sillyputty's Profile

I do this too, @rosebud! Especially if what's been cooking is cheesy - I love scraping off the nearly burnt cheese and scarfing it down.

I also love to carve the poultry, so I get to snag a piece of crispy skin before serving.

if you're cutting rounds into wedges, 12 wedges per round is a nice amount of cake. i would recommend squares instead if you have the pans, it's much easier to divide. an 8" square will give you 16 pieces (2" x 2"), a pretty standard wedding-cake-serving size.

you can bake up to 2 weeks in advance, wrap TIGHTLY with a double layer of plastic and freeze. remove from freezer 24 hours out and let thaw for at least 8 hours (10 preferred) before icing. it's really best not to freeze or refrigerate once they're iced, most types of icing do not do well being chilled and warmed, you'd get slumping.

the babycakes bakery has a cookbook where the recipes are vegan and gluten-free (some are sugar-free as well), and everything i've made from it turned out really well.

http://www.amazon.com/BabyCakes-Gluten-Free-Sugar-Free-Recipes-Talked-About/dp/0307408833

i don't drink much, but i never know what will cause a hangover. i can have wine with dinner two different nights and wake up fine one day and feeling like crud the other.

my best cure is a whole glass of water, 2 ibuprofen, and 2 chewable vitamins before bed, then a coca-cola and a diner-style breakfast (hashbrowns and bacon always do it for me). coffee makes it worse for me, sadly.

My partner used to work as a kitchen designer for a super high-end german cabinet company, and we bought Ikea cabinets for our kitchen remodel. The boxes are built exactly the same way as the $100,000 kitchens he used to work with, and they use the same brand hinges and drawer slides!

We put them together and installed them ourselves. The Euro cabinet system is SO MUCH EASIER to install than American style cabinets. The wall cabinets all hang on a rail. You install the rail by screwing it into studs and making sure it is level. Then each cabinet that hangs on it is automatically level - genius. The base cabinets come with legs that have twist-to-level feet, so there's no shimming involved.

We have 14 cabinets total - I put them together by myself in 1 day while my partner was demo-ing the old cabinets, then we installed them together the next day. Honestly, a new kitchen in a weekend.

They have been in for 3 1/2 years, and we haven't run into a single issue. The hardware is still soft-close, and the cabinets and doors/drawer fronts are holding up great. We used dark wood veneer slab fronts on the base cabinets, and white lacquered MDF slab fronts on the uppers (I can't remember the name of either).

I honestly can't recommend them highly enough.

I use them to retrieve items that I accidentally drop down the garbage disposal. It happens more often than I'd like to admit. :)

I'm with emilie_b on both points. My partner and I built and installed our Ikea kitchen ourselves (just the two of us) in 2 days, no glue. I think you may have made it harder on yourselves using that platform base, using the Ikea legs was super easy and fast. Ours had tiny holes in the center of the leg bracket, and a tiny screw to hold it in the right spot while placing the cabinet.

The only issue I have run into is that one of our base cabinets holds a trash can (insert by Rubbermaid, I believe), so the door is held on at the bottom of the trash slider. The knob is still at the top of the door though, so it has warped a bit with 3.5 years of use.

seems like a lodge issue. i have a (very affordable) tramontina that was well regarded by the folks at cook's illustrated, and it performs beautifully. i stew, roast, bake, and fry in it.

If you're not whipping it, heavy cream freezes beautifully. Buy a carton and freeze tablespoons into an ice cube tray, then put them in a zippy bag once they're frozen. You can take out as many tablespoons as needed for a recipe and thaw them easily since they're so small.

I have to admit I got a little pit in my stomach just from reading the headline here. I am agog at the notion that any of the spaces in my home would be considered "public", or that anyone other than the people who live there would have any say whatsoever in what is displayed.

I think we are taking the notion of "design" way too far when we decorate our own homes - our safe places - for the comfort of others rather than ourselves.