Kajikit

When you've got to go, you've got to go... locked restrooms and signs that say 'customers only' are very user-unfriendly. When I need a bathroom I need it without extra hoops to jump through! I'll often walk into a suitable venue and go straight to the restroom - then I'll buy something to eat/drink after my personal needs have been attended to. I wouldn't do it in a full-service restaurant unless I was planning to eat there, but it sounds like you're in the grey area.

Cranberries are DEFINITELY bitter to me. Not enough to make me refuse to eat them, but enough that it's definitely detectable. Cranberry juice cocktail wrinkles my mouth with the aftertaste. I totally fail to understand why people voluntarily eat bitter foods.

Thank you for that, you've made my point very clear. "THEY"'ve been putting salt content on packaging for some time now. Salt is not given in actual weights, but expressed in a % of your daily requirment. Just look at the packaging. Like I said, I believe every adult should make choices about thier diet, but I'm more concerned about the children.... Two things upset me to no end: The first is adults smoking in a car with children in the backseat. The second is standing in line at the supermarket watching overwieght parents with overweight children unload cases of 2 l pop, salty snacks, and all manner of highly processed foods on the conveyor belt. Not a vegetable or a jug of milk to be seen... I'm not sure if you're backing me up here or trying to step on me... the fact is that food labelling is such a mess that there is virtually NO WAY to compare products with each other. I do read labels very carefully but a lot of the time the information is deliberately rendered meaningless by the manufacturer. Sure, it says 'one serving contains 600mg sodium' but when you look at the fine print, that 'one serving' is only 1/4 cup! Or else you don't notice the 500g of added potassium to make it taste even saltier. As for your comment on what people buy, you can't control what somebody else chooses to buy at the grocery store. And there is no way for you to know whether that overweight family made a stop at the vegetable market yesterday and bought a week's supply of fresh fruit already. They may have stocked up on milk and eggs last week and just not need any now. They may only buy soda once a month and drink water the rest of the time.

They don't need to regulate the use of salt - they need to make clear and consistent labelling laws so that we can decide for ourselves what we want to eat!

All my dishes etc are less than five years old... but I got a lovely heavy grandma-style rolling pin from the thrift store after I read that older is MUCH better for pins. I have no idea how old it is, but it has a beautiful non-stick patina on it from decades of use in butter-filled kitchens. Oh, and I bought a 'Settlement Cookbook' at the thrift store. It was published in 1910, and I wanted to see what REALLY OLD country-style cooking was all about.

I confess I am a sinner, bigtime! I buy bagged lettuce - and frequently the bag ends up being tossed in the trash unopened because the leaves have turned to green slime in the bottom of the bag. When I cook a roast I put the yummy broth/juices into the fridge to flavour something else... but I might as well save time and put them straight in the trash because 90% of the time they never get touched again until I have to throw them out or die from eating them! My poor fresh vegetables sit in the veggie keeper until they rot, while I eat frozen mixed veggies on a daily basis. Woe betide any fresh spinach or herbs that enter the house. I might as well save the time and put the rest of the bunch into the trash after I use two leaves, because that's where it's going to end up sooner or later! And I feel guilty about all the wasted money these poor dead and dying foodstuffs represent and I vow to do better on a regular basis... At least I put my chicken carcasses and chicken scraps into the freezer and occasionally make broth in my crockpot. Boxed/canned broth just doesn't taste the same. And last month I took all the bread ends from the freezer and made a tray of delicious homebaked croutons. Now I just need to remember to do this regularly.

It sounds like they don't really WANT 'healthy'... They want 'sugar-free'. If they were going to the extent of counting every individual carbohydrate they consumed, they wouldn't be wanting to buy your stuff. So why no cater to them by making some fruit desserts? Fruit helps to disguise the taste of artificial sweetener, and the added fiber lowers the carb count. Every diabetic reacts differently to foods anyway, so it's not as if you could guarantee a perfect result for anyone. It's up to them to know what's 'safe' for them to eat.

