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

We actually started thinking about renovating a kitchen, oh, about seven or eight years ago. That was in the house we lived in before we moved here. That kitchen was a completely different shape, which presented completely different challenges. But we started talking about what we liked and didn't like, and what we wanted from a renovation, that long ago. Ultimately, we moved out before doing much work on that kitchen, but we were able to use quite a bit of that planning in the process of planning this kitchen. In retrospect, I'm very happy we spent so much time planning. We knew we'd be on a tight time budget, and by having most of the decisions made before we even started, we were able to get done ahead of schedule. That, having a handy husband, and not finding anything horrific enabled this project to proceed well. Yeah, stuff in the DW doesn't necessarily get completely dry. Especially things like the bottoms of mugs which have a bit of a lip so they hold water, or the lip of an upside-down Rubbermaid container. There's no dry cycle clearly marked on the Bosch, so what we've started doing is running it through its cycle last thing before we go to bed, and then in the morning popping it open slightly (and dumping out the bottoms of mugs, etc.) but not actually putting things away then. The bigger issue for us right now is the stuff that gets hand-washed: the good knives, the hand-blown glasses, the ice cream scoops. They sit out overnight, and when it's humid they don't get completely dry by morning. That happens sometimes in the summer, but more often in the winter when all the windows are closed and it's snowing a couple of inches every day. I guess we might have to start drying things by hand, if they don't get dry sitting out overnight. But I'm not complaining, as it beats washing everything by hand! Speaking of dry: I've been oiling butcher block like mad. For some reason, the two surfaces on either side of the range are drinking mineral oil like it's gone out of style. I'm completely out, and there are *still* sections that will easily take more oil in. Guess I need to go to the drugstore tomorrow and pick up another bottle. Last night, when I went to bed I left a thickish coating of oil on the butcher block. In the morning I found little oily kittyprints on the front of the range. And tonight, there was another hairball on the floor. Coincidence? Thanks! Most of the sweat and effort and work belongs to my husband, not to me. My part was really in the planning, but that was a joint effort too. Advice: Think carefully about whether a counter-depth fridge would make a difference to you. We don't have one, because two years ago you paid a huge premium to get counter-depth, but the only options available seemed to be side-by-side, which I don't like at all. Things have gotten a little better since then, but you still pay a premium for the counter-depth. And if you don't want side-by-side, you pretty much get stuck with french doors on a top fridge, which is nice but costs you even more. We love having the freezer on the bottom. It means that the fridge is on top, so there's no bending to get into the veggie drawers. However, with our narrow kitchen, the big door causes a little trouble, because it's so...urm...big. The designer's original plan called for the fridge to be right opposite the range, which wouldn't have worked because the door handle would have banged into the oven handle and we couldn't have opened the fridge. A french-door version would have solved the problem, but boy, they're pricey! We didn't care about having water in the door. It's not that big a deal for us. YMMV. One thing I'd definitely look at is the freezer door vs. drawer options available. I know Amana makes both, or at least they did at the time we were looking two years ago. We really like our drawer. I think you may lose a little bit of freezer space with the drawer, but it's really easy to get at. (We have friends with a bottom-freezer door.) Again, if you want a counter depth model, your choices will probably be limited. I'm about ready to put a Lyon on the wall sometimes, as I'm nearly positive he's the guilty party who knocked over a half-full water glass on the dining room table last night while we slept! (I think this because Leo spent most of the night on his pillow, which is on our bed.) Fortunately, most of the water soaked into a placemat and the tablecloth, and the table's finish wasn't damaged at all. We're apparently still in the new-surface-that-must-be-fully-explored phase, according to the cats. And the old dining room table and countertops being off limits apparently doesn't mean diddlysquat about the new dining room table and countertops! We're going to Syracuse tomorrow, to run errands. Among other things, we discovered a paint specifically designed to paint on glass. You paint it on, let it dry for 24 hours, put the glass item in a cold oven, slowly heat it up to 325 °F, and then turn the oven off and let the oven and item cool together. At the end of the cooling, the paint is baked onto the glass more or less permanently, and gives a stained-glass effect. We've found a Lion of Flanders emblem on line (the official version, black with