MelissaH

Hi Lyle, Wow, you're being more ambitious than we were, adding more space to your house. Best of luck! How did you decide on the Wolf range? What was your thought process there? MelissaH

I have a backsplash! The black tiles are up and the gray grout is in place. By the beginning of next week, the grout should be completely set and dry, and ready for a bead of caulk between countertop and backsplash. The Lion on glass is in progress. We actually thought it was done, but technical issues have forced a redo. My husband started with the red claws and tongue, and then added the black. He let that dry for a day, and then baked it off to set it. It baked pretty well, but a few areas flaked off (maybe from fingerprints on the glass that we didn't notice before starting the painting?) and a few places have small bubbles. I should note here that although the claws were painted with a brush and the black outline was also carefully done with a brush, my husband did the big areas of black by dumping a large amount of paint on the glass, and then using a big brush to spread it around. I probably would have done multiple thinner coats, but this is his project, and the worst-case scenario is that we wind up having to clean or scrape all the paint off the glass and start over. We looked at how the glass looked on the wall, paint side directly against the wall, and decided the general concept works. Then, my husband started in on the yellow background; we decided not to bother with the white highlights inside the Lion because the wall color is close enough to white, and the white paint tested out as milky rather than opaque. We'd gotten two bottles of yellow paint, but my husband ran out before finishing the background. (That was Sunday.) The directions said it was possible to dilute the paint slightly with water, so he tried doing that. It didn't work well, so we made a mad dash to Syracuse and the nearest store that sells the paint we were using. (And we ran a bunch of other errands also, as long as we were down there.) With a fresh bottle of paint on hand, he finished up the painting and set the glass aside to dry overnight. I wasn't convinced it had dried long enough, especially since when it baked, the fumes it emitted were bad enough that we had to turn on the hood so we didn't gas ourselves out of the house. The result: the black touched up nicely, but the new bottle of yellow turned out to be a slightly different color than the old two bottles of yellow. (My husband thinks he maybe didn't get it mixed completely.) In one place, the tape he'd used to mask off the edge of the glass also pulled up a good bit of paint. And worst of all, the entire area he'd tried using the diluted paint in bubbled horribly, all the way to the glass. This despite covering it over with more undiluted paint. So as a result of all these calamities, my husband got to spend some quality time with a razor blade and a vacuum cleaner, scraping off the bubbled and otherwise damaged paint. The glass is still reposing on top of our refrigerator, as it's been way too hot to even think of turning the oven on. Speaking of turning the oven on: I've now cooked! More than once! Last Thursday, we got back from the farmer's market with (among other things) a bunch of green beans and some local peaches, clingstone and with terrific flavor but still just slightly firm. I started by getting rice underway in the rice cooker: jasmine rice, about 1/3 of it brown jasmine. We still had a thawed pork tenderloin in the fridge that needed to be used, so I cut up the tenderloin and added a glug of soy sauce and a splash of sesame oil, and let that sit while I topped and tailed the beans. Once the beans were done, I started cooking. I stir-fried the pieces of meat in a big frying pan till they were done, took them out of the pan and tossed in a couple of whole unadulterated dried Tien Tsin chiles and a couple of smashed garlic cloves and the green beans, let them stir-fry till I saw some nice color, and then added a bit of water to the pan, brought it up to a boil, put a lid on, and let it simmer to finish cooking the beans through. When the beans were done, I uncovered the pan and boiled off the liquid, added the meat back, and heated everything through. We ate the beans-and-pork over the rice. Friday was the day we smoked pig and birds. It rained all morning, so I made up a batch of galette dough, using the Fine Cooking recipe but subbing brown sugar for the white sugar because I liked the idea of the brown sugar flavor and I figured a little acid wouldn't hurt. The smoking took up all day (and you can read about it here). I made up a batch of =Mark's mustard sauce after I got the galette dough safely resting in the fridge. Once the sauce was done, I started working on the peaches. I sliced them off the pits, and combined them in a bowl with a bit of sugar, a pinch of salt, and the crumbs made by buzzing half a dozen gingersnaps in the mini-chopper. By then the dough was relatively chilled, so I started rolling it. It was warm enough that I had some problems with the dough, enough trouble that it stuck to waxed paper pretty badly. It went in and out of the fridge a lot, as I tried to get it rolled sufficiently. Eventually it was big and thin enough, and it went back into the fridge to rest before I tried to add the filling. Finally, after half an hour of chilling I pulled it out of the fridge, piled on the filling, folded the edges up around the fruit in pretty pleats, and then got the whole thing back in the fridge to wait for the oven to pre-heat. Then I turned over the kitchen to my cousin and husband to finish dinner prep. While they cooked and made salad, the tart baked. It turned out well, and the gingersnaps were a nice easy way to add both flavor and thickening. The crust was flaky and tasty but tough. I think the recipe from the Fine Cooking link in my blog calls for too much water, and next time I'd definitely cut back. (For this batch, I actually did short the water a touch from what the recipe called for, because I knew the brown sugar contained more moisture than the white sugar in the original recipe. But the dough was still a sticky mess, not easy to handle at all.) Saturday was beer day. While the guys made a batch of homebrew, I steamed the smoked pig to finish it off and made a batch of corn tortillas from the masa harina in the freezer. The griddle made that part easy. Sunday after the Lion fiasco, I made dinner. I started with dessert (of course; as we all know, life is uncertain ) and rolled out the other half of the galette dough from the fridge. It behaved as badly as the first half. That recipe definitely needs to be tweaked, or dumped in favor of something else. I filled that galette with the last remaining peach and a mess of blueberries, added to a bit of sugar and a touch of flour. The unbaked tart sat in the fridge while I cooked the rest of dinner: one of Rick Bayless's recipes from his Mexican Everyday book. (The original was for salmon and spinach.) We'd gotten two nice big snapper filets while we were in Syracuse, as well as a bunch of chard. I started by cutting the chard into ribbons about half an inch wide, and washing them many times. Then they went into a pot with the water clinging to them, to wilt and soften. In the meantime, I smashed a couple of garlic cloves to remove the skins, and toasted them in a bit of oil in our big frying pan (not non-stick). The garlic went into the blender jar, along with a couple of roasted and skinned poblano peppers from our freezer (which I opened up and seeded and then cut into strips; much easier while they are still frozen), a bit of left over half-and-half and enough milk to get to a cup and a half, and a big spoonful of the masa harina that hadn't gotten back to the freezer yet. When the chard was tender, that also got added to the blender, and the whole mix got buzzed more or less smooth and poured back into the chard pot to be heated to a boil, so it thickened, and then simmered while I cooked the fish. The fish just got pan-fried in the garlicked oil, a few minutes on each side. I totally wrecked it because it stuck to the pan. Oh well. We ate the fish and chard-creamy sauce with a baguette. My husband was surprised by the heat in the greens, because I hadn't mentioned where the chiles he'd brought up from the freezer for me had gone. It all went over well. For next time, I'd probably cut the fish into smaller pieces that are easier to handle. I'd probably also dust the fish with flour (or maybe masa, in this case) to give it a bit more of a crust and maybe help with the sticking issue. But it went over quite well. I thought the chard in sauce would make an excellent beginning for a souffle or soup. My husband thought it would also be good added to the winter squash or sweet potato pudding, of sorts, which we found in a book of Creole and Cajun recipes and also contains spicy sausage separated eggs. But not this time of year. It might also work well over pasta, or possibly even in pasta. It's certainly something to keep in mind, at any rate. And that was the last dinner any of us actually cooked. Since then it's been hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot. Today is somewhat better, but it still feels humid. It's supposed to get warm again over the weekend, but next week is looking more promising. Tonight we're planning to go to a band concert given by the community band of the town ten miles down the road, which is conducted by our neighbor. We still have some of last week's market goodies in the fridge, because it was too hot to do anything the last few days. I'm thinking of roasting and marinating the eggplants, and maybe also giving the baby bok choi a quick braise. In short, I'd like to turn them into salads that we can bring with us to the concert for a picnic. We also have two big bunches of basil that I've been keeping on the counter in a glass of water. Maybe I'll have to buzz that up into pesto and freeze...or turn into a pasta salad. Does pesto go with eggplant? I think it could! We've started thinking about the munchies that we could serve when we hold the kitchen party. So far my husband wants to do the little Tostito scoop corn chips with mole. That will be either with some of my smoked pig, or possibly with just sliced turkey from the deli. I'm thinking maybe gougeres. Cookies or biscotti. We haven't set a date yet, but it won't happen before the Lion is on the wall so we have some time to think still. Time for a swim. I'll post pictures of the backsplash once the caulk is in. We'll have to take the stuff off the counters to do that, so you'll be able to see the backsplash! MelissaH

