by Maggie and Ed | Oct 23, 2013 | Entrée, Food, Recipes, Sandwiches
We’ve been saying it to ourselves for months, but haven’t really gotten to it until now: We have to start doing some side by side sandwich comparisons. Today was pork. The main objective of this process is to create good recipes, but the other part is deciding where to place standards for what the deli will serve. We weren’t sure how many levels there were between that’s great and we nailed it and hoped that doing this would help us to figure that out. A sandwich can be great standing on one or two really tasty ingredients, with some others adding a bit, but not fully meshing. Thinking that we nailed it seems to come either by quite a bit of fumbling around and changing ratios, or more rarely by a chance risk or flash of insight. When it all comes together I can barely stop myself from pulling people off the street to try things. That’s about the point of all this.
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by Maggie and Ed | Feb 28, 2013 | Home Renovation
We decided from the start that we wouldn’t make any big changes to the house that weren’t related to the Deli. The wall colors were…quirky…but they were easy enough to stomach. These decisions held strong for about 72 hours. Ed left for a six week job a few days after we moved in, at which point I decided to paint the aforementioned creepy-bedroom-with-a-sink-in-the-closet. I felt like that project was a success. For one, I had apparently rid the room of any ghosts, and two, I had a fairly presentable home office. Until we realized the room was about 15 degrees colder than any other in the house. Our dining room table became home to any and all projects we were working on, and eventually both of got a little tired of eating dinner surrounded in x-acto blades and vellum.
The third floor was basically a dead zone for the first few months we were here. I blame this, in part, in my only having lived in cramped apartments for most of my adult life. The idea of having three floors to roam around on was overwhelming enough that I pretended the top floor didn’t exist. The front room held a few half filled ikea bookshelves, various video game systems, and a two half broken televisions. We moved in a few folding table and moved our “work” set up from the dining room to neglected game room. Eventually, the post-it note green walls broke my spirit enough to make me forget how much I hate painting and we started on major room renovation #2.
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by Maggie and Ed | Feb 15, 2013 | Equipment, Food, Home Renovation, Technology
>When I bought the house, my kitchen didn’t come with much. It actually came with less than I expected. The seller was supposed to leave the refrigerator- which would start me off with a refrigerator and a sink. No cabinets, counters, range, or anything else. I was sort of excited about this, since I could create whatever I wanted. Once we got to the final walkthrough, a day before closing, my realtor, lets call him Steve, and I realized that he took that too. So I started with a sink.
Steve was furious. He called the seller’s realtor and yelled. The other realtor called the seller and he yelled that he wasn’t giving me a cent for it and it didn’t work anyway and he’d call the whole sale off over it. He had a bit of a short temper. Steve made a deal with the other realtor (at this point we just wanted to leave the seller out of it and deal with the other three sane people) that they’d each give us $200 to make up for the fridge. So, Steve got me $200 for it. Conveniently, Steve also had a new fridge for sale for $400, so I got that the day I moved in.
I moved in my circulator, toaster oven, vitamix, kitchen aid mixer, and vacuum brewer to add to my refrigerator and sink. I was still pretty excited, since I could fully appreciate each piece of equipment as I added it. I needed some burners though. Not having a gas line and wanting to not get anything I couldn’t use in the deli, I scrapped the idea of a gas range for now. I thought I’d try an induction burner. I got a cooktek 1800W one used. I had heard good things about induction, but was nervous I’d miss the gas. It took a bit to get used to, but I don’t. Induction is cleaner, faster, and plenty variable. I stuck with this for a while. Then I added a meat slicer, 3500W 220V cooktek burner, an espresso maker, a 40 lb CO2 tank, and a centrifuge. I’ll do some individual posts on each eventually.
I found out pretty quickly through, that running all this on 60 year old wiring wasn’t going to cut it. I ran everything through surge protectors and had extension cords going into the basement. I couldn’t do laundry and make toast at the same time. Or grind coffee and heat up my espresso maker. Try making bacon, eggs, toast and coffee – yuck! Here’s how I did it: Preheat espresso maker, unplug espresso maker, plug in grinder, grind coffee, swap plugs again, turn on espresso maker, pull espresso, try to sip for long enough to have some left with breakfast. Cook bacon on cooktek, make toast to 75% in toaster oven, put bacon in toaster oven to keep warm, cook eggs on cooktek, plate eggs, heat up toast the rest of the way with bacon, put out food, get ready to eat, wish I had more coffee. After a while, it bothered me too much, so I got an electrician to run some new circuits, including one for my 220V cooktek. I got 4x20A 120v circuits and a 220x20A one to the kitchen. I’ve never been so excited to turn two things on at once.
The electrician was great. He did all the kitchen wiring, put in a few basement circuits, one for the bathroom, and a couple on the third floor in two days. Fast, reasonable (~1800) and clean. One gfci was messed up and he came to fix it the next day. We even went out to have a famous fish sandwich at Armands together and, after a bit of I wouldn’t do this normally but what the hell talk, a beer.
The kitchen has come along from when I moved in, but it’s still an ongoing process, and I’m moving slowly to avoid any mess ups along the way (and it’s expensive). That’s why my circulator and centrifuge live on the floor, and my mixer and blender live in a cabinet and go on chairs or in front of things. I’ll make more posts as we add equipment and finalize our plans for renovation.
