DerekW

Our BS 30" has been a joy for years, once some initial teething troubles were sorted out a decade or thereabouts back. Last year the oven stopped lighting reliably - the igniter was the problem [they do not last forever]; the replacement part was about $20 on eBay [it's a standard item] and took about ten minutes to install through the front door. One of the things I have enjoyed about the 'monster' is the degree to which the manufacturer has been prepared to support me doing my own repairs as needed over the years. When a mouse got in and shredded oven insulation the company sent me a full quantity of insulation to fix it, on their dime. Over time, heat cycling [expansion and contraction] pulled some oven rivets - It was easy to replace them myself again through the door. When an earlier door hinge design evidenced problems, many years back, they shipped us a complete new door and hinge set F.O.C. And of course it's a joy to cook on / in. A "mid-life crisis" purchase which has proven perhaps more durable than a sports car would have been 😊

Reductio ad absurdum: Ice water. Improbably refreshing: Dog's nose Cheating: Gimlet [using lime juice and cordial is really three ingredients]

More information on your tools and process please Kerry? I've done my Googling and read around. What worked well or otherwise for you?

Written recipe, assembled into an apothecary's measure or similarly graduated beaker. That way if I forget where I am then I can tell by reading the volume in the beaker and adding up the ingredient volumes down the list until I get to the matching point. Which said, forgetting where I am while assembling a MaiTai may be a clue that I should not be having another MaiTai right now....

Just another happy BlueStar owner chiming in. [30" model] We've had ours long enough that it has the old [i.e. long since improved / superceded] oven door hinges. As noted, no-tech electronics, robust construction. Thermal expansion / contraction eventually loosened some blind-rivets, and we had an ignitor module go down once, but nothing which could not be fixed fairly easily. I don't broil much, but the thing is like the surface of the sun. Our convection oven [startlingly] seems to accurately reflect the set temperature on the dial, and is stable. Burner outputs can be custom-adjusted easily, and the simmer holds at a very low level, while the big ones [as in, we needed to run a bigger gas line into our little house 'big ones'] are a joy. Running a five-foot Vulcan, you probably have all the extraction you need already, eh? We run a Sakura 600cfm hood [wire filters, spin-off traps] comparable to the Broan unit mentioned above [don't know where the 1200cfm figure comes from, that's a 600cfm hood too] straight up through the roof and using the burners gives no smoke/smell issues. About half the price of the Broan hereabouts. OTOH, opening the oven door trips the smoke alarm fairly regularly, and the noise is not insignificant. Depending on pocket depth and tolerance for these things perhaps a higher end solution might be worth the money for you?

That Forschner [Victorinox] you linked to is our current very satisfactory breadknife. The offset blade does a couple of things - it keeps your knuckles up off the board, and it gives you an effect similar to the depth of blade your 'chef' knife allows. That's to say that you can pinch grip, and have better control over direction of cut. Bread knives are saws of an altogether cruder nature than honed stropped razor-sharp wonders, but [iMO] a thick blade doesn't help much when you are trying for a clean slice through crust and crumb. When Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" came out he wrote that many chefs had taken to carrying an offset blade as a go-to general purpose knife, using them [i paraphrase here] for just about everything, sawing up frozen materials, cutting bread etc. I always pictured one of these.

Interesting. With one of those and a stainless cambro [steam table insert], how far are we from the $100 chamber sealer? The P.O.S. bag sealer part grafted on, and a plumbed in water feed, and what else?

Gourmet Warehouse ship. The shipping's not cheap, but if you're ordering a bunch of items maybe it makes sense. Good place to visit, if you're in Vancouver at any point.

When I lived in Scotland, decent game was easier to find and more sensibly priced. Somewhere I should have notes for a game pie involving a a brace of Pheasants and a some prunes. Those packs of frozen quail are a staple in our house - rubbed with coarse salt and stuffed with a quartered lime then tossed onto a roasting tray for 'a while', they make great finger food. In playful mood, I've served them on saucers as dinner party starters with suitably tiny vegetables etc; Everyone gets their own entire minature roast chicken dinner.

30 bottles for an entire province? Still, anything is better than the Giant Sloth of the Forests of Bureaucracy which is BCLDB, where it seems they have a hate-on for rum - Alberta gets high-test Lemon Hart, you good people get S&C. BC gets, well, excused having to live in Alberta or Ontario, I suppose. Bah

Many varieties of 'stainless' are not magnetic. For example, the lining steel used in Falk copper cookware is not magnetic. Yes. Google is probably your friend there. For example. http://www.retinning.com/ Hard to tell from the picture ['though they look tinned to me]. They may also be aluminum with a thin copper outer layer; I've seen 'faux copper' cookware made that way, too.

