MelissaH

Aaah, one of the great mysteries from when I was a kid! They came as flat sheets of translucent plastic, with designs printed on them. You'd cut them out, punch a hole through if you wanted, and color with colored pencils. When you baked them, they'd shrink and get very thick, and the colors got much brighter than your original colored pencils. We'd make them into necklaces, suncatchers to hang in your windows, and whatever else you could think of to do with a little plastic ornamenty-thingie. Click here to see what the manufacturer says.... MelissaH

It's not exactly a food usage, but we find that clementine crates work wonderfully to start fires in our woodstove. Put a bit of newspaper inside, turn it upside down, pile some small wood pieces on top, light a corner or two of the newspaper, and away you go! We, too, cannot recycle the yogurt containers. They're typically #5 plastic, and around here we only recycle #1 and #2. But in the event that you buy Dannon brand yogurt, there's still something really cool to do with them, or at least with their tops. Dannon brand yogurt comes covered with a foil seal, and then a clear plastic cover with a colored rim on top of that. Cut off the colored rim, and then sand one side very lightly with fine sandpaper. (Don't do this on a nicely finished surface.) Get out your colored pencils, and draw on the sanded side. Punch a hole through if you want. Then bake on a foil-covered tray at 400 degrees F (we use our toaster oven; my MIL doesn't have a toaster oven so we used her regular oven but found that we had to preheat the pan as well as the oven) for 10 to 15 seconds. Voila---homemade Shrinky Dinks! Are yogurt containers microwaveable? I've always been concerned about freezing them because I've had too many non-freezer plastic bags crack and spill their contents all over the deep freeze. But if they're microwaveable, I could see using them for short-term fridge storage. (Of course, there's nothing to say that I couldn't freeze my stock or whatever in the container, and then pop the frozen cylinder out and bag in a freezer bag for later use! Why didn't I think of that before? ) MelissaH

so enquiring minds want to know: just how does that work.... ← First, a picture (reposted from Page 1 of this thread) to show the yucky old kitchen (but now, take out the semicircular shelves and replace them with a cart to give us more countertop): The short stretch of wall is an interior, load-bearing wall. The designer's plan (she gave us two but we like one much better) puts the stove (in her design, a 36-inch range, although I suppose we could do a 36-inch cooktop and put a 30-inch oven down below, since we want the 36-inch space for the burners but the only 36-inch ranges that seem to be available are the pro-style ones with hefty price tags ) on this wall. The kitchen is on the top floor of our house, and she asked early on if we were planning to tear the ceiling down to studs as well as the wall. We are, which gave us the ability to put the stove on the inside. With the stove on this wall, the venting can go up and then across the ceiling: only one bend still. The designer said a previous client of hers, who does much wokkery, did a similar hood with similar distances, and it works fine to contain the oil and smells. Apparently the blowers suck enough to manage that sort of distance without a problem. Something else we've been mulling over: the design we like would make it possible for us to put multiple countertop surfaces in the kitchen, easily. I promise I'll post pictures sometime before the end of the weekend so you can see what I'm talking about, and I'll share our concerns as well. The designer's asked us to take a week and think about what she's given us, and then we'll talk some more to firm things up. MelissaH

We got our drawings from our kitchen designer this morning. All I'll say for now is that we have lots of things to think about. I'll post more later, once my husband and I have digested things a bit, because her ideas are different from what we'd been thinking of. (That's a good thing, in my opinion.) The most valuable thing I've learned so far: Even if you want to vent your hood to the outside, the stove doesn't need to go on an outside wall! MelissaH

There was a tip about this in the latest issue of Cook's Illustrated magazine: get yourself a cheap chisel from the hardware store, wash it up really well, and then chisel the chocolate hunk to pieces. I haven't tried it, but I like the idea. (Now, the real trick will be to keep my husband from taking the chocolate chisel downstairs into his workshop.... MelissaH

Hey, a keggerator! I keep waiting for my husband the homebrewer to decide he's ready for one. Then all we'd need to do is find room in amongst the bicycles, the table saw, and---oh yeah---the car! MelissaH

