Porthos

The kitchen will be repairs and new surfaces. The ceiling has been painted and will get a new light fixture Tuesday. We're all about unfussy. We'll be replacing the barely-functioning range hood with another builder grade hood. The new kitchen flooring will extend through the family room. We haven't decided whether the kitchen wall color will extend into the family room or be a slightly different shade. I had wanted a single-bowl kitchen sink for years. My Sweetie was willing but really wanted a traditional 2-bowl sink. I asked my FB friends if buying a house with a single-bowl sink would be a plus or a minus. The vast majority said they would want a 2-bowl sink. So the new sink (S/S) will be have 2 bowls. We're waiting on delivery of a second flooring sample. We both really like both choices so seeing the samples on the floor should really help. We can't paint the walls until the repairs have been made. I'll start the demolition to support that tomorrow. We'll pick out wall colors and cabinet faces when that repair is done. In the mean time I do what I can in the kitchen and press on with the front bathroom. I, along with my BIL, met with realtors and went through the fix up vs sell as-is 3 1/2 years ago when we were figuring our the best option for my late FIL's house. For that house, sell-as is made the most sense. Using the insight I gained from that coupled with my Sweetie's desire not to sell as-is made the decision easy. The rooms that will have the most changes will be the bathrooms. Everything goes except the tubs. The balance of the interior will be all new surfaces. When we re-carpeted 13 years ago we picked out a stinker. We're replacing the carpeting with low-end stuff so that it's new and will show well.

My first Keurig coffee maker. I'm the only coffee drinker. Not set up yet, been painting in the kitchen. Hopefully tomorrow. Birthday gift from my wife. I've been lazy a lot lately and running out for my morning cup. Well, not really lazy, the renovation work as well as keeping up with life's needs is using up my available energy.

For economic reasons we've had to defer a lot of maintenance items in our home. We can now start. We are planning on selling and relocating on another state, hopefully next year. Item one on our list is the kitchen. This is not a remodel, just all new surfaces. We've elected to reface our cabinets. My (still hoping) Blue Star range will be after we move. I had a misguided and idealistic expectation that we would go to Home Depot, pick out everything we wanted in one trip and proceed. This is not to be. You can stop laughing any time. We don't need any new appliances so that part is simple. I didn't take any before pictures but it's a typical California tract home built in the 80s. Because this is going to take WAY longer than I expected we're working on the front bathroom in tandem. We have a relative that was an employment victim of COVID 19 so we're paying for some much-needed labor to help us along. Oh, and I really HATE painting. In the kitchen we've stripped off the 25+ y/o wallpaper and are prepping the walls for a primer coat. Tomorrow we'll start on cleaning and sanding the ceiling. The biggie in the kitchen is repairing the wall behind the sink. There's a bit of black mold to deal with but I've purchased the right PPE and can handle that. Wish us luck.

I went for the Half Baked Harvest Super Simple.

In late 2006 I was googling for information about knife sharpening and found Chad's Knife Skills and Sharpening (not the title) tutorial, looked around the site and was hooked.

Yup.

@gfweb Well, it took another 6 years but after hanging off of that one hook for 30+ years, last week the hook bent and dropped the pot rack. Shockingly, nothing broke, and was surprised by that given that there were several bottles of alcohol on the counter below. I installed 2 larger hooks and it's back in use.

When shopping you remember when ground beef was $0.39/lb. You know exactly how long dinner will take to make based upon what you’re serving that night. You wish your whole kitchen floor was made out of fatigue mats. You didn’t have many, many close-by fast food franchises to let you bail on cooking with minimal impact.

I am fond of Penzey's.

Want! Looks beautiful. I have no idea where to find heirloom tomatoes here in southern California's Inland Empire.

Found this on Amazon: From Scratch: 10 Meals, 175 Recipes, and Dozens of Techniques You Will Use Over and Over - Michael Ruhlman 2.99 I'm almost done with his The Making of a Chef and thought this might be interesting.

Baking: bread pudding or other custard-based items.Using half&half that was frozen, my Sweetie makes bread puddings for ren faire participants to eat and consistently gets rave reviews.

My corned beef hash is basic but tasty. I prefer the canned corned beef. I sweat down a couple of onion in bacon drippings, the added (thawed) frozen shredded potatoes and when they're mostly cooked I add the corned beef and salt and pepper to taste. My Sweetie and I really like it this way. I think that will be tomorrow night's dinner.

