SirWired: Any home cook who uses anything other than a standard porcelain-topped range (or cooktop) is a poseur. Restaurant kitchens use stainless steel appliances because their stuff gets scrubbed down several times a day with a ScotchBrite and Comet. Unless you seriously do that in your kitchen, Stainless Steel is just extra expense, in addition to being a real pain to keep clean.

And the mega-BTU burners they use? They don’t make the food taste any better; they just cook it faster. And, unless you are an experienced line cook, your food will probably turn out WORSE if you use it at high settings, because you probably can’t work fast enough to keep up with that kind of heat. (Not to mention that far more recipes need a quality simmer vs. a high-powered blast of flame…)

(Really the ideal heat source for foodies is magnetic induction; safe, even heating, doesn’t heat the kitchen as much, and is easy to clean. Gas is second, electric coils third, standard smoothtop last.)

msbaskx2: I have 5 brothers and sisters. We all had paper routes as kids, often passing them down from one kid to the next when the older kids were able to get ‘real’ jobs.

In those days, you went and picked up the Sunday paper “innards” from your distributor, then the actual Sunday newspaper (the part with the news!) was delivered to your home really early Sunday morning. We’d put the paper together, and off we’d go to deliver them before sunrise.

One Sunday morning, we had a house fire. Started in the basement, worked it’s way up. Whole house totalled including the Sunday newspapers that were in the house, waiting for the main section to be delivered.

While there was still smoke pouring from the house, while the fire trucks were everywhere, while my whole family was standing in the street watching our house burn in various states of undress, my brother’s distributor came to the house with the main section and asked where he should drop them off. My mother explained to him that our house was on fire and the last thing she cared about was the newspaper delivery. So he asked her if she wanted him to drop them off at another house. She said, sure, drop them next door and the idiot distributor actually did leave the entire stack on our neighbor’s front porch.

I don’t recall if we ever got a complaint from the people who didn’t get their papers, but we still laugh about Oblivion Guy™ to this day.

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