white trim inside and red tongue and claws) that we were able to enlarge without destroying the resolution, and printed a tiled version that's nice and big. We're going to see if we can find some of the glass paint and test it out. If we like the effect, we'll be ordering a big sheet of glass from our local supplier, taping our lion emblem underneath, and painting on the glass. Also on our list: looking for 4 inch square bullnose tiles, to use in the backsplash. We're going to do 2-by-6 bullnose tiles for most of the backsplash. But we realized that the butcher block in the baking area is a smidge thicker than the laminate that butts up to it. If we used the same tile, straight as it comes, we'd wind up with a little bit of a bump that would look like a mistake. So we can either trim the bottom edge of the tiles that would form the backsplash over the butcher block to get a common tiletop height, or we can get a different tile entirely for that area, to make it look completely different and therefore not a mistake. We've opted for the larger tiles, but our Lowe's doesn't have them. Home Depot seems to have a better selection of tiles. If the HD glossy black doesn't match the Lowe's glossy black of our 2-by-6es, I'm lobbying for glossy red to match the lion's tongue and claws. I now have toekicks all the way around, and light valances everywhere except over the lights to the right of the baking area (which is hidden by the fridge anyway). Tomorrow I may get the last light valance, and we should also be able to mount the paper towel holder. I haven't had a paper towel holder since I moved away from home! (I'm so excited to have a home for my paper towels that's off the countertop!) What's left: backsplashes (as described above), threshold pieces for both floor transitions, and shelf for iPod. We've pretty much settled on the under-counter mounting system from iHome, but haven't ordered it yet. I'd like to have a subwoofer, but when I look for the one with the subwoofer that was supposed to be available on 1 July, nobody seems to have it and it's nowhere on the iHome Web site. I wonder if it got delayed. In any case, we can't put in the shelf until we know what's going on it, and we both like the idea of keeping the iPod safely out of harm's way. Time for me to go push oil around on the countertops, to move it from the areas that have apparently taken in all they can to the areas that need more. I'll be glad when that's all evened out. Must remember to get heavy cream. I have eggs already. I want to make that caramel ice cream recipe. (Two things to do on the new stove: make caramel and cook eggs for custard!) MelissaH

Lori, We started packing up stuff from the kitchen on 1 June. The dumpster came the next day. Before the end of the month, we were cooking in the new kitchen. That's about a month sooner than we'd originally figured! (We attribute the speed to three things: first, the lack of nasty surprises; second, the IKEA cabinets going together and in much more easily than we'd figured on; and finally, everything being delivered early so we didn't get stuck waiting. We had fish for dinner last night. Nothing too exciting: some tilapia filets from the freezer, defrosted and cooked in olive oil and butter. But the exciting part is that our vent hood works! Had I not known that we were cooking fish for dinner, I wouldn't have known at all! Hooray for hoods! As far as totally finished, we're still close. Other (work-related) projects have taken precedence over the last day or two, but maybe over the weekend we'll get nearer the end. I did buy a brand-new paintbrush today, which I'll dedicate to mineral oil for the butcher block sections of countertop. Tonight I plan to give both sections around the range their first coats of oil. If they suck all that in overnight, I'll do it again first thing when I wake up tomorrow, and then lightly sand them down just before dinner. My goal is to have the countertops totally ready to go before the weekend, so I can crank out some fresh pasta for the first time since forever. Tonight is market night. It's a beautiful day today, sunny with light breeze and temps in the low 70s, so it will be a wonderful market night. I'm hoping to find some good pie filling material, but I think it still might be a little early. MelissaH

Your bread looks beautiful! Did you bake it right in these pans, or is there something special in the bottoms? I applaud your local efforts. Have you been tracking your mileage for the week at all, so you can compare it to a week when you aren't going out of your way? I'm intrigued by the concept of eating locally. Unfortunately, since I'm not a farmer or other person with large cellar and silo and other storage facilities, other than in the summer I don't think it would work so well in a small town in upstate NY. MelissaH

