MelissaH

Here in Oswego we still don't really have aisles that look like these. Of the three grocery stores in town, only one is set up such that you can pass someone else without scraping something off a shelf. Our produce is getting better, even in just the two years we've been here, but when I need a produce orgy I have to drive the hour to Wegman's.How big or small a town do you feel like you live in? Do you feel "safe" running to the grocery store in whatever you happen to be wearing, or are you pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you know and you feel like you need to at least put a baseball cap and a non-holey shirt on? Enjoying this slice of your life tremendously! MelissaH

Recipe, please? MelissaH ← I added it to the eGRA. Check it out. ← Thank you! Have you ever used frozen spinach to make this? One box worth? MelissaH

I've tried just about every way. My preferred method, when I have time, is to peel and de-seed them. When I'm in a hurry I just de-seed them and call it good. This particular batch had been chopped in a food processor (not pureed, just chopped) but I've sometimes just cut them in half, dug or squeezed out the pulpy seedy stuff to the extent possible without damaging the flesh, and crammed them into a container or freezer bag. ← Hm. In our Ohio days when we had a garden, we never got so fancy. We'd take the tomatoes just as they came off the vine, give them a little bit of a rinse under the hose, and then freeze them like you'd do for berries: on a sheet pan in a single layer until they're solid, and then packed into a double layer of freezer bags. Then, when you're ready to use them, you take out as many as you'll need, and stick them in the fridge inside a bowl. When they thaw, the skins slip right off. If you can catch them while they're still a little frozen-crunchy inside, it's also pretty easy to dig out the seeds and the slime they're encased in. If they're completely thawed, the tomato flesh is a little more fragile. MelissaH

Recipe, please? MelissaH

Downy woodpeckers already? Ours pretty much vanish for the summer. We've given up on leaving suet out once it gets warm: not because the suet melts (our orchard store actually sells suet blocks that are guaranteed not to melt) but because the &^%$ squirrels demolish a whole block in about ten seconds. Do you have a squirrel issue? The dishwasher! Oh, a dishwasher! I also noticed that you don't have a hood over your stove. Have you found this to be an issue, or are you just very good at not making dishes that create smoke? I like this story. Very much. I like all the pretty things on top of your cabinets. That's a big improvement on a soffit!MelissaH

Got a ricer? My favorite way to get rid of the water from spinach (or shredded zucchini, for that matter) is to put a handful or two into my potato ricer, held over the sink, and squeeze! MelissaH

I'm most definitely not a pro chef, but I did plenty of cooking without a stove back in the days when I lived in a dorm and the only cooking appliances permitted were hot pots and small refrigerators. No microwaves, toasters, or anything else. Or what about some tapas-like little plates, which could be prepared elsewhere and then either served cold or heated in a microwave? (I like that idea!) Maybe a Spanish tortilla? Bread with ham? Potato salad? Seasoned chickpeas, roasted or not? Cured olives? Slices of pate? You can make more-than-decent bacon in a microwave; this time of year, BLTs go with everything. Get a single burner of some kind (standard electric, portable butane, or induction) and set up a pot with a steamer basket for seafood and maybe vegetables too? Actually, I think someone makes an electric steamer. (Come to think of it, you could even do shrimp or fresh pasta in a wide-mouthed hot pot!) With a rice cooker, you have the ability to make rice to go with. Get a panini press and you can do all kinds of toasted sandwiches: use your imagination! If you can't find decent bread to bring in, you could investigate acquiring a bread machine. Heck, you could even get an electric griddle and do pancakes (blini with caviar, anyone?) or acquire a waffle iron. A George Foreman-type grill may be another viable option, although in my opinion the best use for one of those is to cook the frozen slices of garlic bread from the grocery store. Soup or stew made in a crockpot? MelissaH

pa-TEET-sa? MelissaH

We just got the September issue of Gourmet in today's mail. My husband got everything out of the box, and while we were at a friend's house made the comment that the new cover art looked really disgusting. At the time, he had both hands busy replacing an electrical outlet. My friend and I looked at each other quizzically; she hadn't yet retrieved her mail to look at her copy. I asked, "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" His reply stunned me: "Definitely mineral. It looks like dirt. Maybe a scoop of ice cream, on a pile of potting soil." We got home and he tossed the mag my way, still in its plastic wrapper. And he's absolutely right! Maybe that's a new tactic: put dirt on the cover and force people to read the article to find out whether it's for real. MelissaH

I've discovered that cookie or cake crumbs make a nice addition to galettes, to help sop up juice from nice ripe fruit. Don't know if it's practical to make mini-galettes, but I'd think that if you wanted to do a creamless fruit tart, you could make use of them in that. Almond goes nicely with many fruit flavors. MelissaH

Reminds me of the first time I saw Oswego, on a house-hunting trip after my husband had accepted the job here. It was the week after Memorial Day, and the whole two days the fog at the shore was too thick to see the lake. It took until our second house-hunting trip for me to believe that there actually was water out there! We're only supposed to get down to the mid-60s tonight. Our refrigerator's a little smaller and warmer than yours. MelissaH

If Daddy-A ever was in our neighborhood, I'd happily feed him, ply him with appropriate beverages, or whatever it took. However, since I have a hard time getting people to even drive the hour up from Syracuse, I somehow doubt this will happen. MelissaH

I believe the active ingredient is oxalic acid. Don't know what else is on the ingredient list. Maybe scrubbing with a rhubarb leaf would do the trick? MelissaH

