MelissaH

Ooh, you could do a surprise mix of sour and sweet candies, all panned together! Wouldn't that be fun?? (Or maybe not. )

Smithy, that would be wonderful, except that we haven't had a landline phone since we moved into this house in 2003. And I'm not willing to leave a computer on when I'm away on an extended trip. We'd need something with WiFi for the idea to be practical.

The penny on the ice trick, as well as the ice cube in a ziplock bag trick, are fine and good if you're home to look in the freezer. But what I'm mainly concerned about is what happens if the freezer fails (separate from the power going out) and only the cat is home. The cat cannot check on a freezer. Bluetooth is also not so useful in this situation, even if we're only across town. (Never mind the possibility that the freezer goes just after we leave for a long weekend out!) It's one thing to learn that there *was* a problem with the freezer and everything in it is kaput. It's another thing entirely to catch the problem early, and be able to save everything in it with prompt action.

Bumping this topic back up to ask an updated question: does anyone know of a freezer alarm/thermometer with some form of connectivity? If your house thermostat and garage door opener can talk to you through a smartphone app, why not a freezer monitor? I'm thinking of a situation a friend experienced where, unbeknownst to her, the deep freeze was plugged into a switched outlet. The switch was inadvertently turned off, and it was a few days before she returned to the basement and discovered the problem. I'm also envisioning a situation where something happens and a freezer dies when we're not home to hear an alarm sounding, but we would get an alert from an app (or could log in and check every day, if we were worried). Does such a gizmo exist, for a reasonable price?

At what temperature does durian freeze? Does that adversely affect its eating properties? I'd think it would help cut down on volatile compounds.

A friend makes a red velvet cake with beet puree for the coloring. It looked very red.

I <3 my cheapo electric kettle that comes up to a boil and shuts itself off. Works beautifully for cups of tea, french presses of coffee, and (because ours has a wide opening) doing hard-cooked eggs: start the timer when the kettle pops off.

As far as school lunches, if you're going to include things that need to be kept cold, remember that most schools don't have refrigerators for the kids to use. Unless you plan to make a major investment in ice packs that don't need to be returned, you might consider including a frozen juice box or other beverage nestled next to the most perishable items. Or you could even freeze water in a ziplock baggie (or use a Food Saver without the vacuum so you have expansion space, and then double- or triple-bag it to be extra sure it won't leak) to make a small ice pack. Would you be permitted to use your own home kitchen to make food for sale, or would you need to rent commercial kitchen space?

I liked Joanne Chang's recipe, published in her cookbook Flour and available on line here: http://macybakes.blogspot.com/2011/09/mmmmpeanut-butter.html She uses Teddie brand peanut butter, but if that isn't available where you are, look for something that's not too sweet. I prefer something that's homogenized, because the all-natural stuff always seems to make the cookies too oily.

Whatever is in a club sandwich, I've always seen it as a "club sandwich." I don't think I've ever run into a "club house sandwich." Is it possible that the two are not synonymous?

I just want to say that yinz are all making me wish I had the time, space, and money for a freeze dryer. Alas, it's not happening any time soon, so in the meantime I'll just have to live vicariously through you. Kerry, I'm curious whether the spiralizing is important for the fun spiral shape or just because it gives you more surface area from which water can get extracted. Would shaving veg with a peeler be as effective, albeit less pretty?

We have the World Cuisine spiral vegetable slicer. My mom was so impressed by the zucchini "noodles" we made with it (we sauteed them with a touch of garlic) that she ordered one for herself.

I agree with those who soak no-boil noodles before building the lasagna. My current favorite lasagna is the spinach lasagna from Cook's Illustrated, usually the variation with mushrooms added. I put hot tap water in the lasagna pan and then add the noodles from the box, and given them time to soak while I make the white sauce. When they're ready, they come out and drain on kitchen towels until everything else is ready to go. The pan gets emptied and dried, and it's ready to go. I may, at some point, try soaking "normal" dry lasagna noodles à la Adventures in Food, where the pasta gets soaked in room-temperature water for about ten minutes per minute of cooking time as advertised on the box. We've done other pasta this way, and it works. Not trying to start any wars.

