dscheidt

WE have a 14 cup cuisinart food processor. the work bowl has broken again. I've been unimpressed with it for the 12 years we've had it, it's gone through a bunch of plastic pieces, and has generally not been as good as the one my mom used to have. So, I think instead of buying yet another work bowl, I think I'd like to get something else. The size is right, both the capacity and counter foot print. We do normal food processor stuff, and a moderate amount of shredding and grating. We have a good blender for blender stuff, this is just for slicing and grating and general mushing together. What do people like that doesn't require an expensive plastic piece on a regular basis?

Who said it can't be separated? Composition is not color.

Your faith in Chinese manufacturing is perhaps less than well placed. The black plastic is hard to separate by composition, so it ends up ground into very fine powder, where it used as a filler, instead of carbon black or some other virgin material.

that's about what the place I buy most of our produce at is charging. They generally have good prices for good quality stuff, with prices that change based on what they're paying. (and for stuff like berries packaged by the grower, often two or more suppliers at different prices.) I'm pretty sure the big chains use banananananas as loss leader, because everyone buys bananas, and they remember where they were cheaper. But, outside a few things, I've never considered trader joe's prices on produce good. The one exception is citrus, which is of reliably good quality, and sometimes much cheaper. (limes are much cheaper at the mexican markets. Got to pick the good ones, though.)

My wife bought an escali from sur la table. The nutri or nutro or something like that. Works fine so far. measures to the half gram, which is nice, but not necessary. has ml and fl oz units, which is dumb without a way to specify density. presumably it's assuming water.

I bought the oxo. I'm returning it. Two problems: it's too wide to fit in the drawer I need to store it in, which is 7"; and my wife didn't approve of it. she though the cord would break, get dirty, etc. I probably could have made one of the problems work, but not both. so, any narrow scales? that's really hard to search on....

So, this scale is dead. I suppose 16.5 years is okay life span. But, I need a scale. I could just buy another, it's still sold. Or I could buy something new. Waht's out there?

I got given a bunch of 10x18 bags, which were even longer than that that, because they were zipper bags, with the zipper end being factory sealed. (they had a pre printed label stuck to them, with wrong info, which meant the converter who'd ordered them coul;dn't use them. My home kitchen not being subject to FDA inspection....) I have a vp215, which is 15" long, inside the chamber. I used a bunch of them up, and gave the rest away, but they worked okay in the machine, you have to fiddle around with where you have the excess, but it's pretty easy to figure out what works. For stuff that doesn't need a super hard vacuum, just folding the extra under works fine. Also, remember that bags get shorter when they have stuff in them,

One day in August a few (four, five?) years ago, I decided I needed a new TV. So I bought one, a not quite top-of-the-range model, of (by modern tv standards) modest size. It was selling everywhere for about the same price. In November, it was a headline sale item at several different places (best buy, walmart), for $50 to $100 more than I'd bought it, not on sale, in August. In February, (after the super bowl) I happened to mention that to someone, and looked, it was a few bucks cheaper than when I bought it.

If you have ever had ice from a bar or restaurant, you've had ice as 'wet' as the stuff that comes out of of one of these machines. It's not a big deal for anything I use ice for.

I'll the one's I've looked at are just an insulated bin, with a drain. Commercial machines have an ice tray, that's cooled by frigerant piping. water is pumped over the tray, some of it freezes to the tray, the rest flows into a sump, and is recirculated. Some circulate constantly, some do it in spurts. when the machine thinks the ice is done, the refrigerant flow through the tray is reversed, which heats it up a bit, enough to melt the cubes off, and they fall out the chute, into storage bin. The ice is wet, because it's had near freezing water on it, and since it's wet, the storage can't be refrigerated, because the wet ice would form huge clumps as the water froze in storage. To get dry ice, you have to stop the flow of water, wait long enough to be sure every thing is frozen, and then release the ice. There are big ice plants that do that, usually with a slightly different batch process. Packaged ice is often made this way, because it's got to be kept frozen, so wet ice makes horrible blobs. your home freezer makes dry ice, because it makes ice the same way as old-fashioned ice cube trays do, using the cold of the freezer air (instead of cooling the tray). That's slow, because heat transfer from air to water is slower than from the tray to water or later in the process, ice to water of the continuous production machines. (some very fancy fridges have a second ice maker in the door of the fridge, which usually operates on the continuous process). My freezer claims to be able to produce 7 or 8 pounds of ice a day, actual production is maybe 5. The little counter top units we had in the office claimed production of something like 25 pounds a day (which would require constant tending to keep the bin from filling up and refill the water.), and in the summer, we probably got six pounds of ice out of it during a work day.

Refrigerated ice bins are bascially unheard of except in residential freezer ice akers, and the biggest commercial plants. it's much simpler, and cheaper, to just run water over a cold plate, and produce wet ice. For almost all domestic uses, that's not a real problem. If you're putting it in soda, the wet ice provides fewer nucleation points to drive CO2 out of solution, so it's a bonus for that. We had a series of these at the office I used to work in. They lasted a year or two, under pretty heavy usage. the ice was fine for stuff you use it in an office.

I had a chef choice 609 or 610 for several years. It worked fine. For what it cost, it was good. It had a number of annoyances, one being the small blad (7"/180 mm, something like that), which limits what you can cut up. It's also a bit annoying noisy, with a whiney high-rpm motor. The tray to catch cuttings sucks. (this appears to have changed in the newest model, which is more expensive than the old, by a lot. I don't know if they've fixed other issues I had with it.) It's under powered, cutting cheese is a chore, and blew a couple fuses trying to do too much at one go. My biggest gripe was the minimum thickness was too thick for italian beef. (A chicago thing, thin sliced roast beef for a sandwhich) And the thickness setting wanders away from the thinnest setting, so it has to be held in place, which complicates slicing. (this isn't an issue at thicker settings. It drifts, but pretty slowly, and you can just check it visually ever few slices.) the optional blade (serrated, I think) improves performance a lot. I bought a 12" Berkel from a thrift store, spent a lot of time cleaning it, and repairing it. It's vastly superior, but for some reason, my wife won't let me keep it in the kitchen, so I don't use it too often.

My experience with vacuum pumps is mostly for pulling a hard vacuum in AC systems. Hydraulic oils have more components that will evaporate at low pressure, and they won't hold up to heavy vacuum use. It probably doesn't matter much for the amount of use most of these sealers see, and the relatively low level of vacuum they pull. But a quart of actual vacuum oil will last several changes in the 215 pump, and it's only a couple bucks a change. that's worth it in my book.

it can be done, you're not going to be printing a different list for each recipient, but only for a metro area or a region. It's almost certainly not worth the effort, people who read advertising fliers are probably already your customer and know where you are, or are motivated to find you. the ones I've looked at (none terribly recently) have had web stie links for store locators, too, which is easy enough.