Well, I think I've figured out a way to get around the safety issues, at least in part. Friday morning started with a bang, literally: I was jolted out of bed at about 5:30 AM by a thunderstorm. I'd planned to light the chimney on the order of 8 AM (with the intention ONLY of having things cooked before dark, ready to eat for Saturday) but the pouring rain decided otherwise for me. I didn't really want to set the WSM up on the downstairs patio, where it would be sheltered by the upstairs deck but perfectly set to pump smoke into the whole house. That left somewhere in the yard, which was quite soggy thanks to all the rain we've had of late. So we (in this case, "we" meaning our friend Bruce and I) put things in a rain delay for a few hours. Finally by about 11:00, the downpour had tapered to a trickle, so we hauled the cooker out to the lawn, loaded the ring about half-full of charcoal with a handful of hickory chunks interspersed throughout (sorry, no pictures; it was still raining enough that I didn't want to bring the camera outside, and the hand that otherwise would have been free was holding an umbrella) and put 22 briquettes and 2 pieces of newspaper in the chimney starter. I decided to light the chimney on the grate of the gas grill, as there wasn't really anywhere else to do it. It left lots of little fluffy black ash, marginally readable, in the gas grill. Must get a big brick paver for the next time, because the grill's still a bit messy. But at any rate, the chimney did its thing, and we dumped the lit charcoal into the ring, tossed on another couple of wood chunks for good measure, added the middle ring and water pan, filled the foil-wrapped water pan with water, realized that we'd managed to get one leg of the cooker in a depression in the yard so the whole thing was not level, stuck a rock under the leg to help level it out, nearly suffocated ourselves with the smoke as we put the two chunks of pig down on the bottom and the chicken up top, added the lid, and finally stuck the analog thermometer in its cork into one of the holes in the lid vent. All the meat went in straight out of the fridge. I did rinse the chicken first, but things got a little crazy on Thursday night so they never got brined beforehand like I'd intended. Oh well. After a little experimenting, we had very little trouble controlling the temperature, to keep it at about 220 degrees F near the top of the dome (the max reading on our thermometer; I'll be looking for one that goes up a little higher before long, I think). But we did have a little trouble with uneven burning, because Bruce adjusted the three bottom vents to "take advantage" of the slight breeze blowing. When we peeked in through the door to see how things were burning, we discovered that most of the charcoal on the side that had been opened more was gone, but there plenty of unburned, unlit briquettes remained everywhere else. Next time, if anything I think I'd close down the vent on the side towards the wind a little more, to try and get more even burning. I wound up sticking one probe thermometer in the larger hunk of pig, and another in a big chicken thigh. Both thermometer bodies went into a quart-size ziplock bag, which I sat on top of an overturned dead laundry basket, and I carefully wound the probe wires into drip loops just below where they entered the corner of the bag. By 1:00, the rain was over and the sun came out. I know we peeked inside way too much. But everything looked so gorgeous, we had to keep looking at them! I'd set the chicken thermometer alarm to 165, and the one for the pork to 190. (Two different temperatures made it easy to tell the thermometers apart.) Both thermometer readings rose steadily for quite a while. After a few hours, the chicken thermometer seemed to get "stuck" at 150, and the pork at 140. We checked the cooker's temperature, which had dropped down below 200, and opened the vents a touch. (That was when we noticed the uneven burning pattern.) An hour later, the cooker temperature was up to over 220, but both thermometers read what they'd read an hour before. So I guess my butt stalled at 140, as it stayed there for over 2 hours. But after the spike, the temperature went down below 200 again, and stayed there. We took another look in the fire chamber, and discovered that from the edge well into the center, the coals were gone. But everywhere else we could still see black. The choice was to either add more hot coals (and maybe turn the cooker) or to say uncle. By then, it was about 7:30, and it was time to eat dinner. (My cousin cooked. Steak au poivre and fried potatoes, salad my husband made, and a peach-gingersnap galette I'd put together for dessert.) Because I figured it would be dark by the time we finished with dinner, I removed all the meat from the smoker and closed all the vents. The chicken thighs seemed like they were mostly done, and I figured they'd be plenty dead if they'd been sitting at 150 degrees for an hour. So I pulled on a pair of gloves and stripped the meat off the bones and skin into a pot. The bones just about fell out of all the thighs except the two largest, one of which had the thermometer probe in it. I did, of course, give some of the meat a taste-test, and while it was nicely smoky, it was pretty boring (probably because I didn't brine it first). So I added a sprinkle of salt, a splash of water, and about half a cup of =Mark's sauce to the pot, brought it up to a boil and turned it down to simmer on the stove while we ate, to try and infuse a little flavor...and be sure it was completely cooked. When we moved on to dessert, I pulled the chicken and sauce off the stove, transferred it to a rather shallow Rubbermaid container to cool, and then into the fridge it went. As for the pig: I put both pieces on a sheet pan, covered with heavy-duty foil, and stuck them in my oven at 250 degrees F. I figured that if it's really true that once the meat hits 140 it's not going to absorb any more smoke, why not speed things up a little? At any rate, in the oven the temperature stayed stuck at 140 for another 45 minutes, and then finally started to come up. By the time we were done with dinner, it was up to about 152 and it was getting really late and I was getting really tired! So I decided I'd let it go to 165, and then take it out of the oven to rest. It actually got up to 165 relatively quickly once the temperature started moving again, but I was more than ready for bed by then so I pulled it out to rest. While it rested, I took a much-needed shower. By the time I was done with my shower, the temperature had maxed out and was on its way back down. The two roasts (cooked but definitely not tenderized yet) went into containers of their own, and headed into the fridge. Next time, I'd load the ENTIRE cooker ring with charcoal. I'd also do what I could to make things burn evenly. And next time if it's raining, I'll choose another day so I can start at a more appropriate hour! At any rate, the next morning I woke up refreshed. My husband and our friend Jeff were brewing a batch of beer, and the tradition is that after they brew, we eat. First thing, I went out to the cooker to clean it up. The racks were an absolute mess, but most of the gunk cleaned off reasonably well with a brush and some soap. (The racks are the one thing I've found that don't fit into my new gigoonda sink.) The foil on the outside of the water pan (thanks, Mike!) meant an easy cleanup job. But I'd been careful to keep water in the pan, and in the morning (thanks to the humid weather and the low temperatures towards the end of the on-bullet cooking time) I was faced with a nearly-full pan of water topped with fatty greasy drippings. Yuck. I was able to carry it to our dumping ground without sloshing it on my feet, thank heavens. And the pan does fit in the sink, and cleaned up easily. I think a Brinkmann pan, with its larger capacity, may be in order, so I can fill it once at the beginning and then forget about it. As for the pig, I remembered what I'd seen last fall when we took a weekend trip to Montreal and had sandwiches at Schwartz's : the meat was spiced and smoked, and then steamed. So I thought: the meat's been smoked, so why not steam it to finish cooking it and make it tender? So I rigged up a steamer from a pot, a rack, and a couple of custard cups, added water and one hunk of pig from the fridge, stuck the thermometer probe back in, and put it on the stove. I let it steam for about 3 hours, during which I made up a batch of corn tortillas from some of the masa harina in our freezer. By the end of the steaming time, the meat was up over 190, and the skin and bone came right out and the meat easily shredded by hand. There was a beautiful smoke ring, terrific flavor, and it wasn't dry at all. My husband, UNPROMPTED, pronounced it "excellent," which he doesn't often do. We ate the pig and fresh tortillas with =Mark's sauce, the last of the salsa verde from a couple of days ago, the chutney (not at the same time as the salsa verde), the last of the leftover rice, but no slaw of any sort because there was no cabbage to be had at the market. The other hunk of pig will be frozen whole, ready for steaming another day. The chicken will probably go into tonight's dinner in some way. Next time I want to do a beer can chicken, I'll be using the WSM, in part to learn how to control it and in part to figure out if it's better than the gas grill for such endeavors. MelissaH

