MelissaH

Nothing more yet for me.

How do these differ from what used to be called prunes, and have since just become, well, "dried plums"?

Too bad. I love the idea of wings with a lime-sriracha sauce. Maybe I'll try that myself, but with better-cooked wings.

My verdict on the Crispy Oats and Honey Nut Crispy Oats: they're OK. Compared to the Wegmans brand, the Honey Nut variety (especially) seems rougher, almost shaggy, on the outside. They're noticeably sweeter. I think I prefer Wegmans enough to spend an extra $0.30 for the box.

And those amounts with the sig figs they give you to work with? Get real!

Another Finish user here. I first saw Finish tablets when we stayed in one of those extended-stay hotel rooms that has a kitchenette with a dishwasher, and they provide you with everything you need including the dish soap. At the time, I looked down my nose at it. But then I read a review of the various dishwasher detergents in Consumer Reports, and they rated the Finish Powerball as #1. It's available reasonably inexpensively at either my supermarket or my warehouse club, and it seems to work well in my dishwasher. The Finish pods seem to be a powder that's pressed together into a lozenge. Many of the other pods are a skin that's filled with liquid or other stuff. I like the idea of just pressed powder, with nothing else there that needs to somehow get dissolved away.

Or maybe even P for poultry, D for drumsticks, T for thighs, or F for fowl, as long as we're getting creative.

My Aldi had the pork belly. Two varieties, same as in the photo from @GlorifiedRice above. $5.99/12 oz. package. I got one of each, along with a couple of boxes of cereal at $1.39/box (Wegmans has the equivalent for $1.69/box right now; their standard price for their own brand when it's not on sale or for those without the shopper's card is $1.99/box).

@ElsieD, I would certainly think you could cut down on the sugar without a problem. It might just take a little longer to rise. Even if it's a bit sweet, it looks lovely. What kind of cheese did you use that you didn't think worked well with the sweetness?

So I just worked through the first week's homework problems. I found them to basically be child's play—but remember, I'm a chemist and I went to graduate school to learn how to be a synthetic organic chemist (someone who makes molecules). Gotta admit, I'm actually a bit disappointed. I'd hoped for more things like the lab assignments and less of the boring dry stuff that turns people off like the homework questions. I don't doubt that the homework assignments cover important concepts, but I want to see how they make them relevant to our kitchen lives, especially the super-quantitative stuff that even I don't recall actually using in lab. (Number of molecules? Really??)

@gfron1, I admire your restraint and your tact.

I also think hard cider instead of sweet would help to tone down the sweetness. But if you're planning to pressure cook with the hard cider, I'd make a point of boiling with the lid off for a few minutes after the pressure releases. Because a pressure cooker seals in the vapors, the alcohol doesn't cook off but stays in the pot, and I find that often gives the dish a harsh flavor I don't care for. Boiling open for a little bit takes care of it for me.

If I've cooked chicken breasts specifically for the purpose of making chicken salad, I'll dice with a knife. If I'm using leftover roast chicken, I'll rip it off the carcass while it's still warm, and then run a knife through it a few times so it's mostly shredded but doesn't have any overlong fibers.

I used thick sliced center-cut bacon. It worked fine chopped up in a chowder, but was useless to separate the slices from the fridge.

Your range looks to be an updated version of mine. I don't have the electronic display, but rather buttons for each of the oven's functions (bake, convection, clean, broil, off) and then a knob to set the temperature. Ours is 36", six-burner natural gas top and electric oven. We found the wok side of the grates to not be worth bothering with. They raise the wok too high off the burner. We either use a flat-bottomed wok inside on the normal (unflipped) stove grates, or take a round-bottomed wok out to the mega-burner that my husband uses when he brews beer. The warming light in the hood, OTOH, is marvelous. The one maintenance issue with the range that we've had recur is a switch or relay or something inside the burner knob assembly that goes bad. When that happens, you turn the burner off but the igniter keeps on popping until you either turn the burner back on or you give up and kill the breaker. When the second one died, we had our appliance repair guy order us five of the replacements parts, so that when the last four went, we wouldn't have to wait for the part to come in. Of course, the last four have been fine now, and the parts have been waiting going on three years now! <knocks on wood>

My SV bacon experiment was also a failure. I cooked it about 18 hours, and then immediately clipped a corner to pour out the melted juices and fat. The drained bag went into a gallon-sized ziplock in the fridge for a day. The next morning, the slices were impossible to separate from one another. I think for this to work, you must either need to use the bacon right away, or separate the slices right away with paper between them before putting them in the fridge. My verdict: more trouble than it's worth, especially compared to the ease of cooking anywhere from 2 to 6 slices in the microwave, or more than that in the oven.

At the risk of sounding like a pot calling the kettle black: YOU'RE ALL ENABLERS OF THE WORST KIND!

Assuming you can't add a freestanding freezer, is there any way you could store some of your stocks by canning them rather than freezing them?

And do you plan to go with another monster of similar size, or something more like what is in most houses?

@gfweb, is anything staying, or will you replace all the appliances?

Another one I just heard about is Soup Nights by Betty Rosbottom, published in October 2016. I got a recipe for a cauliflower soup with chorizo from the Splendid Table's email list. I love making soups, and based on the sample recipe, I wanted to check this one out. But it's apparently only available as a paper book way out of my price range, it's currently out of stock at Amazon anyway, and it isn't in either my local library system or the nearby university's library. Has anyone seen this book?

I've never ordered by mail from PennMac, but they're always a stop when we visit Pittsburgh. The prices in the store have always been more than fair; I couldn't imagine that mail order would be any different other than the addition of shipping costs.

Either that, or like you might get in the early stages of cutting one a squid up sort of like those ways you can cut a hole in a postcard large enough to step through.

The apartment we lived in for three months when we were on sabbatical in Belgium had a combi-oven. I hated it because it didn't seem to do anything well. Based on that experience, I don't think I'd ever consider one for my own house.

We consciously chose a large single sink (big enough to hold our largest roasting pan, or a half-sheet pan flat) because it's easy to subdivide a large sink with a dishpan, but it's impossible to make a divided sink big enough that you can wash a large roaster or a half-sheet pan easily and without cursing. This is my first large single sink and I don't think I'd ever go back, given a choice.