Smithy

Thank you, Dejah! I hope you enjoy those recipes as much as I have.

ElsieD, you're very welcome! Good luck with that move - and with finding a new companion to share your lives...if not Zorro, then another. Or three or four! It occurs to me that I need to have started my next batch of sauerkraut several days ago. I'll try to get to that today, and post photos. With regard to corner cupboards, I was surprised to find that even they have design choices. There are semicircular pull-out shelves that pivot halfway out through the door opening and then slide out the rest of the way. Their advantage is that they have a standard-width door instead of the relatively small opening of my (and Annabelle's ) cupboards. I found myself having to trade off door space for wider cupboards elsewhere along the line, and I'm happy with this choice. The friends who came over last night went the other way in their larger kitchen, and they're happy with their choice. I'm grateful that so many options exist.

I don't know whether to describe it as good planning (crafty) or bad (calories) but so far today I've noshed on leftover bread, cheese, and tri-tip. That tri-tip was as tender and flavorful as I can remember having in a very long time. I think I'm onto something. Since it's snowing again, and we have new snow removal equipment coming today (a fancier roof rake) I figure I'll burn those calories. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. (Yes, the pipes are okay, thank heaven! and no, no cleats except to protect the vents.) I'm not sure what I'll be cooking today. Depends on how the snow removal project goes. Tomorrow, for sure, another trip to town so I can show off more favorite shops.

If it's not too much trouble, I would like to see a picture of this. We are moving into a condo next week that has three of these corner cupboards and i'm trying to find out what would make the contents more accessible. PS I also like the pictures of your kitties. No trouble at all! The door is jointed so it makes that right-angle corner, but then can open straight to clear the way. You can see that the turntables have a quarter-circle "notch" taken out to accommodate the corner; that allows the turntable to use more of the available space. The turntables move independently. Marco Polo thinks they're really cool. As you see, the storage is pretty good in there. I have a couple of tall canisters of pasta tucked away in the corner, off the turntable, but there isn't much wasted space.

Thank you. Yes, our kitchen designer convinced me that the extra granite for the splash guard would be money well spent. She was right...but I was surprised at the additional cost. Then again, a lot of things added up - a little here, a little there. Kitchen remodeling is not cheap. I'm really glad we did it for ourselves, while we could enjoy it, instead of waiting until time to sell the house and then spending money to fix it up.

...and if there's any left, it helps ease the cleanup.

Is that a 50s coffee server repurposed as a wine carafe? Very yummy inviting looking spread. I'll be over directly. You'd be welcome! I assume you're asking about the carafe on the right? It does look like a 50's coffee carafe, now that you mention it, but it was a wedding gift for my parents in the early '40's. I remember it sitting on display for as long as I can remember, but I don't remember Mom actually using it. She wasn't sure how she'd get it clean, and was worried about damaging the rattan wrapping. I figure this sort of thing was meant to be used, and so far I haven't had any problems. Finn MacCool is supervising again. He keeps hogging the limelight. Edited to add: rotuts, I think I got the left-hand carafe at TJMaxx a couple of years ago. Some of those shops carry great glassware at reasonably low prices.

Thanks, Annabelle! I'm pretty sure the faucet is a Delta, but now I'm left trying to decipher a logo without words. I looked at Kohler and at several other manufacturers. This one got my vote, at least in part, because it could spray or stream and would stay in the position I'd last selected. Most faucets I looked at always started in the default mode (usually "stream"). I wanted a faucet that would stay in the selected mode as I cycled the water off and back on. I also wanted, and got, a faucet with an attached hose so I can pull the unit out to clean and spray the sink. That hose is a GREAT feature. I have a good friend who alphabetizes her spices. We aren't that organized, and it would backfire if we tried due to my darling's extremely creative spelling. Trying to categorize herbs or spices according to cuisine is marginally better, but things tend to migrate anyway.