All the really big stuff is now done, unless you count backsplash and toekicks as big. Painting the dining room wall and ceiling was a group effort. My husband and cousin put the first coat of paint on the wall: (see, they have faces!) And then I finished up the task. Once the paint had dried and we removed all the blue tape from the fan and the ceiling, we brought up the dining room table. It's a perfect fit for the space, looks good with the cabinets, and is a huge improvement over our previous table. The new chairs also work well, and the new fan looks terrific with everything. I'm thrilled and delighted with the improved dining room, as well as the new kitchen. (Yup, that's the same old molding around the door. We might replace it when we build the box around the former baseboard heater pipe.) The changes are getting smaller and smaller, harder to see unless someone points them out. Probably the biggest thing in this picture is that the under-cabinet fluorescent lights are installed, as are the valances to hide the lights themselves. There's stuff in the cabinets (and I like how the textured glass doors hide any messiness inside) and stuff on the countertops. (The wine bottle is Ravenswood Zin, Vintner's Blend 2004, IIRC.) We've even got some of the decorative stuff up. The towel is what we've been using to dry the stuff that gets hand-washed. We need to find a better solution for that. The window molding (and painting the quarter-round trim with three coats of shiny paint, same color as the ceiling) really finished off that area. The hood vent is also in. That took a bit of doing, and we wound up with a cap and flange that will need to be painted so they don't corrode. But the ventilation system works, well enough that after cooking shrimp and scallops indoors, there was virtually no trace left behind. It took a bit of doing to get the vent cover installed, because the only way to attach the cover to the hood is to basically sit on the stove and reach up. I didn't take any pictures of that. We also don't really have a great place to keep the giant roll of plastic wrap, which we acquired in the process of packing everything up to move here three years ago. Sooner or later we'll use it all up, and go back to normal-sized rolls of the stuff that fit nicely in a drawer with the aluminum foil and baking parchment and ziplock bags. I've used the oven AND the baking area now. We had cherries and blueberries to use up, and I have a dishwasher to clean the food processor after I use it. So I pitted the cherries, and kludged a pie together. I started the night before, oiling the butcher block with a thick coat of mineral oil. In the morning, I wiped off the oil that hadn't soaked in, and realized that it really could use a light sanding. So I hauled out the old pastry board, and rolled my dough on that. (I'll be sanding after dinner tonight, so next time I can use the butcher block for its intended purpose.) The filling turned out well, but the crust wound up a bit tougher than I would like. I think that's because I used the food processor to mix in the water, which I almost never do, so next time I'll go back to folding in the liquid by hand. But I did weave a beautiful lattice top, that would have been even prettier had I remembered to brush it with something and then sprinkle it with a touch of sugar to make it sparkle and shine. Oh well, it still nicely showed off the cherry-berry filling inside. I've also now sacrificed the first bit of skin to the kitchen god: I touched the oven rack with my bare wrist. I got ice on it right away, though, and it didn't even blister. (Note to self: if someone asks what we need for the kitchen, tell them some nice LONG oven mitts! Kitchen god and construction god are two different things, and the construction god got many blood sacrifices in the course of building the kitchen.) I tested out the convection function of the oven with the pie. Don't know what difference that may have made. The towels hanging from the oven door were a gift from our friend Bruce. The ceiling and walls have been patched and touched up now. All that remains is some of the light valances and the aforementioned toekick and backsplash work. Today's purchases included some boards to make threshold pieces, for the doorway and the transition to the dining room carpet. (No sense in going through a lot of effort for those, because the carpet will be GONE within a couple of years at most, and when we put hardwood in, we'll need to redo those transitions anyway.) Random thoughts: *I'm definitely seeing good reasons to keep the fridge door as it is, not reversing it. If I'm in the baking area working, someone else can get into the fridge without disturbing me! *Lyon tried to go under the cabinets yesterday. He stuck his head underneath, looked around, and then decided that he really didn't want to go there. Toekicks are definitely a good idea in our kitchen. *When I oiled the butcher block and left it to absorb overnight, someone went exploring. I found oily pawprints on the laminate countertop next to the butcher block the next morning. Don't know if it's related to the 5 AM hairball. <yuk!