I second a few of these suggestions. Fresh water chestnuts seemed like a wonderful idea, but by the time you've got them shelled, processed and chopped guess what? They look, smell and taste EXACTLY the same as the ones in the can at the grocery store! And anything involving homemade puff pastry? Well, it's a nice idea but by the time you've done all that endless rolling, folding and kneading you're too tired to eat it. Buy a good quality puff pastry at the store (one with real butter in it) and you get just as good a result for a heck of a lot less labour.

Putting recipes in with your unusual foods is a great idea! Our freezer is almost empty atm - I've been running it down all month long. We're down to the last two packs of meat so I had to buy more yesterday.

Interesting thread, even if the body of it is pretty old. I grew up in Australia too and my recollections agree with gingerbeers... we didn't eat morning or afternoon tea except for special occasions - if you invited guests to drop by in the afternoon you served them afternoon tea. But my grandparents sat down twice a day for their cup of tea (real tea made in a teapot, none of those teabags for them!) and a single biscuit or little square of cake. Breakfast - morning meal Morning tea - 10.30 or so. Lunch - your middle of the day meal no matter how heavy or light it is. If you go out at lunchtime you're still having lunch! Afternoon tea - 3-4pm snack (after-school snack for kids...) Dinner - evening meal, usually served around 6pm though in some households it was as early as 5. Supper - late night snack. Not an everyday occurance, just for special occasions ie. if you went out in the evening, afterwards you might have supper. Snack - any time of the day or night. Nowadays our meals don't get nomenclature... DH works on a flexible schedule and I cook a main meal to be eaten when he gets home - if he's too late to have 'lunch' I just serve our 'dinner' at 4! Then we have a snack later on.

Thanks for the suggestions. So far the hardest thing I've actually found is opening jars and bottles! I can't get a good enough grip on them to turn the darned things. You can kind of cut with your arm straight out in front of you... and you can hold the wooden spoon in a fist grip instead of like a pen for rough stirring. Fortunately I have a can-opener with nice comfortable handles and it's not too hard for me to use.

My dominant hand has been playing up since New Year's Day and it's getting frustrating! We're going to a potluck dinner tomorrow and I had to resort to a Stouffers frozen lasagna for my contribution instead of my usual made-from-scratch productions. I can cut stuff up but not finely, and I can stir pots but not if they're heavy, and so on... yesterday I made a beef shank stew in the oven using a bag of frozen soup vegetables so I didn't have to chop anything. It wasn't the best stew in the world, but it was edible. The day before I made burritos, but the amount of stirring I had to do to get the ground beef broken up and cooked properly was a real strain on my wrist. What's worse is DH can't even boil water so I can't get HIM to help me... we've been eating a lot of take out and frozen food, and I need suggestions for one-handed cooking!

I just wanted to drool over all the beautiful chocolate creations... but they hardly showed ANYTHING! It really was a total waste of an hour.

Just because you have an agent and want to be on reality television doesn't mean you know thing one about cooking! I laughed my head off at the first episode... 'decoratively' arranging the silverware over the top of the plate! It would be a disaster if the whole thing revolved around just how bad they were, but they do actually have to demonstrate some kind of skills and improvement to stay in the game... it's a kitchen bootcamp and I'm not going to knock it just yet.

A plate of al dente pasta in creamy sauce with a perfectly poached egg on top of it so that it melds into the plate when you put your fork into it sounds pretty good to me! Especially if it had wonderfully crispy bacon croutons scattered over the top. Deconstruction isn't just a little pile of lettuce in one corner of the plate and a little pile of tomatoes and so on... it's taking the ingredients and making something new from them.

A popsicle works wonders for a mouth burn... it's slower to eat than a bowl of icecream and somehow icier!

Not unless it's fried!

The basic expectation for a restroom is that it be a)CLEAN and b)CLEAN! I don't care if it has one stall or fifty, and if it has the latest-greatest in decor... as long as the floor is clean, there's soap and towels available (and no used papers of any sort strewn across the floor), the toilets look like they've been cleaned in the last 24 hours, and the cubicle door locks, it's okay. If you go to the cinema, the restrooms are kept immaculate and they have thousands of people through there every day, so a restaurant should be able to manage! I've been in a few places where I've walked into the bathroom and immediately walked out again and told my husband we have to eat some place else... the staff have to use that restroom as well, and if it's filthy it doesn't say much about their general standard of hygiene! I've also eaten in restaurants where I didn't discover the icky restroom until after I'd eaten and I didn't die... but it's preferable to avoid!