The Lion is partially painted on the glass, and I may have a backsplash before the end of the weekend. Something truly momentous happened earlier this week: there were four of us working at different tasks in the same kitchen! (Washing stuff in the sink, constructing a salad, cooking at the stove, and putting things away.) And to think, it was a major project to even have two different activities in the old kitchen. Last night's dinner (my husband's doing) was concocted largely out of pantry materials. We had thawed a pork tenderloin, which got cut into medallions and seared. To go with, my husband concocted a chutney out of a couple of fresh mangoes, the remnants of a can of pineapple chunks from the last time we made pizza, and the remainder of the dried apricots. Cider vinegar, black peppercorns, allspice berries, cinnamon stick too. And salad. After dinner, my husband asked me when and what I wanted to cook on the new range. I've baked several things already, but I haven't really cooked anything beyond scrambling a couple of eggs. I didn't really have a good answer for him, but I'll be smoking outdoors tomorrow. I should start working on a galette dough. I have sour cherries to use up, and I plan to make a sour cherry galette with gingersnap crumbs in the filling, similar to the plum galette I made last summer. But that's still baking, not cooking. This weekend is our annual Harborfest. Our town grows from about 18,000 people to over 100,000 for four days. The car's not moving again till Monday. MelissaH

Never heard of anyone doing this. For it to have effect you would have to do it without the wood ans the smoke would overwhelm it. Tea leaves in a dry water pan? That may work to generate the tea smoke. I'll have to think about that ← Yeah, I should have been more specific; I meant tea leaves in place of wood, not in addition to. I know you can tea-smoke indoors, but even with a new megahood in the kitchen, I think smoking's probably better done outside since I have the option. I'll check my freezer space, then, if chillier is better. I should also find a good place for the smoking tomorrow, to try and keep from smoking the inside of the house. I haven't really gotten that far yet. Some of it's probably going to depend on what we find at the market tonight. We have some smooth-textured salsa verde from a couple of nights ago that was quite nice, and some fresh mango/canned pineapple/dried apricot chutney that my husband concocted last night to go with pork tenderloin. (Should really come up with a zippier name for that: Three Fruit Three Way Chutney?) Other than those? Certainly chips and salsa of some kind; if I get really inspired I may actually hydrate some masa harina to make my own tortillas. If we find good tomatoes and cilantro, some salsa roja or pico de gallo or whatever you want to call it. We have potatoes, so maybe a potato salad of some kind; the issue of Fine Cooking that arrived at our house not long ago had a bunch of suggestions but we also have an old favorite that we do with a vinaigrette dressing. Maybe some anadama rolls like I did at New Year's or focaccia or pita bread or other bread, if I get inspired and don't mind turning the oven on. Cherry galette along the lines of the one with plums from my foodblog, with crushed gingersnaps to catch the juices instead of breadcrumbs, if I get my act in gear enough to make the dough tonight. Smoked chicken summer rolls, perhaps. If we don't have the ingredients in the house after tonight's visit to the market, then it's not going to happen. The traffic is already getting crazy, and Harborfest isn't even in full swing yet. MelissaH

OK, that would imply putting the pork down below, right? (Until proven otherwise with a myriad of probe thermometers.) Do you think I need to go so far as to put the pork in the freezer beforehand? Or is straight out of a very cold fridge good enough? Can I get away with just removing it from its packaging and plopping it straight onto the grate, or do I need to at least give it a rinse first? Chicken I always at least rinse, but I plan to brine that overnight anyway, which should take care of it. MelissaH

