christine-murphy dot net

A continuation of this post…

I hate the thing more than ever now. Usually I’m good at making risotto, but I made the worst risotto EVER on that stovetop. Either the burner gets TOO hot, so stuff burns, or not hot enough, so that it’s hard to maintain a steady simmer.

I not only had to throw away this risotto, but it looks like I’ll have to toss these lamb shanks I made on that stovetop.  They just didn’t cook up right.  They should have…I almost NEVER screw things up like this.  It HAS to be the shitty quality of this stove.

I can’t afford to go on like this.  Yet another reason that I’ll be using alternate appliances for most of my cooking now.  There is nothing wrong with the oven on this thing, I just have to clean it manually, since the self-clean feature has been known to blow out the computers inside the thing.  I won’t be taking that chance, I can’t afford $400 or whatever it costs to have Sears fix it, and I’m sorry, but I will NOT allow the landladies’ work release workmen into my house to fix it.  And, to answer a question, no, they won’t stay with me and supervise, they often leave these guys in their OWN unit alone.  And then they wondered what happened when  it was discovered that their checkbook had been stolen.

The other day, I came upon this page, which is full of nightmare stories about these flat top stoves.  Ellen, whoever she is, obviously hates these stoves as much as I do now, as do many people who posted on her website.  Yeah, it’s a few years old, but one read of this will talk you out of buying one of these pieces of junk.  Many times, Ellen advised people who rent to buy electric hotplates, as I did, so they could still use various types of cookware, and also still be able to do stir-frys (something that doesn’t work well on the flat-top.

I decided to ask Rick Bayless, who is on Twitter, what he thought of these glass-top stoves.  He’s a celebrity chef, but he’s known for responding to people who ask him questions on Twitter.  So I asked him, and I got this response in less than an hour.

If they are induction, i love them RT @catmommy9 @Rick_Bayless What do you think of those glass-top ranges?

Of course, mine is not induction, it’s radiant.  That’s why it sucks.  I guess the induction burners are the ones that are more sensitive to temperature changes, as with a gas stove.  I’m assuming that Rick does NOT like the cheapy radiant ones, like I am stuck with.

I am hating the stupid landladies more and more with every passing day, for making me have this thing.  There wasn’t anything wrong with the old one, I don’t know what the Sears guy did with it, but I suppose it is gone forever.  Nothing ruins your joy of cooking more than having crappy tools and appliances.

But what would THEY know?  They say they got the same stove for themselves, but they never cook anything.  Their trash and recycling is loaded to the brim with assorted pizza boxes and other take-out/fast food packaging.  And let’s just say that they could both benefit from an alli diet pill, or two or a hundred! Yeah, that’s mean, but not as mean as how they destroyed my joy of cooking in buying this piece of garbage.

I need to win the lottery, soon, so I can get the hell out of this dump and have the kind of stove that I want!

I was searching on Amazon.com for Julia Child DVDs, to see if there were any new “French Chef” box sets out yet (in addition to the three I already have).  And I came about this – The Way To Cook on DVD.

This is apparently based on the book of the same name, and was a six-part series on PBS back in the eighties…although I don’t remember it.  Maybe the PBS station where I was living at the time didn’t carry it.

Anyhoo, I am very much familiar with the book.  I have it, and I’m always saying that if you could only own one cookbook, this would be the one.  In the book, Julia gives simple, step-by-step instructions for basic, or “master” recipes.  And then she expands upon those with variations.  From the description on Amazon of this DVD set, this looks like pretty much the same idea.  So, if you feel you need a little extra instruction beyond what still photos in a book can provide, this would be a great companion to the book.  Just remember that Julia was never into counting calories, so you may want to look for a good diet pill review along with it. But then again, Julia lived to be almost 92 years old, so eating as she did wasn’t so bad, after all!

I ordered it, just because there is not allowed to be a Julia DVD set that I don’t have. I just love her, and can never get bored watching her!

Including meat loaf!

I’ve been collecting the season DVD sets from the PBS cooking series America’s Test Kitchen.  I was recently watching Season 1, which I haven’t seen since it aired ten years ago.  The show has changed somewhat since then, but mostly due to some of the cast coming and going.  The “man on the street” interviews quickly disappeared, and John “Doc” Willoughby left as Science Editor for a gig at Gourmet magazine.  That magazine has since folded, I suppose he’s still working on the website/TV end of the brand now.

During Season 1, they made a Bacon-Wrapped Meat Loaf with Brown Sugar-Ketchup Glaze. It looked awesome, so I decided to try it. I already had the companion book for the first season, so finding the recipe was easy. Although I think they have printable recipes on the DVDs.

Fortunately, this recipe is available online for free.  At the Cook’s Illustrated/America’s Test Kitchen websites, only current content is available free…too see archives of past issues/seasons, you have to either own the book or get a paid membership to the site.  However, it seems that host and Cook’s editor Chris Kimball has not forgotten the older recipes from earlier seasons, as he presented this one last year on the CBS Early Show.

