Blether

I think if you go to Spanish or Italian olive-producing regions - or ask people who grew up in them - you'll come back with very different results for preferences between oil & butter. And as David said, in the first place it will depend on the bread, the oil, the butter, the context and the diner. Personally I've developed a taste for certain olive oils on certain breads in certain situations - it's easier to dip hand-torn bread into oil than to be fussing with a knife and butter for every bite. Then there's the wonderful habit I picked up from an Italian joint (Japanese owned and run, of course) in Koishikawa, to serve a plate of olive oil mixed with fresh grated parmesan for bread dipping, an approach that converts dairy-lovers by the dozen. What to use neutral oils for ? There's a convention that good salad dressing is all about good oil; another convention says salad dressing should be an emulsion of 3:1, oil:vinegar. Your favourite and mine, doyenne of French food in the UK Elizabeth David poo-poo'ed that last, firmly in the good-oil camp and suggesting just a very little vinegar. For myself, 10 or more years ago I came across an excellent dressing in yet another Japanese-Italian restaurant, and some years in I plucked up the courage to ask how they did it - just oil, soy and grated onion, chef said. That didn't work, but experimenting I've found that ponzu rather than soy got very close, and recently by accident that men-tsuyu (a soy-mirin-sake-stock-sugar blend noodle dressing) closer still. The amount of onion is important, but one of the interesting things about this dressing - an element that I recognised from the start - is that it uses a light, neutral oil - I use canola because that's the light oil I stock, but in Japan, there's also "salad oil" which can be canola, sunflower, safflower etc., in a blend. Anyway - 'good' oil will mean different things to different readers, but here I've found a demonstration that you can just as well build good salad dressing around good-quality neutral oil and good-quality flavourings of your choice, as you can by relying solely on a carefully-sourced oil for richness and flavour, both.

I used to stir fry canned tuna with rice, onions and green peppers - cheap, easy & good - but I did it too often when I couldn't afford much else and got tired enough of it that it I rarely think of it any more.

Gooseberries (sharp fruit) are traditional with blue / oily fish, aren't they ?

So change it so often it becomes obvious who's the leader and who are the followers ! Good dishes aren't that hard to come up with, are they ? Not for someone like you. PS those veggies will make great crudites, served with a choice of your house-made mayonnaise / garlic mayonnaise - and you'll be using all those shellfish and crustacean carcasses - even the customer-gnawed ones because boiling purifies them - for seafood stock for those gratins, and for infused oil for your special seafood-salad (sandwich) mayonnaise, right ? Let them figure that one out from scratch.

Funny it's the same place You're in the best position to judge whether there's room to change / add to your target market (price range). The likes of Cullen Skink, Aberdeen beef & raspberries are what I'd expect you to be using to show off & make hay out of what's good locally, and to be "Scottish" for the foreign visitors. Seafood is of course dead right at a beach cafe, for both local & foreign audiences. What do you have on the menu that's "something different" for the locals ? Something Indian (e.g. tandoori sardines if you can get good fresh sardines) ? Something from South-East Asia (say, tom yam kun or tom kaa kun with proper prawns) ? Continental European dishes (I've a feeling raspberries would make a beautiful "cream", Normandy style, just as Elizabeth David does with strawberries in FPC) ? Sashimi when you've got top-class seafood (soy; fresh horseradish rather than tube or powder wasabi; spring onion for negi; turnip for daikon) ? Are you serving a good seafood gratin with good Scottish cheddar (freeze, microwave, finish with a gas torch ?) ? I'm only a home cook - pros will have better advice on methods. I expect you have better ideas yourself. With those opening hours and that set up, I would be offering a good range of soups - freeze well, easy to microwave, infinite variety, good eating and cost-effective. "Today's soup" takes up one ring on the cooktop ? And don't discount those "ordinary vegetables" - for all their being just carrots, onions and spuds, they'll be a world away from what's commonly sold in the big city.

I used to do Baked Alaskas - something of a meme for me back then - by cutting cold, hard ice cream into chunks and building the ice cream layer like assembling an igloo, or laying out the cheese for toasted cheese. Quite easy to do.

You might like this recent thread. In the position you describe, I'd re-freeze everything without a second thought.