> *I should remember to pick up a brand-new paintbrush to oil the two other sections of butcher block. It should be easier than wiping oil on with a washcloth, won't get my hands as gunked up as the washcloth, and probably (I hope) won't leave behind as much lint. *This kitchen is amazing, because it lets us do things we like, that never would have been possible before. Even stupid things like someone doing dishes (meaning, "someone loading the dishwasher") and another person prepping food. *We like being able to seat as many people as we could ever want around the table. *The cats have taken a liking to our new red IKEA chairs. We need to get a lint brush to keep nearby. *I should really make some Korova Cookies in the very near future. And something with salty caramel, since I have such an embarrassment of wonderful French salts. Maybe some caramel ice cream, to go with Korova Cookies? There was a recipe in the new Gourmet magazine that looked promising. There are four freezer canisters in the deep freeze, just waiting for me. *I should start thinking of things to feed our friends for when we hold the Kitchen-Viewing Party. The tapas book by Jose Andres will probably have some good ideas...like the potato chip tortilla. Should test that out. *This must mean life is getting back to normal, WRT kitchen matters, because I'm spending more time actually planning things to cook rather than making building decisions or daydreaming about impossibilities. MelissaH

Wow, thanks for your responses, everyone. I'm now really curious to at least find pandan leaves, to stick my nose in them and smell them. We have a small Asian grocer in town here, run by people who are (I think) Filipino. If they don't have a clue what I'm talking about, we have larger Asian stores in Syracuse. Do Filipinos use pandan leaves and/or palm sugar? Ottawa's not far, but something tells me I'd have a problem getting fresh leaves of any kind across the border. MelissaH

Oh! I forgot to mention: We tested out the oven last night. At the supermarket yesterday, we got the parts for my favorite initial oven test: two cans of "whomp" biscuits. I followed the directions on the can, and the biscuits were done right in the middle of the time range given in the instructions, which means that my oven's thermostat is pretty darned accurate. Furthermore, the biscuits browned evenly, which means that the oven is also pretty even-heating. The second can of biscuits is waiting in the fridge still, since as it turned out we didn't need to adjust anything and try again. We ate the resulting biscuitoids with local strawberries, macerated in a touch of sugar while we ate dinner, and ice cream. Yum. Watch out, butter cake recipe! MelissaH

Wow, things got ahead of me in a hurry! I meant to get back to this a lot sooner, but it obviously didn't happen. As I'd said, we have cooked our first dinner entirely in the new kitchen. (And since then, we've cooked a few other dinners partly upstairs, since it's gotten nice enough to use the grill again the last couple of evenings.) We don't yet have a hood that actually vents outside. Until we have a hood that actually sucks dirty air somewhere, we can't do anything too noxious. But it's coming. Wednesday afternoon (that was the 28th) the stainless steel was delivered to our HVAC roofer guy, and then he needed to make the sheet of metal into the ducts and various other pieces. The original plan was for him to come on Friday and do the work (yesterday, that is) but the rain we've had backed things up enough that all he could do was come over quickly and get up on the roof. Because of the way the roof extends over the back deck, we actually have two different pitches of roof on the backside of the house. Depending on exactly where the stove is in relation to the roof, we may or may not be able to go straight up the way we want. But we do have options, and because we have lots of extra wiggle room in terms of the amount of ductwork we can use, we'll be able to find a viable workaround, even if it involves coming out somewhere other than straight up. He'll be over Monday morning, and the kitchen may actually be done that day, completely! (Did I just lay a curse on the kitchen? I hope not!) The moldings, filler strips, and end panels are all in place! The story of our first dinner: nothing too exciting, just a bag of cheese ravioli from the freezer with what was left of a jar of sauce, and a loaf of store-bought garlic bread. Whatever salad fixings had been left over in both our kitchens. We'd been working and running around (three of us individually: me, my husband, and our friend Anne) enough that nobody wanted to take the time to do anything much or that would involve massive prep work or time. Hence our meal selection. (Dessert was good, though: the last of the blueberry pie.) The stove heats water beautifully. We didn't do the scientific experiment of measuring the amount and temperature of the water in the pasta pot, and starting the stopwatch the moment the burner ignited, to see how long it takes our stove to boil water, but it was fast enough that nobody complained. But what really impressed us: the simmer setting of our burners. Our friends' Viking simmers with what seems to be little spurts of flame, but this baby has a very very very low, but constant flame. (Part of the difference may be because our friends run on propane, but we use natural gas.) The neatest part was that we could actually get the flame so low that the sauce heated but didn't bubble or blurple everywhere, for once. Casey at the stove, before the burning The stove without Casey But then, the part about our first burning. I hope that our non-ceremonial burning was enough to satisfy our kitchen gods for a good long time. It happened to the garlic bread. The