Special K

Just brilliant. I have leaves, I have garbage bags and I'll be doing this next week. Thanks! And the both of you are doing a good deed - keeping the street drains clear and the street from flooding!

Just about all of the above, and I use them to snip "slashes" in bread loaves, too. I keep them standing in the top of the kitchen string cone thingy, which lives on top of my kitchen scale, always handy. I have the Wustoff come-apart shears, easy to clean!

Costco sells the Active Dried Red Star yeast in the vacuum-packed brick.

Loosecannon Dolph, I agree with you completely! Something about "being thrown to the wolves," (this was at culinary school) as you put it so eloquently, really brought me out of my shell. In about three months, I went from the silent, acutely self-aware, miserable newby to one of the gang; something I never did accomplish in regular school or in other jobs. I'm not cooking professionally now, but in my present job I've managed to keep that self-confident attitude, and it's great! It's really all about forgetting yourself and putting the group's needs first and foremost, I think. All of the advice here to SaladFingers is very good.

I made a double batch of snickerdoodles yesterday for the kids at school. I've finally figured out that in my new convection oven, it's ten minutes exactly at 400 degrees (the oven automatically turns it down to 375 when I ask for "convection bake"). The trick is to take them out before they look done. Also, I've been making apple galettes a lot lately - dead easy; frozen puff pastry (I just thaw it, double a folded sheet over and roll it out to make a roughly 9 x 14 inch rectangle (2 per halfsheet pan), build up the sides, fill with sliced tart apples and sugar and butter, with a little bit of cinnamon, and grace with a bit of thinned down apricot preserves. It takes no time at all to make a pretty design with the apples, and it always gets oohs and ahs. Freezes and reheats easily, too.

I use the Red Star brand from Costco, and I use it straight out of the freezer. I just bought a new bag - I'm sure the last one lasted for at least three years, but I've been baking a lot more lately.

Agreed to all of the above - as long as it's garlic (or onion) powder, and not garlic (or onion) salt (bought by mistake).

We tried the ziplock bag in hot water method last night with some lamb chops - worked perfectly! Thanks.

I don't know if you've ever tried garlic ice cream, but I wouldn't recommend it. I had just a taste of it years ago at the Gilroy Garlic festival, first thing I tried, and it ruined the whole rest of the day. Even the things that *should* have had garlic in them tasted terrible after that ice cream. Maybe if I'd saved it until last? Don't think so.

Oh, man, that sounds GOOD!

My reputation makers are all things I've been working on, refining, for a long time. Mostly they used to be main dishes like baked chicken - I've learned to use thighs, not breasts, and bone-in, not boneless, for better flavor, and I've experimented with marinades - yogurt, buttermilk, etc. Just this weekend I tried using jarred (Marie's) blue cheese salad dressing, and it was great - it's really good and very easy. I always do big batches, and the resulting chicken salad from the leftovers is always great, too. I just use whatever I used for the marinade as the binder. But lately I've had sucesses with two baking projects, scones and onion rye rolls. This is challenging, because I don't eat baked goods myself, so I must rely on aroma and looks, and my (I must say very willing) husband or the kids at our school to be my taste-testers. For the scones, I made two breakthroughs recently. The first is grating the butter, rather than chopping it. Makes a big difference. The second is shaping the dough into a loose log roll and then breaking off six equal sized pieces and gently shaping them into balls and flattening ever so slightly by pressing a little more of whatever fruit (or chocolate chips) I'm using into the tops, rather than doing the disk-cut-into-six-equal-wedges thing. They come out so much better this way for me. (I know, I must have been overhandling the dough). I'm a bad scientist, according to my husband -- I made both of these changes in the same batch, rather than one at a time, so I don't know which one made the difference - I think both did. For the rolls, ah, they were a challenge! For a while now my Mom has been sending my husband onion pumpernickelrolls from her local Publix, which he loves, and I'd been trying to dupicate them. Mine aren't exactly the same (hers are pumpernickel, mine are lighter rye), but he swears they're perfect. I did what I usually do - checked the ingredients on the ones Mom sent, scoured the internet and my cookbooks for recipes, and just played in the kitchen until I got the results I wanted. But the breakthroughs there were to use beer instead of water (which I now do with most breads - try Guiness Stout in the case of the no-knead bread), and to use raw onions in the dough, but carmelized ones on the tops, which look much nicer. I had thought that caramelized onions *in* the dough would be a great idea, but they lost their snap! Oh, and I also doubled the amount of caraway seeds I found in most recipes. Wish I could eat them - they smell absolutely wonderful. I brought those in to work for the montly science dept. lunch, and now that's a permanant gig. I have to say, both of these breakthroughs came after I traded in my old oven for a spiffy new convection one - it's just so much fun to play with! The kids are getting snickerdoodles all the time now, because I can make a huge batch in no time. Fun! Oh, and reputation makers for kids are all about sweet, sweet, sweet. The bittersweet chocolate brownies which all of our adult friends love bombed completely with the kids.