Wow, thanks for all the comments and compliments! I'll follow up on them tomorrow...technically, later today now...and include photos. Our dinner spread tonight, as previously noted, was a lot of hors d'oeuvres (I had to look that up twice, no wonder we say "appetizers") as well as the tri-tip, potatoes and bread. Good conversation, good wine and beer, and a movie ensued. The spread: I neglected to mention earlier that we picked up smoked salmon at Old World Meats in addition to the tri-tip. Clockwise, from the warming tray on the table, we had crackers and olives, several cheeses, garlic-cheese bread from the machine, smoked salmon and cream cheese, veggies with roasted red pepper hummus, and an artichoke dip on a tray with spare eating utensils. In the center are cashews, wine glasses, and the wines. The tri-tip and potatoes landed on the warming tray after that photo was taken. Today's tri-tip adventure was well worth repeating: the meat was tender, flavorful, juicy and rare to medium rare through much of its cross-section. Adding potatoes didn't hurt, either.

That's excellent, dcarch...both the invention and the film. We have a rotisserie for our grill, but it isn't portable. I'd love to have something like that for our oven.

Thanks for that, rotuts. I've been following the topic about the reviews. Very interesting!

Tonight we're having friends over for dinner and a movie, so the meal plan involves a lot of finger food and the fixings for sandwiches. I generally make bread by hand these days, but on days like this when we're trying to thaw frozen water pipes (!) it's nice to just throw stuff into the machine. This bread machine cookbook is still one of my favorites. In the machine are the makings of "Rita Fried's Garlic Herb Bread". My Old World Meats tri-tip is waiting to begin cooking. I'll be trying out a protocol set out by America's Test Kitchen in an edX course on the Science of Food and Cooking: sear quickly, then cook very very low and slow. At times like this I wonder if sous vide is in my future. Here it is, in its original package. I was a bit surprised to get it home and find they hadn't cut it themselves, but I think demand must have risen enough that they order it specially.

One of the things we did when we remodeled the kitchen was solve some thorny storage problems, Corner storage is always an issue: our old cabinets had a blind corner with an open space, out of sight, between the end of one set of shelves and the under-sink storage. The cats loved it. I found a food mill that the previous owners had probably long since lost. One of my priorities was to use that space better. Ta-Da! Turntables in the corners! The lower corner has larger-radius turntables with a corner cutout. I didn't bother attaching a photo, but I'll show it if someone asks. We also made good use of pullout storage. The waste baskets (3: 1 for trash, 1 for paper recycling, and 1 for other recyclables) sit in one pullout rack. Many cutting boards and baking sheets, as well as those countertop drain pads, occupy another. The pots and pans, and small electric appliances, are on rollout shelves. I love being able to roll out a whole shelf and grab what I want, instead of having to dig to the back of a cabinet.

Garrison Keillor often makes jokes like that about a "mixed marriage" in Lake Wobegon being between Lutherans and Catholics. As far as I know, I'd have to drive to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) to find a Middle Eastern, Oriental, Mexican or Indian grocery store. That's around 3 hours from here, so I resort to mail order or else stocking up when I'm passing by a convenient store. Woe is me, my favorite mail-order place seems to have folded. Flavor of the Med (Flavorofmed.com) is the only source I've found for Greenland feta cheese, an Egyptian creamy feta packed in tetrapcks. Alas, their web site is down and they aren't answering my calls or emails. (If anyone reading this knows of another source, please PM me.) I may have to do without that cheese.

I have one 9 1/2" chef's knife that I hand-wash. I only use it for veggie prep. All other knives go into the dishwasher. My machine has a 6 comparment cutlery tray built into the door. I only put one knife in each of the 3 sections I use for knives so that they don't bang against each other. My other 9 1/2" chef's knife, which I have had for 30 years, does go in the dishwasher. The two 9 1/2" are from the same maker, long out of business. I sharpen all of my knives on my EdgePro and have never had issues with the dishwasher affecting them. I spent 16 years in the corrosion monitoring industry so I have some insight as to what could happen.IMAG0345.jpg Corrosion monitoring, eh? You're the perfect person to ask, then: is it just the knives' being banged around that's hard on them? I'd gotten the idea that the dishwasher detergent could pit them. Does the type of detergent and the water chemistry change the answer? Feel free to PM me if the answer is too long - but I bet there are a lot of others here who would also be interested.

