andiesenji

You might try using a heavy-weight balloon sprayed lightly with release compound. I used balloons into which I had poured a cup full of BBs before blowing it up to the size I needed, you would need more for a larger balloon. Once inflated you clip the valve closed with a wood clothes pin and place it with the valve at the bottom on one side, manipulating it until the BBs are spread out, the bottom is flat and the balloon is stable. After your cage is completely set and dry, hold the valve and gently let the air out by carefully squeezing the clothes pin until the balloon has pulled away from the interior of the cage then let the rest of the air out. Try it with smaller balloons at first. I also use balloons to make chocolate bowls.

Speaking of pie - crusts - that is. did you know that you can blind bake pie crust on the outside of an upside-down pie pan on a sheet pan and not have to worry about the sides collapsing. I run a docker over the rolled dough then drape it over the inverted pie pans and cut around the circumference with a pizza wheel, then use my hands to firm it around the pan. After baking and it has cooled completely, I invert the pie dish I am going to use for the finished pie over the crust and flip it over. Since these are cream pies and meringue or whipped cream in going to cover the edges, it doesn't matter if the edges are not fancy.

I bought three sets of the "pie rings" at Linens 'N Things a year or so ago. makes it too easy

I have a very old Gaggia that has been retired to the shed. I won one of the superautomatic machines last fall and had the old monster hauled out to make room for the new baby. Who knew it could be so easy to get a cup with perfect crema....not me, that is for sure.

I just finished cooking the last of the apricots from my tree on Sunday. I cook them down - pictures on another thread - apricots Then freeze in Cambro containers for later use in combination with other fruits and etc., and canning in jam jars. I combine apricots with ginger in a marmalade, with lime and various other things, including hot peppers - an apricot/ginger/lime/hot pepper sorbet. a sauce for chicken and pork with sage and star anise cooked in the apricot sauce. apricot butter and apricot leather.

When I can get them, I dry them because the flavor concentrates and they can be used in so many baked items. I also make juice which I process and can in quart jars for later use. Saves me having to do so many labor intensive things at one time. I have a steam juicer that is great for extracting juice from seeded fruits, much easier than cooking the fruit then straining, and you don't have to stand over the pot and stir constantly. my juicer I have a friend in Sweden who turned me on to this several years ago. She processes all kinds of the various berries that grow wild near their summer home. It comes in two sizes, I have the 10 liter but the smaller one is fine for smaller batches.

I make a lime curd and layer it in parfait glasses with blueberries and strawberries or raspberries. It is very pretty as well as a fantastic blend of flavors.

The last time I was in Florida for one of the dog show circuits, (several years ago) friends took me to a Cuban restaurant that was like an insect zoo. There were no bugs in the food, but there were a lot of the ubiquitous "Palmetto bugs" and one galloped along the chair rail behind one of my friends and she just swatted it off onto the floor. Sure looked like a roach to me, but a darn big one. The food was good but I checked everything carefully before taking a bite. This reminds me of the scene in Victor/Victoria where Julie Andrews has a roach in her purse and tries to dump it into her salad so she could get out of paying for her dinner and also the dinner of Robert Preston - - and the pandemonium that followed when it crawled up the leg of another diner. Hilarious. However there was one restaurant I went to in Mexicali quite a few years ago just at sunset and where we sat on a terrace about five feet from a wall that I thought at first had a curtain hanging in front of it becuase it seemed to move. When I mentioned it to one of my friends he said it was scorpions on the wall catching the last rays of the sun. I left........... Some things I can take but scorpions, big spiders, and such things are not my cup of tea. Not a bug story but another thing that startled me while eating in a Mexican restaurant in Guadalahara was having a lizard, maybe a gecko, gallop across my plate after a moth. I scooped out the little footprints and deposited it on a leaf at the side of my plate and continued eating.

I am looking forward to your experiences in the kitchen and will be interested in seeing what other veg and fruit you have on hand. My daughter has lived in Livermore for several years, but is moving to Inverness, Scotland next week. I also have friends who live in town (have worked at "the Lab") and in other towns in the area. There are some very fine small growers in the area who market some great produce.

Schaum torte or schaumtorten is similar to pavlova in that both are baked meringues. However schaum torte is the classic Austrian dessert and is split into layers. Since it is difficult to cut with a knife, one uses a multipronged tool to make punctures all around the circumference of the schaum torte and lift the layer off. I can manage a 3 layer torten but have seen as many as 5. Very tricky. The filling has to be light enough to not make the meringue collapse but still have enough fruit to flavor it. It is a spectacular persentation when done correctly. They can be made as individual servings but the classic is a large meringue baked on a sheet pan. Now I only do two layers as it is much easier.

