MelissaH

How tall is the stack? (I'm trying to figure out whether it would fit on my counter.) And how much steam comes out the top when you use it in whatever mode generates the most steam?

@chromedome, I'm still stuck on the small size. This summer when it's been hot, I've been using my Breville Smart Oven (the XL version that fits a quarter sheet pan) extensively. I've been avidly following these CSO threads, but I just can't quite bring myself to pull the trigger and order yet another countertop appliance, which will be too small to hold much of my cookware. I'm still trying to figure out if this was a conscious decision by the designer (to keep the outside size down) or if it just totally slipped through the minds of the Powers That Be because only true kitchen geeks would care about such a thing. Is anyone else out there totally torn, still?

@Anna N, thanks for the heads-up. Earlier this summer, I ordered spare gaskets for both the Instant Pot and my stovetop pressure cooker. Now, the challenge is to find somewhere safe to store them where they'll be ready when I need them, but not so safe that I can't remember where to find them!

How much of your foraging knowledge will transfer? And how, other than a mentor, will you learn about the foraging opportunities available in your new location? (No need to enter me in the book drawing, as I ordered mine from you back in May and am eagerly awaiting its arrival!)

Keep us posted on the results, please!

Yeah, I've had lid issues both times I've used the mold. I'm new enough to this that I don't know whether it's something I'm doing (or not doing) or if it's just a "feature" of this particular lid/mold combo. And yes, the boozy pops definitely melted much faster. I think I'm going to steal that cookie sheet trick, to see if that works for me. And I'm going to start hunting for a small rectangular container that's *just* the right size.

Something that I didn't see much discussion about: filling and then unmolding. How do you all do it? I have the Norpro mold: makes 10, metal frame with plastic depressions, plastic lid with stick slots. I've used it for two batches of popsicles: the first from tapioca pudding and the second based on a blender pineapple daiquiri recipe. Before I made the pudding, I stuck my wooden sticks in a shooter glass and added water to pre-soak them. (I don't remember where I read about this, but somewhere said to soak your sticks in water for an hour before using them, so I tried it.) The pudding was pretty viscous and dripped when I poured it from a spouted measuring cup into the mold. Once I got it loaded, I gave the top a swipe with a dampened paper towel before I put the lid on, to try and keep the lid from sticking in place. After about half an hour in the freezer, I stuck the sticks in and let it finish freezing. When I was ready to unmold, I pried the top off, dipped the whole thing into a bowl of hot tap water for a five-count, and wiggled the pops out one by one. This worked, but many of the pops had melted significantly by the time I released them. I laid each one on a piece of plastic wrap, folded the wrap over and around, and then stuck the whole lot in another plastic bag to keep them collected. For the pineapple daiquiri pops, I didn't soak the sticks. I again put the mixture in a spouted measuring cup and poured it in. This mixture wasn't as viscous as the pudding but it was still a little on the thick side, and I still got a few drips to wipe off. When I was ready to unmold these, this time I tried dipping one enclosure at a time in a glass of hot water. The first two, on the edge, worked beautifully. But when I got into the middle, I couldn't find a vessel of a size that would admit one or two of the interior enclosures. Instead, I wound up pouring a bit of water from the cup over the enclosure I was trying to free. This worked well enough on 5 of the 6 interior popsicles. By the time I made this batch, I had been to the dollar store and purchased a box of cheapo non-ziplock sandwich bags to hold the individual unmolded popsicles, which I again bagged to contain the lot. I still experienced some melting while the bagged pops waited to be collected, but some of that could have been because this particular mix was such that it didn't freeze particularly hard. The sixth one had the stick pull out, and I scraped out what I could with a spoon and ate it as a slushie. As far as the soaked vs unsoaked sticks: the pudding was easy to eat off the stick. The daiquiri seemed to have frozen right into the stick. More experimentation may be called for. That said: what do you use to fill the mold cavities evenly? And do you have any tricks to make unmolding easy?

Or, for that matter, in Belgium when the apartment where you're living for 3 months has only a microwave oven.

When I read the article, I thought this sounded less like what I think of as a restaurant, and more of what could loosely be described as a supper club.

Two years ago when we visited Nfld, we noticed that onions were scarce and expensive. We surmised it's because they don't seem to grow there, and thus had to be imported. I'll be interested to see if you also found/find this to be the case!

This might be the first time I've ever heard gardeners complain about not having enough zucchini.

I haven't been to either PEI or Nova Scotia yet, but a couple of years ago we were in Nfld. And yes, it was absolutely gorgeous! We only had two weeks so we stayed in the eastern third of the island, but I don't remember seeing any fish drying on screens like that. (Then again, there hasn't been commercial cod fishing in Nfld for quite a while now, while we all wait for the stocks to recover.) We did, however, do a few hikes on areas with lots of wild blueberries underfoot, which made me quite happy.

@kayb, would you be willing to share your cheesecake recipe?

We didn't even try. My cousins in Albuquerque had the weekend pretty well planned. We did, however, go to the zoo and the botanical garden, both of which were great hits with 3 1/2 year old Simon (and to some extent, 10-month-old Max). The chiles we ate were on a cheeseburger at Standard Diner (seemed like a decent benchmark, but I like the ones my husband makes at home better!) and at Amore Pizzeria (highly recommend, especially if you have kids along; the pizza in question was the Zia: white sauce, house-made mozz, green chile, corn kernels). From there, we headed towards Mesa Verde for a night, and then up to Ouray to visit my parents. And therein lies the reason we didn't look too hard for chiles: the H side of my family is notoriously wimpy-tongued. My ABQ cousin, whose father is my dad's younger brother, and I talked about this; we believe that in the elder H home, food was more for subsistence than enjoyment, and there was a profound lack of flavor at most meals. My cousin said that when his folks came to visit, and they went to a more typically New Mexican restaurant, about the only thing on the menu that my uncle could tolerate was...cottage cheese. Even the bit of zing in the vinaigrette on the salad was too much for him. Fortunately, those particular genes did not get passed on to the next generation! Anyway, even if we'd found chiles in ABQ, we couldn't have easily kept them good for the two weeks after that until we got home. We had a few days on the Front Range when we did occasionally smell a chile roaster, but even then we decided not to bother. Wegmans is once again having a chilefest at selected stores this year, and we plan to go to one of those and stock up. Time to use the last few of last year's supply from the freezer! I think I want to try my own version of the Zia pizza, which was stupendous.

