Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Vacation over! Back to work, slaves!
I spent the tail end of my vacation relaxing, for the most part. I played some PS2 games, obvious enough. I also went out to buy some kitchen essentials. I’ve been watching a lot of ‘good eats’, a cooking show on cable. Once I cancelled my cable bill, good eats was the first thing I went out to buy to replace my cable experience. It’s a great show, presenting cooking as a whole, rather than just specific recipes. It teaches you how to cook, going over important fundamentals and going over the food science fundamentals that eventually lead to people making up their own additions or edits to recipes. It also presents of stuff on good cooking gear, and Alton Brown (host) often extols the virtues of ‘restaurant supply stores’.
Here’s my review of restaurant supply stores:
Little more than an awesome, huge, kitchen stores, you really have to steel yourself a little bit before you go into these places. First, the prices, at least at the place I went to, are higher than other places. As near as I can tell, that’s for two reasons. For one, it is a specialty store, and for two, the items they’re selling are of pretty darn high quality. These are heirloom-caliber pieces here. I bought some half-sheet pans that I’ll probably be able to use for the next ten or twenty years. I also picked up a fairly manly cast iron skillet, working under the theory that I should get one that’s a little small and one that’s a little big, to cover my bases. (10 inch skillets are pretty small).
I picked up a few other small odds and ends here and there, a dough blade and bowl scraper, but the selection at this place is absolutely ludicrous, and all pieces are of quite high quality and construction. I’d recommend going here if you want to buy a pot or pan that you’ll never have to buy again, the kind of thing you can use over and over and over and every day that’ll never break down. What I would *not* recommend is picking up common, everyday items here. If you’re just looking for a standard edition hand-or-stand mixer that you might pick up at a wall mart, I can guarantee that the big store will have better prices. I stopped by a Bed/Bath/Beyond store a while ago to look for cast iron, and I didn’t see any. I stopped at a different one afterwards and actually found cast iron, and for a bit less than what I had paid. Unfortunate, but that’s just the price of a good lesson.
What I will heartily endorse is heading off to a restaurant supply to buy something for the last time. If you make a lot of soup, your big pot is starting to show some wear, and you’re thinking of upgrading, hit up a restaurant supply store. Not only do they have the sort of freaky-huge specialty items that (almost) only restaurants use, but everything is quality, because restaurants can’t afford to be replacing their stuff. Upgrade from Rubbermaid to Lexane containers, quite literally bulletproof! Make sauces? Buy some squeeze bottles for dispensing. Ice cream scoops in *standard measuring qualities*, for precise scooping! It’s easy to get lost in this place, just wandering around and grabbing stuff because it’s freaking awesome, for crying out loud! Not to mention that if you really do want a 55 gallon stand mixer, a supply store may be the only place to pick it up. I actually saw one, sitting right in front of the store. It had one of those spiral mixer attachments that was as thick as my arm! I could have taken a nap in the bowl!
Plus, if you’re into cooking, they can be really fun to just walk around and gawk in. Just try not to spend too much.
Hey, can someone hit me with some cooking advice? My last sheet pan would get oil cooked onto it that would eventually turn black and a bit nasty-looking. Is that normal, just standard wear-and-tear on a sheet pan? Should I perhaps be making a habit of lining the thing with aluminum foil or parchment paper (silicon coated, available at your local restaurant supply store) to keep it clean, or is aesthetic wear-and-tear just the way of the sheet pan?
Pretty much the last ‘kitchen essential’ I need is a stand mixer and then perhaps a hand mixer too. There are a few things a hand mixer can do that a stand mixer can’t, but I think I’d get more use out of one of those awesome kitchen aid mixers I’ve seen around. They’re reportedly quite good, solid tools, even at the consumer level, and they’ve got something on the order of a billion attachments. And when I go out to get one of these, I will do so at a mass-market store, because I’ll get a better deal there on common stuff. See? I learned something!