I just acquired a copy yesterday. I'm working my way through it, as if it were a novel, and I'm enjoying it greatly. To me, the photos add greatly to the ambience. MelissaH

We're back from a working vacation to Belgium and Amsterdam, and tomorrow morning (take advantage of the jetlag and our new propensity to bounce out of bed at 5 AM) we're meeting with our designer to see her drawings. I can't wait! MelissaH

Thanks for this. It will be most helpful to have the Chinese characters together with the English translations, so the next time I find myself in a Chinatown, I don't need to rely upon finding someone to tell me what's what! MelissaH

My husband made his first-ever quiche last night. And in the crust, he used 7 Tbsp. butter and 2 Tbsp. duck fat. It turned out quite yummy, although not excessively ducky. I'd describe it as more crumbly than flaky, but in the context of the rest of the quiche it worked fine. MelissaH

We already have another Weber: one of their propane grills, which has worked marvelously for us for many years. (It was a wedding gift from my uncle! We probably got our two most-used gifts from my dad's two brothers: the grill from his older brother and the pasta pot from his younger brother. And I'm not sure that either of them actually cook much!) What are your favorite sources of wood chunks? We have lots of maple and ash firewood, but we also have lots of poison ivy that grows in the local woodlots. MelissaH

We met with the designer yesterday. She came here, armed with pad, pen, and tape measure, and measured everything. We also talked about the sorts of things we like and don't like, showed her some of the pictures from our scrapbook, and lent her our latest IKEA catalog because they're difficult to come by in these parts (hours of driving from any of their stores). The way it works: she takes the measurements and our ideas back to her drawing board, and comes back to us in a couple of weeks with a few drawings. She'll go through the drawings with us, and when we pay her fee the drawings are ours. We can take or leave as much of it as we want. If we need more work, it's on an hourly basis. I particularly like that she's not trying to sell us anything except her services. Something that we do want to explore, once we have a firmer idea of cabinet plans, is the cost and quality of IKEA compared to what we can get through our local hardware store. While I like the IKEA cabinets, something we've become quite aware of since moving to a small town is buying locally from local vendors when the choice exists. (There's also the small matter of fixing things that don't go as planned: if the wrong cabinet gets sent, it would be a huge deal for us to ship back the old one and get a new one shipped in, compared to calling the hardware store a mile down the road.) If they have something in a style we find appealing and of comparable quality and price, we'd be inclined to go local. If not, we'll need to make plans to visit our friends in Connecticut again. I'm most curious to see how her designs are similar to, and different from, the ideas we've put together in this thread. MelissaH

The propane smoker has been returned. Both the manufacturer and the place I bought it from were terrific about the whole thing. The guy who helped me carry the rig from the car to the store was a little amazed at my husband's dremel tool handiwork, and wondered aloud how the burner ever made it through quality control with that sort of flaw. I plan to bite the charcoal bullet get a WSM, but probably not until after I get back from an upcoming trip to Belgium and the Netherlands. I'm already scoping out plastic waterproof containers that will be large enough to hold charcoal and wood chips, if not also the chimney starter I'll need, but that can also be weighted or tied down so as not to blow away in our winds. Another month or so and I should be back into smokingland. I'll have to try chicken thighs again, to try and get them properly cooked this time. Do I sense a brisket coming up for this year's seder? MelissaH

I'll try to remember to take a picture of my bag and add it to this thread so you know something that's not barley malt powder. MelissaH

I'm so excited! The kitchen designer's coming to take a look at our space and talk to us on Thursday morning! MelissaH

Post-mortem, test results in: I made my phone calls. According to the folks at King Kooker, I did everything right. It sounds as though we took all the necessary precautions, and managed to avoid the problems common to these burners, like tripping tank valves due to not getting the flame lit soon enough. (The mystery part, BTW, is apparently a piece that comes and goes with the years; as I understand it, it goes on the ground under the burner, to help protect the ground underneath from hours of burning. ) But all the troubleshooting we ran through related to the burner, not to the smoker. And my husband's a pro with this style of burner, since he's been using one for the past six years or so. Interestingly, they'd heard about me before I called them: the place I bought the beast from called the manufacturer earlier today, to let them know that someone had gotten the wrong instruction manual. Anyway, I got permission from them to return the beast to where I got it. I called them to give them the heads-up. We'd planned to make a trip down that way anyway, so we'll just add this to our list of errands tomorrow. If they have one in stock, a WSM may be very tempting. Those of you who are charcoal gods, how do you store it? We don't have much indoor space for that sort of thing, so I'm going to be looking for something that's weatherproof. MelissaH

