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Post by mach12 on Nov 24, 2017 16:19:54 GMT -5
Wow Mach12!!! So inspiring! Everything is so bright and cheerful and the cabinets/tile are the perfect frames for Pepper. The band of glass tiles is so sharp. Are they black? All your planning and hard work really paid off. Now how are you going to fill your hours?? (Laugh) Our project has been put off until after the new but it is becoming real. Guessing the last screw will be tightened in late Feb. Meanwhile I’ll look at your post! Thanks Evangeline. I have an old Minolta pocket camera that I keep handy and every now and then just pick it up and snap an in-progress shot as I go. The photo I posted is just one of them and doesn't do any justice compared to what it looks like in person. I need to get my Nikon out and get some better pictures. The glass mosaic strip looks a lot better in real life since it's a mix of crackled, glossy and I guess what you'd call flat-finish pieces. They came as a square piece with 18 rows of tile blocks glued to a net material so I laid the block on a piece of particle board and cut each block into strips with 6 rows each with a utility knife. We thought about going with 3 row strips and that would have been fine too but I put it into a computer program to see what it would look like and in order to get a decent look I'd have had to make hundreds of more cuts (and sanded each cut with a rubbing block) of the subway tile, plus and we preferred how the wider strip looked in the simulation. We went with black since we wanted it to stay in the background while adding some interest. In so many of the older home pictures we looked at while we were trying to come up with ideas they did something similar with black tiles and that looked nice so this is kind of a variation on that, too. There are so many tile options that it was quite a task, especially since so many of them would look great. There's no problem keeping busy around here, plus I still need to do all the trim, paint the rest of the room, and put down the flooring before I can call this finished. Then I need to catch up on the outside projects that I've let go while I've done this inside stuff and that'll have me busy until this time next year! Plus there has been talk of bathroom remodeling. Do I know what you mean about putting off the work for holidays and other reasons! Living in a construction zone hasn't been bad, or at least wasn't up until now. I think that as we get closer to the finish line the idea of being done gets a lot more desirable. I've had so much fun cooking with Pepper the last two days that I just want to quit doing kitchen stuff and play with Chambers recipes.
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Post by nana on Nov 25, 2017 7:36:15 GMT -5
What was the absolute first thing you cooked with her?
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Post by mach12 on Nov 25, 2017 13:00:56 GMT -5
What was the absolute first thing you cooked with her? I hardly want to admit it but it was beer battered fish from a box, cooked in the oven, and french fries cooked in vegetable oil in a #8 cast iron skillet on the cooktop. I was kind of just playing around since I had been doing adjustments and the oven was hot so I grabbed the fish from the freezer, stuck some on an insulated cookie sheet, tossed them in the oven and then ran the gas at 400F while I watched the flame drop into bypass, then turned off the gas. Because the oven was already heated to 350F from doing adjustments it only took about 6 minutes to drop into bypass. I started the oil heating (I filter and re-use the oil several times, so it was cold from the fridge) so just left the fish in the oven until the fries were done, probably 30 minutes after I shut off the gas by the time I finished fiddling with the fries and making some tartar sauce for the fish and some cole slaw, but I forgot to check the actual time. I took a peek at the fish when the fries were done and they looked like they were ready so out they came. I stuck one of the pieces of fish with a thermometer and it was at 175F, which was 10 degrees over what the package says is the safe temperature. I'm not normally quite that OCD about the details but figured I was learning, so might as well collect the data. Now I'm curious to do the next fish straight from the freezer and into a cold oven and see how that goes. Heck, they'll probably be done before it hits by-pass. So, the first meal cooked on Pepper was Fish & Chips (the second thing cooked was pumpkin pie).
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Post by karitx on Nov 25, 2017 20:00:57 GMT -5
Ohmygoodness, mach12, that looks phenomenal! Congrats on your beautiful new kitchen and especially for Pepper!
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Post by nana on Nov 25, 2017 20:12:46 GMT -5
There's no shame in fish and chips! A perfectly respectable meal. If memory serves the first thing I actually cooked on Marilyn was boil water for tea, and the first meal, she reheated pasta on the stovetop. She had a bit of a rough start, but by now she and I are a team. We understand each other pretty well, I think!
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Post by mach12 on Dec 12, 2017 23:17:23 GMT -5
Tomorrow will be 3 weeks since we got Pepper up and running and man is she awesome! One of the things I've always struggled with is timing everything so that it's ready at the right time and it's so much easier now. Even simple stuff, like last night when I thawed some chili I had made a few weeks ago and heated it and made rice in the T-well to go with the chili. I put the rice in following the instructions in the Idle Hour cookbook and it was done right on time. Then a neighbor came over and needed some quick help (more my tractor than me) so everything had to wait about 20 minutes. The rice was still perfect and better than when it's done in our electric rice cooker. I've done baked potatoes in the well a couple of times. broiled steaks, made pancakes and French toast on the griddle, Christmas cookies, Chex Mix, on and on. My wife thinks the pilot "warming burner" is the ticket too. Every morning she makes a pot of tea, pours a cup, and then sets the pot over the pilot and she loves that. Now and then I see her look at Pepper, run her hand along the top and smile. I was worried that she might not be too crazy about having a vintage stove as our regular stove but it doesn't look like that's a problem. Tomorrow, for the 3 week celebration, I'm making that T-well chocolate cake that everyone's always talking about.
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Post by mach12 on Dec 13, 2017 14:29:36 GMT -5
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Post by mach12 on Dec 15, 2017 14:52:39 GMT -5
Well, the cake wasn't awesome but it was okay. Only because of a hardware problem with the T-well though. I mixed up the cake and poured the batter into the large pot and, following the instructions, preheated and then placed the pot in the well and so on. I have a digital thermometer probe in the well so set it to notify me via the app on my cell phone when the temperature went below 200F and it went off way too soon (maybe 15 minutes). When I went to see why I noticed that the T-well lid wasn't sitting all the way down. Turns out the lid was sitting on the lid clips. I had used that pot twice before and hadn't had that problem so pulled it out, checked that the grate was sitting on the pegs properly (the BZ well grate has brackets at the outer ends of tines that sit on the pegs in the wall of the T-well vs. the C's that are a round, flat circle). Everything looked fine but nothing I did would let lid close when the pot was in there so I had to run the gas several times because of the heat loss past the lid of the well. The cake ended up with a scorch on the bottom at the center but was otherwise okay.
I fiddled with the well yesterday, tried a couple of different pots and T-well lids and nothing worked so figured it had to be the grate. Looking at the grate it looked fine so I took it out and sat it on a flat surface and is was fine. Then I turned it over on the flat surface and it turns out that the tines are all high in the center so are lifting the pot. I'll be darned if I can see it though. I went out to the shop and grabbed a couple from other stoves and when you turn them over on a flat surface there's like a 1/4 inch space between the ends of the tines and the flat surface. I stuck one of them in, put the pot in, and stuck the lid on the well and there's no contact between the lid clips and the lid of the well. Same with the other grate, so clearly the grate is the problem.
That explains another of the changes in the C series, the well grate. And adds a new check: turn the well grate of BZ and earlier stoves over on a flat surface and make sure there's a space between the ends of the tines and the flat surface.
Another thing this shows is that heat when using the open style grates in the earlier T-wells is hotter in the center, likely why the C's went to a diffuser style grate. I need to figure out some kind of a diffuser setup that doesn't raise the pot and keep the lid from closing all the way.
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