I have Nita's recipe. Party Bake Pork Chops Betty Crocker New Dinner For Two Cookbook copyright 1964 4 lean pork chops, 1" thick 4 thin slices onion 1/4 cup uncooked rice (not instant) 1 can (1 lb. 13 oz.) tomatoes 1/2 to 1 tsp. salt pepper Trim any excess fat from chops. Season chops well on both sides with salt and pepper. Brown on both sides in lightly greased hot skillet. Top each chop with a slice of onion, 1 tbsp rice, and cover with whole tomatoes. Add any remaining tomatoes and juice to skillet. Cover tightly; simmer over low heat or bake in foil covered baking dish at 350 degrees for 1 1/2 hours or until tender. 4 servings. This is Nita's way of making them: I don't brown the chops. I put them in an oblong baking dish and put sliced onions on them and then I rinse my oriental rice (Calrose or Hinode) to remove the talc. It won't hurt if you have a little extra rice. Then I take a large can of whole tomatoes and break them up all over the pork chops. I add some water to the can to get the rest of the juice and then cover with foil and bake. This is delicious served with soy sauce to taste. From Nita AZ

Yes, they do work, and it chops so fast. Someone posted about using one a year or so ago, so I got one at Target for the "salsa-fest" we had last summer. I peel the cukes and make big slices, slice the tomatoes, clean the peppers and cut them into big pieces, same for the onions. That's the easy part - for me, chopping it all up into smaller pieces is very tedious and messy and I hate doing it. When we made salsa a couple of years ago, I had veggies everywhere when I was chopping them, with tomato juice running all over the cutting boards onto the counters, this thing kept the mess much more contained. I'd plunge and peel and line up the tomatoes, and we had 8 cups in no time at all. Same for the onions and peppers. With tomatoes, you have to "sharply" close the top quickly so they don't just get smashed through the cutters. My grandson loves to help with the tomatoes. Peppers can be a bit resistant, so we slam the top down on them too. Mine just has two blades, medium and fine, but this one has three and I like the option of slicing, too. It's really useful for chopping veggies to freeze, I keep a few bags of onions and peppers in the freezer now. My daughter and I were thinking this would be good for fruit cobblers, too. While the kids were here, I finally managed to peel an apple with one long peel - where they ever impressed! I sliced and chopped it. The kids just scooped up the pieces and ate them. I've used it on left over boiled potatoes, chopped with the fine blade and fried for breakfast, too. Very good with bacon and eggs.

Thanks Fenworth for that heads up on carbon steel. My grandmother's knife does get rusty if left wet but it is easy to get the rust off with a regular kitchen scrubby. And I just remembered my most recent gadget, and this really qualifies as a gadget. Its a wood kitchen ruler with magnetic button for hanging on fridge, a hook for pulling out the oven rack and forked end for pushing rack back in. It was $2.50 at a cute little local cook store. However, my new fridge doesn't support magnets so I hang it on the access panel on my radiator cover :)!

Wantto, yes, I knew about the LST being returned to the US from across the Atlantic. The elderly crew came into the boat supply store where I was working at the time. And they were a chipper bunch of old guys, and I was so pleased to meet them. After WW2, the company that my dad worked for used some of the WW2 large landing craft to load highway vans on, and then ply between Apalachicola FL (eastern end of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway) all the way to Brownsville TX or Port Isabel TX, which was the western terminus for the ICW. This was the beginning of the "container freight" concept. The company was bought out by Federal Barge Lines, and then by one of the big cargo companies like PanAtlantic Steamship, and then the rest is history. Steph, would you define SCOOCHED? Interesting term. :) In one episode of HOLMES ON HOMES where they redid a kitchen for a handicapped woman, they put some kind of hardware in the upper cabinets which would come down to counter height so she could reach them from a wheel chair. I think REV-A-SHELF makes such a mechanism. I would think that in a kitchen with really really high ceilings this would be a good thing, even for a person who was not disabled, but just vertically challenged. :)