Which Kirsch were you using, Kerry? I find that the Luxardo Kirsch [sadly no longer available here in BC] has a flavour profile much closer to their Maraschino than [for example] the Schloss Oberandritz Austrian stuff we get now.

No harshness intended. Just a gentle comment on the relevance of the name - 5oz compared to 1 1/2 oz. Both Something like, but homemade. While I don't have my copy in front of me, I'm pretty sure that I lifted the idea from the pages of 'Beachbum Berry Remixed', where he is discussing Donn Beach's 'secret ingredients in coded bottles' system. Making the cinnamon infused simple is, well, simple, and it's not a big step to notice how often the grapefruit and cinnamon are called for in various recipes, generally in close enough ratio to suggest keeping them combined. I'm pretty sure Jeff directly refers to "Don's Mix". He also draws attention to the Angostura / Anise combo as recurring in a lot of Dark Rum based D-the-B drinks, and sure enough [to my jaded palate anyway] a few drops of the combo does add extra depth to the off-the cuff tiki variants I've tried it in.

...but perhaps has a harder time justifying it's claim to the name, rather lacking the bludgeoning payload of the previous version?On the 'bitters' shelf at home lives a little dropper bottle containing a blend of angostura and raki. In the fridge is a little squeeze bottle of premixed grapefruit juice and cinnamon syrup. Similar squeeze bottles hold 'five minute' falernum, simple and passionfruit juice. The backups live in the freezer. Tiki time became a lot calmer when I grasped the whole 'frozen squeezy' storage thing.

In the UK? Ikea POKAL at 15cl?

Bread and Butter - small start up; small selection, great product. [full disclosure; I know these people, I know this bread, they don't know I'm posting this....]

You didn't ask for Poultry but in case it's of use, that from Gartmorn has been really good when I've bought from them.

"High Carbon S/S 9" Carving Knife" - The text on the blade is not that which appears on their 'Easygrip' range, the text comes far enough down the blade to exclude their 'Cook's Knife', and there appears to be too long a section of edge parallel to back for any of the small knives. [doffs Deerstalker and waits to be shot down, grinning]

Do you have any evidence to support this hypothesis?

Where I came from in Europe, tipping wait staff was a means of thanking for and rewarding exceptional [above and beyond] service. Here in North America it is built into the remuneration system for those waitstaff. I happen to think that system sucks [big time], but I can see no way of changing it, so where generosity is indicated I tip above what I believe to be the 15% 'de facto' standard. Am I going to support any tendency to extend this foolishness to other retail situations? Hell, no! My butchers price in expectation of a 'no tipping' business model, and receive happy 'word of mouth' commendations, and regular repeat business. Ask a small business owner what these are worth.

Magnetic strip?

Uh, Quail are a bar-snack, aren't they? At our house, anyway; Roasted with a bit of preserved lemon inside, salt-rubbed. Mmmm. As a bonus, as they defrost in the bowl they look like a diorama of paunchy hot-tubbers. I haven't the heart to net the California quail running around the back yard. Or maybe I just lack the patience to pluck them. Back in Scotland a brace of Pheasants along with a handful of prunes and some decent bacon would make a happy game pie.

Another happy Kuhn Rikon user here. We have something like this set and all the parts get regular use - the glass lid is useful for seeing what's going on while bringing up to temperature, the small pan does a great pressure braise and is an effective saute pan, while the larger pan makes stock from a couple of good sized poultry carcases, or meals for six. I haven't found myself wishing for a larger size, but I'm rarely cooking for large numbers - more a case of cooking for the freezer, and if needed we do have big conventional stockpots. mkayahara's understanding of the KR vent system is essentially correct.

Touch-up maintenance? The Japanese knives see a wooden backed leather strop charged with green polishing compound. The western ones visit an old glass-smooth steel, or sometimes a ceramic rod. In all cases real sharpening is done with one or more belts [abrasive or strop] on a one-inch linisher. That's freehanding too, but takes perhaps a minute a blade. The waterstones lie unused.

It's been a while, but I remember using egg-white as the sizing/bonding medium when doing gold leafing. Real gold leaf is [or was] available in sheet form but not from most art-supply places; as baroness notes, beware alloys or look-a-likes.