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Dave the Cook

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Everything posted by Dave the Cook

  1. The bottle in my fridge is at least 19 years old. I acquired it when my then BIL*, with whom I was grocery shopping on a Florida vacation, threw a bottle into each of our carts, saying "I haven't seen this in years. Take it -- you be glad you did." So I took it, and have carted it from house to house to house to house to house, using it once or maybe twice. I was about to throw it away the other day, after finding it guilty of taking up needed space in the refrigerator, but my hand was stayed by none other than @JAZ, who said, "Keep that! I use it in chicken salad." So we're using it up -- two teaspoons at a time. * For those trying to map the geography of Durkee usage, said BIL was born in northeast Ohio, and lived there until he got his BA. The last time our families vacationed together was 2003.
  2. With those requirements, I'd start haunting places like Home Goods.
  3. Dave the Cook

    Baked Potatoes

    Without checking, I wonder if James Peterson might have channeled Olney. He's a known devotee.
  4. I'm sure things will work out fine. It's pretty hard to go wrong these days. Just buy more lighting than you're sure you'll need, and install dimmers. Adjust your levels, and never give lighting another thought. I'll only ask you to be careful. I don't want to be a jerk about this, but while your electrician is probably right, he's not a lighting engineer, no matter what his level of enthusiasm. Put it this way: I'm an ice cream enthusiast, I've made a lot of it, and I have strong opinions about it. That doesn't mean that I can make ice cream that's as good as yours. By the way, you can figure out precise answers to these questions on your own, if you have enough information and graph paper, own a tape measure, and don't mind a lot of math. Also, I'm sure you won't be surprised to find out that there are computer programs that can do it. For some reason they quite expensive.
  5. Functionally, downlights can easily replace pendants. Just make sure you'll have enough light to do island-related tasks, and that the beam angles are wide enough to completely cover the island. Is that the reason for using 4" lights, rather than the 6" used elsewhere? ETA: it's possible to design a lighting plan that obviates the need for "extra" lighting over the island. Much depends on the size and shape of your room, the size of your island and the height of your ceiling.
  6. You re right, I'm sure it was 20-amp. I carried that 18-amp number (what said toaster oven required) around for so long that it got burned into my memory cells. That's because it IS brighter to human eyes. Most household fixtures are 2700K. Many have a switch that will change them from 2700 to 3000Kor 3500K (sometimes 4000K). We like things bright, but 6000K is a little too blue for us. YMMV.
  7. Color temperature turns out to be very important.
  8. Sorry to disappoint, if you were hoping for a saga of despair, dashed hopes and eventual victory over the forces of evil. But as it turns out, the lighting was the least traumatic part of the project. I'll skip the bulk of the story of our kitchen remodel, which took either two months or eleven years, depending on how you count. This is just about the lighting. I moved in here in 2005. This is what the place looked like: There was a 24" fluorescent bar over the sink, two 60W incandescents in the range hood, a ceiling fan with a light kit attached, and finally, a 4'W x 8'L x 1'D recess in the ceiling, which housed four 48" twin fluorecent fixtures. You can see the fan and the recessed (such as it is) lighting in the last photo. Note that the ceiling is 7'. Over the next few years, we made some changes. (Please excuse the mess you see here. These pics were taken in the middle of renovation, so things were, shall we say, chaotic -- not that the kitchen wasn't normally pretty chaotic. Hence the need for renovation!) I added fluorescent work lights over two work areas, one a makeshift island: and the other the dishwashing/coffeemaking area. You can sort-of see in the photo above that I also removed the prismatic plex that covered the recessed fluorescents, mostly to provide more light, but it had the unexpected effect of making the entire ceiling seem higher than its agoraphobic-inducing seven feet. So when we 1) got serious about remodeling; 2) could once again afford it, we kind of did it all at once, or at least in a tight sequence. We replaced the fluorescents with pendants (the ceiling here, where the fluorescents used to be, is 8'): installed flush-mount LED lights over a new prep area and the coffee equipment: and added undercabinet LED lighting to the wall cabinets on the sink/range wall (the range hood has two led lamps as well); Between getting rid of the original fluorescents, addition of bright white cabinetry and upgraded lighting, we don't notice the short ceilings any more. The kitchen is bright (one contractor said it looked like a hospital operating room) and a pleasure to work in. Obviously, there was a lot of other work done, but that's for a different topic. The kitchen lighting was about $2200, including labor. It's impossible at this time to break it out, but that included installation of a new 18-amp circuit to safely accommodate a power-sucking toaster oven, as well as adding a new outlet to an existing circuit and rewiring another.
  9. When we remodeled our kitchen a couple of years ago, we settled on a combination of ambient lighting and task lighting. The ambient was to light up the room; the task was to hit specific work areas: cutting boards, the sink, the small appliance area (mainly the coffeemaker and coffee grinders). There's much more to the story (which I'm happy to tell if peeps want), but we ended up with flat LED downlights to provide part of the ambient lighting; the rest of the ambient lighting was provided by replacing three two-bulb fluorescent fixtures with LED-equipped pendants. For task lighting, we had these installed (well not these, but something similar). Everyone (including kitchen designers and subsequent lighting designers) has called their friends to tell them about these lights. I'm really surprised they're not more popular.