While we were in Denver, I picked up a bag of the Bollywood Popcorn to snack on in various hotel rooms and along the way home. That stuff is absolutely addictive: good flavor with just the right amount of heat. And then, after I ate a plastic hotel-room cup of the popcorn, I filled that same cup with chunks of my first (and probably last) Rocky Ford melon in years. The cantaloupe pieces picked up the last little bits of salt and other seasoning, and WOW! I might need to do that again on purpose.

It doesn't have potatoes so technically it isn't a chowder, but this is the second summer I've loved the Serious Eats pressure cooker corn soup. I've never missed the potatoes because there's a ton of starch thanks to the corn. You start by sauteeing alliums, and then add bay leaves, tarragon stems, corn cut off the cobs and the cobs themselves, and chicken broth. Once everything is in, the lid gets locked on for cooking. After a quick cool, the cobs and bay leaves and tarragon stems get pulled out and the soup is buzzed in a blender. I've done all kinds of variations: rendered some bacon and used its fat for cooking the alliums (and added the bacon to my bowl at the end), switched up the varieties of alliums, swapped water for the chicken stock for a completely vegan soup, used cilantro instead of tarragon (and added some halved cherry tomatoes to my bowl), added a sprinkle of grated cheeze, doctored with hot sauce or vinegar when the soup was too sweet for my tongue....

We went to our Aldi this afternoon, hoping it would be Euro enough to have mustard in a tube. Alas, no.

If I'm in Albuquerque the first week in August, what are the chances that this year's chiles will be coming in?

Once upon a time, my husband and I had a subscription to the BBC Good Food magazine. We enjoyed it because it was so different than most of the U.S. magazines, but the subscription was ridiculously expensive. Out of curiosity, I looked recently at an iPad subscription, and discovered that it was much more reasonably priced than the old-fashioned paper subscription. I haven't done anything more than just look at the price. We still have a paper subscription to Fine Cooking, which gets us access to the iPad version as well. We have every single regular issue starting from #1, which makes me feel bad about possibly cancelling or getting rid of the shelf-ful of paper. (The subscription's been a gift from my parents to my husband since the early days of our marriage.) I also get a paper version of Lucky Peach, which I like because the pages are so carefully composed and the content is a breath of fresh air (although if you wait long enough, it seems they eventually put everything on line). I have Saveur and Bon Appétit on my iPad.

We just did a little tandem bicycle ride on the Erie Canal trail. At one point my husband sat down on the trailside to stretch his hamstrings. When he got up, he walked down the embankment a short ways. I thought he was answering a call of nature, which I thought was awfully quick since the last pit stop, but instead he came back with a small handful of ripe black raspberries. Yum!

You can get different pH papers that are good for different ranges. So if you think your pH is "well above 4" and you want to know how far above, you might consider using this paper: https://www.morebeer.com/products/ph-paper-46-62-beer-vial-100-strips.html If you want to get a general idea of where you are, use a wide-range paper to start, and then use a narrower range paper (in the appropriate range) to get more precise. Some pH meters use probes that can be fragile, and that need to be stored soaking in a buffer solution. These are analytical lab–grade instruments, possibly more than you need. If you don't think you're going to need to do this often, I'd probably start by getting a selection of test papers, since you can buy a lot of paper for the price of a meter. Alternatively, if you live near a college or university, try contacting their chemistry department to see if you can find a cooperative professor who already has a suitable instrument.

How precise do you need to be with your pH measurements? You might be able to get by with pH paper instead.

There are still ferries across Lake Michigan, but you'd have to take one from Wisconsin. http://www.lake-express.com/ https://www.ssbadger.com/ (And they aren't inexpensive.)

No room for a cart in my fully-cabineted, galley style kitchen. The thing that really kills me about the CSO is the size. Had it been quarter sheet pan size, it would be easy to say yes!

Make that 10 years out. We did the kitchen the summer of 2006. First, measure everything twice. Then measure everything again. Then go back and triple-check the specs of everything you plan to put in, and make sure it all fits. Spend your money on the things that aren't as easy to replace. This means flooring, cabinets, plumbing. If you need to economize, I still think countertops are a good place to do so. We finally replaced our laminate with a quartz composite last summer. It still cost about what a small used car would have cost. We liked our single large bowl sink enough that we put in an undermount version of the same thing when we replaced the countertop. We still love our range and hood, and think they're worth what they cost. We have never run out of either workspace or electrical outlets, so we must have enough of both. Be cautious with appliance sizes. Our refrigerator crashed earlier this year. We were glad we didn't box the fridge in with cabinetry so we had wiggle room. That allowed us to choose the refrigerator we wanted rather than getting stuck with the one refrigerator on the market that had the same dimensions as the old one. When the microwave gives up the ghost, we will have the same deal, since it just sits on a shelf in a large cabinet rather than being built into a perfectly sized box. You can plan where you think you're going to store things, but actual usage may dictate otherwise. A soak in Oxy-Clean does a great job of degreasing stainless hood vent screens. And make sure you have a plan in place to eat AND CLEAN UP AFTERWARD for your no-kitchen period.