I still don't understand how the vacuum pots work. Are they basically the same principle as a percolator?

rotuts, I'm howling with laughter; that cartoon is very definitely "feed me" related and true to all four of our cats! Our Siberian husky is less subtle. it's a miracle he hasn't stuck his nose into the photos before now. I'll send you more information by PM; I'm always happy to talk about "my kids". C. Sapidus, how nice of you to check in! That's funny about the cabinets. My darling and I have both lived in places without that grease-attracting gap above cabinets, and we both preferred to keep it open for display/storage...grease notwithstanding. It takes a stepladder for either of us to reach something up there, so anything we use frequently that can fit into a lower cabinet lives there instead. Your comment about grease accumulating despite a good hood makes me feel a bit better about our arrangement; maybe it isn't all that bad after all. My fears about the roasting pan being overfilled were unfounded. In addition to the chicken we had brussels sprouts with bacon, and beverage of our choice. He prefers beer with dinner.

Tonight's dinner is marinating at present. The recipe is a happy discovery from Fine Cooking, Issue #155 (Feb/Mar 2012): Citrus-Marinated Roasted Chicken. http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/citrus-marinated-roasted-chicken.aspx Start with these ingredients: Most of it's self-explanatory. The recipe actually calls for 2 chickens in order to make plenty of leftovers, but we're already swimming in leftovers so I just pulled one chicken out of the freezer. This chicken was locally raised and purchased at our farmer's market last summer. The honey is a product of a really great farm out near Reno, Nevada, and was a gift from my sister. Great stuff. This is infused with basil, definitely not a part of the recipe, but I think it will add a nice touch. The pomegranate is also my addition; I'll use some seeds as garnish. I picked too small a roasting pan and will have to put a drip pan under it in the oven, but otherwise I think this will be fine. It's to marinate for at least 6 hours before roasting. This kitchen island has outlets on both sides and at one end. When I designed it I told the electrician that I wanted it wired like a lab bench. He looked me over - we'd all been working together long enough to be comfortable - and said, "I think you're a bit of a mad scientist!" The cats aren't allowed atop kitchen surfaces, but I usually have one supervising as I work.

I love the idea of using power tools to deal with kitchen chores. As I recall, you use a lathe to peel winter squash, do you not? I think of Duluth's population as still being pretty homogenous: European ancestry, for the most part: Scandinavian, Germanic, Slavic, British Isles, based on the faces I see in the grocery store. However, the populations of the university and colleges here are quite mixed, as are the staff of the medical facilities: with 2 major hospital chains and I-don't-know-how many clinics, the medical practice accounts for a lot of employment around here. Unfortunately the demand for international cuisine hasn't been enough to keep any sort of specialty store afloat, except for a couple of Italian groceries that have been around here forever. (Italian immigrants were a major wave early in the last century.) The Oriental grocery died several years ago, I believe a victim of the general economic slump that hit us all around 2008. There's never been a good Middle Eastern or Indian grocery store here. I'm glad that Cub and Mt. Royal, my other favorite large grocery store here (still to be visited this week) are meeting the demand.

We make our own, sort of. He starts with a package of Good Seasons Italian or Zesty Italian dressing mix. He uses white balsamic vinegar and about a 50/50 mix of olive oil and whatever vegetable oil we have on hand (Wesson soybean, at present). The mixture of oil is so that his doesn't congeal in the refrigerator. I prefer a vinaigrette based loosely on an Egyptian salad dressing recipe I picked up a few years ago. Start with a clove or three of finely minced garlic, then grind it with a couple of teaspoons of fine sea salt to make a paste. Scoop those into a mixing jar. Maybe add some dried sumac, or a touch of dijon mustard, or freshly chopped cilantro and/or parsley, depending on mood and availability. For acid I generally use lemon juice - Meyer if I can get it - but if the lemons are tooooo strong I may tone it down a bit with white wine vinegar. I like straight olive oil, even though I have to take the salad dressing out of the refrigerator in advance to get it to de-congeal. My preferred proportions are 2 parts oil to 1 part acid, so if I squeezed enough lemon to get 1/2 cup I'll use 1 cup olive oil. With regard to the congealing oil, I've discovered that if I can keep the dressing emulsified it doesn't set up as hard. Toward that end I've experimented with a touch of xanthan gum, to some success, although it's easy to overdo it and give the dressing an unpleasant drooly consistency. Once I hit on the "two parts oil to one part vinegar" routine, I started having a blast with making my own salad dressings. I find that walnut oil and (red) balsamic vinegar are brilliant together. You can see my salad dressing, recently shaken (it does separate quickly), in the background of this lunch photo.