This is a rather awful morning show, but I try to catch Chris’ weekly segments.  They are usually sometime during the 8-9AM Eastern time hour; that information will save you from having to suffer through this horrifically awful show.  Srsly.  If I have to hear either Maggie Rodriguez or Erica Hill point out to the world that they are pregnant, I’m gonna gack.  Yes, we can SEE that you’re both knocked up, do you have to point out out every five minutes?  I can’t wait until they both go on maternity leave.  But then, they’ll come back and do segments about getting rid of belly fat after pregnancy. And endless baby pictures. This sort of crap makes the show even more unwatchable. Only Chris Kimball’s segment is worth bothering to watch.

Anyhoo, here is the segment online, complete with Chris’ tips and recipes for good meat loaf.  You can learn how the test kitchen came up with their recipe, and why some ingredients work better than others.  The test kitchen recipe, the one I made, is the first one on this page.

A few tips from me…if you can’t find ground veal, or it’s just too expensive, use the much less expensive ground turkey or chicken.  I didn’t remember reading the gelatin tip in the book, but it’s probably worth a try if you do not use the veal.  But mine, with chicken, came out just fine without it.

I also could not find any ground pork when I went shopping.  So I used sweet Italian sausage instead.  Hey, it’s basically ground pork with some extra seasoning in it.

Some stores sell something called “meat loaf mix”, which is two parts beef, one part pork, and one part veal, as called for in this recipe.  However, I have found that these pre-made packages aren’t big enough.  To make a decent sized loaf, you need two pounds of meat.  I buy individual packages of each ground meat, weigh them out on a scale, and then I find I have almost twice as much as I need for the meat loaf.  That’s okay.  I just mix the extra meat all together and make spaghetti sauce or something from it.

This meat loaf is easy to put together and very tasty.  Try it!

As I’ve mentioned before, I decided to stop using Proactiv. not because it doesn’t work, but because of the cost, the fact that you can’t slow down the shipments of product, and the difficulty in canceling said shipments.  For awhile, I was using Rare Minerals Blemish Therapy.  Actually I’m still using it, because I have plenty left, but right now it’s primarily a zit cover-up.  That, along with the Rare Minerals cleanser, just wasn’t cutting it.  I wrote a little about that here.

I wrote that post ages ago, but just got around to finally buying the AcneFree kit about a week and a half ago.  Already, I am seeing results, and so far, I am very happy.

The AcneFree system is almost identical to the Proactiv system.  It comes with three products, a cleanser, a toner, and a repair lotion.  They are used together, in the order listed.  Although the instructions say to use the products twice a day, I only use it once a day.  When I first started using the Proactiv, I used it twice a day as instructed, but that caused my skin to be red and irritated.  Cutting it down to once a day worked much better, and I started to see good results.  Since AcneFree contains pretty much the same ingredients (mostly benzoyl peroxide), using it twice a day would have the same effect as the Proactiv did.  For my other daily face-washing, I still use the Rare Minerals cleanser, as it does not irritate the skin at all.

I’ve noticed that my face is clearing up, just as it did with Proactiv.  I’m beyond pleased so far!

The one downside is the packaging.  Proactiv has easy flip-up caps.  AcneFree’s caps need to be screwed off, and then it takes a bit of effort to squeeze the product out through a rather small hole (at least in the case of the cleanser and the repair lotion).  I used to like to use the Proactiv cleanser in the shower, but this cap makes it more difficult.  So I use the Rare Minerals cleanser in the shower in the AM, as it has a more use-in-shower-friendly cap, and then use the AcneFree at the sink in the PM.  I’m willing to put up with this slight inconvenience, being that AcneFree costs less than half of what Proactiv does (especially when you factor in shipping costs).  As long as the actual product works, I’m happy.

In addition to the lower price, the great thing about AcneFree is that you can buy it at many national chain stores.  Here is a list from their website, surely you have at least one of these stores where you live.  On that same page, you can enter your city/state and/or zip code, to find a store near you.  No hassles over auto-ship, no shipping fees, you just pick some up when you need it.  You’ll never be stuck with so much product at home that you can build furniture out of all those boxes.

AcneFree DOES offer an auto-ship plan.  But I can’t say anything about it one way or another, I don’t know how hard it is to cancel or anything.  It’s something that you can try at your own risk.  But to avoid hassle, I suggest that if you want to try AcneFree, get it at a store first.  That’s the only guarantee that you’ll not be stuck with endless shipments (and credit card charges) that may or may not be easy to stop.

They also make a bigger kit, a Severe Acne formula.  They also had that one at CVS, when I bought mine.  If you are a teenager, or a parent of a teen with severe acne, and nothing else has been working, it might be worth giving this a try, before ordering Proactiv.  The Severe kit has four products in it, and retails at $29.95, which is still cheaper than the standard Proactiv kit.

