Darienne

London, ON or London, UK? Sounds more like London, UK...but who can be sure?

Being overtired is an invitation for disaster obviously. Which both of us were. Time to take some time off. Past time... I'll get back on the food poisoning thing....

I wish I could be sure that I will never again.... I tore apart my cellar chest freezer yesterday to make room for the recently frozen (in the dog freezer) tomato sauce and Eggplant Parmesan. (It is this freezer's swan song as I am beyond using it any more and the new-to-us upright freezer will be here within a couple of weeks. We've had this freezer since the early 70s and it still works well. I just hate it.) So out it all came, so much stuff to sort through, including three unidentified meals... probably hamburger and something or other. New comprehensive lists made. By the time I was finished, I was really exhausted and needing desperately to lie down. So this morning, when taking down said tomato sauce and Eggplant, I realized that I had left out two ready made pie shells and two boxed pizzas. The pie shells went back into the freezer and now we are having pizza for lunch instead of our usual Sunday bacon and eggs and tomatoes. The second of the pizzas is also being cooked and then will be frozen. I hope I am not risking food poisoning.

I solve my breakfast dilemmas in my usual fashion. Make a huge batch of whatever and then freeze it in daily portions. My current favorites are not 'cereals' at all, but bran muffins and a Middle Eastern dish. It's called Mujadara/Megadarra/etc/etc depending on your ethnic, religious, country of birth background. I use the recipe in Claudia Roden, Book of Middle Eastern Food (one of my earliest cookbooks and which predates my interest in cooking at all) and consists of mainly brown lentils, brown rice and fried onions. I freeze it in muffin pans and then heat it in the microwave in the morning and dose it with Muffaletta spread. Not everybody's taste but certainly mine.

Nice looking system...would not work for me. We've used a very similar system going back and it always fails after a while. In fact, every system we've ever used has failed including Ed's last brilliant idea, currently in use, of using cloth bags (colors identified on a legend hanging above the freezer). It's the best so far...but still no bag of Chile Relleno Casserole this morning. Aaarrgghhh. Whatever it is, so far unfamiliar, that we are having for lunch is currently defrosting and heating up in the toaster oven and it ain't Chile Relleno Casserole! I'll look for a second hand one then.

Speaking of freezers...we have the large freezer part of the 'new' to us horrible kitchen fridge, and two chest freezers (garage freezer = dog meat and quick freeze of people dishes; cellar freezer = people food only) the cellar one dating back to the 1970s. This morning I was searching for something in the cellar freezer and emptied the entire *&%)( thing and never found it and was fairly irked (certifiably deranged I fear) by the entire process which I have endured since the 70s. Apparently a new upright freezer will set us back around $1,700.00. Could there be such a thing as a second-hand upright?

I have a rolling butcher block but it lives in the dining room normally. I have both a huge stand mixer and an ICE (whatever the designation) ice cream maker and a bread machine in a dining room buffet and they are too heavy to carry with impunity and not used regularly either and a kitchen we designed before I 'discovered' cooking. As to fridges...this is a current pet peeve. We exchanged our slowly dying old kitchen fridge for the much newer and fancier and so wonderful looking piece of useless &^$%# which we bought second hand last summer when our garage fridge finally died. It was so pleasing that I thought...wow! Let's exchange the old kitchen fridge for this new fridge. How wonderful! And so Ed did. (Pre-vertebrae fracturing...) And that was before I actually worked out the space in the wretched thing. Huge freezer which I don't need and don't want. And a fridge full of cutesy useless plastic container shelves and bins which now mean that so many regular food items are now living in the garage fridge (our old fridge) and I hate going into the cold dirty garage constantly. Sorry I know this is not 'my' topic and I am crabbing.... If one cooks from scratch all the time, and we do, the new fridges do not have enough interior usable space.

I have countertops and a marble-topped table at three different heights in my kitchen and trust me I use all of them for different tasks regularly. Wouldn't have it any other way.

My goodness, this topic is so old, I had no memory of ever contributing to it or even seeing it before. 2011 it was. Probably my first year on eG. And my two spoon rests, which I still have and use constantly, and was using this morning while making tomato sauce, are not quite like that of @Tropicalsenior. Mine are larger, softer, and completely flexible. And here they still are and I still celebrate them!!!

If I were going to redo our kitchen, one of the things I would go for is a deep "double" sink in which one part was large enough to lay a half sheet down in rather than two equal sized sink which I now have.

I've never seen that item before. We've been using Better Than Bouillon for a while now. It certainly doesn't take up any room. Mostly I keep an assortment of chicken pieces in the freezer and make broth.

Welcome indeed, Yulsam. Lovely to live in Montreal...I am Montreal born and raised. However, young man, as to being ancient...you have quite a way to go yet.

Perhaps I've missed it, but what exactly is your 'regularly scheduled programming'? Are you following some cookbook? Or? Your salads always look so lovely. And each one is a new one.

Alas...there is no appropriate icon for me to use to reply to your post.

Hey! Some of us out here love black beans and chickpeas...and might take umbrage at your tone of voice!!!!! A day without legumes is a day without sunshine.

You do make the most wonderful salads.

I must admit that I hear the great compost in the sky calling....

I've been a fan of Lea & Perrins my entire life. My mother used it in salads and I use it in salads and other dishes also. And I had never heard of this white wine sauce. Interesting side note: we always called it 'wooster' sauce, what the locals call it: 'Why is Worcestershire pronounced Wooster? The reason Worcester is pronounced as "Wooster" is because that is the original pronunciation of the name. The town was named after Worcester, England, and the English pronunciation of Worcester is "Wooster"." And we have no British background at all. I never asked my mother why.

I give up.

Ditto from me...one of the oldest members of eGullet. Almost 82 years to be exact.

One has only to think of the many commercial products that people seem to love...or why on earth would they buy them ?...that others...like me...think are horrible. I could name a bunch off the top of my head...but then some of you love these products that I think are well,.....just went to thesaurus to find a more politic word for the one I am inclined to use but won't...unappetising.

That was my first question also. Where are you? Florida? Oregon? India? France? Canada? Makes a huge difference I would think.

I'm with liuzhou on this one and have never encountered any problem getting the tamarind out of its shell and mine would have been from the Caribbean seeing as it's been purchased at a Caribbean store...lots of those around the Toronto area. And we also have bottle tamarind sauce on hand always. I use it with purchased samosas.

OK. I don't understand why this is funny. Please explain...

I like it.