MelissaH

Our current favorite Utica restaurant is Babe's. I don't know if they do brunch, but it is convenient to the Aud and keeps us well fueled for hockey games, which is what we're typically looking for. MelissaH

Melissa, I hope it isn't too late, but you can't go wrong with the Visiting Cake. Very easy, very quick and very delicious. The recipe is making the rounds in my large, extended family (thanks to email) and the name has morphed into Irish Visiting Cake. One sister uses it for a quick strawberry shortcake, another niece adds fresh lemon thyme and pine nuts, and yet another tried it with Splenda. I'm quite happy eating it as Dorie originally wrote it Hope you can try it, there won't be a crumb left. colleen ← That looks good. But what I wound up doing was a Dimply Peach Cake. (No plums worth buying around here, but the supermarket had adequate peaches.) The peaches I had were so enormous that I only needed two, cut into eighths, to top the cake. I used a smidge of cinnamon rather than the cardamom in the original recipe, and lemon zest instead of orange. And it went over quite well. There are exactly two pieces left after breakfast this morning. MelissaH

I didn't pull these either. The bone pieces pretty much fell out, though, in some cases as I took the pieces off the grill. We ate some, and brought a couple of plates over to the next-door neighbors who had a rough day yesterday. I think I'll chop the leftovers into small pieces, vacuum pack them in serving-size portions, and freeze them. We were thinking how the leftovers would make a wonderful addition to fried rice. MelissaH

My country-style ribs just came off the WSM. So they wound up needing about five hours to cook. I've been amazingly restrained, and didn't even taste the little bits that came off. I did notice that these pieces of butt are more dried out than the corresponding piece of uncut butt would probably be. But then again, I could do this all on one day without having to plan ahead of time. We'll see how they go over tonight. I'm currently debating whether to pull the meat or just leave the "ribs" whole, while I give them a little bit of a rest. MelissaH eta: I did give in and taste. And it's good, not dried out as I'd feared!

You need to give yourself several hours for them. I always hesitate to give time estimates. When I first started smoking meat I asked when would it be done. I got a reply, that I considered snide at the time, that it is done when it is done. I know now the meaning of that. Every one can be different. The country style ribs still have all the fat and tissue to break down. So, as I recall they were on the smoker for close to 4 hours. Clearly they will not take as long as a 16 lb pork butt, but they still need some time. ← I was looking for a ballpark estimate, more than anything so I knew how early I had to wake up this morning. It's relatively cool here now (just under 70 at about 11 AM) and the winds are relatively light, for once. The skies look as though we may get some rain before the day's over. So, I was up on the later side (for me) this morning, and fired up the WSM. The country-style ribs went on at about 9:15, just as they came out of the package. They've been on for about two hours now. Hickory chunks; WSM temp about 240. Thermometer probe stuck in a "rib" says 156. So far, so good. Now, time to make a batch of =Mark's sauce. We've invited friends to join us; it'll be served when it's done. MelissaH

This is sort-of on topic, as country-style ribs are just cut-up pieces of butt (as previously pointed out by lancastermike): Any guesses how long it might take to cook them on a Bullet? Lancastermike or anyone else who's tried it? MelissaH

I've invited a friend to help me work out some issues with resizing a knitting pattern on Thursday morning (two days from now), and I'd like to have something coming out of the oven when she gets here. It needs to be something I can get mostly prepped tomorrow night, and then just do the last-minute mixing while my oven preheats on Thursday morning. (Or if there's something that could be made and baked the night before without suffering, that's also fine.) And because we're going to be busy with swatches I've made as well as measuring tape, calculator, pencil, and paper, I'd prefer something that stays relatively neat (much as I love them, I don't want my knitting covered with chocolate swirls or cinnamon sugar). I'll probably have about an hour and a half from the time I wake up till the time my friend arrives and whatever goodie I make must be ready to eat. Any suggestions for suitable recipes from this book? MelissaH

Leave your stuff at the hotel, even if they don't have your room ready. Then get out and walk, walk, walk. Stop at an ATM to get some local cash, and get some food anywhere but McDonald's. See if there's a market anywhere the day you arrive, since markets are a great place to walk and eat both. Maybe find a museum that's kid-friendly, but follow my very wise grandmother's "museum rule" and don't spend more than an hour there. Maybe plan to go to Klary's favorite teahouse in the park. Do whatever you can to keep moving until it's time for an early dinner. Eat, and then stumble into bed. Wake up whenever you wake up, and you're almost functioning on local time in one very painful day. And take lots of pictures because you won't remember much of what you do on that first day as you sleepwalk through. MelissaH

