Tropicalsenior

That pork chop looks perfect, nice and moist with at least a little browning.

There is a lot of good advice on tempering chocolate and using cocoa butter in this topic. Maybe there's something here that will help.

I like that patina. At least that's what I tell myself when I look up there and see that dark crust forming and I think about scouring them out.

It sounds like you have chosen an ambitious project for your retirement. Your candies are absolutely gorgeous. What part of the country are you in? I hope that you will check out some other forums and share some of your recipes with us, not just for candy but some of your restaurant favorites.

Oh dear! I'm afraid if that were mine I would just have to forget that I had a celler. Stairs are completely out of my league. Fortunately, our house is on all one level and years ago my husband made me a rolling cart. It was originally to use for my sewing machine but it has turned out to be the best thing that he ever made for me. I use it all the time to bring groceries in from the car. I can roll it right up to the trunk and put everything on it. And I usually have a lot of bags because I have the checkers all trained to only fill them about half full. If we are eating in the dining room, I use it to take in all my dishes to set the table, once again with all the food, and afterwards I put a dish tub on it and bring back in all the dishes.

Welcome to eG. Those are beautiful. I'm not into making candy so I hope that you will venture further into the topics on eG and meet the rest of us. I think that you will like it here.

Another cell phone feature that older people don't take enough advantage of is dictation. All smartphones have it and it sure is a lot easier than trying to hunt and Peck on that tiny little keyboard. If I didn't have that you would hear from me once a year at Christmas time when I wished you "hoppy halidabs."

I also photograph and enlarge hard to read directions that I would be using all the time. I keep them in a photo file so that it is easy to refer back to them instead of hunting for a magnifying glass or enlarging them every time you need to read them. That and the flashlight feature on a cell phone can be a big help to those that are visually impaired. I used my flashlight feature today to read the menu at lunch in a restaurant that was definitely light deficient. Otherwise I would have had to have somebody read the menu for me.

I think as we get older, the trick is not so much to work less it is to work smarter. I never move from one part of the kitchen or to one part of the house with empty hands. I make every trip count. One thing that I have started to do is to set up a tray before I start to finish my dinner with everything to set the table. Plates, silverware, napkins, and all my serving spoons that I will be using. That way I have one trip to the table and done.

Buckets and buckets of hummus.

I can't even have the hope that mine will die anytime soon. A friend of mine bought the same one at the same time that I did. He has used it 7 days a week in his restaurant and it still shows no sign of giving up.

Not exactly a sheet pan meal but one of my favorite things to do is a meatloaf meal. When I make a small meatloaf just big enough for the two of us, I put it in a large glass loaf pan. I put the meatloaf in one half and put parboiled potatoes and carrots shaken with oil and some type of seasoning mix in the other half. Bake at 350° for about 30 minutes and you have a whole meal.

I've had quite a few years of learning to cope with this. Carlos lived with us for several years when my husband was alive and I would prepare a dish up to a point and then separate a portion out for him before I added the onions and garlic. When he rented a room for me after my husband died, I decided that I just was not going to make two meals, one with and one without, and I would learn to eat what he could eat. I just found that it was not going to be Bland and that I would learn to compensate with other seasonings and textures. Thank goodness, he is an adventurous eater which isn't common in Latin American people. I've had a few pretty colossal failures and he doesn't bat an eye.

A few years ago I would have agreed with you completely. But my housemate has a deathly allergy to onions, garlic, scallions, or anything in the onion family. He is also allergic to any type of raw pepper. I have learned to compensate through seasonings and things like celery and daikon radish to give the texture of onion in things but I still miss onion and garlic. One of my favorite things to do is to try recipes from around the world and so many cultures rely so heavily on onions and garlic that you just have to give them a pass. Believe it or not, I can make a damn good chili without them. Reading through this topic just about makes me cry.

I bought this one because the first one that I had, A Molineux, was a darn good machine. I brought it down from the states and I used it all the time. This was the only direct drive that I could find down here at the time for what I wanted to pay and I've been sorry ever since.

Great suggestion but... this is why I don't get anything through Amazon. 39.99 $80.75 Shipping & Import Fees Deposit to Costa Rica Details

I think that's probably one of the key points to whether you use it all the time. I only have one outlet that I can use for my appliances so I have to constantly rotate them in and out of that area of my counter. That's another point. The blades and shredder on mine are next to useless.

I remember seeing this when I was in Argentina but I didn't try any of it. It is a candy but is similar to what they call cajeta in other Latin countries. It is basically just a fudge from dulce de leche that has been cooked down to a solid form. It is very, very sweet. As Heidi said, you probably just want a piece the size of an M&M. That size package should last you quite a while. However, it is Christmas so you could cut it up and put it in your candy dishes. You might want to put a sign on the dish that you are not responsible for resulting dental work.

I've used mine once in about nine years.

And here I thought I was the only one that felt that way. Mine is on a shelf in the kitchen in easy reach or I would probably never use it. If I am going to grate a carrot or cheese I use the small box grater because it is so much easier to wash. I got it because it was easy to make small batches of bread dough but now I have a KitchenAid mixer that I use. I think the only thing that I use it for now is to make bread crumbs. The thing that I really hate is my blender. First, the only place that I have to store it is on a bottom shelf and for me, it is like pulling teeth to get it out. Second, no matter how loosely I tighten the blade, the act of blending tightens it so much that it takes three men and a boy to get it off. I have probably given away four or five blenders because I hated them and the only reason I have this one is because somebody gave it to me.

Just from me! I would kill for that beef! Well, at least, I'd kill a cow.

Admittedly, I am only cooking for two but I have had better luck cooking things in a glass casserole dish. It's a lot easier to clean than a sheet pan. The only way that I have done it successfully is to parboil some ingredients that I know will take longer to cook and I guess that defeats the whole idea of one pan cooking.

I understand completely. I traded my bread machine for a KitchenAid mixer that Google tells me weighs 30 lb but for me might as well be a hundred. I have to have Carlos move it into place for me. For almost everything but the bread I still use a bowl and a wooden spoon rather than try and move it. Getting old is a b****. I thought these were supposed to be our golden years.

This also looks like a very good recipe and she has a lot of good baking recipes on her site.

Not knowing anything about gluten-free bread, this is one I chose to Google and I came across this interesting article. It even has a link for gluten free bread in a bread machine. That said, I can understand why you need a bread machine with a gluten-free setting. Basically you just don't knead it because that is the primary method of developing gluten in bread dough. In other words, you would take the bread out immediately after it is mixed and shape it in a bread pan or however you plan to bake it. And if that is all you plan to do with the bread maker, you might just as well do it in a mixer or in a bowl with a wooden spoon.