Not Dakki, then. Dude's just a cack-handed amateur.

If it's Dakki, Chivas Regal would be more like it.

Cool Lindsey - what's on the menu of the place, as is ? Where I grew up in central Perthshire is unrecognisable now - where before it was The Chippy, indifferent bar meals and one exceedingly-rare-for-the-time delicatessen, you can't now take a step down the high street without treading in mozzaprosciuciabaguettes. I'm guessing you have good ideas and good standards for bread (do you have a good supplier, or can you make your own ?) - what special things do you get locally ? In later years we often passed through Helmsdale on the way to the North-west, but we did spend one or two family holidays around Elgin/Nairn. I remember gorse bushes that were the death of our kites, amongst the dunes behind Findhorn beach.

Funny. I was thinking of crail and crab, too - knowing though that it's way down the East coast. 30 years ago there was an aquaculture operation there growing crustaceans ? shellfish ? in seawater pumped up a 30-foot cliff. Still there ?

Chilli isn't something that clashes with other ingredients - choose a recipe and put in as much as you like. That said, I find Julie Sahni's korma very good - lots of aromatics in there, including a lot of bay leaves. By design it doesn't have a lot of spice heat, but even made as written it has plenty of impact.

Cullen Skink Piping hot Aberdeen Angus beef stew (that takes care of the "summer" weather) Interesting uses of kipper Lots of fresh raspberries

Schedule your meals so the pattern fits around your work the same way it would on dayshift - breakfast before work, lunch halfway through, dinner soon after, then several hours of not eating, before you sleep. Your body clock'll do the rest.

I'm with LindaK - it's accumulating dust & stuff that makes cycling the crockery important to me. I got my rack here retail, but there are similar things on Google at wire plate stacker.

I have a wire rack that allows four plate stacks where otherwise there'd be one great big one. It's a mixture of large & smaller plates and bowls, I keep them at most four to a stack, and I do put the washed ones in at the bottom of each stack.

Was there wholewheat flour in the muffins ? The oils in it will go rancid if it's kept too long, and that produces off flavours.

To paraphrase the original poster, "it's been a couple of years and I notice my knife's not sharp any more"

I'd say you have that upside-down. If you're thinking about an electric grind wheel, say, then that's a sharpening tool that needs far more accumulated experience & touch than an Edgepro, for use with kitchen knives. The point, for me, about the Edgepro is that it makes fine sharpening accessible to metalworking/workshop novices. Do you think maybe the ideal solution for you would be 50 bucks on a new knife every couple of years ? You'll get 20 years of cooking for the cost of a single fancy-schmancy knife, and yours'll always be new.

Ho many joints are there in Montreal already with the name "Gouter" - which is nice for being the verb "to taste", as well as this -> gouter.

Did you read Knife Sharpening & Maintenance ? It's worth steeling your knife for each use (before rather than after). How often you need to sharpen it will depend on how intensively you use it.

It looks more like a close encounter of the third kind (lighting-wise, I mean - the food looks delicious).

A projector's a great idea, even if it just means your specials menu appears in a black or self-coloured fonr on one of your white walls. You didn't specifically state your target market is / what kind of people are in the area. In a flash, I'd put flat screens into a young person's cafe / diner and let them take turns choosing their favourites from Youtube. I'm guessing though that high-qulaity-comfort-food-sandwiches entail 25-and-up-professionals or some such demographic - anyway one which will have the same reaction as you're getting here.

"All I need is co-ordination" I'll admit to a dilettante's interest in the shape of the field. If the magnetic field round a bar magnet is like a(n American)-football-shape around the bar, with wheatsheaf sprouts from either end, what does the field that that coil induces look like ? From what you say, dcarch, it's doughnut-shaped from above, but what's the cross-section ? Elliptical, like a squashed doughnut ? Does the requirement for flat cookware mean that it's a very shallow field ? How wide is the doughnut ? Just the area of the coil, viewed from above ? Extending beyond it ? Or not even reaching the edges ? The effective area of induction will influence the degree to which the cookware has to rely on thermal conduction to heat evenly, and so the thickness of metal that is ideal.

- slowly, as I understand it. I extracted my personal rule of thumb above from a long paper that described experimental results over time for different strains / substrates / temperatues. Amen.