Mimi Sheraton has a chapter on hospital food and other institutional food in Eating My Words, her memoir. MelissaH

Here's the post-mortem report. A good dinner was had by all. A little surprising, especially to me! I never did get my nap yesterday. The first friend arrived shortly after 1 PM, and by 2 I was back in the kitchen working on making =Mark's sauce. The shredded meat went in the crockpot with a splash of water, to be warmed. My husband made his Belgian cheese dip and guacamole (two separate bowls!), and I cut up veggies to go with. I also made one of the apple cakes from Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts and, when that came out of the oven, recrisped the rolls I'd made on Sunday. The meat wound up moister than I had originally thought when I pulled it early Monday morning, and when the stuff from the inside got mixed with the stuff from the outside, the amount of smoky flavor was just about perfect. =Mark's sauce was the hit of the afternoon; we put it in a tiny crockpot to stay hot throughout. And the coarse cornmeal I'd used in the bread was a nice touch; one friend said the bread was the best part of the meal. We completely demolished the guac, and very nearly finished off the cheese dip and veggies. I liked the cake also, which is a good thing because it was really easy to make. And most of the right teams won the games yesterday. We have lots of leftover meat. Some got mixed with the tiny bit of leftover sauce, and packaged to be our dinner tonight. The rest just got put into one large container, and tonight when we're more awake and are not staring at a large mountain of dishes, we'll parcel it out into more appropriate portions for the freezer. I'm having visions of things we can do with it: as a base for stuffing peppers or enchiladas, into omelets, non-barbecue sauced sandwiches, alongside potatoes for breakfast... But there's still a phone call or two to be made, because I didn't really want to buy a cold smoker. So no, I'm not entirely happy with the performance, but the end result was fine this time. MelissaH

Continuing the saga: For some reason I didn't sleep all that well last night. (Maybe because I was worried about the hunk of meat quietly incubating in the oven?) I went to sleep at about 11, woke up at about 2 and checked the temperature (174, if I remember correctly in my current besmoked mental state), went back to bed, and was awakened at about ten minutes to 5 by my thermometer alarm (which I'd set for 190). I turned the oven off, pulled the roasting pan out of the oven, pushed the foil down a bit tighter, and went back to bed for 45 minutes. Then I put a cutting board inside a cookie sheet (secondary containment again) and got out a big bowl, a couple of forks, and a pair of gloves. At this time, I noticed that the faulty probe thermometer was reading 68 degrees. Which sounds like a normal room temperature, except that we keep our house pretty cool, especially during the middle of the night, and another more trustworthy thermometer said it was only about 60 in the kitchen. Something's still not right there. I moved the meat onto the cutting board and peeled the skin off. It was nicely browned, but pretty soggy from spending all that time under cover. I also was able to pull off a bunch of fat from right under the skin. And I started pulling the meat into little pieces, mostly with my fingers. It pulled pretty easily, although one side was definitely a bit dry. (I'm wondering if that's due in part to the brining leak fiasco, although I'd be happy to blame some of it on my miserable oven also.) I definitely noticed that as the meat cooled, it got more difficult to shred. By 7:30, I had all the meat off the bone and shredded, except for one edge that got really dried out and which I just cut away. It tastes pretty much like...ham. My husband said that it tasted like pork roast to him. There's definitely a smoky flavor, although it's not completely through the meat so I think it depends on what piece you happen to taste. The house still has a strong aroma of pig and smoke, but it's too cold out to open the windows and air. Also by 7:30, the roasting pan (into which I was tossing back all the inedibles) was cooled enough for the fat in the bottom to solidify. The bowl of meat got a covering of plastic wrap, and it's now sitting in the fridge until later when I'll reheat it. I moved the solids into a garbage bag, and pulled out my little scraper (a gift from my fellow dishwasherless friend Anne) to help me remove the fat into the same bag. A piece of browned hardened goop on the bottom didn't like being scraped, and bit me on the knuckle. It drew blood. I scraped on anyway, and got most of the goop removed. I put a couple of squirts of dish soap in the bottom of the roaster, put the rack in upside-down, and added hot water to the grease mark so the whole thing could soak while I washed the forks, cutting board, and other stuff I'd made dirty this morning. After its soak, the goop in the bottom of the roaster scraped away easily and I didn't even destroy my scruffy cleaning the roaster properly. Since then we've made a run to the grocery store for a couple of limes (and I'm sure my bitten knuckle will appreciate a squirt of lime juice right now ) and a few other things to go with the pig. My rolls from yesterday didn't turn green or fuzzy overnight, which is a good sign; I'll crisp them in the oven this afternoon. We also got some Portuguese rolls (on sale this week) which can also be crisped, for anyone who would prefer a sandwich a little larger than 1/24 of a 9 by 13 pan. My husband has cottage cheese draining for a Belgian cheese dip, and I have cukes, peppers, carrots, and celery to cut up as dippers. (Radishes would be traditional, but they didn't look good at the store this morning.) We have little potatoes, which can be steamed and smashed to go with this dip also. We have chips and salsa, and guacamole-making materials. I still plan to make the mustard barbecue sauce, especially now that we have lime to add a la =Mark. And I have a bag of apples that can be turned into sauce, pie or other dessert...or nothing at all because I'm really tired and ready for a nap about now. Should dream about that one a little. I'm thinking my next attempt will be on pork belly: homemade bacon, cold-smoked because that's what I seem to be able to do on this smoker in the winter. But not until after I make a phone call tomorrow. MelissaH