instructions say to bake for a while, as a whole closed-up loaf, and then open the loaf up and stick it under the broiler for a bit to crisp the top. (You can probably all see where the train wreck's coming from.) We baked as directed, and then switched from bake to broil. On our range, this entails pushing the "broil" button and turning the knob all the way past 500 to "broil." Casey did this, and a couple of minutes later checked the bread. Nothing seemed to be happening. Another couple of minutes, another check, still nothing. We thought maybe it was too far from the broiler---the one knock we'd heard about this particular range was that the broiler might be a little wimpy, compared to some others---so we rested the bread on top and moved a rack up right to the top. Still, after a couple of minutes, nothing. Then, I asked whether the oven lights were on. There are lights on each dial which switch on when the burner or oven is turned on, and there's also a light that turns on when the oven is heating. And lo and behold, the oven lights were off. The knob has a little bit of a click at broil, and my husband had gone past it a smidge. (The only thing past broil is clean.) He turned the oven knob to where it clicked into broil, and you know the part that comes next. Three minutes later, we had a loaf of garlic bread nicely charred at both ends. We cut the ends off, and ate the rest with our dinner. Casey at the sink That night we ran the dishwasher for the first time. I like that we have a display that tells you how many minutes are left in the cycle. We can barely hear it at all when it's on, which is nice. I also like that it's easy to load, and holds lots and lots of dishes, and cleans them well. We discovered that our two largest plastic cutting boards really don't fit in well with the top rack in place, so unless we have lots of tall stuff to do, we'll continue to wash those by hand. But even that's not such a big deal anymore, because we have a beautiful huge sink that can hold even our largest cutting board flat so it's easy to wash. There were a few other things that don't go in the dishwasher, so I also did those by hand, and just spread them all to dry on a kitchen towel on the counter. In the morning, I just had to put them away and hang the towel back through the fridge handle, and that was easy. Back to the dishwasher: in the morning, things were a touch damp still, so I guess the drying cycle isn't quite as efficient as leaving things on a drying rack overnight in the breeze. But I can live with that. I like having my dishes in a drawer right next to the dishwasher. It's very easy to load and unload. The sink (and the glass-front horizontal cabinets) without Casey Thursday we spent the day, more or less, in Syracuse. We didn't get anything too big or wild, with the exception of my 20-year-old cousin. We did get a tone generator to help sort out the electrical messes, as well as to ease any future electrical work. We found some containers to help organize the stuff in our new drawers. On the way back into town we stopped at our farmer's market and got a couple of tomatoes and some potatoes. The tomatoes were for the burgers we grilled for dinner that night. The potatoes we did inside, salt potato style. We also threw some corn on the grill. My cousin was rather appalled to learn that in this country, store-bought ground beef needs to be cooked until it's completely dead. After dinner, we loaded the dishwasher again, added some other stuff from downstairs, and ran it. My jet-lagged cousin headed to bed, and we finished dealing with the last of the electrical issues. The hallway light turned out to be easy: in the process of running a new wire from Point A to Point B, because the old one was so old that much of the cloth insulation had crumbled away, my husband hadn't realized that the wire was supposed to go into and out of a junction box under a sheet of plywood. That was easy to rectify. The ceiling fan was a bit tougher, and we still don't know exactly what's going on with it. By bedtime on Thursday, that wasn't sorted out, but playing with power is not a good thing to do with a tired mind. So, to bed we went. Friday morning, first thing to do was to fix the power. With a clear mind, my husband realized that it doesn't really matter if he understands what's going on, so long as all the wires are capped off properly and the switch associated with the fixture turns it on in one position and off in the other. Furthermore, even having a working switch isn't all that important, because the new fan operates by remote control, so as long as it has power, it's fine. In the end, we determined that the fan and switch function, so that's how it currently stands. With that sorted out, my husband replaced the old ceiling fan with the Avian model from Lowe's. It's got three wide blades, one halogen light, and is much more visually appealing and up-to-date than its predecessor, especially combined with the new cabinets. It also moves a ton more air, enough that the burners on the stove flicker a bit on the simmer setting. The other thing we did yesterday was start to put things into our new cabinets. That meant that we had to put shelves in. I started with the spices, which went on a couple