Stephanie Brim

Holy crap, I think I need one of those. Do they sell them in the US?

I so need to do something like that for Alex's birthday. He was born on Halloween. Heh. His first birthday...such a huge deal.

I often bake cheese sandwiches in the oven. Same preparation as a grilled cheese. It's how they did them in school for us, too, while I was growing up. Best way to make up a mess of them at one time. Served with tomato soup almost always, and sliced apples or pears in the fall. I, er, buy Kraft slices just for this purpose. Sometimes you just want the old stand-by from your youth. Lately, though, I like unsalted butter and a salty, sharp Cabot cheddar. Very tasty on homemade potato bread. In fact, I could make that tomorrow for lunch...

A sundae is made by the ice cream that goes into it. If the ice cream is below par, the sundae will also be. Personally, if I was going to ask top pastry chefs from around the country to make me a freaking sundae, I'd allow them to use their own ice creams and figure out another way to showcase the Breyers branding. I really take offense to it in an unnecessary way, I suppose. But it's like giving them a prepared cake and telling them to decorate it as a challenge.

But you would have been smarter to assume they'd show whatever drama they had over the cooking skills every single time, that's kind of a given if you've watched the show before. Im just saying you gave more and louder drama, including in the group shots, to the extent that they's have to rename it the Seth show in order to give a balanced portrait of you and show the good. Also it seems you didn't notice or care how badly disruptuve and negative your behaviour was, and that lack of respect towards the entire group/ show itself factored in as much as your health in their decison to let you go. If you hated it ll so much and it effected you so badly, why would you want to stay anyway? It appeared (at least at some moments) you were pretty contemptuous of the whole thing. Like you were shocked their was sponsors products to deal with, I had to wonder- had you ever seen the show before? The thing is...we're human. Human's don't always act rationally. When shit is going on in your life it can affect everything you do regardless of whether or not you want to act professionally. Considering that this was a culinary competition, I would've been quite miffed as well to know that I had to create a sundae with ice cream that wasn't my own. As a viewer, I would've liked to see what people would do with their own ice creams. As a company, I probably would've taken the opportunity to maybe, instead of making them use the flavors of ice cream we already had, create a new ice cream for the company that would be sold nation wide. That may have prompted more people who normally would have passed Breyers by completely (and that group includes me most of the time) to check it out. I actually have done this. Brands used on Top Chef have appeared in my kitchen just because seeing them used on the show prompted me to check it out. While I do think that, perhaps, Seth over-reacted, none of us were there and therefore haven't seen enough to really judge him for anything. Walk a mile in his shoes and all that. It's what I was taught as a girl. All that said, I wish all the contestants the best.

I'm drooling. The Cauliflower Bacon Gratin sounds so good and I don't even really like that particular vegetable! May have to buy one and make a half recipe to see if it gives cauliflower a flavor I actually like. I'm buying this book as soon as I can get funds. Probably ordering next weekend. We need a few new dishes in the stable of recipes to cook now that we're eating more vegetables. Oh man, I'm so hungry now. Guess it's time to get started on the chicken strips, mashed potatoes, and steamed vegetables that seem so blah in comparison now.

I, uh, made brownies. I wasn't really that happy with the recipe I'd been using. I tweaked it, figured out what was wrong, and got it down. This is much better than I've been getting. It's the perfect combination of cakey and fudgey, has great chocolate flavor, and would be quite tasty with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream on top. Haagen Daaz, though, would do in a pinch. They don't look pretty, but looks never really mattered much to me.

I forgot about this thread. I meant to respond ages ago. I prefer pie. Remembering back to my childhood, I asked for a cherry pie for my birthday (and got it) instead of a cake. My grandfather was the same way. I did make exceptions for chocolate-cherry cake with fudge frosting for a couple years, though. I still make that cake, though not the same way I did. Cake mixes don't belong in my house anymore. That said, I love baking cakes. I love frosting cakes. I love making cupcakes and frosting those. I love giving people cake and cupcakes. I love eating cupcakes at 11PM just warm out of the oven because I had to have *something* due to a chocolate craving. But I'd prefer pie. I just didn't have time to make crust, let it rest, roll it out, fill it, and bake it for an hour at that point in my day.