The chicken hit 170 degrees F, my thermometer beeped, and so I took the chicken out of the oven. (I never did get downstairs to remove the water pan: read on.) It cooked beautifully, and turned a nice brown, and I moved it to a different container so the pig could go into the big roaster. But as I started removing the meat from the chicken bones, I realized that this is obviously not my day. Part of the bird might have hit 170, but pieces of chicken meat that had been near the skin or on the underside of the thigh were dry and leathery while other pieces closer to the bone were slimy and stuck tight, obviously not cooked through. So nobody's eating chicken tomorrow, because I don't want to kill off even any Notre Dame fans. Back to the pig: I poured the schmaltz from the big roasting pan off, to dispose of later. Then I put the rack back into the roaster and took it down to the smoker. First, I turned off the burner so the rig could start to cool down so I could bring it inside for the night. I still had some smoke coming out, but had no trouble at all grabbing the hunk o'pig off the grill grate with my bare hands to plop it into the roaster. And I didn't even have to move the pig quickly, because it was barely warm to the touch. When the pig came inside, first thing I did was take the thermometer that had been in the smoker all this time, and insert the probe into the meat to get a gauge. The temperature reading said 176 degrees F, which certainly didn't sound right to me. My husband gave me a questioning look as well, so I washed the other thermometer probe, stuck that in, and got a reading of about 80, which sounded far more realistic to both of us. Into the oven the pig went, where it is right now. (It's been in I don't remember how long, maybe a bit more than an hour? and the temp inside is now up to 110.) On a hunch, I took the thermometer and probe that had been outside, and fired up the kettle. When the water boiled, I stuck the probe in and got a reading of 212, about what I'd expect to see for boiling water in degrees Fahrenheit. But when I put some cold water and a couple of ice cubes in a cup, let it equilibrate for a while, and then took its temperature, I got a reading of 113. I don't know what temperature scale that is, but it's not one that means anything to me. Tomorrow when I have both thermometer bodies and probes available, I'll do some more experimenting to see whether we have a blown probe, a blown body, both, or just a bad combination. And although this thermometer seems to do OK at the 200ish range, I'm now questioning whether I actually got an accurate reading of the temperature inside the smoker all that time: was it really at 210 or 215 degrees? Or was it reading artificially high all those hours? I'm frustrated! At this point I'm just praying that the pig comes out of the oven in an edible state. The smoker rig should be cooled down enough to shovel out the wood chunks from the firebox and move back inside for the night by now, and I still have a cooler to scrub out. I think I'll do that first, so the hot water supply will be completely recovered by the time I'm done moving the smoker inside so I can get a long hot shower. I'm also just hoping that I don't discover something disastrous about my rolls tomorrow. I can cook just fine most of the time, really! MelissaH