of sets of "steps" in the 12-inch cabinets over the baking area. I also put in things like the extracts and citrus oils, the honeys, the salts and mustards (we got a wonderful collection of sea salts, mustards, and peppercorns from France, courtesy of my cousin) here. I'm fully expecting to do at least one more full-scale reorganization once we've used the new kitchen for a while. The corner cabinet next to the fridge is where the small electrical appliances live: hand mixer, immersion blender and normal blender, electric frying pan, waffle iron, crockpot, and the like. Casserole dishes also wound up here. The turntables make it really easy to get at everything. The other corner cabinet will hold flour, sugar, and other powdered baking supplies. We have upper turntable cabinets too, but I don't remember off the top of my head what we were going to put here. We looked back at our original list of what we had, and at the diagram of the kitchen where I'd indicated what should go where in the new kitchen, but we left it on the countertop when the cat was still interested in the brand-new countertops, and he obviously found it because one day I came home to discover a giant hairball spewed on top of it. Yuck. We'd thought the toaster oven would go on the counter next to the fridge, so that's where we put it. It seemed fine, except that it was slightly in the way of the switch that will eventually control the undercabinet lights for that area. I still think it will be fine there, but sometime before I woke up today, the toaster migrated back to the other side of the kitchen, between dining room and sink. I think I'll move it back. We've decided for now to keep the hinges of the fridge as is. For one thing, it's pretty easy to use the countertop opposite the fridge as a loading zone. And for another thing, you don't get boxed into the corner when you open the fridge. If we decide it needs to be switched, that can happen later. This morning, my husband and cousin put one coat of paint on the dining room wall, around the slider that leads out to the deck. Then they went over to Anne's, to install her dishwasher. (It's only been sitting in her kitchen for a year now, because she couldn't decide which cabinet to replace with it.) She has the luxury of an open basement, which makes it much easier to deal with utilities than in our house. I put one coat of paint on the ceiling, and then I put the second coat of paint on the wall. I just now put the second coat of paint on the ceiling. That pretty much used up the ceiling paint, but we'll need to get some more because we have areas around the lights that need a little touching up. We'll do that next time we're out east. The view from the dining room. Things are still a bit of a mess, but they're getting better. So, what's next? First, Anne needs to have a functioning dishwasher. That should happen before the end of the day. She and her mom are joining us for dinner tomorrow, which is why we wanted to get the dining room painted today. We also have some little stuff that will need to migrate elsewhere. Once the paint is dry to the touch and I'm sure we have enough coats on the ceiling, and everything else is cleared out of the dining room, we'll be relocating into the dining room table my parents didn't want to move to Colorado. It's been in our garage the last month and a half. This is a beautiful oak table, 40 inches wide and about 74 inches long. There are two leaves, each of which adds 19 inches to the table's length. Now we also need to get a tablecloth to fit, before dinner tomorrow. We also need to talk with our next-door neighbor, the retired art professor. He's probably going to have some good ideas for how to best transfer our Lion of Flanders onto the wall. (Right now, we have a computer printout taped up with blue tape.) Once the lion is up, we'll know exactly where we can put the shelves. Once we figure out exactly what iPod dock we're getting, we'll know how many shelves we can get up. We're thinking a clock would also be nice. We still have to do the toekicks, which means we need to make sure all the junk is cleaned out from underneath. I see a Swiffer in our future, maybe. There's also a little bit of drywall patching to do still, as well as light valances and under-cabinet lighting. And the tile backsplash. And oiling the butcher block sections of countertop, but that needs to wait until all the other stuff is moved off. And.... But it's mainly little stuff now. The kitchen should be fully functional by Monday night! MelissaH

Enlighten me: what's a pandan leaf? Does it provide flavor, structure, or both? What do they look like, and do I have any hope of finding them in the US? MelissaH