I picked up the leftover cookies and brownies this morning. There were 100 people at the funeral, and they ate half of the stuff I took (5 trays of brownies and 4 batches of cookies, and 1 sugar-free slice). I stashed most of the leftovers in the church freezer and told them to use them for morning teas, and brought a few home for us to enjoy. The sugar-free cookies never made it to the event - sitting overnight turned them into hideous pasty blobs of chemically nothingness, so I had to throw them out. But the sugar-free slice was entirely eaten, or else somebody took it home - there wasn't any left today anyway, so I presume it was a success!

I'm finished, AND it's blogged - http://kajikit.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/th...d-im-exhausted/

And I'm done! Well, almost... the blondies are in the oven and there's a tray of marbled brownies still to bake because I had some batter left over and I mixed it together. But I'm done making mess. I need to sit down and make a list of how many ingredients I used for future reference. I've never baked that much at one time before! I was so busy cooking that I didn't take any photos for my blog, but I'll take some in the morning when I pack the stuff up prettily and get it ready to go. In the end I made the three batches of cookies yesterday, and today I made oatmeal cookies, sugar-free sugar cookies (which aren't anything to write home about but they're not horrible and maybe someone will appreciate the thought!), a sugar-free apple slice which is much much nicer, regular chocolate brownies, mocha brownies with pecans, butterscotch blondies, marbled brownies with butterscotch AND chocolate chips, and lastly an invention of my own because I couldn't find a recipe - coconut blondies, ie. vanilla mix with a layer of coconut/condensed milk in the middle, sprinkled with some more coconut on top just so people know what they're getting.

The first three batches of cookies are done last night. I made them all petite/bitesized because I figure it's better to have three bite-sized cookies each than to get one monster... I made basic sugar cookies first ( the classic recipe from Allrecipes.com) and put chocolate eggs on half and papaya chunks on half just to look pretty... That made approx 80. Then I made a batch of spice cookies that's my mother's recipe. That recipe made 90 but we ate a few last night! And lastly I made snickerdoodles. I've never done them before but I figured they're a 'classic' cookie and I couldn't really go wrong. That recipe didn't make so many. There are about 60 of them, and I may make a second batch because they're delicious! As the cookies cooled I bagged them up in ziplock bags and stood them in the cookie tub to give me an idea of how much it'll hold. From the looks of it there's room for two more batches of cookie. Plus I'll do a batch of sugar-free cookies separately for the diabetics. I'm not sure about the peanut butter cookies now... I'm dithering! I THINK they'd be okay but I'm not sure that it would be a good idea to mix peanuts in with all the rest of the cookies just in case there's somebody there who's allergic. So I might skip them and make something different. (those 'kitchen sink' cookies look just like my regular oatmeal cookies except I don't use coconut! I throw whatever fruit/nuts/chocolate I have handy into the mix, and the more the better...)

I was going to do lemon bars but alas I forgot to buy lemons when I went to the grocery store for supplies this morning! So they're out because I don't have time to go back and my budget's been spent. I'm going to do chocolate brownies and blondies with butterscotch chips/pecans... an oaty fruit slice and a sugar-free slice. That'll take care of the slices. Then I'll do some sugar-free sugar cookies, regular sugar cookies, oatmeal cookies, and the peanut-butter cookies. I'll put the sugar-free stuff into a nice basket by itself (there are a few diabetic church members and in a crowd that big there'll be at least a few people who can't/won't eat sugar...), the slices and brownies can stay in their foil trays, and the regular cookies will be heaped up in a nice big tub. Now to start baking...

Peanut butter cookies sounds like a good one...

Thanks Michelle! I bore easily... I HATE making multiple batches of the same thing, which is why I thought I'd make three or four different kinds of cookie. And that way I get to try a new recipe or two - cookies are something that it's very hard to screw up enough to make them inedible!