About six inches, I think. Too hot to get in there and measure at the moment. The biggest issues for me are not that charcoal is offensive, but that it's yet another thing that needs to be kept on hand somewhere out of the way yet not so far out of the way that it's a pain to get at and use, and that it's horribly messy. I'd hoped to avoid the need to acquire a whole separate set of equipment to use for smoking, but rather to maintain some overlap, like the propane tank with its multiple uses, and also the 54,000 Btu burner (I assume that's its output per hour; I got that number off the Web site) that has other uses for us as well. From what I've read, and from my little bit of experimenting on a friend's kettle this summer, I thought it would be easier! MelissaH

I should still leave something there, like maybe the bowl emptied of its water, to catch the drips, right? MelissaH ← Yeah, the empty (foil lined) bowl will make for a lot less mess to clean up. ← OK, then, I'm off downstairs to dump the water bowl and replace it.

I should still leave something there, like maybe the bowl emptied of its water, to catch the drips, right? MelissaH

Timing. I can put together a beautiful main course (cranky smoker not withstanding). I can do a nice side or three. I make a good salad. But I just cannot get them all ready to go at the same time, no matter what combination I choose. Even if I have stuff pre-made so it only has to be heated in the microwave oven, I still can't seem to get everything on the table together. My only hope is to plan for a one-dish meal, like soup with bread, where it won't matter if I need to delay things because the bread didn't bake as fast as I'd wanted it to. I'm sure there's a trick somewhere! MelissaH edited to fix punctuational error

I have somewhat better news to report. At about 4:00 this afternoon, I finally got the temperature inside the smoker (as measured on my instant-read thermometer probe dangling just below the top rack) up to 200 degrees F! To get there, I basically had to keep the burner on, more or less at full blast. I tried notching the burner down a bit, to conserve fuel, but when I did turn it down, the temperature dropped precipitously. The thing that seemed weird is that at no time did the top cover ever seem to heat up to the point where I couldn't comfortably hold my hand against it. In fact, even with the burner maxed out, it's downright cold! Today was on the warmer side: in fact, the temperature's been rising steadily through the day and evening and is now all the way up to 34 degrees. It was also remarkably wind-free, especially for Oswego: we had a little bit of gusting at about 5 PM (just as the sunlight was completely vanishing) but other than that, pretty much nothing. Anyway, my anadama rolls baked, and are now cooling. I pulled the chicken thighs off the lower rack of the smoker. Just for hoots and giggles, I stuck my thermometer probe into one of the larger thighs. (Couldn't do it earlier than this because I needed it for the bread.) Temperature inside the thigh: 80 degrees F. This after being on the cooker for over six hours. The chicken is now on a rack in a roasting pan in my 375 degree oven, with the thermometer alarm set for 170. When it comes off, the oven temperature's getting turned down (that'll happen anyway as soon as I open the door) and the pig's going on the same rack in the same roasting pan, covered with foil, for the duration. I'm hoping it will trip the temperature alarm by midnight. More disconcertingly, especially wrt woodburner's last post, when I removed the bird pieces, the water pan was still about as full as it was shortly after noon. This is telling me that although I'm generating smoke, and although my thermometer is reading a warm air temperature, I'm never transferring enough heat to actually boil the water in the pan. I'm not sure if an insulating jacket would help with this, especially at this time of the year, or if the whole concept of a propane-fired smoker is just a dud. I'm willing to give it another shot or two, especially if I can find an insulating jacket, but on Tuesday I'll be calling both the place I got the beast from as well as the manufacturer, to find out if there's something (key concept or actual physical piece of the puzzle) I'm missing. Here's hoping I don't kill anyone tomorrow, regardless of allegiance!