Well, if Abra (with her certification) says it's OK to put the bird on the top rack, where it will be easy to get at, I'll do so. I'm all about easy. Snowangel, I think these shoulders have definitely been whacked in pieces. Which leads me to wonder: with a little advance notice, could they save a whole one for me? I actually still *have* some smoked pig in the freezer, from the New Year's Misadventure. And it won't be long before the local tomatoes start to come in for some nice pico. We always have tortillas on hand! I talked with my friend Bruce just now. He's going to join me for the smoking adventure tomorrow, so I'll have an extra pair of eyes for my lunchtime swim. And maybe smoked duck rolls for lunch afterwards? Now, if I had a laptop with functioning USB ports, I could be really geeky and attach a thermocouple probe to chart my temperatures throughout the cooking period. But even I won't go that far. In any case, I'll try to be sure I have the camera charged and ready to go for tomorrow! I wonder if tea leaves would burn too quickly to use in the WSM. I keep thinking that would be nice with birds of all kinds. I'm hungry! MelissaH

Actually, it doesn't even take an enzyme, if I recall correctly. Simply being dissolved in water, the "invert" form is a lower energy, so the sugar takes that form. However, it does take time, or heat. ← With a touch of acid. I realized that you could do it as an acid-catalyzed reaction just after I sent off the previous post. That's why you'll often see a bit of lemon juice or vinegar added to sugar recipes---the acid plus the hot water will create a little invert sugar in situ. MelissaH

OK, I'm ready for a first go of pig in my WSM! Cooking will begin tomorrow morning with the Minion Method, although I'm hedging my bets and not planning to eat the goods until Saturday. I put the WSM together this morning. It went together remarkably easily, a complete opposite of the POS allegedly gas-powered thing that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. When we got my parents a Weber gas grill last summer, as we put that together out on the deck, my mom kept exclaiming over how perfectly everything fit together, and all the parts were there, and the holes were drilled in the right places, etc. etc. etc. I felt a little like her this morning. The directions were clear, and even though my husband usually appropriates this part of any process, I got to do this one all by myself, completely unaided after the phone call to help me locate the socket set (which I prefer to an adjustable wrench when all the nuts are the same size, as was the case here). At the grocery store yesterday, I procured two pig shoulder roasts, skin-on, bone-in; one 3 pounds and the other 3.5 pounds. (They didn't have anything bigger than about 4 pounds, which I didn't think would be enough to potentially serve 6 or 8 people, and these were the two closest in size.) I also got a pack of chicken thighs, a little under 5 pounds, also with skin and bone. This morning I got a chimney starter and a bag of Kingsford briquettes at the hardware store. I also picked up a pair of "fireplace gloves" because I've been looking for them for a while, and I'm thinking they'll be good to have around the oven! I have four (count 'em!) probe thermometers. I also have an analog dial instant-read thermometer, which works reasonably well inserted into a cork in a vent to measure chamber temperature. My plan is to do the pig "naked" but to brine the chicken. Pig will go with =Mark's sauce, and chicken will likely be wrapped in rice paper with shredded cucumber, cabbage, and whatever other vegetables look good, and eaten with a SE Asian-style dipping sauce. (The chicken is a practice run for what I'd like to do with duck.) Since there should be plenty of chicken, I'm also going to plan to have vegetables around for a chicken salad. Now, the questions: 1) Chicken on top rack and pig below, or the other way around? (I've come up with arguments both ways. The top rack's likely to be hotter and get the chicken out of the "danger zone" faster, so the chicken should go on top. Or, the chicken should go on top because it's smaller and will get done faster, and will be easier to remove if it's up top. But the chicken's more likely to drip germy juices out, especially if it's been brined, so to prevent cross-contamination it should go on the bottom.) 2) Skin up or skin down? (For both chicken and pig) 3) Do I need to put thermometers in both hunks of pig, or could I just put one in the bigger hunk and figure that when it's done, the smaller one will also be done? 4) How much charcoal? The Virtual Weber Bullet page says that the Minion Method works really well for long cooking sessions. But everything I'm cooking is on the smaller side, so do I really need to load up the entire charcoal chamber to be ready to go for 18 hours? I don't want to run short, but I also don't want to wind up with a huge pile of flaming coals and nothing more to cook. It's going to be hot tomorrow, so I'm guessing that the 20 coals in the chimney starter, as recommended by the Virtual Bullet site, will be plenty. 5) Any recommendations on where and how to apply wood for the smoke? I'll be using commercial chunks of hickory that I've had since New Year's, because I haven't had a chance to hack down the applewood logs into chunks yet. 6) Finally: would I be putting anything at risk if I started things going in the morning, stayed home to watch it till noon or so, but then went out for a couple of hours around lunch? I don't want to burn anything! There are already plenty of cold beverages in the fridge. Did I mention that Saturday, there will be beer brewed at our house? MelissaH

The ratio would be precisely 1:1, i.e. an equimolar mixture of fructose and glucose. Something I was wondering about last time this came up is whether you can buy high-fructose corn syrup in retail quantities, because it is 1) dirt cheap due to gov't corn subsidies, and 2) is essentially the exact same thing as invert sugar, the only major difference being that HFCS is not exactly 50/50 glucose/fructose -- HFCS 55 is 55% fructose and 45% glucose, and HFCS 42 is . . . you get the idea. They are basically the same thing, just made in different ways. Invert sugar is made by hydrolyzing sucrose into fructose/glucose, whereas HFCS is made by partially converting a glucose syrup to fructose. ← Patrick, any idea what the stuff sold in grocery stores is? MelissaH

Invert sugar is what you get when you let an enzyme chew up sucrose (table sugar), a disaccharide, into its two monosaccharides (glucose and fructose). The name comes about because a solution of sucrose will rotate plane-polarized light in one direction, but a solution of the sucrose after the enzyme's broken it apart will rotate plane-polarized light in the other direction. (In other words, the rotation is inverted.) So, I would think that you'd be able to make your own invert sugar by combining equal masses of glucose and fructose. The wild card is whether they come as dry powders, or if they come hydrated into syrups. Since I've never used invert sugar, I can't speak to whether a homemade mixture would work in recipes. I suspect that if it's being used to inhibit crystallization, it would do the trick. But I'm sure there are other eG members with more experience that can give you a more definitive answer. MelissaH

