MelissaH

Yes. Reminiscent of Spanish pimenton. I think it would be great to add a little bit of smoke (and spice) without using a smoked meat product.

I first heard about prebaking the crust for a 2-crust pie in an article about Bill Yosses, (soon-to-be-former) White House pastry chef. He'd blind bake the bottom crust, load the pie with apples or whatever, and then add the top crust and bake the whole pie. Supposedly, the advantage is that the bottom crust is guaranteed to get cooked properly and stay crisp. I've been known to bake "cookies" of pie crust, and place one on top of each serving of open-faced pie. For people who love crust, this is a way to give them more of the good stuff.

We got it to replace a no-longer-functional box grater, and have been pleased with it. We haven't had any issues grating cheese. YMMV.

Hi, Rob! I'm left-handed but my husband is not. Lately, he's the one who has hurt himself (cut, burned) in the kitchen. The two appliances that I seem to struggle more with are the (manual) can opener and the handheld mixer. I know there are left-handed can openers, but every one I've ever seen has been a piece of junk compared to the heavier-duty "normal" versions, so I struggle. The mixer cord annoys me, but my mixer issues stem more from having trouble pushing the beaters in securely...and I always put the bowl on a piece of nonskid so I can let go of the bowl and move the cord out of the way as needed. As long as I have sufficient elbow room on the proper side, I have no issues folding batters. As long as my knives are sharp (and as long as I'm not trying to use the one knife in my husband's knife drawer with a distinctly right-handed handle), I can chop without cutting myself or anything else that isn't supposed to be chopped. I think you've just had a coincidence. Don't distrust us all. And remember that we often use the "other" side of the vegetable peeler, so you can actually keep the same one for twice as long! MelissaH

And our local indie bookstore also sells ebooks, so you can walk in and purchase them using cash (or any other payment method the store accepts).

Sad. Thank you, Fat Guy.

Have you tried tightening the roll using the parchment paper and either a thin cutting board or bench scraper (or a no-sided cookie sheet if you have one)? Form the dough into a cylinder, horizontally in front of you on a sheet of parchment. Then curl the parchment over the top of the cylinder towards you (don't roll it up in the paper yet). Place the edge of the scraper or whatever you're using on top of the parchment, parallel to the cylinder but at a bit of an angle to the table, and push it into the gap where the dough cylinder comes down to the surface. Then pull the BOTTOM edge of the parchment. This will pull the parchment taut around the dough, which should form itself into a perfectly round cylinder and push out any air inside. The edge of your scraper or cutting board should hold the dough in place and keep you from whipping the paper off. Once the dough cylinder is tightened up, you can roll it up in the parchment and twist the ends. I rest my dough cylinders in the fridge or freezer in a cradle I make by slitting open a cardboard roll from paper towels, to keep the side from flattening. Clear as mud, right?

I'll be spending a few days in the Auburn/Lewiston area later this week. Are there any restaurants or markets I should keep in mind? One meal will be with a friend who is not an adventurous eater and prefers steaks and seafood. For him, Italian is as ethnic as it gets. I eat just about anything. We will have a car, and would be interested in potentially bringing seafood home with us if something good is in season now. Thanks for any help you can lend.

For several years, we periodically sent our knives to Bob Kramer for sharpening, and he did a terrific job with them. But then he appeared in magazines and no longer had time to sharpen knives that he didn't make. That was when we bought an EdgePro, and we've been very happy with it.

Actually, no. According to page 216 of my hard cover book (near the beginning of chapter 14, if you have an ebook), he says, "The finished soups were to be placed on the shelves of the walk-in cooler so the older soups were used first." After a sentence or two, he continues, "Demand would require that we produce 150 gallons of hot soup each morning, but the containers couldn't go directly into the fridge because their heat would quickly turn the fridge into a sauna. We didn't have the money or the space for special equipment to cool the containers rapidly." So they were definitely cooling the soup for storage, not for immediate consumption.

