As you may know, this annual rant is brought upon by one particular neighbor who cooks out a lot.  I swear, I think this guy uses a whole can of the stuff when he barbecues!  The whole neighborhood reeks of the stuff, it’s disgusting.

If you are using a charcoal grill this weekend, PLEASE go out and buy a chimney starter.  <— This is what one looks like.  They are widely available at any store that sells BBQ/grilling supplies.  And once again, here is how to use it.  It’s pretty easy, even easier to figure out than the workings of scanning software.

Also, when buying charcoal briquettes, pay a little more and get a name brand like Kingsford.  I’ve had some bad luck with the cheap stuff, it just doesn’t light as well and then stay lit.

Finally, ignore the Hot Dog Police.  You go right ahead and put anything you want on your hot dogs.  Anything except lighter fluid, that is!

But…is it ever okay to play the diabetes card to get quicker service?

Mike is on a form of insulin which requires that he eat ASAP after.  We’ve found that he can go up to an hour here, before scary stuph starts to happen to him.

SO…he took his insulin at the hotel right before we left for the Latitude 41° restaurant, where we’d been looking forward to an amazing birthday dinner.  This place is maybe five minutes from the hotel.  We were seated right away when we got there…but then ignored for almost 30 minutes.

Diabetic or not, this sort of wait is unacceptable, so we left.  We went to another restaurant, where we got served much faster, and nothing bad happened to Mike.

I’m not one to demand special treatment anywhere, not for the top fat burners or anything else. But is it ever okay to tell the host/ess or server about diabetes and the need to eat sooner than later? I don’t know…the way this place was operating, I doubt that they would have cared. The only reason I could see to tell them is so that I could have sued them if Mike got seriously ill from his blood sugar dropping.

Which is what would have happened if he’d not gotten any food in him within an hour after taking the insulin.  We found this out the hard way.  Mike took his insulin before we left the house.  We ran some errands, and it was two hours before we had lunch.  We went to the 99 in Billerica, and the scary stuph happened there.

He broke out in a cold sweat and became very lightheaded.  He then went into the men’s room to do who knows what, and was in there for so long, I thought I’d have to ask a male employee to look in on him, or call 911 myself.

We had already eaten, but it took a bit for the food to kick in.  He was fine.  When he next went to the doctor, he was told that this was caused by not eating soon enough after taking insulin.  So now we know, and try to avoid it.

At the Latitude place, we didn’t have an option to play the diabetes card.  We were flat-out ignored, we were wearing the Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak as far as anyone working there was concerned.  But, if we WERE able to catch someone’s eye…is it okay to play the diabetes card to get quicker service?

I dunno.  Even if we did play the diabetes card, the lax service was not encouraging, and Mike might have suffered the ill effects anyway.  As I said in my email to the management of this place, “first impressions matter”, and going by first impressions, if we had waited any longer, Mike might have ended up in a Connecticut hospital.

Still, no excuse for such a long wait.

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!

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.

The basic gist of the thing is this dude who’s the CEO of Waste Management goes to work as a regular employee; he does things like riding the garbage truck and picking up trash, cleaning nasty old porta-potties, stuff like that.  He learns a lot about what it is like to be a regular worker, and comes away from the experience with a new appreciation for his employees.

If I ruled the world, I would create a similar TV show called “Applebee’s Slaves”.  My show would not only feature top-level executives at the Applebee’s restaurant chain working as cooks and servers in their own restaurants…but they would also  be forced to live on their pay.  For six months.

The fact is that these higher-ups, who do nothing but sit in their ivory offices all day, pressure their store managers to cut costs in any way they can.  This includes forcing employees on the closing shift to work for free.  I am NOT making this up.  I worked as a cook for that hellhole years ago, and they did it to me.  The restaurant closed at midnight, and that’s what time the managers were told to clock us out.  But we were not allowed to go home until the kitchen was cleaned to the manager’s satisfaction.  This could often take as long as two hours, depending on how busy the place was close to closing time.

I was paid ten bucks an hour.  So if I had to close every night, as was usually the case, and worked five nights a week, I was basically cheated out of $100 per week.  Money that we desperately needed.  At the time, Mike was still going to school at MIT, and the only money we had to live on were from my pay and his student loans.  It wasn’t much, that was for sure.  We couldn’t even afford a car at the time…after Mike’s old Ford Bronco II died its final death, we sold it to a junkyard for $75, canceled the insurance, and took the bus.