In my family of origin corned beef hash was dinner along with a salad. I was most likely in my 40s before I discovered it was also breakfast food also.

Can anyone tell me if Canadian Bacon is in short or no supply due to the pandemic?

I did some grocery shopping over the last couple of days. In my go-to supermarket people for the most part are wearing masks and practicing social distancing. At Costco, however, while you can't get in without a mask, social distancing is not being practiced by as many members as earlier in the pandemic. I went to Target and it was worse. People behind you crowding and such. I had a person in line behind me come up right beside me to look at some product on a shelf. The best I could do was turn my back until they moved away.

@kayb That is just too funny! 😂

I bought one a few years ago for my ren faire kitchens since timing multiple things was the norm. I use their Big and Loud Chef's Timer in my kitchen, a blessing since I have a hearing deficit. A couple of months ago I said to myself, "self, COVID 19 has closed the faires your wife and daughter still do. Why not put your TimeStack in your kitchen?" So I did. I used it for about 6 weeks. I normally sets timers going in my kitchen, and sit in my family room (flows from the kitchen) and do other things while waiting for it to go off. It's not REALLY loud like the Big and Loud so I took it back out. When we were using the TimerStack in my ren faires kitchens, other people would alert me when it was beeping. We each tended to use a different timer so they knew when it was mine beeping. I hope you get good use out of yours. I'm a serious fan of Thermoworks.

Chapter 11 is "we hope to re-organize and keep doing business" vs Chapter 7 "we're done." I've only l gone to my "local" SRT once. Very nice stuff but at the other end of my personal spectrum which is restaurant supplies stores.

I went to buy some 12-packs of C/F Diet Coke about 10 days ago. Nary a box to be found. This past Wednesday I went to the same Kroger-owned store (Ralphs) to find that on the first day of a new ad there was none. Later I went to my local TJs and stopped at the another Ralphs only to not find any at that store. Thursday morning I went to a Stater Bros supermarket that normally has it; none. Today my Sweetie and I needed to be in Orange County so we went to the Costco Business Center in Westminster to get a few things. They didn't have any flats of C/F Diet Coke either. We stopped by the member services desk and inquired about it. It's listed as no stock AND inactive. When we got home I went to dietcoke.com and it's listed as an active product and told me that among other places Ralpsha and Stater Bros should have it. If they're discontinuing it in favor of Coke Zero we're gong to have a problem. We don't care to drink really crappy-tasting colas.

No oil in these. I'm not using them like a disinfectant wipe, just leaning up messes, an overflow in the microwave and such. I still have my disinfecting cleaners for that job.

I'm pretty sure there's already a kitchen hacks thread but I can't find it. I was cleaning out the back seat floor area of our Corolla; we have to know in advance if someone besides our grandchildren in car seat and booster seat is going to need to sit in the back seat. So Friday I was doing some deepish cleaning and found a basically full container of house brand diaper wipes, dry as a bone. I took the container into the kitchen to try and re-hydrate it, and was successful. We buy diaper wipes in the 900 count boxes at Costco so I had no interest in actually using them as diaper wipes. I decided to try them as cleaning wipes in the kitchen. They work really, really well. They scrub well and pick up whatever mess I'm dealing with. I'm most likely to keep a container of them in the kitchen from now on.

@chefmd Now I'm hungry and I need to be sleeping.

Love the name!

Warning, you're gong to see a dirty kitchen. My Sweetie is napping so she doesn't know I've taken these pictures. At the end of our large counter we have those large wire cubes, some for food some for other kitchen stuff. the right side is for pasta, rice, and odd bits. The bottom left is for my beloved Cheerios and the cat food. This is the lower pantry for canned goods and other misc dry goods. There is a bit a shelving at the top rear to help make these deep cabinets a little more user-friendly. The upper pantry, save for the the top shelf, is for backing supplies. There is extra shelving at the back of the upper pantry shelves to hold infrequently-used supplies. The bottom shelf over the microwave is spice shelf 1. The upper shelves are for alcohol-related glassware. The second spice shelf is next to the stove, and above the spices are various vinegars, oils, and other "liquid" stuff. Snackage and other overflow stuff are on chrome shelving in our family room. We bought this house, the only one we've owned, 36 years ago. We bought it for the kitchen, lots and lots of storage and generous counter space. When my younger daughter was a teenager and started cooking at a friend's house to help them out she was she was incredibly surprised that not every family has a serious array of pots, pans, bowls and gadgets to cook with.