What about something along the lines of a Black Forest Cake? You could use chocolate cake for the chocolate-cherry flavor, and yellow or other vanilla cake for the cherry (no chocolate). Or does the cherry need to actually be in the cake itself? MelissaH

I don't know why tapioca is supposed to be better for cherry pies. But because my husband doesn't like the texture of tapioca, I blitz minute tapioca in my spice grinder and use the resulting tapioca flour to thicken my cherry pies. The obvious answer is to do a test: make a cherry pie with tapioca, a cherry pie with arrowroot, a cherry pie with cornstarch, a cherry pie with potato starch...and then invite the neighborhood over to eat cherry pie. MelissaH

And Bev's for dessert afterwards? Depending on when/how long you're here for, don't forget the Oswego farmer's market on Thursday evenings starting at 5, and Fulton's on Saturday morning. The strawberries will probably be over, but you may be here for the cherries. And we get sour cherries here! And also, plenty of u-pick berries in the area, probably getting close to blueberry season by then. (The strawberries have been supreme this year.) MelissaH

I think that is delicious, though I will only dip the crust (not the toppings part). My wife will dip any part of the pizza in ranch dressing, regardless of the toppings. ← There's a local pizza chain in Colorado, Beau Jo's. Their specialty is Mountain Pies: thick crusted pizzas with good-sized rims. On every table is a squeeze bottle of honey, with the top trimmed to make the hole bigger. You eat the pizza, and then drizzle some honey onto the crust rim and eat that for dessert. I wish we were closer than 1700 miles. MelissaH

I have not one, but two Black and Decker square four-waffle makers, with the grids that flip over to be a flat griddle. My parents had the first one for a long time. When I moved into my first apartment junior year of college, my parents bought me one of my own. And last summer, my parents moved to Colorado where they already had a waffle iron and gave me theirs. It's great to have two, especially when faced with a crowd of a dozen hungry college students on a Saturday morning! MelissaH

Marlene, I think that's the one we had in our Ohio home. When we did a minor remodel, we built it in and used it happily for another couple of years. (Just remember that when you plumb in the drain line, you need to knock out the knockout piece in the garbage disposal! ) Then we moved...to a house that had no DW or room for a portable. We redid that kitchen start to finish last summer. MelissaH

That looks beautiful! (Forgive me for saying so, but I think it would also be neat if you added some gelatin, to make your own strawberry jello with real strawberry flavor, not that artificial stuff.) MelissaH

Any relationship between this new center in Ithaca and the New York Wine and Culinary Center in Canandaigua? MelissaH

I had a very different take on egg salad a few years back. Literally, it was salad with egg. One of my husband's colleagues is Lithuanian, married to a Russian. And apparently the Russians have a wide variety of salads, of which I've been lucky enough to taste many. They all seem to use a mayonnaise-based dressing. I'm not normally fond of anything with mayonnaise, but somehow it works in Elena's salads. Heck, I'm not usually a trout lover, but I really liked the salad she made that incorporated both trout and mayo. Anyway, she made a "mimoza" salad for us once. It was a chopped salad, with (IIRC) beets, carrots, greens, and probably other stuff too. But the part that made it "mimoza" was the hard-boiled egg topping. The whites and yolks were separated, and each were finely grated. The grated whites were spread over the entire salad, and then the grated yolks went on top of that. Apparently, the yellow and white looks like a field of flowers in bloom, and these flowers are called "mimoza" in Russian, hence the name of the salad. That was the best egg salad I've ever had. MelissaH

If many people don't eat sweets of any kind, I'd steer clear of anything that's sweet, even if it's made that way with artificial sweeteners, unless the people who are ordering the cake specifically tell you it would be OK. I'd look into some kind of savory cheesecake or torta, possibly even a round of Brie that could be decorated? I wonder if it would be possible to do a terrine, or a set of terrines, that might fit the bill. lenabo's idea of a vegetable cake is also quite intriguing. I think the trick will be to come up with something gorgeous-looking that fits the general shape of a wedding cake, that can be made just as frilly as a wedding cake typically is, and that can be cut by the happy couple just like an ordinary cake. In any case, DEFINITELY go for the beautiful cake stand and decorated table. MelissaH