$100 a week may seem like peanuts to these hoity-toity higher-ups, but for us, it was a lot of money.  These people make millions in salary and bonuses for doing very little hard work; they can afford to buy diamonds, fancy cars, and other expensive toys whenever they want to.  They never have to worry about how they are going to pay their rent and buy food.  They think nothing about taking food out of people’s mouths, in order to be able to afford to pay themselves high salaries.  It is truly sickening.

What they did to me and my co-workers is illegal, but Applebee’s covered it up well enough so that none of us would have any way to prove that we worked until 2AM, while only being paid for no later than 12AM.  I have no idea if they still engage in this practice or not; even if they stopped doing this, I will still never patronize another Applebee’s restaurant ever again.  They stole thousands of dollars in pay from me and my co-workers during the time I was there, they will never get another penny from me.  Ever.

If the people who made these financial decisions were forced to live our lives, on what they paid us, for six months…no dipping into bank accounts or anything…maybe, just MAYBE, they’d understand and change their ways.

I finally had enough, and walked out on my shift one night, after the manager, in his usual cost-cutting ways, cut the entire kitchen staff for the night except me and some new guy who was on his second day, and wasn’t fully trained yet.  They even sent the dishwasher home.

Then it got busy.  Very busy.  The new guy behind the line was almost useless, so I pretty much had to work all three stations.  I was getting yelled at by the manager and servers for not getting all the tickets out within the 15 minute time allotment.  Yes, they had a rule that all food had to be out within 15 minutes of the ticket coming in.  They didn’t care if the kitchen was understaffed or not..dammit, MAKE that food magically appear on the plate!

I was getting very tired of being yelled at over circumstances I had no control over.  It was the manager’s fault for cutting most of the kitchen staff, but did he offer to come behind the line and help me?  Nope, he’s too good for that!

But as I saw more and more dishes piling up at the dishwashing station, I snapped.  I realized that I’d be working until 3, maybe 4AM, doing not just the regular cleaning behind the line, but dishes as well.  For not pay once the clock hit midnight.  I said, screw this, I’m not going to take it any more.  I’m not a slave; I expect to be paid for all of the work I do, especially if I’m doing the jobs of two or three other people in addition to my own.  As the tickets kept coming in, I walked off the line, went into the back room and got my bag and my jacket, and walked right through the crowded dining room toward the door.

The manager chased after me, begged me not to go, promised he would help me if I’d stay.  Where was this offer when I needed it, when I was literally begging for help?  Screw him. let him work the line by himself and see what it’s like!  I turned around, flipped him the bird in front of all of those customers, and walked out the door.

And it felt SO GOOD!

I found another job about a week later.  I simply told the truth as to why I left Crapplebee’s, that I was being overworked and not being paid for some of my time.

This is why I have so much resentment toward overpaid executives who do little work, while they allow the ones who do most of the work to suffer.  This is why I hate companies like AIG, who take OUR tax dollars to get bailed out of a mess that THEY caused, and still hand out hefty bonuses to people who already make plenty.  For once, I want to see these people walk a few miles in our shoes, and see how they like it!

And a free bonus of an “egg scrambler” that is allegedly a $20 value?  Give me a break!  For one thing, this thing is probably made of 10 cents worth of cheap plastic, and for another, whatever happened to just using a whisk or a fork to scramble eggs?  Sheesh!

I had posted a couple of weeks ago about dumb kitchen stuff.  But when I heard of this egg cracking gizmo, I knew it warranted a post of its own, it’s so stupid.  I had not seen the commercial for this, but @homebrewchef did, and he Tweeted it:

Just saw a commercial for a egg cracker for $20. Really? Www.ezcracker.com. Hands don’t work anymore. Alton Brown would die if he saw this!

Alton Brown would have been the first person to come to mind if I had seen that commercial, too.  Alton, as you may know, is a leader in the war against kitchen unitaskers, and this gadget is right up there with the worst of them.  I’d rather sit through hours of commercials for colon cleansers, acne treatments, and the best night cream, than look at dumb crap like this.

Who buys this stuff, anyway?  I guess somebody must, otherwise, they’d not be selling it.

By the way, if you are interested in beer and food, both cooking with beer, and what beer to drink with your food, please check out The Homebrew Chef’s website.  Lots of great recipes and info there!

Someday, when our old TV dies, we’ll have to buy a new, flat-screen plasma TV.  I am tempted to toss the old one out the window,  just as an excuse to buy a new one.

Then, we can just mount it on the wall, with one of those plasma mounts, so that no cat can sit on it ever!

I want a flat-screen computer monitor, too, for the same reason.

I am such a bad catmommy!