  10. I'm not ignoring you. I just want to hear what everyone else has to say. You're probably right, but if I gave up space to every "very easy" project for creating an everyday food item, I wouldn't have room to actually cook!
  11. I asked myself how much I'd pay for a 12 oz. bottle of wine vinegar. I answered, "Nine dollars seems reasonable." That's 75 cents per ounce. Yes, it's a bit random, but that's my number, for now. Is it too high? Too low? The topic title says "for daily use," so the answer to your second question is obviously "Yes." But, to be honest, we don't really use it every day. Between vinaigrettes, marinades and balancing a sauce (usually something long-cooked), and yes, doing a little quick pickling, it's maybe three times a week on average. Now that I think about it, we probably use as much rice and sherry vinegar as red-wine. Your point being what? Do you really think that wasn't the first thing I did? I wanted the opinion of people here. Indeed they are. How often do you use it? Saveur magazine says Colavita is the best red wine vinegar around (I get 23 cents per ounce from Amazon, but whatevs).
  12. From a group that seems to have an opinion about nearly everything food-related, this is a little surprising. Maybe everyone else is happy with Pompeian, Regina or Napa Valley Natural?
  13. You won't catch me defending thespruceeats.com very often, but in this case I think you're saying something other than what the author has written. She says that dry sherry is a better substitution for Shaoxing than mirin. That's not the same thing as saying that dry sherry is objectively close to Shaoxing, or even that it's a great choice. It's just (I think it's fair to say that it's her opinion) better than mirin.
  14. I was going to ask about Zhenjiang vinegar, but decided I probably knew what the general tone of the answer would be. (I was right.) And it was off-topic. Not to prolong the discussion needlessly, but I don't recall anyone saying that dry sherry was "close" to Shaoxing. All I remember is writers saying it was an acceptable substitute. Perhaps it's splitting hairs, but I don't think those ideas mean the same thing.
  15. It depends on whether you're talking about Chinese-Chinese or American Chinese. If it's the former, it entails a two hour schlep to get ingredients (where I can find a number of Shaoxing wines to pick from). If it's the latter, the toughest thing to obtain (besides Shaoxing wine) is Sichuan peppercorns, which are easily found on the internets (can't get wine that way where I live). But mainly, it was intellectual curiosity on my part. I wondered if the blithe advice was accurate or not. I suppose that the reason the substitution is widely accepted is because the results, even if not authentic, are still tasty.
  16. In this part of the world (in the US for sure, but I'm guessing a good bit of the planet that's not east Asia), often in cookbooks or recipes, dry sherry is often suggested as a reasonable substitute if Shaoxing wine is not available. So, the question I can't believe no one has asked yet: is it?
  17. @weinoo, I don't think it was a butcher, it was someone working for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, who, using money raised by their check-off program, financed the University of Nebraska's undertaking of the Bovine Myology project, which identified not only the Sierra, but the flatiron, the chuck-eye, the petite tender, and a few other "new" cuts. I beg you, stop. There are cuts that are just as good for burger meat, but few that can equal the succulence of a chuck-eye.
  18. I had never heard of the Sierra steak (or seen a watch like that). It looks tasty (the steak, not the watch).
  19. I stumbled across this video (sponsored by the Certified Angus Beef folks) the other day. It's as clear an explanation of the difference between a chuck roll and a chuck-eye roll as I've ever seen. Although it demonstrates a breakdown of an entire chuck roll, it has particular relevance to this topic, as it pretty clearly shows how chuck-eye steaks are fabricated. How to Break Down a Chuck Roll Almost as interesting, partly because it shows how to extract the spinalis (ribeye cap, or sometimes deckle, much beloved by @TicTac) steak from the 109 rib primal, is this video (same source): How to Break Down a Ribeye Roll. There's also a slightly less compelling but still interesting video on breaking down a whole sirloin.
  20. All of that is correct. "Delmonico" is affixed to a number of different cuts, the chuck-eye being one of them.
  21. But that's not what spruceeats said. Rather than ". . . less than the 6th rib area . . . ," they said ". . . from the fifth rib . . ." Your description is correct, mostly because anything from the fifth/sixth rib demarcation forward to the head and above the foreshank/brisket is the definition of chuck. The spruceeats description, striving for greater exactitude, is incorrect. (Sometimes, the fifth rib is used to fabricate a tomahawk chop.) spruceeats is also incorrect in saying that there are only two chuck-eye steaks per steer. Depending on the size of the steer and how it is butchered, there are six to eight 3/4" to 1" chuck-eye steaks, cut from the rib end of the chuck-eye roll. I'm glad Jeff C. got his rib issue straightened out.
  22. That's not at all what I posted. I've been vocal and public in my praise of chuck-eyes for several years, including an article in the late lamented Daily Gullet. All I said was that the writer of the thespruce article was mistaken (personally, I'd never use thespruce as a solitary reference). Further research, however, turned up the Denver steaks @Margaret Pilgrim posted about. They come from the side of the chuck roll opposite the chuck-eye roll (you can find them on page 8 of this document). I cannot fathom how they command $25/lb. As for the OP's original query, I have no idea, except that I think @Paul Bacino might be on to something -- an oddly (poorly?) butchered steak, or a steak cut off a poorly butchered prime rib.
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