That's another reason I have several of these letter openers from Staples

There are some venues where tips are very, very good. One of my nephews worked at the Santa Anita racetrack clubhouse just on weekends, to finance his college career. His shift pooled their tips and divided it equally with a portion for the barman who handled their drinks orders. He did very well indeed. Now he is an astronomer working on some mountaintop in Chile and makes hardly anything but has nowhere to spend it either. He keeps writing home for long underwear and sweaters....... His Santa Anita days a distant memory. One of the young women who used to work in our office, an inhalation therapist, moved to Las Vegas and worked in her profession for a year then started moonlighting as a banquet server. Soon after she began working full time as a server and is making more than three times the amount she made here.

Yes'm, You said it! Right ON!

Most of my shopping trips involve quite a few items as I plan menus ahead of time and try to get everything in one trip because it is really a chore for me to get in and out of the van, hobble in to the store, find one of the riding carts (which never hold enough) and wheel my way around. If I am in line and see someone behind me with just a couplf of items, I tell them to go ahead of me and often they are so startled by it that I guess there just are very few people who are considerate of others. I was brought up in an earlier era where everything was not me, me, me all the time. Sometimes I don't notice everything that goes on around me because I am concentrating on my list, but I do try. I often shop at the huge Mexican supermarket and I am fairly well known to several of the cashiers and the box persons. They always help me out to my van and load my groceries and I insist on giving them a tip. They are very careful how they load my groceries, and are always very polite. Some of the other markets are very different, if a checker asks one of the box people to help me out there is one young man who I tell never mind because he slings my bags into the van, sets heavy items on top of crushable things, etc. I complained to my checker one day that I did not want him bagging my groceries after he put a carton of eggs in the bottom of a bag and dropped a bag of apples in on top of them. needless to say, 8 of the 12 eggs were broken. I pulled the apples and the eggs out of the bag and showed the checker the eggs. She sent another box person off to replace the eggs. Apparently this young man hasn't learned that he is employed to serve the public, not the other way around. He obviously resents having to perform his job properly. Too bad....

When I was in high school and my nickname was "slats" because I was so thin, I used to buy a package of cream cheese (4 oz) and eat it like a candy bar. My buddies all thought I was nuts but I loved the flavor (still do) and didn't care that much for candy. I also ate it on top of hot apple pie, would slice one of those little bricks in half horizontally and slap it on top of the pie. Everyone else would have vanilla ice cream on top of theirs but that always tasted too gloppy sweet to me.

I believe that large parties, and by this I mean parties of 8 or more, should have the gratuity added to the bill because there are some really nasty people out there. I have been horribly embarassed when part of a very large party with several demanding people who had the server running back and forth for petty reasons. Then, after figuring what everyone owed, and collecting from everyone the guy who had started it pocketed most of what the rest of us had left for tips. I called him on it and he just turned and walked out of the restaurant leaving an eight dollar tip on an almost 300.00 check. I walked out to the parking lot and told everyone what he had done, asked him for the money I had placed on the table for my part of the tip and he grudgingly gave it back to me then two other guys asked him also and finally he gave in and handed the handful of cash to me. I went back into restaurant with slightly more than 50.00 which, with the 8.00 gave her a 20% tip, which was fair considering the service we got. Had she been working regular tables for the time we were at the table, which was quite a long time, she would have made more than that. Otherwise it isn't fair to servers because large parties often stay at the table far longer than regular parties and the server is cheated far too often by cheap jerks. I often eat out on my own and I go to familiar places where I am known. I tip very well and I get excellent service. When I take a larger party to these places they bend over backwards to accomodate me because they know I will make it worth their while.

I started doing it out of self-preservation. I used to buy the multi blister packs of light bulbs at Price Club, before it turned into Costco. The packaging was rigid and apparently not made to be opened because no matter how I tried to get into it I would end up breaking at least one light bulb and did cut my hands several times. One day I was using the ice pick to burn a hole in a rubber spatula handle because I needed to hang it in a handy spot and of course that one had no hole in the handle. I had just bought a package of the light bulbs and I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Been using it ever since. Smells a little but nothing I can't live with.

More like used it to hook his feet out from under him. Too often these young jerks have the idea that women are easily intimidated by such as him. They are always shocked when someone like me strikes back. Oh yeah, he was one of these jerks who wears his pants hanging very low. Looks like a toddler waddling around with a full diaper to me. Why do they think it looks so cool?