I am reminded of a story in Jacques Pépin's memoir, The Apprentice, in which he also needed to cool large amounts of soup very quickly. His solution was to make the soup very concentrated (use less water or make a point of reducing the soup as you cook it), and then once it was made, add ice to both chill the soup and dilute the concentrate into what you're after for the finished soup. Might something like this work for you?

Casey also did fantastic french toast this way: bread and custard in an uncovered pan, and run a couple of cycles. Way faster than my usual technique of an overnight soak.

How do yinz feel about ladles that have a pouring spout? I myself generally hate them, because I'm left-handed but my husband is a righty. I get frustrated by ladles that have a pouring spout on the right-handed side, but nothing on the left-handed side, because they generally seem to drip and slop more than the ones that don't have any spout. I notice that the ones pictured above all are spout-free! MelissaH

You've given me a great view of a city I only visited for a couple of days in March of 2007. There's so much more to it than we were able to see. Thank you!

Oh, I know, and we do so when we can get decent tomatoes and decent peppers. But there are times when opening a jar is a lot easier and better, or times when we're feeding the masses. And then it becomes annoying to find only wimpy salsa on the store shelves.

I love the idea of using power tools to deal with kitchen chores. As I recall, you use a lathe to peel winter squash, do you not? I think of Duluth's population as still being pretty homogenous: European ancestry, for the most part: Scandinavian, Germanic, Slavic, British Isles, based on the faces I see in the grocery store. However, the populations of the university and colleges here are quite mixed, as are the staff of the medical facilities: with 2 major hospital chains and I-don't-know-how many clinics, the medical practice accounts for a lot of employment around here. Unfortunately the demand for international cuisine hasn't been enough to keep any sort of specialty store afloat, except for a couple of Italian groceries that have been around here forever. (Italian immigrants were a major wave early in the last century.) The Oriental grocery died several years ago, I believe a victim of the general economic slump that hit us all around 2008. There's never been a good Middle Eastern or Indian grocery store here. I'm glad that Cub and Mt. Royal, my other favorite large grocery store here (still to be visited this week) are meeting the demand. I do, in fact, use a lathe to peel butternut squash, my favorite of the winter squashes. HUGE time-saver, if I'm doing more than one squash, but not so good on the ridged varieties like acorns. My corner of upstate NY is also pretty homogenous. I wouldn't be surprised if, around here, a mixed marriage consisted of someone from a family attending St. Stephen's, the Polish Catholic church, wedding someone from a family attending St. Mary's, the Italian Catholic church. (To say nothing of the other two Catholic churches still in town, or the three that have been closed since before we moved here. But, like Duluth but on a smaller scale, we also have a university and a hospital, which help a little. We had a Filipino grocer for a brief moment, started by one of the doctors who was Filipino, but she passed away suddenly and the store subsequently closed. If we can't find what we're looking for at the one big supermarket left in town (I'm looking at you, hot salsa!), we need to go to either Syracuse (an hour away) or Rochester (an hour and a half) for an Oriental, Indian, or Middle Eastern grocer. How far would you have to drive? Is it close enough that you're willing to do so, or do you resort to mail order or just go without?

