Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Kitchen equipment & dishes

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

>I also recommend getting quite a few real solid stacking dinner plates and 
>bowls of the same kind.  They stack more easily and are less likely to fall 
>over. 

We are very happy with our Corelle dinner plates, cereal/soup bowls, and 
little dessert bowls.

Regular china, and definitely "restaurant/institutional" china is HEAVY. 
Corelle has lots of advantages:
it's light
it's slim and many dishes fit on a stack
it cleans up beautifully in the dish washer
many people have some at home - we were able to collect quite a lot from 
individuals
it shows up in thrift shops and garage sales
there are Corning outlets here and there where it is sold at lower prices 
than usual
it's rather difficult to break, though it looks like china

--
Our range top seems to be doing a good job. A Dacor high-end residential 
gas top. It has space to put big pots, gets quite hot, and can also take 
a griddle and a wok ring. 

Genuine "commercial" stoves get you into different fire-code stuff, and 
insurance implications, we were told. 

We also have a separate convection oven, with room for several levels of 
pans. We're still learning how to choose time and temperatures, as it's 
not like either microwave or regular ovens in that regard. Does anyone 
have a good guide for convection oven use? 

At a festival where I watch them serve food for hundreds of people, they 
make good use of baking parchment paper, which goes into the bottom of 
baking dishes (lasagna, fish, etc) and keeps stuff from sticking to the 
pan. A certain amount of paper bits gets into the food when serving, but 
that seems a good trade for encrusted pans. Anyone have a source for this?
--

A recent discovery I made was an expensive ($10?) silicone spatula that 
leaves all other spatulas in the dust! It makes a real difference in how 
much gets scraped off plates before they go to the dishwasher spray 
table. If you are struggling with a rubber or plastic spatula, treat 
yourself to this upgrade.

Lynn Nadeau
RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend WA
where we are happy to have a mail carrier who happily accepts the goodies 
in the empty mailbox (in our common-house-foyer set) we have labelled 
"treats for the mailman". I was afraid it might be dismissed because of 
rules or fears, but I guess the call of chocolate is strong. He's 
collected baggies of cookies, brownies, Halloween candy, gingerbread, 
apple cake. 
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