The local Polish Catholic church in town sells pierogi every year with your choice of cheese, potato, or kapusta (cabbage and sauerkraut), both for Fridays during Lent and in August at their festival. Because I wanted to learn from the best, I went and helped the kitchen volunteers several years ago, making literally thousands of pierogi during the week before the festival. They liked the way I rolled dough, which would be delivered to me in the community room by a runner. Making the dough was the exclusive province of the little old Polish ladies (back in the kitchen, where what I presume were wisecracks flew back and forth in Polish) so I can't tell you what went into the dough, other than it was made in the food processor and then set aside to rest before coming out to me and the other rollers. What I can tell you was this: we'd roll the dough on a floured surface, and then cut it into circles with a can that had both ends cut off. To make it easier on our hands, someone had cut circles out of fabric and then sewn elastic into the edges. They looked like the sort of pretty covering you might find on a jar of homemade jam in a store, but they were a godsend when you were cutting dough circles for a couple of hours nonstop. We'd put the circles on a sheet pan that had been covered with a piece of parchment dusted with flour. The flour was ordinary bleached AP flour like Gold Medal or Pillsbury, so I presume that's also what they were using in the kitchen to make the dough. We were told it was OK to reroll the dough once, but no more. When we had a pan full of circles, it would get moved to the tables where the fillers, or "pinchers," sat. The pinchers would then put a ball of the day's filling into each circle, fold the dough over the filling, and then pinch the edges shut. The filled pierogi would get consolidated onto a sheet pan (again, lined with flour-dusted parchment), and the emptied sheet pans would get returned to the rollers, to refill with dough circles. The last step was to send the tray of filled pierogi to a "checker," who would look carefully at each pierog to make sure that all the edges were pinched firmly shut, and correct any openings or pinch shut any holes in the skin: if there's an opening, there's a high probability that the whole thing will open up and dump its filling in the boiling water, which makes a mess (which is a big deal if you're boiling hundreds of them) or upsets the buyer (if they're purchased frozen, to be cooked at home). The cabbage-filled ones are the hardest to close properly, because the strands of cabbage tend to stick out from the center and into the edge that needs to get firmly pinched shut. After each tray of filled pierogi is checked, it's carefully labeled (so that someone who wants kapusta doesn't get cheese!) and put in the freezer until it's needed. Tradition has it that the last tray from each day gets boiled and then fried with onions on the spot, for lunch. The last step of each day, before cleanup, is to prepare the next day's filling. This, again, happens in the kitchen so I don't know exactly what happens, but I do know that mashed potato flakes and farmer cheese go into the cheese filling, the potato filling involves a little bit of cheddar as well as spuds that get peeled, boiled, and mashed (and dried out a tad with more mashed potato flakes), and the kapusta involves bought sauerkraut as well as some of the smaller cabbage leaves left over from making the golabki. In any case, after the filling is mixed, it gets brought out to the table along with a stack of parchment-covered sheet pans and a bunch of dishers with a scoop about the size of a ping-pong ball. The filling gets scooped out (and carefully leveled in the disher before pushing out, to control portion size) into arrays on the sheet pans (I no longer remember the array dimensions, but it was something specific so they know how much they have, and therefore how much dough they'll need to cover them) and stuck in the freezer overnight, because a frozen dough ball is easier to grab and seal in dough. On kapusta filling day, it's also really important to try and push any loose strands of cabbage into the filling ball, so that the whole thing freezes into a tidy mound that's less likely to cause a problem sealing. The whole system's about as efficient as it could get, without adding in any more mechanization beyond the food processors for making the dough. It was from these people that I also learned about using a large drill bit to core heads of cabbage, but that's another story!

Interesting that a friend just returned from visiting her in-laws in Oregon, and she reported that they served a brined london broil, which she reported as the best ever. It was brined for about 4 hours and then grilled, she said, and had terrific flavor and texture. Alas, it's not grilling weather here.

