MelissaH

Those smashed potatoes are my absolute favorite way to use what is marketed around here as "salt size" potatoes. We'll sometimes do the crisping on the grill. Have you ever tried that with the egg?

Kira looked incredibly happy eating that waffle. Do you think the sandwich technique would work with "normal" waffle batter also? (My usual is the ingredients from Marion Cunningham's yeast waffle recipe, sometimes with buckwheat flour subbed for about a third of the white flour, mixed according to the technique from Cook's Illustrated.) And please, yell when you're getting ready to plan your next Trader Joe's run!

How does the steam-bake mode compare to, say, using a regular oven but either tightly covering the food in question or pouring hot water into a preheated dish alongside? I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around the benefits. Anna or Kerry, is the Costco in Sudbury new, or has it been there a while?

Anna, is the smaller-than-1/4-sheet size of the Combi Oven starting to get on your nerves at all, especially compared to the Breville?

So, KennethT, shall we put you first on the list of beta-testers for THAT?

You have my sympathies on the dishwasher's infirmity. But I have friends who only ever use theirs as a drying rack! How do you keep the swtrawberry crumble from getting all watery? When I bake strawberries, they always seem to exude their liquid in an effort to avoid the heat of the oven, and whatever else is in with them becomes intolerably soggy.

I'm with the foil contingent, regardless of whether I'm cooking them indoors or out.

Mine looks like a white plastic pair of scissors, except that instead of blades there's a cup with a hole on one side, and a pusher on the other side. Then again, I'm absolutely anal about pitting cherries for use in baked goods or for freezing, and I won't put a cherry into the "pitted" bowl until I know I have put the pit into the pit bowl.

Martha gives me the willies. She's got a baking show on now in our area, but she can't measure worth squat, yet she talks about how important it is to measure properly. If she really felt that way, she would tell us all to buy a scale, and show us how to use it.

How many ovens will you have available, once everything is unpacked and set up?

I'm thinking breadfruit, maybe?

When I was in Scotland last month, I obviously forgot to look at the varieties of oats. This linked recipe specifically calls for "medium oatmeal." What would the other options for oatmeal be? What do they look like? I ask because most U.S. oatmeal is of the rolled oats variety, and looks flattened. The Scottish oats look more 3D (and have more fine matter than the Irish oats I can find here).

I anxiously await your further experiments. I am particularly interested to hear if it and the Breville are really different versions of the same thing, or if they're different enough that they could both warrant a place in the kitchen (sorta like a blender and a food processor).

Or visit a homebrew supply store.

Nothing to add about making it easier to peel the eggs, but I like to use brown eggs (rather than white ones) for eggs that get peeled after cooking because it's easier to see the bits of shell that you haven't yet removed.

Our solution to this, as well as all other cereals, is a clothespin. When you open the bag inside the box, do so carefully (using scissors if need be). Then, after you pour out what you need each time, push the air out of the bag, fold the top two corners in, roll the top down a couple of times, and secure with a clothespin. For us, anyway, this keeps the cereal crispy long past the amount of time a box of cereal SHOULD last in our house. This even works for things with a sugar coating on the outside like Corn Pops, which otherwise become sticky and not worth eating in a couple of summer days.

Here's my knife, alongside my 8-inch Henckels chef's knife as a size comparison. This was a wedding gift, nearly 16 years ago now. I love it still!

We also like pressure-cooker risotto. Just as Franci does, we cook it directly in the pressure cooker pot. No muss, no fuss, quick dinner. Definitely not soup.

Was the table as crowded as last week?

I agree with the above sentiments: don't use things that you don't feel good about, and don't make things that you're not going to be happy with. Instead, find recipes that start without eggs, butter, or cream. Are the vegans willing to eat traditional-process sugar? Will they have an issue eating things prepared in your dairy- and egg-laden kitchen? (If not, that might be a whole nother deal-breaker.) One book that seems to have some reasonably good ideas for vegan desserts is Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. If you do chocolate work, what about non-dairy chocolate bark with dried fruit, nuts, or whatever else you could add? Or if you're into candymaking, what about nut brittle (with or without a chocolate coating)? Could you make something like a pastry shell out of baked phyllo dough, and use that in place of a traditional tartlet shell, with a fruit-based filling? The one swap that I'm sometimes willing to make is to use coconut milk in place of dairy milk, assuming that whatever else in the recipe will work with that flavor. (Tropical rice puddings, maybe?) If you think there's a market for vegan pastry in your area, it might be worth doing some experimenting in your spare time. But I don't think the traditional pastries you mention above would do the trick for anyone in vegan versions, especially if they don't work for you.

Nobody has yet mentioned the mirrored disco ball on the ceiling of the restaurant. It hung next to the projector. Neither was operating, yesterday at lunchtime. The aerial view photo isn't great, as I was just holding my cell phone as high over the table as I could reach, and blindly snapping photos. I would have needed to stand on a chair to see what I was photographing, and I was afraid I'd lose my balance and fall into the (fully loaded) table if I did so. Lunch was truly dizzying, and I'm still thinking about the potato pancakes. Next time, I think someone needs to try the golabki...and the czarnina! (Maybe in winter?)

I'd think that isopropanol would evaporate off very quickly, so you aren't actually eating any of it. My concern would be with the nonvolatile impurities, which (again) may or may not be considered safe to ingest in any amount. If the cocoa butter is a fat, is there any chance that you could dissolve it using another oil, whatever you typically keep in your kitchen? Would filling the molds with oil and letting them sit for a bit soften the cocoa butter crystals to the point where you could dump most of the oil out and then wipe the molds clean? Or what about hot water? IIRC, the phase diagram of cocoa butter doesn't include anything with a melting point too high, so near-boiling water might melt the cocoa butter and allow you to wipe it away. (Conversely, if very hot water doesn't do anything to the granules in your molds, it's probably not cocoa butter gunking them up.)

No more Heinz factory in Leamington? Say it isn't so! We did a bike ride through there many moons ago, and the Heinz factory is one of the things I remember as distinguishing Leamington from all the other towns along the lakeshore that we rode through. (Well, that, and a great kitchen store called Strawberry, and our first-ever venture into a Canada Tire store, and the oppressive heat and unrelenting sunshine that turned our tent into an oven for the two nights and a day we were there. My contribution to this topic is one favorite from Girl Scout Camp days: Fried Ham! As I remember the words: Fried ham, fried ham, cheese and bologna. After the macaroni we'll have onions, Pickles, and peppers, and then we'll have some more Fried ham, fried ham, fried ham! (Save some ### verse. ***** talk, much much worse!) For the second (third, fourth, etc.) we'd keep the words the same, but change the style: "doggie talk" where all the words became woof, baby talk, Pig Latin talk, or whatever other talk we could come up with. It was invariably much much worse.

We use a remote-read indoor/outdoor thermometer. The transmitter goes in the fridge or freezer, and sends its reading to the receiver, which lives in the kitchen. No need to even open the door to get the temperature inside. I'd love to get something with a little bit of memory, so we can track at least the high and low (for instance, when we're out of town) but I suspect my geek side is showing now.

Is there any reason you couldn't just do what most industries do: pay your employees a higher rate, raise your prices to cover the higher rate, and eliminate tipping?