What's your average weekly budget? Do you have a freezer that you can use to take care of things if you buy in bulk occasionally? If you do, you may just want to keep shopping around using the sales circulars for your local grocery stores. I frequently see chicken hind quarters on sale here for under $5 for ten pounds. Whole pork loins frequently go for $1.69-1.89 per pound as long as you buy the whole thing. Both of these are a great way to eat cheaply and can be broken down into smaller amounts and then frozen. I freeze the hindquarters in threes (three thigh-leg portions) and the pork roasts in two pound cuts. I use the bones from the ten pound bag of chicken to make stock. I always look for good deals on frozen produce and I get a paper every Sunday to use the coupons. When it comes to fresh produce I just buy what's in season or what's cheap and looks good; those two things tend to overlap most of the time, though. To get the good deals, I shop at both grocery stores in town and sometimes go out of my way to pick things that I prefer up. Though I hate to admit it, the only place I can go to get my favorite cheddar (Cabot Extra Sharp 2 pound block, by the way) is a Wal-Mart 20 miles away, but we go to Target for diapers and wipes and other such things in the same town so I just stop and pick up a couple blocks, cut into quarters, and bag and freeze. It works, and it saves me money over buying it here; the 8 ounce blocks here are $4.59 whereas the whole 2 pound block there is less than $7. Being a stay at home mom and living on one income, I've dealt with a lot of these things. Over the three months my husband was laid off, we ate very simply. Lots of eggs, frozen vegetables, mac & cheese made from the dregs of the cheese drawer. Not a whole lot was wasted. Now that he has a job at which he's making more than he was at the previous one (though not by much more than a few cents), we're doing fine, but we're getting off track as to budgeting. Getting us back on track is my project for the next couple of months and this is my plan for doing so. Tight budgets suck, but as long as you're willing to do a lot of your own stuff (baking your own bread, making stock, making your families treats and snacks) it really isn't that horrible of a thing to do. Interestingly enough, it can show you how little time it actually takes to do some of the things we take for granted when there's more money to go around. If you're really dead set on utilizing that program, though, I'd suggest sticking with the fruit and veggie package and maybe the meat packages. You're going to be pretty safe if you assume that nothing horrible is in those. I've been thinking of trying out one around here for a while, but haven't really had to do it money-wise yet. Then again, our gas bill come February kills us. Heh.

I feel a lot better now because I can do that, too. Both regular and peanut butter Crunch is a real weakness of mine. I don't normally like cold cereal, but that and raisin bran are the only two I can actually stand. One thing that seems to have changed since I was a kid is Barnum's animal crackers. I used to love those and now...not so much. My daughter doesn't like them, either.

The huge jar of pickles I bought while pregnant with my son comes to mind. I ate pickles every day for a week and told the husband that it would probably be much cheaper if we just picked up the big gallon jar at Sam's. Little did I know that they'd disgust me completely the next week. Really, I hadn't had a pickle spear since until I went with my sister to lunch last week and got one with my sandwich. Also, I have a huge amount of canned beans that I keep thinking I'll do something with yet I never do. I did open a can of red beans and a can of black beans recently, but the Great Northern and the garbanzos, though I love hummus, are just sitting. The garbanzos probably have something to do with the fact that tahini is an ingredient I can't find within 30 miles of this tiny town, but I have no excuse for the great northerns other than the fact that it is just now bean soup season. I've had them for a year or so, though, so that excuse doesn't really work. There's also some cheap hot chocolate that I got at an Aldi a year or so ago in an attempt to save money. It's awful, like I knew it would be, and therefore both cans of the stuff is sitting on the pantry shelves aging. I have a couple different kinds of beer sitting around that I probably won't drink or use. One is a blueberry lager that sounded good at the time but now I can't think of a damn thing it would go with. The other is an oatmeal stout that's actually pretty damn good, but I've had it for a year and it's probably gone to meet the beer gods by now as to taste (and, really, carbonation). Other than that, I can't really think of something I won't have use for. I do, however, have too much of a few things. Too much pasta, too many cans of Swanson beef broth, too much plain yellow mustard. Bah.

Supposed to be breadsticks of the soft and squishy variety, but I didn't get the stuffed shells made that they were supposed to go with and, thus, this particular yeast dough has ended its life as sandwich rolls.

Awesome! Thanks. I guess I'll be replacing the other whisk soon then.

Will the 610 whisk work with the 600?

Chocolate Chip Cookies. Recipe adapted from the Tollhouse recipe. My go-to. Always good, never fail. They seem to come out better when mixed by hand then by machine.