This is probably not what you mean, but when ever I watch Emeril (which is rarely) he wipes his nose on the back of his hand at least twice a show and then goes on his merry way. No wiping, no nothing. ewwwww.Thanks, Kevin ← Kevin, I didn't mention names above, but Emeril is exactly who I had in mind. Not only does he get a no on the let-him-in question, he gets a rather resounding HELL NO!!! Interestingly, also on the HELL NO list is Charlie Trotter. That goes back to an episode in his first season on PBS, which I think I've mentioned previously on eG. It was an episode about birds (mostly chicken, I think). During the first season, they'd intersperse the color portions of recipe demo with B&W segments in the restaurant kitchen, where he'd show you things about the food or variations thereof. The B&W shots were always done in a single cut with a single camera. And in this particular episode, with his bare hands, Charlie T caressed some raw chickens, some raw quail, maybe a raw pheasant or other raw bird...and then IMMEDIATELY wrapped those same grubby paws around a roasted bird. Unless his editing people are really really good, he most definitely did not wash his hands inbetween. That really grossed me out, and blacklisted him from ever setting foot in my kitchen...or me from setting foot in his again. In the end, though, that little incident was not why I quit watching his show. I quit watching because he wasn't doing anything that was at all accessible to me in my own kitchen. I got sick of seeing microgreens grown in Ohio especially for him, meat from providers that those of us not in the biz don't have access to, and other unavailable stuff. He'd talk plenty about how beautiful his ingredients were, but didn't have any advice for those of us who are normal ol' home cooks, even those of us who live in agrarian areas with farmers' markets. But it got worse. Especially in the second season of the show, he started talking a great deal about flavors and simplicity. But then, when it came time to put his money where his mouth was, he'd concoct a dish that had two dozen ingredients, each of which was used in minuscule quantities and/or required substantial preparation. I'm not quite sure what idea of simplicity he was trying to convey, but it was totally lost on me. The tone of the show became unbearably uppity, and I lost interest in even watching for inspiration. The show in its first season at least presented things that might have been doable by, say, me. But the second season sent it up over my head and my interest level...which takes quite a lot. The technique looked pretty good to me, and the kitchen stayed relatively tidy. But there really wasn't much teaching going on, beyond the part about restaurant chefs being able to get stuff that none of the rest of us can. And I knew that already. MelissaH

Vanessa, I cooked in Colorado for nine years before becoming a flatlander again. The basic advice is that there is no general and exact solution to altitude problems. I'd try what your friend suggests, but be aware that you may still need to tweak to get it to work. Then, there's the other issue that if you're finding things too sweet, it may just be too sweet a recipe! I'd highly recommend keeping a notebook of what you try, and what the result is. Photos can be useful, as can (of course!) the collective wisdom of eG. You're probably in for multiple iterations to get a perfect product, and it can help immensely to write things down so you know what you did and whether it made matters better or worse to your tongue. That said, when I was visiting my parents last summer (their house is at about 8600 feet), I found the book Pie in the Sky by Susan G. Purdy (eG link) to be helpful in making baked recipes of all kinds work at altitude. The explanations inside of what happens and why you need to make the changes are quite useful. There are many other high-altitude cookbooks out there (and it's probably worth a couple of bucks to order the pamphlets from the Cooperative Extension, as the people in Ft. Collins know their stufff) but many of the recipes in other books didn't work at all at my parents' house. High altitude, in general, seems to be 5000 feet unless otherwise specified in the book. Heck, even the high altitude directions on a box of cake mix don't work when I visit my parents! (BTW. my mom has wrecked more baked goods using an air-insulated cookie sheet than I can count. If you use one, NOTHING browns on the bottom. If your oven has a tendency to heat very strongly from the bottom, you may find one useful, but I wouldn't give one a blanket recommendation. It's probably worth a try, once...but YMMV.) Good luck! MelissaH

Agreed that PBS these days is doing a better job of teaching than the Food Network. No matter what they're showing, PBS always seems to do a pretty good job educating. But I'm not so sure that PBS has more content time on their shows. Since getting a DVR, we watch very few shows in "real time" anymore. And regardless of whether the shows are on PBS or a commercial channel, we can zip through a "half hour" show in a little more than 20 minutes. The difference is that on a commercial channel, the meat of the show (excuse the expression) is in snippets, separated by commercials (like kebobs that include vegetables on the same skewer) whereas on PBS, once you get through the opening messages, the good stuff is in one big roast-like chunk. PBS is easier to watch this way. But for me there needs to be at least some decent entertainment value, if I'm going to spend my precious time watching a show (time-shifted or live). That's what doomed RLB's Baking Magic show for me: there wasn't anything new from either an educational or entertainment standpoint. Everything she talked about was in one or another of her books, which I own, and the show itself was pedestrian enough (it felt like I could have done the same thing in my own kitchen) that there was no draw for me. And that, in a nutshell, represents some of the problems with many of the shows today. MelissaH

Two nights ago, I marched out of our house and phoned up my friend Anne. I announced, over the phone, "I'm getting bitchy, I needed to get out of the house before I ripped someone's head off, and I need ice cream. Do you want to join me?" In due time, I arrived at her door. We got in her car, and made a quick run to the nearest place that sells pints to go. Once we got back, we proceeded to have a double date with a couple of cool guys named Ben and Jerry. While we ate (Phish Food and Peanut Butter Cup, two spoons, thank you very much), we did something we almost never do and watched Hell's Kitchen in real time. (We also did something we always do as we watch that show and yelled at the TV a lot.) We both pegged the person who was gone that night. Then I marched home again, feeling much better. MelissaH

Not to hijack your thread, Chris, but as I read through the replies this morning, I was struck by something: Technique and tidiness apparently do NOT go hand-in-hand. My husband and I sometimes have discussions along the lines of "Would you let So-and-so cook in our kitchen?" And some popular people get a resounding NO from both of us. While we both recognize that many of the presenters possess decent knife skills and some common sense, a handful are plain messy in the kitchen. By that, I mean that they can't seem to keep the kitchen relatively tidy by making sure stuff goes into the pot/bowl/container rather than all over the stove/countertop/work surface. I understand there's a difference between cooking on TV and cooking in your own kitchen, but I'd contend that keeping the kitchen in decent shape is as important a technique as the knife skills or the recipe development. And the ones who keep a neat kitchen are more fun for me to watch, because I don't find myself cringing at the thought of what comes after the cooking's all done. (Has anyone watched the Take-Home Chef and wondered who cleans up the kitchen, after he waltzes out the door? He's not as messy as some, but he does use a fair amount of hardware.) That said, I find the people with good technique AND the ability to talk intelligently about what they're doing and WHY they do it that way make for the best TV. And those who can are the people I find I prefer to watch. From that standpoint, I really miss Sara Moulton's live show. That was fun (sometimes in a perverse way that reminded me of a grad school oral exam), and the show was a whale of a challenge that not many people could pull off. Friends have, in the past, borrowed the old Jacques Pepin technique shows on videotape from their library, moved the TV to where they could see it from the kitchen, wrapped the remote in plastic, and followed along step by step. Jacques was their guide to learning how to cut up a chicken. I wish those shows would become available on DVD. And yes, I'd buy an eGTV DVD, if it were anything close to as useful as the eGCI. Some things are better done in video. MelissaH