I did some writing, and I think I’ve pretty much wrapped up chapter 10 of my novel-in-progress. I may add some stuff to it though, so it’s not quite ‘release-quality’ yet. Soon, though. Also played the drums. Went through a bunch of drum fundamentals (the ‘scales’ of the drumming kingdom) and played some DrumMania and then just beat along with some songs. Good exercise.
Those of you that watched the news this weekend might have spotted something about the fact that it rained in California this week, and the state exploded. For those of you concerned, weathered the storm (ha) just fine. It certainly was pretty rainy for a while though, and I saw the Los Angeles River with actual water in it, so good that that thing still works and now, presumably, is just a little bit cleaner. I also caught a couple of public advisories on the telley whilst I was watching some college bowl game or another this weekend, first a flash flood warning, and then a thunderstorm warning. After each of them, I went out on the balcony to make sure that my apartment complex wasn’t, y’know, floating, or anything. Nope, everything fine in my particular corner of the world. All my stuff is dry, except for the outside of my car, which got a complementary car wash from the rain. Sweet.
J(5) got back yesterday, and we were all huggy and happy to see each other, so that was good. Tigger was happy to see J(5) too, though evidently I’d taken pretty good care of him while I was back, because he was excited and happy to see her, rather than angry at her for being gone. I’d spend a couple hours over at J(5)’s house every day while she was gone. She has a PS2, so I can play games over there, and it’s nice for Tigger to have some company. Plus, Tigger is a pretty sweet kitty when he’s not trying to eat me. He’s graduated to the point where he’s just nipping at me a little, and he hasn’t broken skin in a while, so he’s getting better. Plus he’s always in a very ‘petty’ mood when he’s been without company for a while. He can be a nice little kitty at times.
Other random memories:
My parent’s anniversary dinner was quite nice, all us kids got to come along and have some good food and share funny stories and enjoy each other’s company. We all ate too much desert.
I tried running the treadmill this weekend, but I only got about 10 minutes in before the power died on me. Of interest, though, I saw a little snippet in some men’s health magazine or another that running up an incline is not only great for building up wind and stamina and speed and all of that, but also greatly reduces knee strain, so I gave myself a couple degrees of incline to work along. I’ll try that for 40 minutes next week, and it’ll probably kill me. Heh.
Here’s some fun math: 3 miles = 5280 * 3 feet = 15840 feet. At a 2% grade that’s an ascension of 316 feet! Roughly a football field straight up! Not bad!
Now I have a picture of a football stadium built sidewise stuck in my head.
I’ve also decided to get my finances under control. Not that I’m hurting for money or anything, it’s just nice to know where all your money is going so that you can adjust or trim as necessary. I re-did my budget and all my account information on quicken on the break. I’m going to see if I can keep ‘entertainment’ down a bit more. That’s where all my video games come from. Buy used, play older ones, or even just sell them off. Half.com: a good way to get used games, and presumably a good way to sell them off, too. I just have to go out and get some DVD-sized packages for sending stuff.
Comcast gives me 25 MB of personal web page space. Bully for that, somewhere to put my random stuff. All my songs might not fit there, but pictures and stories? No problem.
Called up USC just to check on my masters degree, and it sounds like everything paperwork-y is going through just fine. It’s being reviewed as we speak, I think.
Um…what else…
New contact lenses. Thanks dad! I’m reading all sorts of stuff from great distances now.
That’s a pretty hefty little entry. Enjoy that. Have fun with it. Get it framed, if you want.
-N
I spent the tail end of my vacation relaxing, for the most part. I played some PS2 games, obvious enough. I also went out to buy some kitchen essentials. I’ve been watching a lot of ‘good eats’, a cooking show on cable. Once I cancelled my cable bill, good eats was the first thing I went out to buy to replace my cable experience. It’s a great show, presenting cooking as a whole, rather than just specific recipes. It teaches you how to cook, going over important fundamentals and going over the food science fundamentals that eventually lead to people making up their own additions or edits to recipes. It also presents of stuff on good cooking gear, and Alton Brown (host) often extols the virtues of ‘restaurant supply stores’.