Lucky you. Looks like Bosch has started putting their newer manuals on line, but ours isn't (yet?) available. Before the detergent change, we were able to get things perfectly clean with the quick wash cycle. With the phosphate-free detergent, the quick cycle didn't work as well, so we went back to an "auto wash" cycle. The countdown is great, but I adore the delayed start feature because at night, I can set it to finish its cycle just before we get up and around in the morning. When we go into the kitchen to feed the cat and ourselves, we pop the dishwasher open, dump out the water from any containers that flipped open mid-cycle, shake off the plastic stuff that never gets completely dry in the dishwasher, and leave the door open a crack to let everything get completely dry. As for the breaker...quiet is nice. And if you have somewhere to set up the old dishwasher, particularly if it's somewhere that you don't have to listen to it, so much the better!

These are the same questions, IMHO, that apply to any purchase of something that you expect to last a while and that's large enough for you to think more than twice about: a dishwasher, a washing machine, a snowblower, a water heater, a car.... Did it last as long as you expected it to? Did it work as well as you thought it would? Is it worth fixing, or would it be better to instead replace it? (And also: what would happen if you don't replace/repair it now?) We put our Bosch dishwasher in when we completely redid our kitchen in the summer of 2006. We run it three-ish times a week, so that's probably "only" about 1200 cycles, and have been very happy with it. The stainless interior is maybe not quite pristine anymore, but it's still in very very good shape, and the racks have held up well. Our water hardness is such that we need to give our showerheads a vinegar soak about once every four or five years. The dishwasher has been more reliable than either the Amana fridge or the GE Monogram range. The only (minor) issues happened when the detergent manufacturers removed phosphate from their formulas, and the detergent we'd been using all of a sudden didn't work as well as it had. We changed brands and haven't had any issues since. My only real complaint about Bosch is that the owner's manual is apparently not available to download, so I have to dig out the paper one when I want to change whether it dries with heat, since that isn't at all intuitive. And one more thing about Bosch: several years ago, they apparently issued a recall due to a problem with the control panels shorting. I checked our serial number at the time it was first announced, and we were not included in that recall so I promptly forgot about it. We periodically got phone calls for TWO YEARS after that, from Bosch or one of their representatives, to check our serial number and make sure we weren't part of the recall. They were definitely concerned, although I'm not sure how their record-keeping is.

Do you find that more dense objects (peanuts, coffee beans) are easier to coat than the fluffier ones (cereal)?

Not available in my part of NY either. I think they must be another of those downstate-only things. I love Wake Robin Farm's yogurt, but since they decided not to sell at area Wegmans stores anymore because they couldn't meet production (12 Jersey cows at the farm, according to their website), it's become an even more special treat.

Ooh, it's like a giant electric poffertje or aebelskiver pan! I love the idea: way more efficient when you're cooking for a crowd. (Can I come over? Please? I'll even bring some of our fine Lake Ontario octopus with me. )

At the risk of going ghetto, I recall reading about a homemade Funfetti cake recipe, which is a very white cake with multicolored sprinkles. (Ah, here it is: http://food52.com/blog/11225-how-to-make-a-funfetti-cake-from-scratch) I haven't tried it, but you could use chocolate sprinkles or other black or dark candy pieces, or even cookie crumbs, with whipped cream to frost.

Rotuts, could you please provide a link for the HomeBarista discussion? I'd be interested in reading it and the geeky details within.

Anna, absolutely a Slater fan here. I'm currently enjoying Mastering the Art of French Eating by Ann Mah. She and her diplomat husband have just started a stint in France, when he gets sent to Iraq and leaves her alone for a year in Paris. She fills the year by traveling around France, and exploring some of the regional foods.

Ours (red!) arrived while we were away. It didn't need a signature, as our catsitter found the box when she arrived after school. Now debating the first thing to use it for!

Can you order from Amazon.com? (And I'll ask my parents about GJ, which is a couple of hours north of where they live.)