I glued a couple of hooks to the ceiling above the sink, and I hang the silpats using those pants-hanger things, with the two clips. I store them in the pans, which fit nicely below the pull-out drawers in my lower kitchen cabinet.

I really like my Simplehuman motion sensor soap dispenser. It's so nice to get a dollop of soap by just sticking my hand or the sponge under the dispenser, and it has an optional feature I like - you can set it to blink its little blue light for exactly 20 seconds after the soap is dispensed. I wish we had these at the school where I volunteer - the kids would know exactly how long to scrub their hands before rinsing! Oh, and if I need extra soap, there's a continuous dispenser button, too.

You're right, Fooey! I just got this in the mail the other day and it has gone right to the top of my favorite cookbooks. Thanks!

Don't know if you've seen this new urban chicken book: City Chicks: Keeping Micro-Flocks of Laying Hens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-Recyclers and Local Food Suppliers (Good Earth Publications, $22.50), by Patricia Foreman. Little article about it in yesterday's "Currents," NYT.

I'm definitely a board prepper. That's why I have five Epicurean boards - one large, three medium and one small - all with permanant places on the counters in my small kitchen. They're much easier to clean than a bunch of bowls (just wash, rinse, dry and put right back on the counter), and I can use different boards for different tasks - one for meat, one for aromatics, etc. I love those boards! (I stick those little silicone "dots" to the backs for traction). Also, keeping the boards permanantly in place on the granite counter saves my knives from well-meaning friends who would cut directly on the stone.

For me it's when I'm a guest in someone else's home, and they are cooking - holding the (dull) knives wrong, adding pepper from a ten-year-old tin of tasteless dust, opening cans and dumping the contents into a saucepan, which then gets turned on "high" and forgotten, or grilling steaks or salmon to oblivion. I say "Behind you" all the time in public (that "you" makes it intelligible to non-kitchenites), and I also have wiped my hands on the imaginary towel!

I would visit Fauchon and Fouquet's, and Dehillerin.

Best thing to do, I think, is convert to grams. Gourmet (I think it was) did a comparison of a whole bunch of measuring spoons a while back, and they were all different. In fact, I think we've discussed this here before. I'm sorry, I don't have time right now to find it. Try this: http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/gram_calc.htm

Mmmmm, especially if there's also one last beer hidden in the back.

So the bacon craze continues, at least in Seattle: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:zh123...n&ct=clnk&gl=us What do you think? Would you try it? Would you make it yourself or buy it?

Oh! Cool! That sounds like a neat gift item. Thanks.

Metal balls?? Wow. I can see using rubber balls, maybe like those spiked things they sell for washing machines, but metal? I'd crack the decanter for sure.

There are special brushes, but I just put mine in the dishwasher (mine's one of the smaller upright ones, though, not the fat round one).

It was always a main dish for us (from Atlanta and Nashville), but then we didn't have a lot of money and often skipped meat (we were vegetarians before vegetarianism was cool). We never had it for company, who would definitely have been looking around for the "something barbequed or deep fat fried." I still consider it a main dish, but I usually do add a bit of meat (so I no longer associate it with being poor).