Pictures and details to follow, later today I hope. The end is in sight. My husband is currently in the attic, following wires so we can have a functioning light in the hallway again, and also a ceiling fan (with light) that works as well. (It's not super-warm for the moment: the Lyon Thermometer says loosely curled up, with head over tail.) But: momentous occasion last night: we cooked our first meal in the new kitchen, and then ran a load of dishes in the dishwasher for the first time! (Slightly less momentous occasion: we burned something in the oven for the first time also. But we'll forget about that.) We've been spared the worst of the rain, unlike what's apparently south and east of us. However, it was thundery and rainy enough last night that I was relieved I didn't have to go outdoors to make dinner. In a couple of hours, we'll head to Syracuse to run a whole bunch of errands, including visits to Target and Home Depot. Then we'll stop at the airport to pick up my cousin, who arrives from Paris to do an internship in the chemistry department here. (Dinner plans for tonight include the all-American burgers on the grill.) In the meantime, I need to finish clearing stuff out of the room that will be his for the next six weeks. Hope Lyon doesn't mind sharing the bed for a while! We've started putting stuff into drawers. This is harder than I thought, trying to figure out what should go where, knowing that once something goes somewhere it probably won't get moved for quite a while. We're hoping that Target (or Home Depot) has better options for drawer organization than Lowe's and BB&B did locally. We're also looking for a new stepstool, so I can reach the upper portions of our beautiful TALL cabinets. My husband is wonderful! MelissaH

In various restaurants and cookbooks, I've also seen the dish's name spelled as lard na, lad na, rad na, and other variations. I'm guessing it's a transliteration thing, like going from Yiddish to English. Around here, it's always got lots and lots of broccoli to go with the wide rice noodles and brown "gravy." Your choice of beef, chicken, pork, tofu, shrimp.... MelissaH

Frozen Berry Report: Yesterday, we provided most of the dessert to go with dinner, chez our friend Anne. Anne made and baked me a pie crust, because right now if I tried to roll one, I'd be using sawdust to keep it from sticking, in my kitchen-under-construction. I made the filling outside on the propane stove, and just kept it in the pot for about an hour until we got to Anne's, at which point I scraped it into the baked shell and popped it into the fridge until we were ready for dessert. I followed your recipe except for two things: I used the unmeasured juice of one lemon, squeezed with a lemon squeezer; and I used frozen blueberries, which we picked ourselves and then froze in a single layer on sheet pans before bagging. It tasted delicious. You could taste some contrast between the cooked and uncooked berries. The texture contrast wasn't quite what it probably would have been with unadulterated berries, but the effect was still quite acceptable. There was a minor problem with the berries running out of the crust, once the pie was cut. I attribute this to my monkeying with the filling after it cooled to get it into the crust, disturbing the set from the cornstarch. I suspect that if I'd filled the pie without delay, it wouldn't have been a problem. Interestingly enough, I found a very similar recipe in Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte, called a Double-Good Blueberry Pie. That recipe says it's OK to use frozen blueberries you picked and froze yourself, adds an extra tablespoon of butter to the berries, and includes a cream cheese layer (unbaked) under the blueberries. I'd call the recipe a decent one to use with decent frozen blueberries, especially if you are in an ovenless situation. Respectfully submitted, MelissaH

We did our day trip to Ottawa today, and got a whole bunch of little stuff (trash cans for under the new sink, a pullout rack for the cleaning stuff under the sink on the other side, a cat food holder, a magnetic metal bar to hold up recipes, drawer dividers, etc. The trip itself was uneventful. We did stumble upon a couple of bonanzas in the As Is section. We found another horizontal cabinet door, for CDN $5. We also found two drawers, no fronts (but those can easily be constructed in our color out of birch plywood if necessary) for CDN $5 each. My husband just glued the countertops together with epoxy. I can't do that, because I'm allergic to one of the ingredients in the uncured resin. Here's what it looked like last night, with the plumbing all done and the bucket below DRY: The epoxy will be cured tomorrow morning. Then, the trim work really begins. MelissaH

Grrr. The sink hole is cut in the countertop. The sink fits beautifully in the hole. (We also had to trim the top rail of the sink cabinet slightly, so the sink would fit in.) And then my husband looked at the pieces to attach the sink to the countertop. The screws that came with the clips are designed to work only with 0.75-inch countertop. Our countertop is 1.5 inches thick. The clips don't work with the countertop. Why don't they tell you these things when you order? (This was an order I placed over the phone! All it would have taken is a "How thick is your countertop?" from the person on the other end of the line?) Who knows how long it could take to get in the "real" replacements! A workaround with readily-available materials is coming...I hope. MelissaH