I'm reminded of the ladies who make the pierogi at St. Stephen's Church here in Oswego. Every day of the week leading up to their big festival, they make one kind of pierogi, and one filling. First, they make the dough (usually three or four food processors and stand mixers going at a time), set each batch aside to rest for a moment, and pass a batch of rested dough on to someone else to roll it out and cut circles. The circles get placed on parchment-lined sheet pans, and sent on to the tables of fillers. The fillers take the balls of filling that were made yesterday, place each ball onto a dough circle, pinch the edges shut, and put the filled pierogi back onto the sheet pan. The pans then go to a checker, who checks that no filling has crept into the seal (which would result in the pierog opening in the boiling pot) and fixes any potential problems, and then put in the freezer to wait for the festival. When the day's batch is complete (meaning all the dough balls have been sealed into dough), the next day's filling gets mixed and scooped with a disher into individual balls, which are put on parchment lined sheet pans and frozen. The freezing helps to keep the filling in a rounded shape, which in turn keeps it away from the edges when the dough gets pinched shut so the pierogi stay properly sealed in the cooking process. Doing it the day before also helps to expedite the assembly line, because the filling becomes grab-and-go and because the dough makers will know exactly how many batches of dough they need to make that day, for the complete batch. The pierogi stay frozen until the festival, when they get boiled and then fried. They'll also sell them frozen, for people to take home and cook later.I wonder if a similar methodology of freezing ravioli filling in dollops would help to expedite your process? Great idea, and thanks for the evocative description of the St. Stephens assembly line! It's still amazing to me how efficient the assembly line production is: in just 3 or 4 hours, they can have literally a thousand pierogi finished, and about the same number of filling balls in the freezer for the next day's batch. When I haven't been busy during prep week, I've gone over to help but also (selfishly) to learn some of their secrets. The only jobs I haven't done at this point are mixing the dough and cooking the pierogi, because those are reserved for special people who have been at it for decades. I knew I was on their good side when they allowed me to roll the dough out flat! Making the pierogi is women's work at the church, although the cooking on the day of the festival is strictly men's work. Another thing that's strictly men's work is coring the cabbages for the golabki, with an electric drill and large bit! I think the first year I helped was the first time I'd ever seen a power tool repurposed for kitchen work. Smithy, you have a nice array of international cuisine sections in your supermarket. Is the population as diverse?

I'm reminded of the ladies who make the pierogi at St. Stephen's Church here in Oswego. Every day of the week leading up to their big festival, they make one kind of pierogi, and one filling. First, they make the dough (usually three or four food processors and stand mixers going at a time), set each batch aside to rest for a moment, and pass a batch of rested dough on to someone else to roll it out and cut circles. The circles get placed on parchment-lined sheet pans, and sent on to the tables of fillers. The fillers take the balls of filling that were made yesterday, place each ball onto a dough circle, pinch the edges shut, and put the filled pierogi back onto the sheet pan. The pans then go to a checker, who checks that no filling has crept into the seal (which would result in the pierog opening in the boiling pot) and fixes any potential problems, and then put in the freezer to wait for the festival. When the day's batch is complete (meaning all the dough balls have been sealed into dough), the next day's filling gets mixed and scooped with a disher into individual balls, which are put on parchment lined sheet pans and frozen. The freezing helps to keep the filling in a rounded shape, which in turn keeps it away from the edges when the dough gets pinched shut so the pierogi stay properly sealed in the cooking process. Doing it the day before also helps to expedite the assembly line, because the filling becomes grab-and-go and because the dough makers will know exactly how many batches of dough they need to make that day, for the complete batch. The pierogi stay frozen until the festival, when they get boiled and then fried. They'll also sell them frozen, for people to take home and cook later. I wonder if a similar methodology of freezing ravioli filling in dollops would help to expedite your process?

I'm a bit confused, Shel, about why you'd like a hand mixer if you're going to start making bread. I've always either done bread in a stand mixer, or by hand. What breadmaking tasks are you thinking would be made easier with a hand mixer?

I'd like to make better use of my freezers, both to hold things for later and then use them when it gets to be later.

My kitchen cabinets are from IKEA, and we've been very happy with them. They're also fairly easy to modify to fit your exact needs, if need be.

Many baking cookbook authors will tell you how *they* measure flour. I'll look at this, and then when I make a recipe from a cookbook the first time, I'll measure it their way into a bowl on my scale, and note how much that is in the recipe. After a few repetitions, or a few different recipes from the same book, it's usually possible to figure out how much a cup of flour weighs according to that particular cookbook. (Bonus: if you don't like what happens the first time, and it's something that seems related to the amount of flour, it's possible to add a little more or less and make adjustments that should carry through the rest of the cookbook if the author was consistent. But anymore, I have enough baking books that if I'm buying a new one, it really needs to have mass measurements.

I'm relieved to know that we aren't the only ones with a "to do and to eat" list!

gfweb has a good point: is the display dead? If so, try plugging something else into the outlet, to be sure it isn't an electrical issue with your home rather than a toaster problem. If the display still works, but nothing happens when you push the on button, then it's more likely an issue with your toaster.

Oh, with the right apps, it could be!