So, if you’ve been seeing those Proactiv commercials on TV, and have been tempted to give it a try…don’t!  Not until you’ve given AcneFree a try first.  I think that once you do, you’ll be glad you did!

Note: I am not affiliated at all with AcneFree or University Medical.  I purchased this product on my own, for my own use.  I posted this review here to let readers know of what I feel is a good product.  And if it saves even one person from dealing with all of the hassle I had with Guthy-Renker/Proactiv, I’ll have done what I set out to do!

The one pictured here, that is.

As you may know, our landladies recently replaced our still-perfectly-good stove with a new one.  I did not ask for this, and was given no input as to what type of stove I wanted.  You’d think that after having lived here for something like 15 years now, I would have been asked first.  If I’d had the choice, frankly, I’d have just said that the old one was fine, no need to spend money on a new one.  Seriously, I don’t understand when people forever see the need to replace things that are still in perfect working order.  We’re the sort of people to use things until they die.

This is the stove we got.  If I were the one who was making the purchase, I would have read the reviews first.  For the most part, the reviews are good, but the few bad ones concern me enough, in that they would have made me NOT buy this particular stove.  For one thing, I’m concerned about the computers on the inside going on the fritz, it supposedly is something that would cost $400 to fix.  One person said they had this happen after using the self-clean feature for the first time, and was told by a Sears technician that this is a common problem.  Now I am afraid to use the self-cleaning feature.  I haven’t used it yet, because I’ve only had the stove for a few months, and the oven has not gotten dirty enough yet.

I also don’t like that there seem to be a million restrictions as to what you can and can’t use on it to cook in.  I had heard that cast iron is not recommended; however, I have been using mine anyway, because other people say they have used it on these kinds of cooktops, and have been okay.  You just have to be careful not to drop the heavy iron pan on the glass, or drag it on the surface, lest it get scratched.  So far, no problems.

Look at this, from the owner’s manual (you can click it for bigger, will open in new tab/window):

This is just a small part of the whole book.  It seems that I’m expected to jump through a zillion hoops to keep this cooktop from being scratched or broken.  What a wonderful way to kill my joy in cooking, huh?

Anyhoo, that leads to the stovetop smoker, which I definitely CAN’T use on this stove.  Not only does it break two rules of the cooktop (the bottom is not smooth, it’s ridged, and it’s big enough to overhang even the largest burner), but even Camerons, the manufacturer, warns against this.  This is from the manual from the smoker:

Well, since Camerons makes a big deal out of telling people this, I’d best heed their advice.  So I ordered the single burner hot plate seen above.  It’s mostly so I can use the smoker, but given the fact that this damned cooktop is supposedly so fragile and needs to be treated with kid gloves…it might end up being my ONLY cooktop.  Because if this stove breaks, it’s staying broken until we move out and the landladies opt to fix or replace it for the next tenant, and they can go and suck eggs if they expect US to pay for it.

Either they will blame me for breaking it, and refuse to pay for the repair…or they WILL pay for the repair, but cut corners by hiring one of their regular cast of skeevy workmen, rather than a Sears technician.  And I will NOT have the skeevy workmen in my house, not when I’m here alone (landladies often go out and allow skeevy workmen free reign of the basement and their own unit upstairs).  Even if Mike were here, I still might not want them in here, every single person they hire is a smoker, and none will respect our rule about no smoking in our apartment.  Mike is severely allergic to cigarette smoke.  If he is exposed to it for too long, his entire face puffs up to the point where he can hardly breathe, and then I’d have to call 911.

And I am NOT going to pay Sears to repair it myself, not when I don’t own it.  All the law says is that the landladies must fix the stove if it breaks, nothing about who they have to hire to fix it.  I just don’t like the skeevy workmen; I have seen cleaner, classier looking guys panhandling on the streets of Boston.

Mike is also severely allergic to whatever additives they put in supermarket smoked sausage; this is why I got into sausage making and bought the smoker in the first place.  I also enjoy using it for other things.  Why should I have to give that up, because of someone else’s stupid choice of a stove?

So if the cooktop breaks, I’m keeping quiet about it.  I’ll just use the hot plate, my George Foreman grill and rotisserie, my toaster oven, and my NuWave oven to cook.  I’ll do my best to be careful, but it just makes me nervous all the time, with all the warnings about the alleged fragility of this thing.  If I had my way, I’d never have agreed to this stove.  If we owned our own house, I’d want a gas/propane stove, but that is not possible here.  I’m not a huge fan of the electric coil stoves, but as a frequent cook who gives a stove a good workout, they are the lesser of two evils.  I am convinced now that these glass-top stoves are more for people who hardly ever cook anything, and want something that just sits in the kitchen and looks pretty.

It works just fine, I just don’t like the fact that it is too easy to break it, and very expensive to fix if it does break.  And that doesn’t even include the inner computers inside the thing.

Gack.