Here’s my review of restaurant supply stores:
Little more than an awesome, huge, kitchen stores, you really have to steel yourself a little bit before you go into these places. First, the prices, at least at the place I went to, are higher than other places. As near as I can tell, that’s for two reasons. For one, it is a specialty store, and for two, the items they’re selling are of pretty darn high quality. These are heirloom-caliber pieces here. I bought some half-sheet pans that I’ll probably be able to use for the next ten or twenty years. I also picked up a fairly manly cast iron skillet, working under the theory that I should get one that’s a little small and one that’s a little big, to cover my bases. (10 inch skillets are pretty small).
I picked up a few other small odds and ends here and there, a dough blade and bowl scraper, but the selection at this place is absolutely ludicrous, and all pieces are of quite high quality and construction. I’d recommend going here if you want to buy a pot or pan that you’ll never have to buy again, the kind of thing you can use over and over and over and every day that’ll never break down. What I would *not* recommend is picking up common, everyday items here. If you’re just looking for a standard edition hand-or-stand mixer that you might pick up at a wall mart, I can guarantee that the big store will have better prices. I stopped by a Bed/Bath/Beyond store a while ago to look for cast iron, and I didn’t see any. I stopped at a different one afterwards and actually found cast iron, and for a bit less than what I had paid. Unfortunate, but that’s just the price of a good lesson.
What I will heartily endorse is heading off to a restaurant supply to buy something for the last time. If you make a lot of soup, your big pot is starting to show some wear, and you’re thinking of upgrading, hit up a restaurant supply store. Not only do they have the sort of freaky-huge specialty items that (almost) only restaurants use, but everything is quality, because restaurants can’t afford to be replacing their stuff. Upgrade from Rubbermaid to Lexane containers, quite literally bulletproof! Make sauces? Buy some squeeze bottles for dispensing. Ice cream scoops in *standard measuring qualities*, for precise scooping! It’s easy to get lost in this place, just wandering around and grabbing stuff because it’s freaking awesome, for crying out loud! Not to mention that if you really do want a 55 gallon stand mixer, a supply store may be the only place to pick it up. I actually saw one, sitting right in front of the store. It had one of those spiral mixer attachments that was as thick as my arm! I could have taken a nap in the bowl!
Plus, if you’re into cooking, they can be really fun to just walk around and gawk in. Just try not to spend too much.
Hey, can someone hit me with some cooking advice? My last sheet pan would get oil cooked onto it that would eventually turn black and a bit nasty-looking. Is that normal, just standard wear-and-tear on a sheet pan? Should I perhaps be making a habit of lining the thing with aluminum foil or parchment paper (silicon coated, available at your local restaurant supply store) to keep it clean, or is aesthetic wear-and-tear just the way of the sheet pan?
Pretty much the last ‘kitchen essential’ I need is a stand mixer and then perhaps a hand mixer too. There are a few things a hand mixer can do that a stand mixer can’t, but I think I’d get more use out of one of those awesome kitchen aid mixers I’ve seen around. They’re reportedly quite good, solid tools, even at the consumer level, and they’ve got something on the order of a billion attachments. And when I go out to get one of these, I will do so at a mass-market store, because I’ll get a better deal there on common stuff. See? I learned something!
I did some writing, and I think I’ve pretty much wrapped up chapter 10 of my novel-in-progress. I may add some stuff to it though, so it’s not quite ‘release-quality’ yet. Soon, though. Also played the drums. Went through a bunch of drum fundamentals (the ‘scales’ of the drumming kingdom) and played some DrumMania and then just beat along with some songs. Good exercise.