If you think it might be too low, see if you can find one (in any size) and play with it. Definitely bring along any large- or odd-sized dishes/pots/pans that you think you might want to use inside, to make sure they'll fit well, especially if you can find the size you'll want. How low would the second oven of a double wall oven be? Our sink is an Elkay, stainless, drop-in, giant-size single bowl. I think this is it. It's worked really well, especially for washing the things that don't go in the dishwasher or that would take up an inordinate amount of space. I can lay a half-sheet pan flat in the bottom, or my largest roasting pan. I can also get long stuff to fit, like rhubarb or celery. Or racks of ribs. Or a whole walleye, to keep the scaling somewhat neater. After nearly a year of use, it's got a few scratches, but as far as we're concerned, that just means we actually use our showpiece kitchen. We're also enjoying our faucet, a Grohe Alira. The integral sprayer is particularly nice to have in conjunction with the single giant bowl, as we can reach anywhere in the sink without having to contort the sprayer hose. We still love it. It gives us the very high heat my husband likes to use for stir-frying. Our house-sitter was envious, since we can boil a pot of water for spaghetti in only a few minutes. But we also get a wonderfully low simmer. I've virtually quit using the microwave to melt chocolate in quantities larger than an ounce, since I can put the chocolate in a metal bowl, put that on the burner on simmer, and pay it about the same attention the microwave would require, what with the stop to stir every 30 seconds. And of course we can get everything in-between also. I've had to learn to turn the burners on something lower than I'd become accustomed to using. We've both gotten very good at keeping a potholder or dry bar towel on our persons when we're cooking, because we now have hot pot handles (a new phenomenon for us) to worry about. You're a chemist, so you've surely heard the saying, "Hot glass looks like cold glass"? The same is true of pot handles, and we both learned quickly after the first time. Our house-sitter also learned the hard way, despite reading about it in the notes we'd left him AND cooking under our supervision a couple of times. (He's a former student of my husband's, who likes food but is still very much in the bottom of the learning curve, where everything is new. He's a lot of fun to teach!) I love having continuous grates, because it means you can slide stuff around the top with abandon. The only minor issue we've had is that a couple of our smaller (1 qt) saucepans can tip if you aren't careful about where you put them on the burner grate, or if you don't have something good and heavy in them. Will you be using natural gas or propane? My parents have the four-burner version, which they run on propane since there are no gas lines in the county. We aren't sure whether the propane or the high elevation (8600 ft above sea level) is to blame more, but their high isn't quite as high as ours. If you're planning for a potent cooktop, try to also plan for a potent hood that vents outside. When you have a terrific stove, it's really easy to do a lot of fun stuff that can smell up a house. A good backsplash is a must also, because high heat cooking means splatters. As far as the oven: it's terrific fun. The thermostat's been spot-on since Day One. I can bake flat cakes, for once. I have some plain tiles, which I put on the back of a cheapo half-sheet pan and use as a pizza stone; I can turn the convection on, crank the oven up as high as it will go, and do pizzas with crust that are the equal of our local pizza shops. (Gotta work more on the sauce, though. And maybe get one of the screens they use, too, since I'm not so good at keeping my pie round.) And speaking of convection, I can bake a whole batch of chocolate chip cookie dough at once, which is great for instant gratification. Even with fairly limited aisle space, we've never had a problem with space. And it's well-enough insulated that the kitchen doesn't heat up noticeably, as long as you're not doing something like pizza where the door is opened to put one in, and then opened again five minutes later to take it out, and then opened again in a couple of minutes to load the next one in. But it is a big hot space, and between the pizzas and the no-knead bread, we keep a pair of leather elbow-length welding gloves in the drawer with the potholders. We've run the self-clean cycle once so far. It stunk up the house a bit, although we don't know if that was just because it was the first time and there was odiferous gunk to burn off. We chose a chilly day, and next time we'll make sure it's warm enough to have the windows open. You also need to make sure you're home, because the self-clean cycle works like this: you start it, and after a little while the internal vent fan comes on because it gets hot enough inside the oven for the thermo-switch to activate. You know the self-clean cycle is done when the vent fan turns itself OFF, and at that point you need to manually turn the oven off. (You'd think that with what the beast costs, it would at least shut down automatically. Geez! ) It was fairly easy to sponge away the ash left over from the self-clean cycle. As others have noted, the racks don't slide as well after a self-clean. And as I noted earlier, mineral oil will smoke with a plasticky odor if you use that to re-lube the racks. But once the volatiles in the oil burned off, the racks slide well and we don't get any more smoke. I'm wondering if maybe silicone oil, like what we used in oil baths in lab, would be a better option...or if it's just best to make a plan to smoke the kitchen on purpose, immediately after each self-clean cycle. My other advice for those considering kitchen renovations, particularly those involving plumbing: try out your plans for washing dishes before you get stuck with them. In my case, that meant doing dishes in a miniature, shallow bar sink down in the family room. (Before this project started, we removed the other leg of the bar to open up the family room. The bar migrated outside, where it still acts as counterspace by the grill, and also helps to protect the antique propane cookstove that we also used during the reno. The barsink was so small that I wound up washing the pasta pot in the bathtub instead, and it was so low that I wished I could have gotten a chair underneath to save my back. As things went, one of our kitchen cabinets arrived damaged. They didn't want it back, and instead just sent us a new one. The damage was on a back corner that would have showed prominently in the kitchen, but as it turned out, would be hidden in the family room. We even had a leftover piece of countertop big enough to go on top. And then we found a cheap sink at the local Bargain Outlet. We already had a faucet, the one we took out of the kitchen (which we'd put in shortly after moving here). So after the kitchen was finished, we removed what was left of the bar downstairs. My husband rejiggered the plumbing to accommodate the new arrangement, and we put in the new cabinet and sink. A trip to IKEA furnished us with doors for the cabinet (full-height, so we can get at the sink if need be). And we have a wine fridge down there that's about the same height as the cabinet. The space between the fridge and the cabinet just serves as more wine storage space, as we have a set of shelves to fit there and it stays a relatively cool and constant temperature. I wish we'd had the bigger sink before we started, as it would have made my life much easier. Oh well. But, we will NOT be doing this again. My husband's been recommended for continuing appointment by the university president (that means tenure, for you non-academic folks out there) so we won't be moving again except if we choose to do so ourselves. We're happy, and relieved, and as a result we're enjoying this summer even more. MelissaH

