chromedome

My class was the last to graduate before the kitchens at my school were extensively remodeled (I joked at the time that "Now I know what Martha was doing while she awaited sentencing..."). I'm sure the one at the CIA was more lavish by an order or two of magnitude, but this was still pretty impressive. I had the same comment for my former instructors, when I went back for a visit. When your school kitchen has as many Rational combi-ovens as most of the rest of the city put together, for example, going out into the real world and working with a cranky 40 year-old Garland has got to be something of a letdown.

When I was in culinary school, we made Persian-style rice pudding in international lab. It was scented with rose water, of course. One of my classmates unthinkingly blurted, "It's like eating my grandmother," and did not hear the end of it until the semester was over.

I did chuckle over her summation of the air fryer as "a glorified Easy-Bake oven."

I hadn't seen this before, but the style seemed strangely familiar. Then I realized it was the same guy who does the "This is why your team sucks" blog for each NFL season.

I gather from your preamble that the diners were your academic peers?

Yup. I can't tell you how many endless conversations I've had with friends, relatives, co-workers, acquaintances, etc about their latest round of "stomach flu" (sic) and why it keeps hanging on in their household. Unfortunately, a certain percentage will always get very upset and defensive ("You're saying my home is dirty?!!"), which makes it harder.

Also light switches, doorknobs, cupboard handles, drawer pulls, and -- especially -- the faucets of the sinks where you both wash your hands.

Here they have blue bins in (sparse) locations around town, and you're supposed to drive there and put stuff in the bins yourself. Some do, most don't.

The picture does look a lot like the color plates in my 1940's vintage American Woman's Cookbook.

My worst-case story comes from an Edmonton location of a very large fast-food chain. The kid mopping the floor spilled a box of gloves onto the wet, newly-mopped (with a gray, nasty, shaggy old mop) floor. He picked them up, stuffed them back into the box, tucked the box under the counter, and kept mopping. Ugh. There are legitimate reasons to wear gloves, as Lisa Shook points out (a lot of people are Staph A carriers, for example) but mandatory-glove laws largely just create a false sense of security. They're popular with legislators, I think, because they give the appearance of doing something tangible.

Don't feel too badly. When I was in my first year of culinary training, the chef-instructor one morning told us we would need to double the recipe we'd been given. A collective groan went up from my (mostly very young) classmates, who complained, "You didn't tell us we'd need our calculators today!" I was genuinely shocked. I mean, seriously, children...if you can't multiply by two, just frikkin' measure everything twice, no?

Is that the model with the Flex Duo oven? I wrote a few articles about those for Samsung.com.

That's a sweet-looking piece of kit.

Well, I'd say keeping hubby out of the kitchen would be step 1. Gloves, scrupulous hand-washing, diligent surface/implement sanitation etc are the best anyone can do, really. Of course, if some of the people on your list are immuno-compromised, you might want to let them know about the situation and offer them an "IOU" for future redemption, just in case. My ex and I got noro on our honeymoon, at (long story) my brother-in-law's wedding reception. It made for a long and unhappy week for us both...not at all improved by my poor bride passing a kidney stone just when she was getting over the virus.

That's priceless...right up there with IKEA's Apple-spoofing catalogue-launch video.

Cool...I hadn't really thought of it as the kind of project that could be carried on from year to year. What do you do by way of storage between Decembers?

After being here in New Brunswick for about eight months, my California-bred second wife complained, "I've been seeing those stupid 'Watch for Moose' signs on every road for most of a year now. I've been watching, and I haven't seen a moose even once!" The very next day, as she was coming home, she rounded a curve in the road and nearly hit one (in my little Mazda Protege, so it wouldn't have ended well). She was aghast..."People told me they were horse-sized," she said, still visibly shaken, "but nobody specified Clydesdale!" She insisted that if it hadn't been for the "boy bits," she could have driven the Mazda underneath his belly. That's an exaggeration, but after an encounter like that I think it was a perfectly understandable one.

I don't think it was televised, but Jacques Pepin had a great story about demo-ing souffles in front of a live audience at a trade show or some such venue (it's in his memoirs, IIRC). Somehow the oven's self-clean cycle was triggered, and of course once that happens the oven is locked. All he could do was point to the oven's window a few minutes in, and say "That! That is what it's supposed to look like when it's done!" ...and then vamp for a while as it burnt to a cinder.

I have some Maltese ring-shaped cookies/pastries made up and in the freezer. I found 'em while researching an assignment, and thought they looked interesting. The dough is...meh...basically just a wrapper for the filling. The middle is cooked semolina, well spiced and with lots of citrus. They're a bit larger than I'd expected (definitely big enough to share) but excellent with my tea.

Since it seems to be random, and to come in both mainstream/supermarket and small-producer eggs, individual variation between hens seems the likeliest answer. Presumably, if one had a small flock, over a period of years it should be possible to select for this.

There's also this, for when you want to cast a broad and non-specific net in search of inspiration. I've used it off and on for years (research is a large part of my freelancing life, and I used to read Tara's newsletter regularly).

I eventually came to embrace them, because the concomitant of solo dining is "It's hardly worth the effort of cooking [x] for just me..." After I while I just cooked my usual batch of whatever, and portioned it into the fridge and freezer. Days when I didn't feel like cooking (which were plentiful) or when I was busy with work and didn't think of it until mealtime (ditto) I'd just pull out the first thing that came to hand, and reheat it. Things are more complicated now because I'm perfectly happy with the first-thing methodology, but my GF has to be "in the mood" for a specific food. This, I've found, complicates meal-planning decisions profoundly. I have also come to notice that that what she's in the mood for very seldom corresponds to any leftovers we have on hand. So...my lunch on any given day is generally a previous day's leftovers.

Oh, I keep my eyes open every time I hit a Salvation Army or Value Village. I haven't seen one yet, but you never know. I also keep an eye on Kijiji*, but so far have only seen cheapie Chinese-made knock-offs. (* That's the Canadian edition of eBay Classifieds, MUCH bigger here than Craigslist...Anna's a Canadian and knows this, but I mention it for the non-Canadians)

I used to have one of those Imperia pasta machines, and it was wonderful. Alas, I once neglected to clean it immediately after use, and had to take it apart and reassemble it after prying all the dried-on dough out of its innards (I'd been interrupted by my kids, and had forgotten about it by the time they were in bed...my then-wife thoughtfully boxed up the machine for me and put it away). I did *something* wrong along the way, because afterwards it was always loose and "clunkety." I tried taking it apart and putting it back together several more times, but without any improvement. It was terribly disappointing. New ones sell here for well over $100 CDN, so I'll doubtless order one online at some point in the next while. Been debating the Kitchenaid attachment kit instead, but it hardly seems worth all the extra cash.

Links #6 and #7 are non-functioning.