Those of you that watched the news this weekend might have spotted something about the fact that it rained in California this week, and the state exploded. For those of you concerned, weathered the storm (ha) just fine. It certainly was pretty rainy for a while though, and I saw the Los Angeles River with actual water in it, so good that that thing still works and now, presumably, is just a little bit cleaner. I also caught a couple of public advisories on the telley whilst I was watching some college bowl game or another this weekend, first a flash flood warning, and then a thunderstorm warning. After each of them, I went out on the balcony to make sure that my apartment complex wasn’t, y’know, floating, or anything. Nope, everything fine in my particular corner of the world. All my stuff is dry, except for the outside of my car, which got a complementary car wash from the rain. Sweet.
J(5) got back yesterday, and we were all huggy and happy to see each other, so that was good. Tigger was happy to see J(5) too, though evidently I’d taken pretty good care of him while I was back, because he was excited and happy to see her, rather than angry at her for being gone. I’d spend a couple hours over at J(5)’s house every day while she was gone. She has a PS2, so I can play games over there, and it’s nice for Tigger to have some company. Plus, Tigger is a pretty sweet kitty when he’s not trying to eat me. He’s graduated to the point where he’s just nipping at me a little, and he hasn’t broken skin in a while, so he’s getting better. Plus he’s always in a very ‘petty’ mood when he’s been without company for a while. He can be a nice little kitty at times.
Other random memories:
My parent’s anniversary dinner was quite nice, all us kids got to come along and have some good food and share funny stories and enjoy each other’s company. We all ate too much desert.
I tried running the treadmill this weekend, but I only got about 10 minutes in before the power died on me. Of interest, though, I saw a little snippet in some men’s health magazine or another that running up an incline is not only great for building up wind and stamina and speed and all of that, but also greatly reduces knee strain, so I gave myself a couple degrees of incline to work along. I’ll try that for 40 minutes next week, and it’ll probably kill me. Heh.
Here’s some fun math: 3 miles = 5280 * 3 feet = 15840 feet. At a 2% grade that’s an ascension of 316 feet! Roughly a football field straight up! Not bad!
Now I have a picture of a football stadium built sidewise stuck in my head.
I’ve also decided to get my finances under control. Not that I’m hurting for money or anything, it’s just nice to know where all your money is going so that you can adjust or trim as necessary. I re-did my budget and all my account information on quicken on the break. I’m going to see if I can keep ‘entertainment’ down a bit more. That’s where all my video games come from. Buy used, play older ones, or even just sell them off. Half.com: a good way to get used games, and presumably a good way to sell them off, too. I just have to go out and get some DVD-sized packages for sending stuff.
Comcast gives me 25 MB of personal web page space. Bully for that, somewhere to put my random stuff. All my songs might not fit there, but pictures and stories? No problem.
Called up USC just to check on my masters degree, and it sounds like everything paperwork-y is going through just fine. It’s being reviewed as we speak, I think.
Um…what else…
New contact lenses. Thanks dad! I’m reading all sorts of stuff from great distances now.
That’s a pretty hefty little entry. Enjoy that. Have fun with it. Get it framed, if you want.
-N
Comments:
the oily cookie sheet thing-
the black stuff around the edges doesn't seem to add any flavor to your cooking (which is good, because it doesn't look like a nice flavor) but it does build up pretty quick. I have some nice sheets that somehow avoid such build up, and some other ones that don't. Some build up is probably normal, but eventually move your sheets into the "upgrade" list.
Or wax paper makes for easy clean up. Or you could get a silicon cookies sheet like I have. It rocks.
S
Post a Comment
the black stuff around the edges doesn't seem to add any flavor to your cooking (which is good, because it doesn't look like a nice flavor) but it does build up pretty quick. I have some nice sheets that somehow avoid such build up, and some other ones that don't. Some build up is probably normal, but eventually move your sheets into the "upgrade" list.
Or wax paper makes for easy clean up. Or you could get a silicon cookies sheet like I have. It rocks.
S
# posted by 
: January 5, 2006 at 3:39 PM
: January 5, 2006 at 3:39 PM