I think it would go well with the duck. I have smoked duck on the WSM and it turned out fine. Did you get rid of that smoking contraption you had the trouble with last year in favor of the WSM? ← Yup, I did. The WSM is still sitting in its box downstairs, largely because I was away for the past week. Our town's annual Harborfest (read: a town of 18,000 people suddenly mushrooms into a town of 100,000 from Thursday through Sunday) starts tomorrow, which means that since we live on the west side of town and all the supermarkets are on the east side, we'll be doing a food shopping run later today. I plan to include whatever pig butt the store has, since I didn't plan so well this time around. My experience last time has me a little leery of chicken thighs, but I think I may try some of them again. (The only ducks we ever see here are frozen, and more often than not they need to be special-ordered because they don't show up very often.) As far as other supplies, the hardware store a mile or so down the road has chimney starters and charcoal, so that's easy to get to any time. I still have some hickory chunks left from the January misadventure, and of course there's the applewood I rescued from the neighbor a couple of weeks ago that just needs a hatchet and/or chainsaw. I'm thinking Minion method, started at a reasonably early hour in the morning so I can make sure everything goes OK the first time. We probably won't be going much of anywhere this weekend. MelissaH

Good! I had never read this before, but I paged through every food magazine on the rack (and there were a lot of them) and that was the one that looked the best. ← We picked up this magazine regularly for a while, also. The only place we could find it was the nearest Borders (for us, in Akron). Fortunately, that store was very close to the monthly meeting of my husband's homebrew club, for which I served as chauffeur. Finally, my MIL figured out how to get a subscription, which we kept for a few years, especially after we moved to CNY and were an ugly hour's drive from a Borders. When I learned how expensive it was (and the subscription only saved the cost of driving) I let it go. I still miss it, because it's a very different view of food than the US magazines. (It also gave us hours of fun, trying to figure out which varieties of fruits and vegetables here were equivalent to the ones listed!) I'm sure there's a Chuck E. Cheese around here somewhere, but I've somehow never managed to find it. I think it was in seventh grade that I went into one for the first time, when a friend had a birthday party there. We all waited in line for the Skee-Ball machines! MelissaH

Not that I can think of... fellow Clevelanders are you here? help me out!! ← Wow - that's a tough question! I've lived in Cleveland just over ten years, but I can't think of any food uniquely indigenous to Cleveland except for Dominic Cerino's Blue Egg Ravioli. Still, when I think "Cleveland Food" - I think pierogi and kielbasa - a reflection of the large Polish and Eastern European population here. The grandmas at some of the local Polish churches still make pierogi to die for! Kris - do we need to get you some of those before you leave?? ← I'd never heard of sauerkraut balls before I moved to NEO. Might they qualify? MelissaH

I would think you could keep it for at least a month. I've made that sauce before and thats how long I kept it and it was fine. I've made other bbq sauces and they keep a long time too. I think the vinegar and sugar kinda preserves it. ← We're now going on about two weeks, and it still looks and smells fine. However, I tend to heat it up to a simmer before using it after the first day, just to be sure anything in it is good and dead. I'm wondering if it would totally overwhelm duck, that honored common companion of pig. After all, a WSM has two racks! MelissaH

Does anyone know how long you can store =Mark's sauce in the fridge before it goes bad? (I'm just using a plain old Rubbermaid. It's not processed in a jar or anything like that.) MelissaH