Bag of pretzels, with salt. Jar of Nutella. Can of Vanilla Coke Zero. Bottle of Advil. For breakfast. MelissaH

I saw that this year's IACP baking book winner is Bread Matters: the sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own, by Andrew Whitley. I haven't yet seen a copy, and I have enough baking books at this point that I hesitate to purchase anything without having a good look through it first. Have you seen this book? Do you use it? How does it compare to other bread-baking books? Thanks, MelissaH

We'll get whatever brand is on sale, as long as it's a pick-a-size version. Most recently, that means our grocery store's brand. I've never noticed much of a difference, other than using less if it's pick-a-size compared to one-size-fits-none. I'm very excited to have a paper towel holder in my kitchen, for the first time in nearly nine years of marriage! MelissaH

I love your glass tile accent. MelissaH

Did I say that mineral oil was wonderful? I discovered the downside on Saturday as I baked a cake. Obviously, the smoke point of the mineral oil I used is below 350 °F. I let the oven preheat as I mixed the batter. Just as I was alternately adding the dry ingredients and the milk, I became aware of an odor like that of burning plastic. I opened the oven, and white smoke billowed out. At that point my cake could not be delayed, so I just left the oven door open, turned on the convection fan to help blow out the smoke, and opened the screen door to help air circulate throughout the house. (Good thing it wasn't below freezing, or precipitating at that moment!) I went ahead and finished the batter, scraped it into the pan but forgot to marble the walnut and mocha layers , and slid it into the oven. I checked the cake a couple of times, briefly opening the oven door to let the smoke out. By the time the cake was baked, the smoke was completely gone. The cake was for the annual departmental picnic. Nobody complained about either (1) the lack of marbling or (2) any plasticky taste. I didn't detect any plastic in the cake myself, so it must have been fine. I haven't used the oven since, but the racks slide marvelously well! Now, if I could only come up with something else to use as lube, preferably with a smoke point well above normal oven temperatures! MelissaH

Ours are just like the oven racks I've seen on every other oven: the inside of the oven has ridges molded in, and the racks ride directly on the ridges. And yes, a smidge of mineral oil on the edges of the racks works wonders for slideability! He must have learned from his brother, the one who knows how to pop open the cabinets in the house we used to live in. When we first got the boys, we kept the treats in a low cabinet. One day we came home to find that Leo had not only opened the cabinet where the treats were kept, but that he had somehow taken the top off the treat canister and eaten the whole thing! (And how did we know this was Leo's doing? That's easy: Lyon had gotten himself shut in the bathroom all day.) There's smart, and then there's kitty smart. MelissaH