I certainly have something to say when someone in front of me in the express line has a pile of items, way over the number listed. One idiot had about 40 items in his cart and he too kept darting off and picking up additional items. I use a cane to walk and after watching this a couple of times I mentioned to him that he was in the express line. He made a rude remark to me so I loudly announced that I was so sorry that he was obviously unable to read the sign but it specifically said 10 items or less and no checks. He said something else and I again loudly said, you should be ashamed of yourself using that kind of language to me, I am old enought to be your grandmother. The store manager then came over and escorted the man out of the line. I purchased my two items and hobbled out of the store. The lady who had been in front of the man was outside and thanked me. She said that he had kept pushing his cart into her behind and when she looked around he gave her the finger. I didn't stick around to see what happened but jerks like that shouldn't be allowed out in public with normal people. The other thing that gets me riled is people who are obviously not handicapped using the placards and taking up the handicapped spaces. There was a chiropractor in Palmdale who was actually selling the certifications to anyone who would pony up the money. He was caught but apparently a lot of his "patients" are out there using them. Last Friday morning at Wal-Mart I saw a guy in an SUV with the overside tires park in a handicapped space and run into the store. I mentioned it to the security officer who was driving around and he said he was going to call the sheriff. When I came out of the store there were two patrol cars and the security car parked behind and alongside the SUV and three officers talking to the guy. The fine is now very stiff for illegally parking in these spaces and having a falsified document makes it even higher. The local news stations have been doing investigations about fraud - ever since some of the UCLA football team members were caught 3 years ago, parking in handicapped spaces with placards gotten with forged documents. And LAPD has a rotating task force that is also checking on the problem. One estimate was that there were over 50,000 bogus placards just in the L.A. area.

I "burn" them open. I keep an ice pick stuck in a cork block (along with long-tined chef's forks) next to my cooktop. I turn on the gas, heat the icepick in the flame until it glows red and then use the point to cut a slit in the hard plastic. It leaves the plastic with rounded edges so nothing sharp to cut me. Much easier than trying to punch a hole with scissors and straining my hand trying to cut with them.

I don't know how they would manage it. They could produce "proprietary" peppers but would have had to develop a separate individual strain and patent it. There are a lot of patented peppers that have been developed here in the U.S. And there is no question that better farming methods have increaed the yields by a considerable amount. I have driven through areas in Mexico where peppers were the main crop and also in New Mexico (around Hatch) where they are also raised in similar climate conditions. The yields in New Mexico are vastly superior because of the farming methods. Things change all the time. Wisconsin is still known as "America's Dairyland" but now more cheese and other dairy products are produced in California. The state is much larger and has a climate that allows a great deal more use of the land. Then there is the wine production which is phenomenal. Even a "bad year" here produces huge crops. Sometimes the restrictive laws of production that are so dear to the hearts of the French can be detrimental to the small land owners. One friend who travels regularly to France has complained that so many farmers have uprooted ancient olive trees to make way for vineyards, that it is becoming difficult for her to find the small batch, home pressed oils that she loves so much.

I make guava jam or paste (a friend in Orange county has a couple of trees that produce a lot of fruit) and some is made with the additin of hot peppers. I use this with cheeses and also I make beggar's bags from filo dough, filled with a slice of goat cheese, a couple of slices of cooked bratwurst and topped with the guava/pepper jam. The combination of sweet, sour, hot and salty is fantastic.

I second that motion! I have several recipes for ginger marmalade, also with various combinations but am always looking for more.

Oh yes, that is another thing I use the little coupon cutter for, zipping around the rim of cottage cheese, deli salsas and so on that have plastic inner covers with no pull tab, or one that tears off without opening the container. A quick rinse under the hot water tap and it is clean.coupon cutter

I have a couple of little cheap gadgets for opening recalcitrant packages. For opening things sealed in plastic wrap, I bought 3 (for various locations) of the little things made for cutting coupons out of magazines. It has a tiny blade that is super sharp and only projects a fractions of an inch, just enough to cut through 1 sheet of paper or plastic without cutting into the item (or the next layer of paper or plastic). I also have problems with the sawtooth cutters in boxes of plastic wrap, foil, parchment paper. I remove them and toss them out. I have several of these little letter openers from staples I have one that hangs on a string from the rack where most of these items are stored and the others are in various places around the kitchen where they are handy for use. They cut cleanly and there is no exposed blade to cause harm. Another gadget, which I bought in quantity, have given several away, because it is really handy and saves me grief with my arthritic hands, is this Can Claw. It is so helpful for many things besides opening cans. I have one next to the stovetop to lift hot pan lids. I also buy some items in bulk containers that have a cap type lid and an inner lid that is recessed into the contaner and has a tab pull that is difficult to grasp. This thing pulls that (disposable) inner lid out with no problem whatsoever.