No question from the beginning: we wanted gas burners and an electric convection oven. I'll pick up the decision process after we finished agonizing over cooktop and separate oven vs. range, and 30-inch range vs. 36-inch range. Once we'd decided that we were going to do a 36-inch range (which pretty much put us down the pro-style path, as there doesn't seem to be a 36-inch consumer-style range in existence) we started looking at our options. We restricted ourselves to things available in stores within about an hour's drive. This was not so much because we wanted to buy locally (which, as it turned out, we didn't, because the price tag for purchase and delivery would have been a couple thousand higher to go more local) but because we wanted to be sure there was going to be someone around who could service the range, should the need arise. Then, once we knew what stores carried the higher-end appliances here, we visited them to see what the people were like. And we didn't like the people in the Syracuse stores: in every single one of them, the people either didn't call us back when I phoned to ask a question, ignored us completely when we showed up, or were incapable of giving coherent information when we tracked someone down. We therefore decided that we'd be going with something that the store in Auburn carried, which gave us five options: Monogram, Viking, Wolf, DCS, and Thermador (if I remember correctly). We spent quite a while in that store, where the salesperson talked to us as soon as we entered, answered our few questions, and then left us to play in peace. We ruled out Thermador right away, because we thought it ugly and because that giant oven temperature dial looks, to me, like something else that periodically needs to be tweaked or calibrated to stay in sync with the oven dial. We also ruled out Wolf, both because we'd heard that they weren't as reliable as others and because we wanted all 6 burners to be high-powered as long as we were going the pro-style route, and according to the specs, the Wolf has wimpy burners. We liked the way the DCS looked, but the floor model at the store had a broken door. Cross them off the list! So, this left us with Monogram and Viking, which were the two at the top of our list even before we started to look at everything. We have friends with a six-burner Viking rangetop, and it is an absolute joy to cook on (especially to us, since last time we visited them, we were still saddled with the old electric cooktop). We also liked that Viking is available in something other than a stainless finish. (Stainless is nice, but we were both concerned about having what appears to be a giant hunk of metal in a relatively small kitchen.) Our friends' rangetop has been fine, in terms of reliability, but we weren't sure about getting someone to our small town if something came up here. (Our friends got their rangetop the year before Viking came out with sealed burners. They said that given a choice, it's a no-brainer: sealed burners are the way to go.) In Monogram's favor, it's a GE, which means that it should be relatively easy to get it serviced, should the need arise. I also liked the wok holders on the flip side, since I realized long ago that many of the things I keep on dreaming about cooking someday are things where a component gets fried in oil, but could be done in relatively little oil if I used a wok. (My husband just discovered the wok holders when I showed him a couple of days ago!) We liked the look and feel of the range. The deciding factor? In the end, it all came down to price. When we looked at comparable Monogram and Viking models side by side, with price tags, the Viking was over a grand more expensive. Therefore, Monogram it is. You didn't ask, but I'll also tell you about how we chose the hood. Once we settled on a Monogram range, we wanted either a Monogram hood, or a hood made by someone who doesn't make ranges. The other big thing we wanted: filters that go in the dishwasher. Again, we looked for things available locally. My husband didn't like Vent-a-Hood when we saw one in person, so it was going to be something by Monogram. We narrowed down to two choices: the Straight Side Professional Wall-Mounted Hood or the Restaurant Style Professional Wall-Mounted Hood. (They make a taper-sided hood also, but because it was going between wall cabinets, we wanted the straight sides. They also make all kinds of more decorative hoods, but they either don't suck as much air or have a second blower and are therefore more complicated. Anything "pretty" or "architectural" would get lost in our kitchen, because the hood will be largely invisible from the dining room, unless Superman comes over for dinner and sees through the cabinet.) Functionally, the two are about the same, and we think they use the same motor. We went with the Restaurant Style hood for one reason: cost. The Restaurant Style hood comes with a stainless backsplash that works for us, but the Straight Side hood does not come with a backsplash (and buying one adds on a few hundred dollars to the cost). Had we not been satisfied with a plain stainless backsplash, we might have gone the other way. Speaking of hood: we heard from the roofer duct guy. The stainless he needs to build our ducting didn't get delivered last week. He's expecting it to arrive on Wednesday, so we'll probably see him towards the end of the week. I may very well have countertops (at least the laminate ones) and a working sink by the end of today! MelissaH edited because my brain got ahead of my fingers