Basically, CBS plans to replace “Guiding Light” with an updated version of the classic game show, “Let’s Make A Deal”.  Now, I’m old enough to remember the original with Monty Hall, I loved it as a kid.  But, as often happens when someone tries to update a classic, it’ll likely be very lame.  And so will whatever game show they come up with to replace ATWT, should that soap be cancelled.

Over at ABC, it’s just been announced that “All My Children” is moving from New York to Los Angeles, as a cost-cutting move.  “One Life To Live will be staying in New York, but moving to the studio that AMC will be vacating.  Article here.

The problem with AMC’s move is that it’s possible that many of the long-established actors may not want to make the move.  For example, Susan Lucci, who has played Erica Kane since the show began back, has a long-established residence in New York, and she may not want to move to L.A.  But maybe that is part of the cost-cutting…if these highly paid soap veterans get dropped to recurring status or simply decide to leave completely, that eliminates their salaries.  Then  they can create new characters and hire young unknowns to play them, people that are willing to work cheaper.

But this could really backfire, because people will stop watchng the show if their favorite characters leave because of this move.  Then ABC will have a great excuse to cancel it completely, no doubt putting another lame talk or game show in its place.

NBC may soon be soap-free.  All they have now is “Days of Our Lives”.  The cancellation of “Passions”, a show I never watched, but I know a lot of people liked it, resulted in NBS showing yet another hour of “The Today Show” in its time slot in many markets.  But how long before Days tanks, now that many of their big-name stars have left, mostly due to budget cuts.

I find all of this very sad.  People like me like to watch soaps as a form of escapism.  I hate the new trend of these cheaply-produced talk and game shows, as well as reality shows.  I’ll take well-written fictinal stories any day.  Talk shows, especially have gotten ridiculous and often depressing.  Even long-established shows, such as Dr. Phool, have gotten too tabliody.  He sunk to a new low this past season with all of that crap about Octo-Mom.

If soaps go away completely, a lot of us may not even bother to turn our televisions on during the day. I do know that I will NOT be watching the new “Let’s Make A Deal”, and I certainly will not watch anything that replaces “As The World Turns”…which is actually my favorite soap right now.

Such a crying shame.

Just as long as our fellow campers are not like our neighbors, who douse their BBQ fire with lighter fluid.  Well, if it did smell that bad, at least we could drive away and go elsewhere…hard to do when you come home, and the stench of burnt lighter fluid hangs in the air, and even seeps into the house through the air conditioner.

Of course, we’d have to visit www.goodsamvip.com to buy RV insurance.  So worth it, though, as you never know what could happen.

And, finally, when we get tired of hearing the neighborhood children screeching at the top of their lungs, and giving me serious headaches, we could always drive up to Potters Place Campground and get some peace there.  An adults-only campground in the boonies of Maine…now I can get into that!

Maybe someday!

They are perfectly nice people, just not people we’d want to hang out with.  Once we ran into them at a local ball game, and the wife came over to us, and it was kind of awkward.  We just kind of run in different circles, we really have little in common enough with them to ever really be friends.

Also, in that relationship, the husband is the GRILLMASTER, and I suspect he would not take too well to grilling advice from a mere woman.  And I know I’d have a hard time keeping my mouth shut about the lighter fluid.

So we always told them we had other plans, and actually made other plans to be out of the house, if we didn’t already have them.  I mean, they can see where we park our car from their yard, so it’s best that the car not be there on the appointed BBQ day.

Eventually, they stopped inviting us, but they still wave to us if they are out in their yard.  We wave back.  That’s about it.

Still, on days we know they will be BBQing, always on Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day, we vacate the premises just so as not to have to smell the lighter fluid.  It seeps in through the air conditioners, so there’s no escape unless we leave the house for a few hours.

Today we went to the local TGI Friday’s to watch the Red Sox game and have some lunch.  Since most of the world was probably having BBQs with way too much lighter fluid (IMO, ONE DROP of it is too much), the bar was pretty quiet.

When we got home, the neighbors’ party was still going on, but they’d finished cooking, thank goodness.

Pictured above is a chimney starter.  This link provides detailed instructions on how to use one.  Notice that no lighter fluid is involved.  If people used chimney starters, they’d not only not stink up the neighborhood with lighter fluid, but they’d save money on not having to buy the stuff, as well.

As for those briquettes that come already doused in lighter fluid…Match Light, I think they are called…they are even more evil than lighter fluid.  I knew people who used them, and the taste of them gets into the food even worse than regular lighter fluid and briquettes.  And they smell worse, too.

SO…DON”T USE ANYTHING THAT IS OR CONTAINS CHARCOAL LIGHTER FLUID!  Your neighbors will thank you!