I am rather anal about having only plastic cutting boards in my kitchen. I am very big on everything being able to go into the dishwasher. I purchased a bamboo board a few years ago. I rarely used it because of my aversion to hand-washing. It finally went to a thrift shop. (The aversion is to hand-washing as the final cleaning. I pre-scrub everything before it goes into the dishwasher. Maybe if I had a 3-compartment sink in my kitchen...) I also got a chuckle out of recognizing the mixing bowl you used. I have them in multiples in 3qt through 8 qt plus a14 qt. Are yours Tramontina or another brand? Thank you for the compliments! The mixing bowl is some thing I picked up at, oh, Target or Pier 1 or a grocery store down south. I keep buying more of these - I have 2 or 3 in the trailer and 2 here at home - in different sizes. They're such great mixing bowls, and I like the shape. The very first bowl of these I bought over 30 years ago at some import store in Pasadena, I can't even remember the name. Maybe a Cost Plus? Early Pier 1?

Porthos, rotuts and heidih, thanks for all the input on the cutting board. I'll try the bleach method and see whether that helps. I wouldn't have described it as a grassy smell, though; I know what a bamboo steamer smells like and this wasn't it; it seemed a bit more sour, and not in a pleasant lemony sense. That's part of the puzzlement. I have a couple of wooden cutting boards as well as several plastic ones. The most useful to me are the flexible mats - usually 3 or 4 to a package for not much money. I use those for meats, but have read that they're harder on knives than wooden cutting boards. Their flexibility is wonderful: cut or chop stuff, flip it into the bowl or pot. I also like that they're more or less dishwasher-safe. However, I find that they do warp in the dishwasher after a while, so I tend to wash them by hand if they were used for fruit or vegetables. Porthos, I'm probably almost as careful as you about meat contamination...but I don't worry about pre-washing before things go into the dishwasher. Is that because your dishwasher doesn't get things clean without a careful prerinse, or some other reason? Do your knives also go into the dishwasher, or are they an exception to the "no handwashing" rule?

This bamboo cutting board is a new acquisition: $10 from Smart and Final, and I've been admiring the beauty of these babies for a while. Today was the first time I used it. I cleaned it before use, but as I cut the strawberries I started noticing that it was taking a stain from the berries and a strange odor was coming up. It doesn't seem to have affected the flavor but I stopped using it and went back to one of my flexible cutting mats - which are, actually, more practical for this operation, despite the admonitions that plastic is hard on knives. Should I have cleaned and sealed the bamboo board better? How? My plan, unless I hear otherwise from some experienced person, is to do the standard butcher block treatment: salt and vinegar, scrape, then rub with mineral oil. This board came with a $1-off coupon for the company's special sealant, but I can't see spending $12 on a special treatment for a $10 board.

My darling's breakfast is generally fruit salad with whole-grain Cheerios. Just as with the green salad I showed, we find it works best to make several days' worth in advance and store it for ready access. Here are the fixings: The berries, grapes and pineapple were purchased at Cub Foods yesterday. The oranges and dates we brought back with us from California. He's less fussy than I about fruit in season and has absolutely no qualms about buying it from wherever he can get it (the grapes are from Peru). I have qualms about some such items: for instance, I just can't bring myself to buy stone fruits at this time of year because it's an insult to the real deal...but the fresh fruit does help brighten our diet, and he's firmly in the "any port in a storm" camp of winter survival. Actually, the strawberries look and taste surprisingly good this time: red through, not too soft, but they have good flavor. The finished salad fills a 3-quart mixing bowl. He'll fill a 2-quart plastic storage tub with some of it, and apportion the rest into smaller containers, ready to receive the cereal. When we first started this fruit-salad-in-advance plan we made smaller batches so it wouldn't rot, but we've learned that the pineapple juice, all of which goes into the salad, does 2 things: it seems to help preserve the fruit quality, and it prevents the navel oranges from going bitter as they sit. When there's no pineapple to be had, another stratagem is to use fruit juice as the base for a fruit-salad gelatin. The gelatin helps keep the fruit fresh. A gelatin made from freshly squeezed mandarin oranges, or minneola tangelos, or an orange-lemon mix, is a wonderful thing.