I think I need this recipe, please. I can only make so many plain meringues & pavlovas with the extra egg whites now that it is icecream season... Happy to oblige. I thought about making meringues, but the downpour we had all day on Wednesday dictated otherwise. Hence, these. This started out based on a recipe from Dorie Greenspan's Paris Sweets book (page 12 for those of you who have the book). The original ingredients: 8 1/2 ounces (250 grams) blanched almonds 1 cup (200 grams) sugar 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 3 tablespoons (20 grams) unsweetened cocoa powder, and/or 1/2 cup (50 grams) finely chopped pecans, to flavor (optional) 3 large egg whites, lightly beaten with a fork And the original directions are along the lines of: heat the oven to 375 °F, and line a couple of cookie sheets with parchment. Grind almonds and sugar in the food processor till fine, add flavoring (unless you're using pecans), dump in the eggs with the machine on still, and stop when everything's combined into a batter. (Add the pecans here, by hand.) Drop spoonfuls on the lined cookie sheets and bake for about 20 minutes, rotating halfway between. Cool on a rack. The original recipe claims to make about 2 dozen cookies, and instructs 1 level tablespoon of batter per cookie. Now, you may see where my changes originated from, if you look at the ingredients and then consider typical quantities sold in America. Start with the fact that the ice cream recipe I tried required 6 egg yolks, so double everything. This means that I'd need 500 g of nuts. But, going back to my pre-dishwasher days when I abhorred using the food processor for anything because I really hate washing that beast by hand, I quickly became addicted to the ground almonds sold at Trader Joe's (or at my local health food store, but at a much higher price tag). To this day, whenever I'm in the same city as a TJ's I make a point to stock up. I don't think the TJ's ground almonds are made from blanched almonds, but I don't really care about that because I always add chocolate so you'd never see the difference. The kicker: TJ's almonds (and hazelnuts, which also work) are sold in one-pound bags, which translates into metric as 454 grams. But double what the recipe says, and you get 500 grams. I'm not opening up a brand-new bag of nuts just to get at 46 grams! My solution: I replaced the "missing" 46 grams of nuts with 46 grams of cocoa (I used Hershey's silver label, because that's what I had on hand and I wish I could still buy it). General assessment was that the cookies were a very dark chocolate flavor; less cocoa probably would have worked if you aren't into dark chocolate. I did not use any other flavoring. I also cut back on the sugar, because I don't like my desserts too sweet, and used only 325 grams instead of the 400 grams the recipe called for. (Other members of the family thought I probably would have been fine going up to 350 grams of sugar, but I like them this way and I'M THE COOK on this one, so if you don't like them don't eat them and there will be more for me! ) So here's what I did for my cookies: 6 large egg whites, straight as they came out of the eggs, aged in the fridge in a big bowl covered with plastic wrap for three days because that's how long it took me to get around to them, still nearly fridge-cold 325 grams sugar 46 g cocoa 454 g (a 1 pound bag) ground almonds from Trader Joe's, also cold in my case, as it came straight out of the deep freeze Before you start mixing, turn on the oven to 375 and line a couple of cookie sheets with parchment. (I always use parchment in a half-sheet pan for these, never a Silpat.) Whisk the egg whites with the sugar and the cocoa until well combined. Dump in the bag of almonds. With your stiffest spatula (or a wooden spoon, I suppose) mix everything together into a batter until all the almonds are wet through. You are NOT trying to beat air into this! The batter will not be at all runny, but it probably will be somewhat sticky. Get a couple of spoons. I use the teaspoons from our silverware. Drop spoonfuls of the batter onto the prepared cookie sheets. On my half-sheet pans, I generally put 3 cookies per row across the short way, but I stagger the rows so that the cookies in one row are between the cookies in the adjoining rows. If I stagger properly, I can get 8 rows of cookies on each half-sheet pan and still keep each one about an inch from its neighbors. With this batter, aim carefully because once the batter touches the parchment, it won't want to move easily. In my new oven that heats evenly and has a good thermostat, I can bake two pans at once. They take about 20 minutes in all. Be sure to rotate the pans halfway through, top to bottom and back to front. In my old miserable oven, I was stuck doing only one pan at a time. I did these on the normal bake setting, but I'm tempted to try them with the convection fan going. When they're done, they'll be a little bit puffed up, even though you didn't consciously try to beat air into the batter. I let the first cookie sheet rest on top of the stove while I retrieve the second from the oven. Then I get my cooling racks out. I transfer the entire sheet of parchment onto the cooling rack, and let the cookies get most or all of the way cool on the parchment. (No grease, so you probably won't even need to wash the cookie sheets!) Then, when they're cooled enough, they come right off the paper without leaving their insides behind. This batch wound up nice and chewy, probably in part because Wednesday when I baked them was humid and rainy all day. (No flooding here, but some problems south of us.) On drier days, I've been able to get a slight crust on the outside, but those batches with the crust also had a little more sugar, proportionately. The original recipe says they keep for up to 4 days at room temperature, and can be sandwiched together. We've never kept any around for even 4 days, and they always seem to disappear before I get around to sandwiching them. We're still figuring out what will work best: front or back. My vote is for the back, because I think that will be easier. If you look, you can find plenty of versions of the Lion of Flanders on line. My husband found a nice one that has the red tongue and claws, as well as the most intricate white highlighting. I'm thinking the easiest thing to do is to tape a printout onto the glass so you can look through the glass and see the picture. Then, we can paint the red and white "trim" very very carefully, carefully add the black outline, and fill it in without tearing our hair out. We were told in Flanders this summer that the Lion of Flanders always faces to the left. So we'll print out a version that's mirrored, facing to the right, if we take this tack. Easy enough. I'm thinking that if we try to paint the front of the glass, we'd be giving ourselves an impossible job because either the black would have to go down first everywhere and we'd have to freehand the white (and red, to some extent) or we'd have to take infinite pains to put the white down first and paint the black around it (or paint the black first and leave spaces to add the white after). From a purely practical standpoint, I'm thinking the back would be easier than the front. I'm leaving the frame/frameless details up to my husband. I would have loved to do a tile mosaic of the Lion, but that turned out to be cost- and time-prohibitive. I may still try to do a cross-stitch or needlepoint to add to the kitchen, if I find myself with time on my hands this winter. There's also a shop in downtown Oswego that specializes in yarns and weaving, and Dan there is willing to work with me to weave a tapestry with the Lion, to show me the techniques I'd need to know for weaving a pattern. But that would be a huge undertaking for both me and Dan since I'm really a novice, and this summer I couldn't say for sure when I'd have the time to devote to something like that. We have plenty of wall space, and who knows: maybe one of these trips, my husband will get a beautiful photo of a flag flying somewhere in Flanders to add. Maybe if we win the lottery, we'll do a custom tile backsplash. Or maybe that will need to wait until we redo the countertops. MelissaH

Thanks, everyone. It's so amazing to me that people actually read my agonizing! We've figured out how we're going to do the Lion. We found some glossy bake-on paints, and ordered an 18-inch-square piece of tempered glass with ground edges. It should arrive next week sometime. Our tests indicate that the paint should work well, and then we'll just need to find some nice mirror holders. Now I also have wood floor transition pieces, too. The only things left are the backsplash, and boxing in the piece of baseboard replacement pipe that shows. And the Lion, of course. Apart from the looks, I'm even more amazed by how well the kitchen functions. I've been in overdrive for the last two days, making such things as homemade pasta (the roller clamps beautifully to the overhang, and the butcher block surface is wonderful because the dough doesn't stick!) which we served with a cream sauce with home-frozen peas and smoked salmon; a cake (the chocolate cloud roll from RLB's Cake Bible, filled with whipped cream that I whipped with "wildberry" jam that I pressed through a sieve to de-seed); caramel ice cream with candied peanuts (read the details in the Ice Cream cook-off thread); and cookies with the egg whites left over from the ice cream, almond flour, cocoa, and sugar. It's been lots of fun! The iPod docking station has two speakers of its own, but no other speakers, and no way to attach them. We were looking for something that specifically would dock the iPod, because we wanted to not just get the music but also to keep the thing charged. (You can attach an iPod or any MP3 player to a stereo system via a cable that goes from the headphone jack to the Aux input of the stereo, but the downside of that is no charging for the iPod. Ditto on the adapters that go from headphone jack to cassette deck, but we no longer have a functioning cassette deck other than the one in a boom box.) We liked that this one was small, and the sound is adequate, with enough oomph to get into the dining room. (We don't shake the house, but that's fine with us.) We would have liked the sub-woofer system that was supposed to be out at the beginning of the month, but it doesn't seem to exist and we got sick of waiting. The Bose system sounds wonderful, but the lack of tuner killed it for us. (Which seems like a really silly omission on Bose's part, IMHO....) We did consider putting ceiling speakers in, and connecting them to our existing stereo system in the living room. But we decided we'd be happier with something independent. More to come later, including pictures. But my Internet connection's gone fritzy today thanks to some power line work that disrupted the cable line, and I want to get this up while I still can! MelissaH

