, I had each of my prep cooks place their waste in a hotel pan (bus pan, at some stations) as they prepped vegetables, and I had to see the pan before it was discarded. If someone was wasting too much bell pepper, or trimming away half the usable portion from a pineapple, then we would have a talk and I would demonstrate the correct way to do it (*again*...sigh). Lather, rinse, repeat. You do have to count, but probably not every item every day. Those tins of applesauce, for example: You probably use them for just a couple of recipes. If you know how often those recipes are made, and how many tins they call for, you can monitor that one relatively easily. If you prepare those recipes once or twice a week, then you can do a quick weekly count and you're good. Ingredients you use more often must be checked more often. Items like individual sugar packets are problematic, because customers are prone to filling their purses/pockets with 'em, which buggers your inventory. All you can do is limit the quantity that's set out for customers. Having someone to issue the supplies and record what goes in and out is probably not an option, because of labor cost, though it's what larger kitchens used to do before computerization streamlined things. That's a whole masterclass in its own right. If it's still the same menu after 30 years, it'll almost certainly require some updating. Your menu will always contain some higher-margin and some lower-margin dishes. It will also contain some that are very popular, and others which don't sell as well. Make yourself a grid and plot them out on the two axes of profitability and popularity. The ones that are both high-margin and high-popularity are your best-performing dishes. The ones that are low-margin and low-popularity are the low-hanging fruit, when you start dropping menu items to make room for new ones. The in-betweens, the ones that are either popular but not profitable or profitable but not popular, are candidates for tweaking. Specials make a good way to test-drive new dishes. I used to challenge my cooks to come up with new dishes using our existing ingredients and/or prepped items (ie, stocks and sauces). I'd put those on as weekly specials, name-checking the cook on my signboard (it's good to stroke their egos a bit, especially if you're raising their hackles the rest of the week by monitoring their portion control and prepping...). The popular dishes got added to the menu. After a while it gets to be a healthy competition between the cooks, which stimulates their creativity and makes life more fun. That's a solid win, because food and morale improve and you also get to assess the talent you have in your kitchen. That lets you identify the people you want to promote. I can't advise you on specific promotional ideas because I don't know your market and your clientele, but when you're looking to do things on the cheap social media can be your best friend. If the restaurant/bar doesn't already have a Facebook page you should set one up, as well as an Instagram account or whatever the current fave is in South Africa. Have someone reliable post regularly, or do it yourself, and fill it with appetizing photos of the food (especially new dishes you want to promote, or profitable dishes you'd like to push to greater popularity). Solicit "likes" and "shares," and periodically give away a meal or a gift certificate to someone who's responded (some establishments in my neck of the woods do this weekly). You could also use social media as a way to test ideas for events or dishes. Put up a couple of choices, and invite your followers to vote on them and select a winner. It drives engagement, and gives you something other than guesswork to determine whether a dish is likely to succeed. It's not foolproof, but it's at least something. I hope this is at least some help to you. Don't be shy to think of yourself as a "bean counter"...the term is used disparagingly, but if you use beans they do, by God, need to be counted. Margins are tight in the restaurant business, and you can't be giving away any profit if it's avoidable. Passion is all well and good, but unless you have the management skills to back it up it's hard to be successful.

Well...it *is* hunting season... (Whether you drop a buck or some "doe," the pun is equally bad...)

How to resist a band that writes lines like "say I'm the only bee in your bonnet"?

To me it looks like a carpet knife, which would certainly not be out of place in a hardware store. Perhaps it just got mis-placed in the kitchen section by the receivers?

I had the electric pot/fryer, but it wasn't a pressure cooker. I picked it up used at the thrift store and used it at my farmer's market stall for a few years, then passed it along to my daughter. She still uses it.

That still wouldn't work with my son-in-law. His M.O. is to just shrug and fill the cart with stuff he likes (and they can't afford) and then say "I couldn't find the things that were on the list."

Yeah, that's just wrong, wrong, wrong.

It's a staple here at the Home of Chrome.