Yesterday we replaced the other circular fluorescent ceiling light with the other Ikea fixture. Overall it's a huge improvement, because the light now shines into the areas that actually get used. I also like that you flip the switch and the light is on instantly. The downside of these fixtures is that because they're mounted in the middle of the ceiling, your shadow flops right over your work surface. I don't think these lights are ideal for the only lighting in a kitchen, especially as a retrofit. However, it's still a huge improvement over what we had before, and it's livable for the next year or so. In the "new" kitchen we'll be looking into undercounter lighting, and in the areas that don't have upper counters we can put something directly above on the ceiling. MelissaH

Don't know that you could undermount a sink, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't do a tile-in sink at the same level as the tiles, like you can do with any other tiled countertop. That would accomplish the same goal as the undermounted sink: removing the raised lip that makes it impossible to just brush gunk from the countertop straight into the sink. MelissaH

I've known some gymnasts who stored their grips in a bag. MelissaH

Just a reminder: people live in parts of New York State other than the immediate NYC area. MelissaH

Don't know about Hobart grease in particular, but Simple Green does the trick for a lot of other stuff. For something really tough, we spray it on neat. MelissaH

Sounds like a great way to keep things available but out of the way. My one concern is that if you're putting a recessed shelf in, you'd be taking out pieces of studs. I really hadn't planned to reframe any walls during this process. But it would certainly be possible to put it "cubbies" between studs without otherwise affecting the structure. (I say this not knowing what lurks between my kitchen wall and my bathtub surround ) MelissaH

Our potholders currently live in the top of the rickety turntable in the corner between work area and stove. If we wanted to display them, we'd have to get some new ones without burn holes, scorch marks, or bleach spots. We should probably get some new ones anyway, come to think of it. One of the reasons I like having my stuff in crocks is that I can then organize it, at least somewhat. One contains nothing but whisks. Another has mostly spatulas. My favorite ladle is so enormous that it would tip a crock over, so it has to go in the drawer. The skimmer I keep in the drawer also, but more because I don't want to get it splattered with other stuff. We should look through everything and assess our near-the-stove storage needs. Any chance I could convince you to work for the patent office? MelissaH

Two advantages, from what I've seen. One, it is cheaper. Two, granite tiles you can do yourself. You order the tiles (around here, nobody keeps them in stock) and rent, borrow, or steal a tile saw for a day or two. It's pretty much like any other tiled countertop, except that the tiles are granite. A slab typically needs to be installed by someone else (or three or four people, depending on the size of the slab) and you hope they measured things properly before they cut out the sink. MelissaH

To me, sour cherries scream PIE. I like an all-butter double crust pie. There's a decent crust recipe in the September/October issue of Cook's Illustrated. For the filling, measure out 6 cups of pitted frozen cherries and let them sit to thaw. Once that's happened, add about 3/4 cup of sugar, 3 or 4 Tbsp. of instant tapioca blitzed in a spice grinder, and a few drops of almond extract. Toss together and let sit for 15 minutes before loading everything including all the juices into the crust. After you finish building the pie, brush the crust with a little milk and sprinkle with sugar (I like a coarser sugar, but even regular old sugar works fine). Bake till done; I won't say anything about oven temps here because my oven seems to break all normal rules of kitchen heat transfer. MelissaH

Ah, that helps. I'll have to give it a try, next time I make a sorbet. Thanks! MelissaH

Nobody complained. The cake's texture inside was quite acceptable. Nobody said anything about the muffin-top texture of the top edge. The flavor went nicely with either the vanilla or the butter pecan ice cream (hey, I had to: Breyer's was BOGO at the supermarket we stopped at on the way over!). The cherries tasted good: I took a couple of cups of sour cherries from the freezer, let them thaw in a saucepan, added a glug of kirsch, about 1/3 cup of sugar, and a tablespoon and a half of instant tapioca whirled in a spice grinder to them, let it sit for about 15 minutes, and then brought it up to a boil. That got them thicker than I'd intended so they were more "goop" than "sauce." My next thought was to split the cake layer in half and pile the cherries between, since (duh! like any good pie filling would!) they would have held up nicely in the slicing process. But I didn't because I wasn't sure how the layered result would have traveled the five miles there. So instead I put the cake on a foil-covered piece of cardboard and wrapped the whole shebang with plastic wrap for transport, and transferred the cherry goop into a Gladware container. Then when it was time for dessert, we each got a slice of cake and a scoop of whichever ice cream, and we did the cherry goop on top by courteous self-service. We have tons of ice cream in our freezer now, but we left the cake behind. (Too bad: the leftovers would have smashed into nice crumbs to absorb fruit juices in a galette, especially after a couple of days!) There were no cherries left over to worry about. I'd do it again that way, with maybe a little less thickener in the cherries to get sauce rather than goop. If we were serving at my house, I'd definitely try stuffing the cake with the cherry goop, and maybe really going over the top with a dark chocolate glaze? MelissaH

Thanks for the info. Our arrangements for this meeting are already set, and in reality I can't do anything other than suggest places. The actual decisions are made by others, and if we're really lucky we have someone who lives in the area who can check it out and let the rest of us know whether to come hungry. (We had a couple of really bad restaurant experiences: in NYC at a Mars-themed place that was far more suited to the bday parties for 10-year-olds that were around us and served us food that tasted worse than prefab, and in Anaheim at a place that was pretty much a Denny's by another name. Those two, at back-to-back meetings, nearly caused a full-blown revolt.) MelissaH