I made some ice cream last week. I followed the recipe for caramel ice cream in the July issue of Gourmet magazine. You can also see the recipe on line here. In short, you cook a cup of sugar with a pinch of salt to make a caramel. Then you add a cup of cream, then a cup of whole milk, and heat up to a boil so the caramel melts and the whole thing turns homogeneous. In the meantime, you whisk 6 egg yolks with a couple teaspoons of corn syrup. You temper the yolks with some of the hot caramel-cream-milk, then add the yolks to the pot, and cook into a custard. The custard gets strained, chilled, and frozen in an ice cream maker. When it was frozen, I transferred it to a container, covered the top with plastic wrap pressed directly on the surface and then the container lid, and sent it to the deep freeze for about 6 hours. The flavor was terrific. I got the caramel just this side of burned, so it had the flavor of my MIL's peanut brittle. Then, to gild the lily, I candied some peanuts and served the ice cream with the candied peanuts and a sprinking of fleur de sel. Marvelous. However, there were two issues with the ice cream. One issue is that this stuff was just too rich to eat much more than a tablespoonful. The fat just completely coated my mouth, and a very small serving was more than enough. Some of this, I can probably work around by altering the proportion of cream to milk. The more puzzling one to me, though: the ice cream did not feel very cold in my mouth. You know how you lick a popsicle and it definitely feels cold? Or store-bought ice cream makes the inside of your mouth cold? This stuff didn't. And it came out of a freezer cold enough that you don't dare reach inside with wet hands. I'm wondering if maybe the high fat content had something to do with the un-coolness of the ice cream. I'm sure that also added to its non-refreshingness. Has anyone else had this experience with ice cream or another frozen dessert? Any suggestions? I liked the flavor, and the texture's stayed silky-smooth for 3 days now, but I'd like something that's a bit more refreshing and that it's possible to eat two whole spoonfuls of. MelissaH

One possibility that I've come up with: when we were doing dishes by hand, we regularly filled the dish drainer that sat in the second tub of the double sink. So we got a wooden cutting board, and my husband ran it through the dado blade of the table saw both ways, to cut a criss-cross with holes so air can circulate. We set this wooden drainboard over a kitchen towel, as a supplement. The only problem with the wooden drainboard is that if really wet stuff went on it, the water caused the board to arch and bend. (When it dries out, it flattens again.) I'm thinking it may be time to put this special board in with the cutting boards, so that when we hand-wash stuff, it's easy to get at, but when we don't need it, it lives out of sight. I'll have to look into this, to see if we have things set properly. There doesn't seem to be much to set temperature-wise on this dishwasher, at least that's obvious: just six buttons on the front panel, plus a power button. I'll have to read through the manual again, since there doesn't seem to be one on-line for quick reference now, but I'm wondering if part of the issue might be our lack of rinse agent. We don't use a rinse agent because it leaves a film on everything in the dishwasher. The problem with a film is that it would kill the head on beer poured into glasses. Something I read on line talks about the DW automatically adjusting the water temperature, so it may or may not be something I have any control over. In other news: we have music in the kitchen now! We ran errands in Syracuse this morning, and decided to stop in to BJ's (our warehouse club) because they're the least expensive source for the kitty litter we use (among other things). And lo and behold, we found the iHome under-counter iPod dock for about 2/3 the cost of Amazon. We liked this dock because it has a radio (FM, TV, and weather band) and because it actually pulls the iPod inside, out of harm's way. So we got it, and as you can see, my husband has installed the outlet and shelf for it. (I suspect he'll patch the drywall tonight, so we can finish painting the wall tomorrow.) It looks good and sounds great. The remote conveniently comes with a magnet, so it's attached to the fridge. If anyone takes it off the fridge and does not put it back on the fridge, I will wring their neck! Our other BJ's purchases were not tremendously interesting, other than the two racks of ribs which are currently on the grill. I'll be making a batch of =Mark's South Carolina mustard barbecue sauce once my husband finishes in the kitchen. He's doing the last of the light valances right now. Tomorrow I suspect he'll be working on the threshold pieces. We did look at tiles at Home Depot. They had the black 4-by-4 bullnose tiles...two of 'em. I think what we'll wind up doing is going back to Lowe's and getting normal 4-by-4 tiles, which we'll then edge with the 2-by-6 bullnose. We can even get 2-by-2 double-bullnose tiles for corners. We got some glossy paint (not the stained-glass stuff I mentioned before, but something that's supposedly opaque) at the craft store, which supposedly bakes onto glass, and we'll experiment with a Lion of Flanders on some scrap. As soon as I got home, I realized that I'd forgotten to add a stop to the drugstore to our list of errands, to get another bottle of mineral oil. I realized this because I looked at the butcher blocks next to the stove, and noticed that they were pretty much dry, despite nobody doing anything to rub in the oil. Definitely time for another coat tonight! Since it's been a glorious day here, I jumped on my bike and rode the mile and a half or so downtown. (When I was a student, I had no car so I rode my bike everywhere. Ask me sometime about transporting a vacuum cleaner 50 miles on the back of my bike. Since Ohio, though, I haven't done much utility cycling. I'm slightly appalled by the lack of good places to lock up a bike here!) I found my bottle of mineral oil; the Wayne Drugs in downtown Oswego had both light and heavy versions. I went for the heavy, since it was about half the cost of the light. I'll coat the counters one more time tonight, and I hope that will do the trick for a month or so. Now that we've pretty much cleared out the electrical appliances from the downstairs temporary kitchen, we've been able to put good things in there. For one thing, we finally got the dehumidifier up and running. This is important because the family room is in the lower floor of our house, and the tiles on the floor were laid pretty much right on the concrete slab. The concrete acts as a giant heat sink and stays at a constant temperature year-round, so the floor feels really cool in the summer. (How cold? Cold enough that the Lyon Thermometer says "Cold!" and he hops on three feet!) We start to have an issue if it gets humid in the summer: the warm humid air hits the cold tile, the humidity in the air condenses onto the tiles, and voilà! we have droplets or puddles on the family room floor. For the past two summers, a dehumidifier took care of the problem. We'd sit it on the bar, run the hose into the barsink, and turn it on when we weren't trying to watch TV. But while we were cooking in the family room, we had neither the surface area nor the electrical outlet for the dehumidifier. Within about half an hour of having that beast turned on, we got the water on the floor under control. The other nice little addition to downstairs is a wine fridge. We thought about putting it in the kitchen originally, but ultimately decided that it would be better downstairs, out of the way. It's completely loaded already, but with more beer than wine. But I haven't even gotten into the biggest score of the week. That happened last night. We don't have trash pickup here, unless you pay for it, but every couple of Mondays the town comes around and picks up the brush, leaves, grass clippings, and other natural stuff that you put out front for them. Well, one of our neighbors around the corner from us had an apple tree that was about halfway dead, so they put out a bunch of apple logs! I knocked on their door and asked if I could have them, and they said yes! (They're going to let me know if they wind up taking out the rest of the apple tree, so I can get that applewood also.) Now that I'm not cooking outside by necessity every night, I feel like I can spare the room, so yesterday I put in an order for a WSM. But that's really a note for another topic. Watch out, butt and duck! MelissaH